Uzma Khan: Thinner Than Skin

I was being sighted.

I arranged to meet her the afternoon of my second interview. This time I included in my portfolio a series of photographs taken on a previous return to Pakistan. It was a series of my mother’s marble tabletop, which she’d inherited from her mother, and which dated back to the 1800s. The swirling cream-and-rust pattern changed as I played with the light, sometimes slick as a sheet of silk, sometimes pillowing like a bowl of ice cream. A few frames were, if I say so myself, as sensuous as Linde Waidhofer’s stones.

The second interview did not go very differently from the first.

“Your photographs lack authenticity.”

“Authenticity?”

“Where are the beggars and bazaars or anything that resembles your culture?”

“The marble is a real part of my family history. It’s old, from 1800—”

He waved his hand. “It seems to me that when a war’s going on, a table is trivial.” I wished for the courage — or desire — to ask what images of what war he was looking for.

He stood up. “I’m a busy man. Could’ve ignored you. Didn’t, know why? There’s something there.” He leaned forward expectantly, so I thanked him for thinking there was something there.

I left the office and walked down the corridor to the stairs, passing the photographs that hung on the walls, photographs I loved with an ardor that stung. I’d recognized them all on my way in, of course. There were prints by Linde Waidhofer to taunt me, including one from her Stone & Silence series. A Waidhofer can be a nature photographer of the Wild West but a Sheikh must be a war photographer of the Wild East! He must wow the world not with the assurance of grace. He must wow the world with the assurance of horror.

I wound my way slowly through prints from Ansel Adams’ Yosemite series — it was the wrong moment to view Bridalveil Fall , the sheer force of the torrent almost making me weep, and I found myself wishing, childishly, if only the drop weren’t so steep —before halting, finally, at Golden Gate Bridge from Baker Beach .

The coincidence hadn’t hit me on my way into the interview but it hit me now, as my eye swooped down from the whiteness of the clouds to admit the whiteness of the surf breaking on the shore. I was meeting Farhana on Baker Beach in one hour. It had been her idea, and she’d been specific about where on the beach I’d find her. I stared at the photograph, surprised at the fluttering in my breast. It astonished me that I was hoping to find her on the exact same length of shore depicted in the frame. Worse, I believed that once there, perhaps without her knowing it, I’d look up and see the bridge from exactly the same perspective as I was seeing it now.

Did I want the picture to be a sign? Possibly. It happens this way when you have just been tossed down a roaring cataract. You grope for a raft, anywhere. You even tell yourself that you have found it.

Before the owl swooped across the moon’s reflection in the River Kunhar, I’d been thinking about that word, Kunhar , how kun sounded like kus which sounded like a cross between cunt and kiss . Do we desire and despise in the same sounds in all tongues? I’d held the bitter taste of glacier melt in my mouth as the silver disc eased deep into the river’s skin. I’d dipped my head to taste her again, and, gathering filigree into the fold of my tongue, gazed down the Kunhar’s length. She cut through the valley for one hundred and sixty kilometers. I’d been thinking of a long labia.

“ Shreet! ”

The thought scattered like moonseed.

“ Shreet! ”

The second time, the sour glacier water inside me froze and my fingers grew so stiff that when I reached for my clothes, I simply poked at them, as though with sticks. I crouched to my knees for warmth, bewitched by those gleaming black eyes in the pretty heart-shaped face. Instead of the owl, I saw the face of a girl. She had morphed into human at an hour no human should see. She had spoken at an hour no human should speak. How many minutes or hours passed before she shot up into the sky and flew in the direction of the lake we would head for tomorrow?

I eventually returned to my cabin, still naked, and slid into bed beside Farhana. She shifted. I was never more grateful for the heat she radiated under our sheets. I curled into her back and she turned, presenting me with the same gift as on our first night of love: she slipped her finger in my navel. Mocking my “proper Convent-boy English,” she whispered, “I’m going to have a listen .” She put her ear to the hollow, exhaling her sweet hot breath over my cold skin till it thawed.

“What do you hear?” Her hair was spread in a fan across the pit of my stomach.

“Shh!”

As her lips enclosed me, I thought, Bliss! I will not have to make up with her in the morning, she is making up with me! And I heard it again. The rush of wings, the moon diving in the Kunhar. Shreet! An ascending — higher, higher, through a smooth, silvery sky — a falling — deeper, deeper, down a silky, slippery skein.

I walked briskly to Baker Beach in joyous agitation. Descending from the parking lot, I pulled off my shoes, expecting to see a girl of Farhana’s description—“look for a long braid, the longest on the beach, black, of course”—waiting at the edge of the sea, as per her instructions, her back to me (showing off the braid), with Golden Gate Bridge looming to her right. Instead, I wound up in a volleyball game, with all the players entirely in the nude.

Was she among them? Damn, how was I to know?

There was a player with a dark braid, though she had two, neither as long as I’d been led to believe. Leaping for the ball, she made a full-frontal turn, and my God, how astonishingly she was built! I gawked at the hair between her legs, wondering if this were a cruel joke. (Granted, not entirely cruel.) Matthew must have arranged it, getting “Farhana” to lure me here. He was probably watching, laughing till he hurt. Nice little Pakistani girl . Funny, Matthew, funny . I stared at the volleyball player one last time — no, that couldn’t be Farhana, please let it not be Farhana! Please let it be Farhana! — and turned to my right to scan the bathers on the shore.

Almost all naked, mostly men. Obscenely overdressed, I jogged in mild panic toward a cluster of rocks on the far side of a thick cypress grove. Along the way, I tried to hunt discreetly for a long braid slithering down a shapely back, but many figures lay on their backs, some on their hair. I could see the rocks now. She wasn’t there. Two naked men were, one walking out to the water, hand on hip. Long cock, wide grin. I waded into the sea, my back safely to him, but the water was too cold for my taste. After a few minutes, I trundled closer to the boulders, trying to look-not-look.

She was sitting there, smiling. Her braid was pulled to the side, draping her left shoulder, and she waved it at me like a flag.

“We must have just missed each other!”

“I thought you told me to wait on the beach?”

“I’m sorry. It got late.”

I was on the verge of asking how she got all the way here without my noticing when I saw how her eyes sparkled. It wasn’t Matthew who’d been watching me but Farhana. I clambered up without another word, crossing a series of tide pools and a snug sandy enclosure between the boulders that sprawled in a V. I crouched down beside her and looked to her right: there loomed Golden Gate Bridge.

“Did you think you’d recognize me better with clothes on?” she giggled.

“Your clothes are on.”