Tahmima Anam - The Bones of Grace

Elijah, I’m on the beach now, and Grace , our totem, has arrived. I am about to meet Mo. And Anwar. Are you starting to love me back? Who am I kidding, of course you’re not. You see how I tease myself, here in the prep lab, and in the empty apartment with only Nina to keep me company, telling myself it’s just a matter of time, and words, before you return to me, knowing, in fact, that the possibility of our ever being together will require an altogether less linear, less knowable set of possibilities, an alchemy of which I am neither the scientist nor the author.

It has been snowing for eighty hours. I have been holed up at the lab, surviving on vending-machine snacks. Nature Valley. Cheetos. Vitamin Water. My tongue is glued to the top of my mouth. Diana accuses me of losing my sense of history. The hands that arrange her bones, that brush away the layers of earth that weighed heavy on her for fifty million years, those hands should be light and unattached, not heartsick, that embarrassing word, not longing for human touch, for the particular grooves of another person’s lifeline, but something else entirely, a pair of moving parts mindful of all that is ancient, and endures. I bristle at her rebuke, knowing she is right.

In the morning Ali had changed his mind. ‘Too dangerous,’ he said, shaking his head. I looked up at Grace and found myself insisting it would be all right. Gabriela and Jack backed me up. ‘It’s nothing,’ Jack said, ‘I’ve been up and down that thing a dozen times.’

‘Let’s be explorers,’ Gabriela said. She had swapped her headscarf for a bandana and tan workman boots, which she wore over her trousers.

Ali passed his hand over his forehead, lifting up the prayer cap, smoothing his hair, and lowering the cap back down on his head again. ‘We have never allowed it before,’ he said, ‘I would not forgive myself if something terrible happened.’

‘Come on, man,’ said Jack, who was wearing a pair of shorts and a baseball cap with a Yankees logo on it. The rumour had spread that a small expedition was going on board, and a few of the workers had gathered around. I was starting to recognise some of them, and when I passed by, they looked down at their feet to acknowledge they knew who I was. It was fully day now, light reflecting harshly off the white hull. It didn’t seem possible to climb all the way up, there must have been a hundred little rungs, narrow and cylindrical and slippery.

Gabriela went first, followed by Jack. They seemed to ascend easily, wind-licked and beautiful, as if on a cable car on a snow-capped mountain. Then it was my turn. The rungs were cold and my legs trembled as I took the first steps.

‘Look only straight, madam,’ Ali called out from behind me.

I started to climb. Rivets. Thousands and thousands of rivets. How would they ever unbraid this machine? A clear sky now, and the sun struck me full in the face, and in the distance, I heard the cry of a lone gull.

‘We have reached halfway,’ I heard Ali say. His voice was dampened by the wind and the growing distance between us. I hadn’t realised it, but I was rushing, putting one step after another in quick succession.

I couldn’t help but glance downwards: a mistake — my stomach lurched. I stalled. The crowd had grown below us. Would they catch me? I believed they would, they were used to rescuing each other, every day on the line with the welders and ropes tied around their waists. I told myself to take one step at a time. My palms were slippery, but I pushed ahead and climbed steadily, one hand over the other, my calves straining to keep a strong foothold, knowing that if I stopped the sensation of falling would overtake me, and finally the ladder curved over the hull and I pulled myself up and over and found myself on a large green square with a circle drawn in white in the middle. A helicopter pad.

The rest of Grace rose above me, three more storeys of staterooms, ballrooms, restaurants, and whatever other delights cruise ships contained. I stepped aside and Ali followed, panting and whispering another prayer under his breath. Jack and Gabriela had already crossed to the other side of the white circle and were leaning over the railing and looking out onto the horizon. Everything was quiet and shining. I felt the skin on my face burn in the reflected light. We followed Jack, who led us across the deck and around the promenade, passing the closed doors of passenger cabins. Beyond lay an empty swimming pool.

‘What does everyone want to see first?’ Jack said, holding his arms out. ‘How about the engine room?’

‘It will be dark,’ Ali said, handing me a flashlight. ‘Please madam, be careful.’

‘Where that captain killed himself?’ Gabriela asked, pulling her bandana down and letting it hang around her neck.

‘Yep.’ Jack took her arm and they began walking to the other end of the ship, passing a bank of lifeboats. Ali rushed to catch up with them, motioning for me to follow.

I lingered behind, peering over the edge. Sea on one side as far as I could see, and on the other, the beach, the tent still there from yesterday’s party, and beyond, the workers’ dormitory, the bamboo shacks that had accumulated around it, and in the distance, the Dhaka — Chittagong highway, the markets flanking it on either side, soon to be adorned with the takings from Grace . I recalled being up high before, behind a wall of glass on the top floor of a new high-rise in Motijheel, or one time when Rashid had come to Boston and we had gone up to the top of the John Hancock building, but this was different, because everything around was so flat, the broken copper sand, the bay with its outstretched arms. Not a living thing in sight, not a gull or a fish breaking the surface of the water, unless you looked down towards the sand, to the men waiting on the beach.

They were still gathered below, in knots of three and four. One of them waved. I hesitated, then waved back. When I turned around, I found I’d lost sight of the others. I walked away from the prow, and back towards the helicopter pad. I found a doorway with rounded edges that led to a stairwell. I climbed down. The stairwell seemed to narrow as I descended. I turned on the flashlight and waved the circular beam of light around but there wasn’t much to see; the walls were white and unmarked except for a few scuffs here and there. I went around a corner and through a passageway and down further, deeper into the ship, where the air was cool and dense and tinged with metal. Finally, on what seemed like the lowest level, I found a hallway with many doors at regular intervals. I stopped and tested one. It was locked, and so were the next three I tried. The forth swung open, revealing a small square room with a low ceiling. There was a bunk bed against one wall. I traced my finger over the chair bolted to the floor. The ship was not meant to be so still. It was meant to move, to sway, to resist a force stronger than itself.

In the top bunk was a sleeping boy, his arm flung over his eyes. I considered waking him up and asking for directions to the engine room, but instead I just held my flashlight over him and saw his chest rising and falling. His hand that was closer to me was curled into a loose fist, and the fingernails of that hand were clean and neatly trimmed. For this reason, I quietly slipped out of the room and closed the door behind me.

I crossed that hallway and another, zigzagging past more closed doors, then went up a few flights. I caught flashes of daylight. Now I was on a promenade deck that circled the ship, and the cabins that opened on to this were spacious, trimmed with metal and glass. I saw deck chairs, fire extinguishers, showers and televisions and refrigerators. I went across and down again. On one of the lower levels, I opened a set of double doors and found a small library of hardbacks arranged alphabetically. Dickens was present in abundance, Anna Karenina , not at all. None of the books appeared to have been touched. I creaked open Robinson Crusoe , hunted, and found, my favourite phrase: ‘For sudden joys, like griefs, confound at first.’