Exit West

  Nadia at first thought there was no need to say goodbye, that saying goodbye involved a kind of presumption, but then she felt a small sadness, and knew she needed to say goodbye, not for him, for she doubted he would care, but for her. And since they had little to say to one another by phone and instant message seemed too impersonal, she decided to say it in person, outdoors, in a public place, not at his messy, musky apartment, where she trusted herself less, but when she said it, he invited her up, “for one last time,” and she intended to say no but actually said yes, and the sex they had was passionate farewell sex, and it was, not unsurprisingly, surprisingly good.

  Later in life she would sometimes wonder what became of him, and she would never know.

  • • •

  THE FOLLOWING EVENING helicopters filled the sky like birds startled by a gunshot, or by the blow of an axe at the base of their tree. They rose, singly and in pairs, and fanned out above the city in the reddening dusk, as the sun slipped below the horizon, and the whir of their rotors echoed through windows and down alleys, seemingly compressing the air beneath them, as though each were mounted atop an invisible column, an invisible breathable cylinder, these odd, hawkish, mobile sculptures, some thin, with tandem canopies, pilot and gunner at different heights, and some fat, full of personnel, chopping, chopping through the heavens.

  Saeed watched them with his parents from their balcony. Nadia watched them from her rooftop, alone.

  Through an open door, a young soldier looked down upon their city, a city not overly familiar to him, for he had grown up in the countryside, and was struck by how big it was, how grand its towers and lush its parks. The din around him was incredible, and his belly lurched as he swerved.

  THREE

  NADIA AND SAEED WERE, back then, always in possession of their phones. In their phones were antennas, and these antennas sniffed out an invisible world, as if by magic, a world that was all around them, and also nowhere, transporting them to places distant and near, and to places that had never been and would never be. For many decades after independence a telephone line in their city had remained a rare thing, the waiting list for a connection long, the teams that installed the copper wires and delivered the heavy handsets greeted and revered and bribed like heroes. But now wands waved in the city’s air, untethered and free, phones in the millions, and a number could be obtained in minutes, for a pittance.

  Saeed partly resisted the pull of his phone. He found the antenna too powerful, the magic it summoned too mesmerizing, as though he were eating a banquet of limitless food, stuffing himself, stuffing himself, until he felt dazed and sick, and so he had removed or hidden or restricted all but a few applications. His phone could make calls. His phone could send messages. His phone could take pictures, identify celestial bodies, transform the city into a map while he drove. But that was it. Mostly. Except for the hour each evening that he enabled the browser on his phone and disappeared down the byways of the internet. But this hour was tightly regulated, and when it ended, a timer would set off an alarm, a gentle, windy chime, as though from the breezy planet of some blue-shimmering science fiction priestess, and he would electronically lock away his browser and not browse again on his phone until the following day.

  Yet even this pared-back phone, this phone stripped of so much of its potential, allowed him to access Nadia’s separate existence, at first hesitantly, and then more frequently, at any time of day or night, allowed him to start to enter into her thoughts, as she toweled herself after a shower, as she ate a light dinner alone, as she sat at her desk hard at work, as she reclined on her toilet after emptying her bladder. He made her laugh, once, then again, and again, he made her skin burn and her breath shorten with the surprised beginnings of arousal, he became present without presence, and she did much the same to him. Soon a rhythm was established, and it was thereafter rare that more than a few waking hours would pass without contact between them, and they found themselves in those early days of their romance growing hungry, touching each other, but without bodily adjacency, without release. They had begun, each of them, to be penetrated, but they had not yet kissed.

  In contrast to Saeed, Nadia saw no need to limit her phone. It kept her company on long evenings, as it did countless young people in the city who were likewise stranded in their homes, and she rode it far out into the world on otherwise solitary, stationary nights. She watched bombs falling, women exercising, men copulating, clouds gathering, waves tugging at the sand like the rasping licks of so many mortal, temporary, vanishing tongues, tongues of a planet that would one day too be no more.

  Nadia frequently explored the terrain of social media, though she left little trace of her passing, not posting much herself, and employing opaque usernames and avatars, the online equivalents of her black robes. It was through social media that Nadia ordered the shrooms Saeed and she would eat on the night they first became physically intimate, shrooms still being available for cash-on-demand couriered delivery in their city in those days. The police and anti-narcotic agencies were focused on other, more market-leading substances, and to the unsuspecting, fungi, whether hallucinogenic or portobello, all seemed the same, and innocuous enough, a fact exploited by a middle-aged local man with a ponytail who ran a small side business that offered rare ingredients for chefs and epicures, and yet was followed and liked in cyberspace mostly by the young.

  In a few months this ponytailed man would be beheaded, nape-first with a serrated knife to enhance discomfort, his headless body strung up by one ankle from an electricity pylon where it swayed legs akimbo until the shoelace his executioner used instead of rope rotted and gave way, no one daring to cut him down before that.

  But even now the city’s freewheeling virtual world stood in stark contrast to the day-to-day lives of most people, to those of young men, and especially of young women, and above all of children who went to sleep unfed but could see on some small screen people in foreign lands preparing and consuming and even conducting food fights with feasts of such opulence that the very fact of their existence boggled the mind.

  Online there was sex and security and plenty and glamour. On the street, the day before Nadia’s shrooms arrived, there was a burly man at the red light of a deserted late-night intersection who turned to Nadia and greeted her, and when she ignored him, began to swear at her, saying only a whore would drive a motorcycle, didn’t she know it was obscene for a woman to straddle a bike in that way, had she ever seen anyone else doing it, who did she think she was, and swearing with such ferocity that she thought he might attack her, as she stood her ground, looking at him, visor down, heart pounding, but with her grip firm on clutch and throttle, her hands ready to speed her away, surely faster than he could follow on his tired-looking scooter, until he shook his head and drove off with a shout, a sort of strangled scream, a sound that could have been rage, or equally could have been anguish.

  • • •

  THE SHROOMS ARRIVED first thing the following morning at Nadia’s office, their uniformed courier having no idea what was inside the package Nadia was signing and paying for, other than that it was listed as foodstuffs. Around the same time, a group of militants was taking over the city’s stock exchange. Nadia and her colleagues spent much of that day staring at the television next to their floor’s water cooler, but by afternoon it was over, the army having decided any risk to hostages was less than the risk to national security should this media-savvy and morale-sapping spectacle be allowed to continue, and so the building was stormed with maximum force, and the militants were exterminated, and initial estimates put the number of dead workers at probably less than a hundred.

  Nadia and Saeed had been messaging each other throughout, and initially they thought they would cancel their rendezvous planned for that evening, Saeed’s second invitation to her home, but when no curfew was announced, much to people’s surprise, the authorities perhaps wishing to signal that they were in such complete control that no
ne was needed, both Nadia and Saeed found themselves unsettled and craving each other’s company, and so they decided to go ahead and meet after all.

  Saeed’s family’s car had been repaired, and he drove it to Nadia’s instead of riding his scooter, feeling somehow less exposed in an enclosed vehicle. But while weaving through traffic his side mirror scraped the door of a shiny black luxury SUV, the conveyance of some industrialist or bigwig, costing more than a house, and Saeed steeled himself for a shouting, perhaps even a beating, but the guard who stepped out of the front passenger-side door of the SUV, assault rifle pointed skyward, merely had time to look at Saeed, a smooth, ferocious glance, before being summoned back in, and the SUV sped off, its owner clearly not wishing, on this night, to tarry.

  • • •

  SAEED PARKED around the corner from Nadia’s building, messaged that he had arrived, awaited the thump of the falling plastic bag, slipped into the robe that it contained, and then hurried in and upstairs, much as he had before, except that this time he came bearing bags of his own, bags of barbecued chicken and lamb and hot, fresh-made bread. Nadia took the food from him and put it in her oven so that it might remain insulated and warm—but this precaution notwithstanding, their dinner would be cold when finally eaten, lying there disregarded until dawn.

  Nadia led Saeed outside. She had placed a long cushion, its cover woven like a rug, on the floor of her terrace, and she sat on this cushion with her back against the parapet and motioned for Saeed to do the same. As he sat he felt the outside of her thigh, firm, against his, and she felt the outside of his, likewise firm, against hers.

  She said, “Aren’t you going to take that off?”

  She meant the black robe, which he had forgotten he was wearing, and he looked down at himself and over at her, and smiled, and answered, “You first.”

  She laughed. “Together, then.”

  “Together.”

  They stood and pulled off their robes, facing each other, and underneath both were wearing jeans and sweaters, there being a nip in the air tonight, and his sweater was brown and loose and hers was beige and clung to her torso like a soft second skin. He attempted chivalrously not to take in the sweep of her body, his eyes holding hers, but of course, as we know often happens in such circumstances, he was unsure as to whether or not he had succeeded, one’s gaze being less than entirely conscious a phenomenon.

  They sat back down and she placed her fist on her thigh, palm up, and opened it.

  “Have you ever done psychedelic mushrooms?” she asked.

  • • •

  THEY SPOKE QUIETLY under the clouds, glimpsing occasionally a gash of moon or of darkness, and otherwise seeing ripples and churns of city-lit gray. It was all very normal at first, and Saeed wondered if she was perhaps teasing him, or if she had been deceived and sold a dud batch. Soon he had concluded that by some quirk of biology or psychology he was simply, and unfortunately, resistant to whatever it was that mushrooms were supposed to do.

  So he was unprepared for the feeling of awe that came over him, the wonder with which he then regarded his own skin, and the lemon tree in its clay pot on Nadia’s terrace, as tall as he was, and rooted in its soil, which was in turn rooted in the clay of the pot, which rested upon the brick of the terrace, which was like the mountaintop of this building, which was growing from the earth itself, and from this earthy mountain the lemon tree was reaching up, up, in a gesture so beautiful that Saeed was filled with love, and reminded of his parents, for whom he suddenly felt such gratitude, and a desire for peace, that peace should come for them all, for everyone, for everything, for we are so fragile, and so beautiful, and surely conflicts could be healed if others had experiences like this, and then he regarded Nadia and saw that she was regarding him and her eyes were like worlds.

  They did not hold hands until Saeed’s perspective had returned, hours later, not to normal, for he suspected it was possible he might never think of normal in the same way again, but to something closer to what it had been before they had eaten these shrooms, and when they held hands it was facing each other, sitting, their wrists resting on their knees, their knees almost touching, and then he leaned forward and she leaned forward, and she smiled, and they kissed, and they realized that it was dawn, and they were no longer hidden by darkness, and they might be seen from some other rooftop, so they went inside and ate the cold food, not much but some, and it was strong in flavor.

  • • •

  SAEED’S PHONE HAD DIED and he charged it in his family’s car from a backup battery source he kept in the glove compartment, and as his phone turned on it beeped and chirped with his parents’ panic, their missed calls, their messages, their mounting terror at a child not returned safely that night, a night when many children of many parents did not return at all.

  Upon Saeed’s arrival his father went to bed and in his bedside mirror glimpsed a suddenly much older man, and his mother was so relieved to see her son that she thought, for a moment, she should slap him.

  • • •

  NADIA DID NOT FEEL like sleeping, and so she took a shower, the water chilly because of the intermittent gas supply to her boiler. She stood naked, as she had been born, and put on her jeans and T-shirt and sweater, as she did when alone at home, and then put on her robe, ready to resist the claims and expectations of the world, and stepped outside to go for a walk in a nearby park that would by now be emptying of its early-morning junkies and of the gay lovers who had departed their houses with more time than they needed for the errands they had said they were heading out to accomplish.

  • • •

  LATER THAT DAY, in the evening, Nadia’s time, the sun having slipped below her horizon, it was morning in the San Diego, California, locality of La Jolla, where an old man lived by the sea, or rather on a bluff overlooking the Pacific Ocean. The fittings in his house were worn but painstakingly repaired, as was his garden: home to mesquite trees and desert willows and succulent plants that had seen better years, but were still alive and mostly free of blight.

  The old man had served in the navy during one of the larger wars and he had respect for the uniform, and for these young men who had established a perimeter around his property, as he watched, standing on the street with their commanding officer. They reminded him of when he was their age and had their strength and their suppleness of movement and their certainty of purpose and their bond with one another, that bond he and his friends used to say was like that of brothers, but was in some ways stronger than that of brothers, or at least than his bond with his own brother, his kid brother, who had passed last spring from cancer of the throat that had withered him to the weight of a young girl, and who had not spoken to the old man for years, and when the old man had gone to see him in the hospital could no longer speak, could only look, and in his eyes was exhaustion but not so much fear, brave eyes, on a kid brother the old man had never before thought of as brave.

  The officer didn’t have time for the old man but he had time for his age and for his service record, and so he allowed the old man to linger nearby for a while before saying with a polite dip of his head that it would be best if he now moved on.

  The old man asked the officer whether it was Mexicans that had been coming through, or was it Muslims, because he couldn’t be sure, and the officer said he couldn’t answer, sir. So the old man stood silent for a bit and the officer let him, as cars were diverted and told to go some other way, and as rich neighbors who had bought their properties more recently sat at their front windows and stared, and in the end the old man asked how he could help.

  The old man felt like a child suddenly, asking this. The officer was young enough to be his grandson.

  The officer said they’d let him know, sir.

  I’ll let you know: that’s what the old man’s father used to say to him when he was pestering. And in some ways the officer did look like his father, more like his father th
an like the old man anyway, like his father when the old man was just a boy.

  The officer offered to arrange for the old man to be dropped off if he wanted, with kin maybe, or friends.

  It was a warm early winter’s day, clear and sunny. Far below, the surfers were paddling out in their wetsuits. Above the ocean, in the distance, the gray transport planes were lining up to land at Coronado.

  The old man wondered where he should go, and thinking about it, realized he couldn’t come up with a single place.

  • • •

  AFTER THE ASSAULT on the stock exchange of Saeed and Nadia’s city, it seemed the militants had changed strategy, and grown in confidence, and instead of merely detonating a bomb here or orchestrating a shooting there, they began taking over and holding territory throughout the city, sometimes a building, sometimes an entire neighborhood, for hours usually, but on occasion for days. How so many of them were arriving so quickly from their bastions in the hills remained a mystery, but the city was vast and sprawling and impossible to disconnect from the surrounding countryside. Besides, the militants were well known to have sympathizers within.

  The curfew Saeed’s parents had been waiting for was duly imposed, and enforced with hair-trigger zeal, not just sandbagged checkpoints and razor wire proliferating but also howitzers and infantry fighting vehicles and tanks with their turrets clad in the rectangular barnacles of explosive reactive armor. Saeed went with his father to pray on the first Friday after the curfew’s commencement, and Saeed prayed for peace and Saeed’s father prayed for Saeed and the preacher in his sermon urged all the congregants to pray for the righteous to emerge victorious in the war but carefully refrained from specifying on which side of the conflict he thought the righteous to be.