Six months later, I’m still thinking of the conversation. As the breathing of the man lying next to me deepens and slows, I trace the beams along the ceiling and the slanted walls. The beams have always reminded me of a web, the apartment our very own ecosystem. As we lie I watch the shadows move, the music changing from a bluesy mix to the jangling guitars of Mazzy Star, and the romantic dreaminess it promises fills the room. Because we can’t be seen together and his home is off limits, it is always this bed, this ceiling, this afternoon light. Once he came over solely to take a nap in my sheets.
His phone on the table across the room buzzes and we ignore it. In the beginning he would make a show of going to check, sighing when he saw the number, filling the room with the weight and thrill of what we were doing.
And again my mind returns to the conversation six months ago. We had met at the dinner for a visiting professor and were crowded around the desserts, cordials of sherry at our elbows and surrounded by empty wine glasses, when the conversation turned. The professor cocked his head and asked, ‘What’s the worst thing you’ve ever done?’
None of us had a good answer, the kind of juicy talk that transforms an evening from an enjoyment to an experience. I sieved my mind for latent shames, times I’d failed people or sold them out, but nothing really amounted to a transgression. I had felt like a child then, exposed, bathed in the light of my naivety.
Afterward the man had driven me home and when I turned to thank him he said, ‘Are we really doing this?’
I pretended not to be surprised. He was lanky and bored, a type I’m rarely attracted to, but I felt a delight just pausing before I answered, ‘I guess we are.’
The buzzing again; the phone casts its blue light onto the walls around the table. I lift my head from his arm and lean back on one elbow.
‘Do you want me to turn the music off so you can get that?’
He sighs, ‘Seems smarter to just let it go at this point.’
‘You sure?’
‘It was in my pocket. I didn’t even feel it.’
I lay back down. The first time we talked about us, he used the word enlightened: no provincial moral obligations for us. I spent weeks floating on a cloud of our superiority, surprised to find my mind was blissfully clean. Usually the brain doesn’t obey the laws of entropy. Instead it collects, growing heavier with thought, crowded, like tapeworms multiplying in a host. Eventually the organs get so full they can’t function properly. Burden, they call it. Now my thoughts go back to the professor; I wonder where I would be if he had never asked his question.
On the other side of the room, the buzzing of his phone has gone from sporadic to continuous. The sun is dimming; my music plays a little too loudly. He sits up, swings his legs over the edge of the bed and goes to the phone.
‘Fuck,’ he says. He doesn’t answer it, but cradles it in his palm, staring at the caller ID until it stops ringing. He sets it down, then comes back and sits on the bed, legs straight in front of him, arms propping him up from behind.
‘I should probably go soon,’ he says.
When he leaves I will be exhausted, dragging myself out of bed to examine my body for tender spots, picking knots of pulled-out hair from between the sheets.
The glow of the phone disappears. I refuse to think of the name lighting on its display, or the person who belongs to the name. I think about the professor. I wonder what he had done to initiate himself into the ranks of the corrupt. If afterward he had felt himself like a butterfly, burst free from the shackles of arbitrary moral encumbrance and buoyant with possibility. Or if instead he had felt like a caterpillar arrested in metamorphosis, trapped inside a brittle chrysalis of his own making, with each day forgetting more and more what it was like to live outside.
Roya Khatiblou is an Iranian- and British-American author based in Birmingham, UK. She has been the recipient of a grant from Arts Council England, a Short Story Apprenticeship from Word Factory and membership in Room 204, Writing West Midlands’ professional development scheme. She received her MFA from University of Illinois, where she was an editor for Ninth Letter, and is currently the Assistant Fiction Editor for Sabotage Reviews. Her work has appeared in Chicago Review, Hotel Amerika, Passages North, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Hobart and elsewhere. You can find Roya on Twitter as @Roya_Khatiblou.
Photo by Cassidy Dickens on Unsplash.
