Slowly, Zakhariye makes his way across the office, passing a line of cubicles full of hard-working interns who get paid nothing and who are frequently reminded how grateful they should be for the chance to be associated with the glamorous world of magazine publishing. As he heads toward the men’s room, his feet make more noise than he likes on the creaky hardwood floor of the sun-drenched, loft-like office with exposed red-brick walls that accentuate the self-conscious aren’t-we-so-hip decor.
Once inside the men’s room, Zakhariye shakes his head vigorously to snap out of the spell or whatever it is that has come over him. He yawns repeatedly in an exaggerated fashion until he catches a glimpse of himself in the mirror, which prompts him to stop immediately. To give his brain one last good shake, he tilts his head to the side and whacks the top of his skull a couple of times with an open fist the way he did after swimming on the beaches of Mogadishu as a boy to empty his ears of sea water. But the trick that worked for him as child doesn’t do him any good now.
Desperate for a remedy, Zakhariye paces the narrow, grey-tiled space that separates the sinks and stalls. Mysteriously, his head responds well to the pacing, at least better than the violent yawning or the head banging. Zakhariye has noticed that as long as he keeps moving the spells aren’t so bad. When his body is in motion, the numbness isn’t so all-consuming.
Zakhariye got a wonderful jolt of life, however transient, from nicking the two bumps under his chin during shaving, but he has no more bumps to slice and even the last cut didn’t give him the exhilarating rush he felt after the first accidental one. When he became aware of what he was doing, it seems, the delicious thrill was lost. That’s the trouble with being as self-aware as he is — he can never find his own self-destructive remedy among the countless “cures” people indulge in to cope. He is always too aware of their futility while in the middle of doing them. Like the time he was dumped by his first love for another man. To numb the agony that came with the realization of his utter replace-ability, he went to a prostitute. However, he stopped midway because he couldn’t expunge from his head the knowledge of why he was there long enough to find any pleasure in being there. The trick, he now realizes, is not to see himself in the act.
The same thing happened this morning as he stood over the sink, finger pressed on the slash, trying to staunch the bleeding. He imagined himself as a guest on a daytime talk show, perhaps an episode entitled “Men Who Cut Themselves with Shaving Razors.” And that was when the pathetic futility of what he was doing hit him. He was too old to be a guest on a Jerry Springer– style show, so he stopped what he was doing at once.
As Zakhariye now paces in circles, he realizes how strange it would seem if a colleague — God forbid, Daniel sporting his permanently smug grin — were to enter and see him going around and around in the men’s room. Zakhariye remembers a quiet, tree-lined street off Queen that would be perfect for the sort of anonymous, vigorous pacing he has in mind. He knows he needs to get back to his meeting with Virginia, imagines her sitting in her cramped office, waiting for him to return, endlessly rearranging that damn scarf of hers. But he fears what he might do if he goes back to that airless office. No telling what might result from an hour-long dissertation on font size and background colour.
The worst-case scenario is that during one of three meetings he has scheduled later in the day he will let loose with a sudden, deafening scream that will cause everyone in the office to hide their scissors and letter openers. He can’t take that risk. So he leaves the washroom, quietly passes Kisha, the receptionist, and escapes out the big glass door toward the elevator, trying hard to avoid Virginia altogether.
Zakhariye’s desire for movement, his need not to be pinned to a chair, has started to affect the customary dinner with his wife. It is a custom they started in the early days of their marriage as an antidote to their hectic, overscheduled lives. Although implicit, they agreed that no matter how chaotic things got, they would always make time for a proper family meal at the table, complete with good china and conversation. To their credit, Thandie and Zakhariye have maintained this tradition even after everything unravelled following Alcott’s death. Out of defiance, stoicism, or plain desperation to hold on to something familiar, they have continued to come home in time for dinner, sit face to face, eat, and talk. Or at least try.
Tonight, as they sit across from each other eating pasta and thinly sliced, well-cooked steak, the only sound in the room is the clatter of silverware against the fine china they received as a wedding gift. Unlike some couples who reserve the good china for company, Zakhariye and Thandie believe they are worthy of eating from their expensive plates.
He watches his wife absent-mindedly play with the long bangs of hair that rest on her forehead, and for a moment he sees the horizontal scar that runs across her forehead just under the hairline. Thandie grew the bangs to cover the scar the day before she returned to work four months after the accident. Recently, Zakhariye caught her poring over a website about plastic surgery on her computer, presumably doing research into having the scar fixed. He wanted to tell her she looked beautiful just as she was, but he couldn’t bring himself to say the words.
Fidgeting has become a serious problem for Zakhariye. Whenever he has to sit at a table for a meeting or a meal, the constant rearranging of his limbs and how to conceal it from others takes up so much of his thinking that he often has trouble following a simple conversation. As he sits across from his wife, his thoughts are consumed by what to do with his elbows. He puts them up on the table, but that feels terribly wrong. It goes against all the etiquette his mother instilled in him and that he tried to encourage in Alcott.
Zakhariye can almost hear Alcott’s voice saying, “Your elbows are on the table, Daddy.” So he lets his arms dangle as he chews the steak. This, too, feels wrong. All the blood in his upper body seems to drain into his hands, and the weight is unbearable. Fuck etiquette, he thinks, placing his elbows back on the table. A little sigh of relief escapes from his lips after he does that.
Thandie turns to him. “Are you okay?”
“Sure.” Zakhariye attempts to hide the irritation in his voice. “Why?”
“I don’t know. It seems like you have something on your mind.”
Zakhariye shakes his head, his chewing more animated now from the effort of trying to look nonchalant. A moment later he puts his fork down. “I had an interesting thought today.”
“Oh?”
Zakhariye doesn’t know how to interpret his wife’s noncommittal “Oh.” She could be saying, “Oh, who gives a shit.” Or perhaps she means: “Oh, that’s wonderful. Tell me more, hon.”
Unable to decide, he continues to eat silently.
A moment later she glances at him. “Well, would you like to share your interesting thought with me?”
Damn! He is wrong again. Lately, he has been misreading her little gestures and code words such as “Oh,”“Uh-huh,” and “Hmm.”
“I took a long walk in the middle of the day,” he finally says.
“I was supposed to be in a meeting. But I took a walk instead.”
“Hmm. Must’ve been a good walk.”
“And as I was walking, the thought occurred to me. What if I quit the magazine?”
Thandie puts down her fork. “But you love your job.”
“Do I love my job? Or is it that I never really knew any other work, never really investigated other avenues?”
“Are there other avenues you want to investigate?”
“No, you’re right. I love my job. I don’t know. It was one of those moments, you know, those weird what-if moments.” He tries to smile.
“I had a what-if moment myself.”
“Oh?”
“We were prepping a triple bypass. A thirty-nine-year-old architect, can you believe that? So I put the anaesthetic in, and he’s counting