Uzma Khan: Thinner Than Skin

So this was breakfast.

“They hibernate, you know.” He pointed behind him. “Like mammals and birds. When the sun shines, and the ice melts, they roll over. The thin ice rolls the loudest.”

So we’d talk first.

It sounded like some kind of Chinese proverb. The thin ice rolls the loudest . Yes? And how did the man on the ledge roll? And which man, the one who’d landed here by choice, or the one on another ledge, higher up, who’d — slipped? I decided not to ask.

He drank. His lips were moist, his skin as tawny as his belt. “Shh,” he whispered, lifting a finger to those wet lips, though he was the one talking. “Listen.” From his throat poured a sound like a gurgle. “RrrrrRrrrr!” It sounded like an engine, though, apparently, it was meant to represent water. “Low sound is water gushing, finding a new opening. RrrrrRrrrr!” I heard no low sounds, no gushing water. Only him. “There are always openings in the mountains. Always. You can find them. If you learn to track with sound.” He grinned. “It is a skill that will suit you, when you go.”

Suit you , he said, in English. Suit me how? And go where? He spoke in an Urdu with no trace of a northern accent. He threw in many English words. And his talk was beginning to make less and less sense.

“It is hard to endure, you know?”

I nodded.

“What do you know?” His voice was growing brittle as the bottle in his hand.

I hesitated.

“Can you play the flute?”

I shook my head.

“Drums?”

I shook it again.

“What good are you?”

I nodded.

“Here, try this.” From another pocket, he pulled out a double flute, embellished with multicolored tassels, many intricately braided.

I held it in my hands.

“Play,” he commanded.

When I held it to my lips, I tasted paint. No sound came from me.

He laughed. He began to play.

I heard again the melody played the day Kiran’s body was taken down to the plains. I remembered the way her brother’s cheek had filled with air kisses, the way his farewell filled the shores of the lake, the way Queen of the Mountains and Naked Mountain sang back the notes. I did not recognize this man from that day. As his dirge grew more elaborate, it rolled into the valley like twin armies of dark clouds, each shadowing the other with thunder in its breast. The mountains answered back, with deeper thunder.

When he stopped, I did not weep. But I began to feel afraid.

He dried the lip of each pipe tenderly with a corner of his shirt. “I played at her birth,” he said. “You know?” His eyes were not mild at all. He spat on the wood and began to shine it. He was humming. “Six years for six stars in girgiti. I promised. I keep my promises. Hmmhmmhmm.”

I could feel myself slowly slink away from him, though I didn’t have much room. It was either the chasm, or him.

Without looking up from the flute, he said, “I was coming down from the steppe when it happened. From Kazakhstan. You know Kazakhstan?”

I hesitated.

“She sits on two hundred billion barrels of oil. You know?”

I nodded.

“America says no, no, no pipeline, not through Iran!” He was laughing vigorously now, unbuttoning his jacket after resting the flute on his lap, the black stones at his throat glistening with sweat. “But others, they say yes, yes, yes!”

I had nowhere to go.

“China ships it, the crude. All the way to Iran, from Pakistan. Then back up to China. China, Kazakhstan, Pakistan, Iran. The new Silk Road. You know?”

I nodded.

“But still they are poor. So they want my help, my friends.” He fingered the bottle. It had a red label and he drank it slow. “Are they my friends?”

I kept very still, hoping he wouldn’t notice me searching for an opening. How did he put it? There are always openings through the mountains . Another Chinese proverb?

“The way it used to be,” he kept on. “Except, now we run on land and water.” He stared past my head, at the chasm beyond. “We have always run,” he added, still gazing with some longing at the drop.

I could not speak.

He picked up my camera. “I have seen many others. Better than this.” He shook it, roughly. He flipped it back and forth, searching for the on button.

“Uh.” I cleared my throat, trying to indicate the button with my eyes and my chin.

He pushed it. I looked away. The photographs would begin with the most recent. The one of them, at the glacier. Reason for the broader grin, no doubt. He’d probably seen them first. He was always ahead of me on the trail. He could have killed me any time, on the way up. But he’d waited, wanting me to see. And he was pleased. He began to skip through the pictures backward. I began to see them all in my mind again. I ought to have been offended at his obvious interest in Farhana as a nude and I was, even as I told myself it didn’t matter anymore, but, in fact, I was more offended than I had been on the beach — that must be the one he was gaping at, his wide eyes about to burst — when I’d hardly been upset at all, when the voyeur had been a voyeur not of film but of flesh.

He took his time. I didn’t interrupt.

Eventually, he put the camera down in the gravel, outside its case, and without switching it off. I fought the urge to tuck it away securely.

Moments passed. The sun was high, higher than the man beside me.

After a while, I dared to ask, gently, “Should we leave?”

He scratched his chin, where thin wisps of golden brown fluttered in a wind that scraped my throat so dry, I was tempted to drink his drink.

“Maryam’s mother. She was an escort.”

It chilled me to hear her name spoken. “Yes?”

“Of the sick. When a soul would wander away, she would bring it back.”

I kept looking at him with as much interest as possible.

“You are sick,” he announced. “But I am not here to help.”

It was curious how the will to live now burned bright in me, where earlier this morning, I’d lost it entirely.

“I thought I was going to kill you.” He grinned.

I hadn’t lost the will, not at all. It was a discarded friend I welcomed back. And as it raised its head to fill the space I cleared for it, I wondered about Irfan. Still conscious? An ever-expanding part of me hoped he was, even as I wanted to silence this part. They couldn’t have reached help yet, Wes and Farhana, though they might be close. No, I couldn’t count on that. It would be some time before they made it all the way back up.

By then, what would have happened to me?

He said I thought I was going to kill you.

He was peering into my face with eyes now small and red.

“You know?” he asked, seeming genuinely lost.

I took a chance. “Have you ever killed?”

Seeming to remember something, he frowned, as if to chase the thought away. “You are a sick man. A dying man. I have never killed a dying man.”

Well, this was hopeful.

“A life of exile is worse than death. You will forever be alone.”

Another proverb?

He smiled, suddenly pleased. It was different from his grin. He looked almost pretty. “I was going to give you a choice, but the dying have no choice. I do not think there is need for this.” He pointed to his gun. He picked it up. He fired into the chasm.

I pressed my hands to my ears. If before the mountains had answered his flute with a series of thundering echoes, now it was the valleys and the bluffs of my skull through which the gunshot ricocheted first. There were hundreds of surfaces inside me to strike, no matter how hard I squeezed shut my ears.

A very long time passed before I found the courage to remove my hands. And when I did, I vomited. I had only biscuits and water to bring up and they did not surrender with ease. A string of froth fell on my chin, on my shirt, and at his heel.