Chapter Thirteen: The Twenty-Three Minute Call

Chapter Thirteen: The Twenty-Three Minute Call

The phone rang twice. Three times. She picked up on the third. "Hur." Just my name. The way she always answered. Not with hello, not with what's up — just my name, as if she were testing whether the person calling was still the person she knew. I watched the timer in the corner of the screen as I talked. Twenty-three minutes. I know it was twenty-three minutes because I watched it the whole time with the particular attention of someone doing something that has a fixed end. I watched it the way you watch a clock when you are in the middle of the last conversation you will have with someone and you know it is the last conversation but the knowledge doesn't make it easier to speak. I told her about the courtyard. About the quality of the thinking. About what I had seen in room 14 at two in the morning. I told her in the imprecise language I had then — I was better at performing clarity than having it, and what I was trying to say in that call was not clear to me yet, was still forming, was the kind of truth that is only true in the act of being said rather than existing prior to the saying. What I said, in the language I had: that something had changed. That I felt we needed to stop. That I was sorry. The sorry was insufficient and I said it anyway, which is the particular cowardice of the insufficient but available word. She did not speak for a long time. The line was clear — I could hear her breathing, I could hear the Karachi night through her phone, faint and familiar. Traffic. Dogs. The sound of the city that had built both of us going about its indifferent business.

Then she said my name once more. As a question this time, or as a statement that sounded like a question. A testing of whether the name still meant what it had meant. Then she said she understood. She did not understand. I did not understand. We said the word because it was the closest available approximation to the truth, which is: two people have arrived at a place where the things between them have become more than either of them knows how to carry forward, and the only available response is to set them down, here, in this call, between a hotel room in Karbala and a house in Karachi, while the world continues, indifferent, in both locations. We were done. I put the phone on the desk. The yellow lamp was still on. The room was still small. The free one was alone with what he had chosen.