Zia Rahman - In the Light of What We Know

Zafar’s question sounded rhetorical, as if the answer was obvious, and that is what I hid behind in order to avoid answering, when a part of me wanted to tell him everything. But what was that everything ? It now seemed like nothing of consequence, meaningless, nothing to speak of. Yet I felt like the pupil who understands that his teacher is not disappointed in him only because she never expected any better.

Why did she tell you that she’d spoken to me? I asked Zafar. She must have wanted to tell you something, I said.

But even as I said this, I wondered how much Emily had told him.

Should she not have done so? he asked.

I mean, what prompted her to tell you?

I asked her one day if she’d heard anything from you. Her reply was that she’d not spoken to you since I came out of hospital.

That’s true, I said, with a plea in my voice that alarmed me, as if to say, That was the only time. It was a one-off. How absurd. Next thing I’d be saying is It didn’t mean anything to me. She meant nothing.

And you, Zafar continued, hadn’t contacted me in all that time, when you knew I’d been in hospital: came out of hospital , she’d said. For all you knew, I must have still been in hospital. Or, to be precise, as far as you knew, I thought you thought that I was still in hospital. There must have been a reason for not calling me. As for her wanting to tell me something, I’m not so sure she actually did.

Not sure she told you?

Not sure she wanted to.

Then why did she tell you? I asked Zafar, but it was the question I wanted to ask Emily right then. I would have demanded an answer from her.

She was looking for her powder kit.

Excuse me?

In the old days, they used to call them vanity bags. I like that. Do you know what cognitive load is?

As a matter of fact, I do. You know, that’s another thing you and my father have in common. You both have this weird fascination with experimental psychology, I said.

I wanted to change the subject. It was clumsy.

Your father’s explained it to you?

His weird fascination? I replied.

Cognitive load.

I do read, you know.

You mentioned your father.

As I understand it, cognitive load is when you give someone a task to occupy his cognitive functions and then ask him questions while he’s performing the task.

It’s a way of getting past conscious censors. When I asked Emily about you, she was rummaging for her compact in her handbag. We were in a cab nearing our destination, a restaurant.

That was the cognitive load?

The rummaging. Emily was such a shifty thing, so secretive and unforthcoming — as you yourself say — that I had to find my own sneaky ways of eliciting information from her. Funny thing is, I don’t even think I was conscious of my own scheming, not at the beginning. Only later, on reflecting, did I realize what I was doing: asking Emily questions when her conscious attention was taken up elsewhere. And when I looked back over other occasions, I recognized that I’d been doing it. We end up doing things we’re unaware of because of another’s behavior. So much for autonomy.

This tendency — can you call it a strategy when to begin with I wasn’t fully aware of it? This tendency was really only useful when the question required a yes or no answer and didn’t require conscious effort on her own part to figure out the answer, a question about where or when something did or did not happen, for instance. Of course, sometimes the cognitive load was too much, and she wouldn’t hear the question or would just wave it off for later.

If she’d been sufficiently distracted, continued Zafar, then later she wouldn’t even remember I’d asked her a question. That was another incidental effect of a question posed at an opportune moment. But you’re so busy worrying about where this conversation is going, you’re not asking the obvious question.

I’m sorry?

Why did I think I might not get a clear or truthful answer if I just asked her straight out? Well, I suppose there’s the fact that she was shifty. But that’s general; there was something specific, too, although I don’t think I could tell you what. I’ve thought about it, of course, but I can’t put my finger on it. Intuition, a sense that something had been kept unsaid. Remember, it was six months since I was in hospital. When I went in, whom would she have called who knew me? Not my parents, certainly. If she’d called anyone, she would have called you. Maybe, in those six months, she’d acted evasively whenever your name was mentioned, but I don’t remember you coming up in conversation. All I knew — however I knew it — was that I had to ask her when she wasn’t listening.

Conversation with Zafar was, from time to time, rather peculiar, but here it had taken a decidedly bizarre turn. We were talking about everything but the thing we were talking about.

Why are we talking about this? I asked him.

I asked her if she’d spoken to you and she replied that she hadn’t, not since I was in hospital.

* * *

When I left the hospital, I stayed at Penelope’s house, as I’ve said, with Emily there, too. I was feeling much better, and everything seemed so much slower, somehow more manageable. Most days, the house was empty. One day in that first week, Penelope asked me if I would mind dropping off her car at the service center on Thursday afternoon. On Thursday evening, when she came into the house, she said she’d seen the car outside and wondered if I’d not had a chance to take it in for servicing. I said I thought she’d said Thursday. It is Thursday , she replied. I’d lost account of the passage of time, lost the feeling for it. I used to sit on a bench in the garden watching the hydrangea and dahlias shriveling and the leaves browning on the sycamore and apple trees. I took to writing things down in my notebooks, not just the usual things but the more mundane, too, and it is because of them that I can now put timings to certain matters. Later, when I tried to figure out how I could have overlooked the obvious, matters that I now see were obvious — not just an error of calculation but rather a basic failure to see — I trace the cause to the untethering from time. If I had retained a sense, not on paper but in my mind, of the proportions of an hour, a day, a week, and a month, then perhaps I would not have been so foolish.

I was sitting in the garden when Emily appeared, her jacket unbuttoned and open, wafting her way through an overgrown path. She sat down beside me. She pinched her lips together and through those pinched lips she forced herself to speak.

* * *

I have always wanted children, said Zafar to me, going back even to my early twenties. I used to think there was something wrong with me. Young men, men in their twenties, they’re not supposed to want children, they’re not supposed to daydream about raising children, are they? If anything, the male role in childbearing — well, there is no role. It’s not his body that houses and feeds the baby, it’s not his belly that blows up and weighs him down, and it’s not from his body that the child is torn at birth. We might protect and provide for our mate, but that’s all. We’re supposed to want to play the field and sow our oats and have a good time and all the rest of it. But wanting children? That comes later, right? Yet that’s exactly what I wanted. Thirty years old and what I wanted most in the world was children. Maybe I wanted a child in order to repair my own childhood; maybe the desire was to fix something in me. But I don’t think so. This is what I think. Some things are random to our eyes because they are buried in our makeup, like the quantum mechanical randomness of the moment of a particle’s emission from the nucleus of an atom. The randomness might be real or only the projection of our inability to grasp what’s going on. I have the impression that women of our generation, the ones who have given so much to their professional lives, they think they can have children as late as forty. But it’s random.