Anatomy of a Disappearance

I wanted to wear her as you would a piece of clothing, to fold into her ribs, be a stone in her mouth.

I wanted this world to still. I wanted to fix it and be fixed within it. But everything was on the move, the clouds, the wind...

There and then, sitting beside her and within the strength of my adoration, I felt invincible.

The world had to be sliced into hours to fill; otherwise you could go mad with loneliness.

There are times when my father’s absence is as heavy as a child sitting on my chest.

Is the heart always failing itself or by nature unfaithful? I had to restrain myself from writing to her too often, especially because she rarely wrote back or responded with the speed and in the manner I had allowed myself to expect. Some people manage to escape the obligation a sincere letter places on them.

There has not been a day since his sudden and mysterious vanishing that I have not been searching for him, looking in the most unlikely places. Everything and everyone, existence itself, has become an evocation, a possibility for resemblance. Perhaps this is what is meant by that brief and now almost archaic word: elegy

Suddenly he is beside me. I do not know how, but we are the same age. There is something tragic about this fact.

If we were all engaged in some conversation, she would direct most of her contributions towards me, as if I were the front wall of a squash court.

I wanted everything good in the world for him; every dream he had, all of his secret plans, to come true. I suddenly was glad that Mona was his.

At that time I would read passages of Father's books or a newspaper article that I was certain he had read because I wanted to follow a trail he had taken.

Everything I loved and all of what was lost was once here. And now I was arriving into absence, after everyone had gone.

You see, most men spend a lifetime trying to understand their fathers.

I felt dizzy, as if comprehending the scale of things for the first time and with it the vast yet intricate reality of the physical world and my precarious presence in it. I held my head and stared at the blades of grass at my feet. I counted the stitches round the leather of my shoes. I wanted this world to still. I wanted to fix it and be fixed within it. But everything was on the move, the clouds, the wind.

And whenever someone said something about how racist the English were or expressed, in that subtle way, self-satisfaction at the fact that they counted among their friends a dark-skinned Arab, I simply pretended, in the way one does when an old person farts out loud, that I had not heard.

Between the ages of eighteen and twenty-four, in order to qualify for my allowance, I had to be engaged in studies leading to a PhD, “in any subject except business or political science, because both politics and business benefit from an indirect education.” I remembered how Father used to say “a man must not take up employment until he has completed his education.

Her cold-blushed cheeks seemed the only color in the gray arrivals lounge.

Why must all horrible things take place early in the morning? I wondered.

sarcasm, more often than not, hides a secret fascination.

It was one of those English days suspended between the seasons: the air temperate yet alive to the coming winter.