A STORY by TONY SANTI
Distant Lovers Become Something Else
Remember the transatlantic flight: a chlorine haze through throbbing barnacles. Impure sweat congeals and nut butter-spreads across the forehead as an elderly Hijabi drives her temple into bare meat where smooth turns to stubble. Scrolling 27 pictures. The video: lace bra dancing in the bathroom mirror against some dreadful French rap song, whispering every lyric, half-smiling to me, dimple on the wrong cheek. Tears again.
Back in Maryland and it’s been a week. Not a week—twenty-seven years or thirty seconds, my whole life, early morning birth, corporate-mandated lunch break and a sneeze. Four nights of them in Cairo and a period of time after. Acidic espresso warps thin paper cups, a cupped cast iron grenade in the Oklahoma winter, bitter vomit in the double sink and a forehead kiss. The weed comforts and breaks down. Fuzzy tongue for six days, and eyes: the pink of mamaw’s bowling shirt the Tuesday she shattered her hip and died in the springtime garden. I haven’t been straight in a while. Just lifted over Cecil County backroads, rolling fields of soybean plants, swirling green in the heat (all things green and young), fresh manure through cracked windows. The needle falls, yellow light flashes, and I avoid eyes with the rose petal gas attendant, paying in cash for no reason at all (candy corn fingernails scratch the palm). The eternal playlist blares, distorted and I need it like the weed. The car door opens and earphones penetrate. A moment of silence: gaseous and heavy. Nitrogen particles bond with Nitrogen particles—to combust upon isolation, separation.
A low budget romantic comedy, and I sob over a carton of chocolate chunk ice cream followed by a hundred push ups. I swallow my own vomit: velvety, dessert-like, and decadent. I exist in the hollow space between messages. They respond the way I do to Aunt Barbara, a moist blanket. Hit the weed pen and feel pathetic. I hit it again. Again. Again. Self-help videos of barking Navy Seals. Waking up before sunrise should help, taking ice baths should help, fifteen miles should help. I sleep until noon and eat three edibles on the air mattress. I shut off the window AC unit and sweat. I sob. My mother’s feet tap gently in the pallid yellow light beneath the door. The air mattress sighs.
I see them there, twirling a glass of red wine by the stem, gentle whirlpool of deep maroon with continuous crimson edge. Their violet tinted teeth are satisfied. Now, they are inside. Leaning back against a marble (not granite) counter that is ours, bobbing their head to an old French song I somehow know and entirely understand. Keys on the counter, a stack of opened and unopened mail, a child’s lead-handed drawing. I feel their unbelievably small hands, the webbing between fingers. I kiss the mole on the top of their left, subtle scent of garlic like home.
**
The freckle at the center, perfectly centered. I see it, his lip, but I try not to taste—to feel his Brillo Pad beard beneath my nails— against gleaming tender pink; his weight forcing me down through a bed of hurt moss or sponge or wet sand, tender. Pressing and pressure, my legs struggling to wrap around, to contain.
Now, I am present. It is shameful to think of him here. Not here: the land of stimulation, where cigarette smoke excites, fragrant meat juices drip from slow-spinning spits, foreign language drips like spittle from foreign mouths—and my mouth is foreign, too. Evoke Edward Said when I am stuffed full of sickening orientalist pleasures, when the shoeless futbol boy drags his melancholy through the dust, something within presses against something else. Cherrywood teeth chatter and I feel myself a part of Gérôme’s Snake Charmer, where I am forced to ask if I am the naked boy, thin porcelain legs pressed together, or his snake, spotted and wrapping—to be charmed. The corrosive exotic thoughts, this Eastern adventure—romantic. I am the snake, the Moroccan blue tile, the naked boy’s legs, and the turbaned audience.
In those final moments he cried for me, sniffling self-flagellation—I did not cry. I ate breakfast as he sobbed, a hard boiled egg with a pinch of iodized salt in bed. A cocoon from Cairo. I wanted to cry for him, but those tears would be tainted, soiled with scraps of Lucas’s tears—well-earned and justified, yet still non-existent. I will not cry for this American, nor Lucas, but only myself, and I will do so in private near-silence.
We climaxed together. Masses of breath smashing up against each other and mixing, pouring into open mouths. It happened just once. I was above and he was below, and there was something ephemeral—and so much sweat. He did not dominate there. His language meant nothing. Euphoria: death of language, and he was submissive, meek, and whimpering. I was all-powerful. He stared up at me, pupils like tea saucers and I forced his wrists down against the headboard. In the grey moonlight I think of this with wandering fingers, and when I pass that budget hotel in Garden City something throbs for a moment.
He wants to meet in Paris when my Egyptian Summer runs its course. I want to peel the skin from this body and glow pink, divine—to swallow my blood-soaked marshmallow teeth and breathe. This is what I want.
Now, to roam the streets of Cairo, a feral dog—no, I am entirely myself, vulnerable and exposed and untethered. The Cairene catcaller does not phase me. The green fava bean falafel is torn between my teeth. A long sip of laymoun bena’na’ clings to my throat, and I am alive. But my tongue remembers his bottom lip.
**
Change is in perpetual struggle with desire, and they are there, surrounded.Chiseled faces swirl serpent tongues. ‘Where are you from?’ one might ask through clean even spaces. ‘How long have you been in Cairo? [finger might move a strand of hair] Wow, your Arabic is good. I could give you private lessons. [potential emphasis on private] Do you know the word for cute? for beautiful? for dimple? [gaze likely rises and intensifies] Oohlala, you are French. Is that thing about French kissing true? [right leg probably uncrosses and crosses over again] Wow what a beautiful laugh you have, what beautiful teeth.’
Maybe someone will kiss them on a Sinai rooftop. Maybe they will fall asleep and snore slightly into someone’s open mouth. Maybe someone will feel their unbelievably small hands. Maybe they will run their tongue across someone’s bottom lip—I hate every being in Egypt. Dogs included. When they return to Paris, I’ll hate every one there, too. This will be better, since I never cared for the French.
And I am here in the marshes where the egret stalls on single leg, and the sea breeze is heard but never felt, never quite breaking through those apartheid dunes. I am dry like those dunes and my nose wants to drip blood down my upper lip’s valley and onto the tip of the knowing tongue. Everything lingers here. I bought the ticket. Paris in thirteen days. I want to be possessed more than I want to possess, but possession nonetheless. They are floating in a sea of flesh. Their body is one of many, a skin collective sinking, fading to black. Sweat: a bonding agent, and cum—of course there is cum like mortar paste. The skin collective moans and melts into itself, imploding and reforming simultaneously; a wretched Warshak test pointing to a single meaning. I am outside of all pleasure. I am here in the marshes. But soon I will be there.
**
Before I board this flight, I will breathe Cairo, listen to the car horn choir, no—a soliloquy, a single energy (all things melt or expand into singularity). I will show every tooth, even the sharp ones. I will speak the Arabic I know, and I will be emphatically and unapologetically wrong.
I will see him in Paris. His kissing was mimetic, and kissing him was kissing myself and the teenage girls and boys who taught me to kiss. There was Something—Something he rushes to define, to structure, and formalize, but Something outside of those bounds. Something previously unfelt. As weeks pass, Something intensifies. We are moving toward Something. The word ‘we’ spreads and tightens the skin, but exists without consent. There is violence in oneness, skin must be shed for the Sacred Python to glow. My skin will forever be mine and I shall shelter within it, pork rind bubbles and all. But I will see him. I will be held again and inshallah feel nothing at all. I must smell something sour in his arms—no, something sweet like death and rotting citrus and toasted corn flakes.
A farewell to Cairo, and this version of self. The flight will last until it doesn’t. Maybe I will dig my temple into some poor boy’s neck, and rest—maybe I will be atomized.
**
There were rats in the Jardin de Tuileries. Legs dangling off my lap, and the rats scurrying from bush to bush, weaving through cobblestone mounds and making little rat noises. They wanted to tongue my bottom lip, and I wanted to watch the rats, a connected pattern in the bushes—a coalesced body of brown fur and wet black eyes, mixing and pulsating in near-unison. Parisians sauntered by, unphased and French. There were never rats like this in Cairo—reductive comparisons between colored spaces on maps.
I have won. Paris has dragged them to me. Our love is ours now. Ten days and the tectonic plates have shifted, the bowels of the earth have erupted, and locust swarms have desecrated Egyptian crops. The Nile is red, the Seine is red, the Chesapeake bleeds, and all is destroyed and remade. Waves surge over those dry dunes, and pour into the marsh, the egret is drowned, and stillness is forever in motion. I can rest.
**
I am hollowed out, turned to a shallow well. Overflowing with a cloying viscous goop. I slurp from my well with a straw made of bird bone. I submit to the center, I surrender, and I am left in a beautifully stupid daze, kissing fruit flies and singing nursery rhymes. Things pause and come together, a stillness over the world—I stand on single leg in the marshes, smiling. His dunes shelter from the violent sea.
Future cracks the present and I see children, lead-handed drawings on marble countertops. I feel the blending of features, my own nose lengthening, shoulders broadening, eyes lightening. Lightning strikes over sea, but his dunes shield. My hollow bones feel nothing.
He barely glanced at the Eiffel Tower, hardly touched foie gras, glugged his Bordeaux without taste. I was above those things, towering. To be sanctified and worshiped, whittled down to an idol—a halo forced over head, bronzen beams, a balaclava swallowing. He is blinded in the bronze and I am not pink as I hoped or even gold, but bronze. I am stripped of the pimples lining my lower back. My breath is perfumed and I am drained of impure blood—drained of many things.
Certain treatments kill indiscriminately: chemotherapy, insecticides, and napalm strikes. Some things are lost in processes of removal or restoration. It is natural. Bloodletting has its place. Clean me, and fill me with something new and pure and simple and painless. Watch how easily my left cheek is cupped in your right hand, as if I were molded for this, alone. Islam comes from surrender, to surrender to something higher than self. I learned this from a tired Ustaz in a classroom for rich French children. I want to surrender to Something, and why can’t it be—
Tony Santi (he/him) served five entirely unpleasant years in the U.S. Army as an Arabic Cryptologic Linguist, but please don't hold that against him. He currently lives in an attic with his hamster in Iowa City. His work has appeared in Page and Spine Fiction Showcase, Quibble Lit, and is forthcoming in NUMUM.