Uzma Khan: Thinner Than Skin

He offered the bottle again.

I nearly vomited again.

“I would not have to do anything except make sure you were never found.” Still with that smile around his lips. The bottle lay with his gun, the cap back on.

I returned the smile. I could taste the acid still rising in me.

“You know the choice?”

I shook my head.

“Go outside the mountains and never return. Or, die.” He pointed again to his gun.

“No!” I squeezed my ears.

He shrugged, feigning surprise, as though I’d just declined a sweet.

I shut my eyes and thought quickly. It would be just fine with me if I left. Distance is a great protector! A quick stop at my mother’s in Karachi, then back to San Francisco, or perhaps the desert. I’d forget all of it. I’d live unencumbered by shame or yearning, history or memory. The farther into the future I’d go, the less my past would shadow me.

“Should we leave?” I hazarded again.

“I said no. No choice.” He fired the gun again.

This time I bowed my head like a coward. My eyes, however, stayed open. I was listening and watching, even if that meant the crack through the canyon made my ears hum and every sound fade as though I were plunging to the bottom of a lake. My ears were filling with water but I would have to keep listening.

I waited. He seemed almost to be in a trance. He’d look at me, then gaze dreamily at the abyss beyond. Look at the bottle, then look at his flute. Look at my camera, then look again at the chasm. Speaking in circles, as though delivering a chant.

“Not south and not across the seas, from wherever it is you came. No no no. I mean north.”

“North?” My voice already sounded very far away. “This is north.”

“China north.” He was laughing again.

And then he began to outline, in the most labyrinthine detail, and still in that trance-like voice, the destiny he had mapped out for me.

Disguised as a trader, I would arrive at the frontier town of Tashkurgan, where I would pass into Kashgar. After that would come a checkpoint, the keeping of which was the bitterest of jobs, when the thermometer dropped to below zero. It made the men cranky, the ones who would tell me to take off all my clothes, there in the cold. And I would be given a new name. And different clothes, clothes worn by the last man to make the passage, and the one before him, crossing in the other direction, perhaps, with no fingers or toes. And the clothes would not have been washed and they would be live with creatures that had survived the cold, and I ought to learn from them. Only after that would I be ready for the Silk Route proper, which I would take from Kashgar to Yarkand, tracing the footsteps of those who had done the same for thousands of years. And this route was more often called the Ghost Route, for it was haunted, so I would need to prepare. I would track ghosts by listening, learning which to avoid and which to sit beside, at a fire, sipping tea mixed with millet seed, telling tales of flying horses whose names changed like the colors of the nimbus through which they soared. Pegasus, Tulpar, Jonon Khar. I would hear them go. And the fire would blow out. And the spirits would vanish. And if my skin were thick enough, I would eventually find my way to Karakol Lake, the blackest of lakes, surrounded by the Pamir Mountains. And the Pamirs would be reflected on the surface of the lake, her peaks and valleys swooping into Karakol’s depths, blue wings in a dark deep, and I would again be visited by fairies and jinns, owls and full moons, and I would kneel by the banks of that lake and wash my tired feet and drink the glacial melt and see the two of us, myself and my love, though he did not say this, he said the two of us, the Queen and the Nude, reflected as on another lake, one in which an unspeakable crime had been committed, for which someone had to pay.

He was blinking like a lizard in the sun.

My lips were cracking. I could taste the warm comfort of salt and blood.

“No.” He shook his head. “That is not how it will be.”

I did not know if I preferred it when he looked at me or past me.

“You are already paying. You know?” The smile returned to his face. “But tell me, you would not choose this life, if I let you choose?”

A life of banishment in place of death? Without love, with only the company of barren rocks? At one time I believed myself desirous of anonymity and solitude, but I was trembling now. He was right. I was sick.

“The dying have no choice,” I answered.

He laughed. “You hear me well.”

“You speak well.”

He grinned.

Again a long pause.

Then, “Can you hear it?”

Behind me, I thought I could still hear the glacier crawl. I said as much.

“No no no. Not the glacier. Your friend. He is moving.”

I decided to stand up, very, very slowly.

“One last thing.” His eyes flew open.

I slid back down.

“If I let you go, you must give me something in return.”

In return for what — my new lease on a lonesome life?

“I want this.”

He took my camera.

“One more last thing.”

I waited. He was looking beside me, at the box wrapped in red cloth.

“Where is your bag?”

“I gave it to him,” I pointed to the general area where Irfan lay trapped.

He seemed alarmed by this. “Did you take anything out?”

“Just that.” I pointed to the camera in his hands. “And that.” I pointed to the box.

He looked away, still troubled. I thought it atypical for him.

“Why?” I asked.

“I was never going to kill you with a gun.” He began to laugh.

As I climbed down the mountain, he played the flute. Goodbye! The melody was at my back, and then on my back. It swung around, knotting a pair of tassles around my waist. It pranced before me in the dust as I walked. Goodbye, goodbye! It was leaping and kicking, skipping and taunting, this jealous jinn, this giddy guide. Not even a fairy princess is worth falling for! It was what Irfan had said, at the edge of a different glacier, on our way to the lake. We’d nearly slipped, both of us. I’d pulled his jacket for support. He’d let me.

Did he only have a broken leg? Was he even alive? A yearning began to rub me raw.

The descent did nothing to relieve me of it, not even when the melody finally faded and my thoughts grew heavy and dull through sheer bodily fatigue. Now my most steady companion was time, time in which to re-live my tale as I scraped my shins against Ultar’s jagged fangs, forging a distance between me and all that I loved, a distance that was no protector at all. I made my way by listening to rocks fall, and to memories surround me: I ought to turn back. I ought to help Irfan. He was in danger. I’d swum away from Kiran and Farhana. Now I was running from Irfan. Farhana and Wes would also leave him. Where was the help? He was abandoned. He was in danger. I, on the other hand, was now out of danger.

I did not turn back.

Before I could reach the first village, I saw a convoy of trucks heading for the foot of the mountain. They stopped when they saw me.

“That’s him!”

“No. That is not him.”

“Then what is that ?”

Two men got out of a truck and told me to put down the box. While one kept watching it, the other searched me roughly. He sneered at my ID card and pocketed the forty dollars I still had in my wallet. They asked what was inside the box and I said food and they asked where I’d been. I tried to explain that I was with a group of friends, but my tongue was stuck somewhere at the back of my throat. Irfan would have been better at this. Besides, they weren’t my friends.

“We are wasting time,” said another man from inside a second truck.