The Fugitivities, стр. 30
In college, a friend had urged him to join a small group gathered in a dorm room to watch the beheading of a Jewish journalist. He had gone to check it out, and then, as the tape began, excused himself. It wasn’t only the gore that he sought to avoid. Or even the dissociation of being a random onlooker watching this snuff film from Karachi on a laptop in snowy western Massachusetts. There were those who whispered that, like the September attacks, this was one of the signs of the coming “clash of civilizations.” Jonah didn’t have the courage to face that bleak possibility, nor could he imagine what confronting it would require. He hated conflict and didn’t have the stomach for it, even if it was inevitable. But he also, more reservedly, couldn’t comprehend the self-evidence of that phrase to many of the students around him. To him, if anything, there was a clash of barbarisms, and the barbarians could be found just as easily in Columbine, or Howard Beach, as in Baghdad. What truly made the video impossible was the foreknowledge that there would be so many more like it; that this spewing taste for cruelty and hatred was just the beginning of a long death-spiral that would shroud the future in its cold spell. That their future had already disappeared.
They both looked up from their phones. Arna was wearing a handsome jacket, and Jonah complimented her on it.
“Thanks! Mariam helped me pick it out from this great little shop in Notting Hill. You would love her. Actually, I’m hoping she will come with me, you know, when I start. She’s got this consulting thing based in London—I think I told you about how she was freaking out when going through the interviews. But they need her to do liaising with the offices in Frankfurt and Paris, and she speaks like seven languages or something, so I’m thinking we can coordinate some time to get away together. Plus, I feel like we would travel well together.”
He picked up on the “get away,” but it was taking him a moment to place the name. She had come up in their correspondence, but not as a main character; a friend she had gone to a karaoke night with, who was busy and ambitious and funny, spoke with a posh accent, and was involved with the Oxford African and Caribbean Society. And possibly she had said something about a talk they had attended together on gender and queer studies?
“She sounds great. I hope I’ll get to meet her one of these days.”
“Me too. Look at these.”
She showed him a sequence of pictures taken at a house party (lads, glitter, Smirnoff) where Arna and Mariam appeared always together amid others, whom she pointed out and named. Arna appeared happy and flushed. In one picture she was smooshed against her friend’s face, the pair sticking their tongues out for the camera. Mariam was obviously fun and hot; she wore a stud in her nose, defiant punctuation on an almond-toned and -shaped face, South Asian, he guessed; more attractive than he had imagined.
“She’s the best. I wish she didn’t have to spend so much time at her job. I know she hates it. But we’re both planning on doing these gigs for now to get started, you know, see where it takes us. Oh my god, look, I’m a mess in this one!”
“You guys look great together—like you’re having so much fun.”
Was she with Mariam? Arna wasn’t exactly saying one way or the other. Possibly she hadn’t decided, or maybe it wasn’t a thing one did decide, or, at least, broadcast like the result of an election or a soccer match. It wasn’t really any of his business. He wasn’t hurt at all, except insofar as he felt he should have known, and thought she would have been more explicit with him about her feelings. But even as he thought this, he realized how stupid it was, how many good reasons she might have for not wanting to tell him everything about whom she was sleeping with.
The waiter came by to see about another round, but Arna, with the precise, almost sculptural language of gesture that Parisian women use, expressed her desire to pay for the drinks, explaining that she had to go see her parents while she was in town. Jonah thought about protesting but knew better than to insist. The entrance to the Métro was at the corner and they walked together to the steps. He went to kiss her on the cheek, but she pulled him to her intimately. She made him promise to keep writing to her. He promised he would. She looked at him, considering; she kissed him on the neck, once, just below the ear, then turned away and descended below ground.
Whatever he had known up until that point now strengthened his new resolve. In a sense, it was simple. He had wasted too much time already.
Jonah’s mother accompanied him to the airport. On the train they slid past the familiar panorama of the banlieues, the peri-urban sprawl, feeder roads swooping under a Samsung Electronics billboard, container shipping facilities, grim little roundabouts, a dingy café de la gare. A Gypsy player with a young boy came into the car and started playing a ballad. The young boy sang and walked up and down the car with his cap out. No one gave him any coins. A mute woman came by and placed a