Chapter Four — — What He Felt and What He Said

Chapter Four

What He Felt and What He Said

The ratio of what Zakariya felt to what Zakariya said, in the years he was in school with Zara, was approximately a thousand to one. He felt enormous things in the specific, physical way of the adolescent for whom feeling has not yet developed its secondary vocabulary — everything arrived as sensation first, understanding second, language a distant third. He said almost nothing.

He was not a coward in the ordinary sense. In other domains he was fine — he could argue in a debate, could stand in front of a class, could navigate the ordinary frictions of school with the unremarkable competence of someone for whom these things were simply the furniture of the day. Around Zara, something different happened.

Every time the moment arrived when the saying was possible — when she was nearby and attentive and the conversation had opened a space through which the true thing could have been passed — he felt the sentence form in his chest and travel toward his mouth and stop there, just behind his teeth, and stay there while the moment passed and the space closed and she looked away and the chance folded itself up and disappeared.

He had the sentence. He always had the sentence. He could not say it.

There is a particular cruelty in the feeling that is too large to fit through the mouth. The feeling wants to be seen. The mouth is afraid of the seeing. Between them, the person carrying both lives in a permanent interior noise — full of the thing that needs to be said, silent to the person who needs to hear it. The silence accumulates. The accumulation becomes its own kind of statement, though not the one he intended.

He found other ways. He made himself useful — the boy who always had the notes, who could explain the difficult concept, who was available and present in all the ways that were not the way that mattered. He became her study companion, her academic ally, the person she turned to when the material was difficult. This proximity was real. It was also not the thing he wanted, which was the specific knowledge of whether the proximity meant to her what it meant to him.

In class ten he asked a friend to ask. The friend's name was Saad — direct, practical, capable of the action that the emotionally paralyzed cannot perform for themselves. Saad asked. He waited. Saad came back.

The answer: she knows. She has always known. She does not feel the same way.

Zakariya received this with the specific quality of a person who has been preparing for a verdict and still finds, when the verdict arrives, that the preparation was insufficient. He said: okay. He went home. He sat on the floor of his room with his back against the wall and his knees drawn up and nothing to do but be in the feeling until the feeling was done with him.

The feeling was not done with him for a long time.