Exit West(29)

There were guns in the house of his fellow countryfolk, more arriving each day through the doors. Saeed accepted a pistol but not a rifle, since he could conceal it, and in his heart he would not have been able to say if he took the pistol because it would make him safer from the nativists or from the Nigerians, his own neighbors. As he undressed that night he did not speak of it, but also he did not hide it from Nadia, and upon seeing the pistol he thought she would fight with him, or at least argue, for he knew what the council had decided. But she did not do so.

Instead she watched him, and he looked at her, and he saw her animal form, the strangeness of her face and her body, and she saw the strangeness of his, and when he reached for her she came to him, came to him though she moved slightly away, and there was a mutual violence and excitement to their coupling, a kind of shocked, almost painful surprise.

Only after Nadia had fallen asleep and Saeed lay there in the moonlight that crept between and around the blinds did he consider that he had no idea how to use or maintain a pistol, not the faintest clue, beyond the fact that pulling the trigger should make it fire. He realized he was being ridiculous, and must return it the very next day.

? ? ?

A THRIVING TRADE in electricity was under way in dark London, run by those who lived in pockets with power, and Saeed and Nadia were able to recharge their phones from time to time, and if they walked at the edges of their locality they could pick up a strong signal, and so like many others they caught up with the world in this way, and once as Nadia sat on the steps of a building reading the news on her phone across the street from a detachment of troops and a tank she thought she saw online a photograph of herself sitting on the steps of a building reading the news on her phone across the street from a detachment of troops and a tank, and she was startled, and wondered how this could be, how she could both read this news and be this news, and how the newspaper could have published this image of her instantaneously, and she looked about for a photographer, and she had the bizarre feeling of time bending all around her, as though she was from the past reading about the future, or from the future reading about the past, and she almost felt that if she got up and walked home at this moment there would be two Nadias, that she would split into two Nadias, and one would stay on the steps reading and one would walk home, and two different lives would unfold for these two different selves, and she thought she was losing her balance, or possibly her mind, and then she zoomed in on the image and saw that the woman in the black robe reading the news on her phone was actually not her at all.

The news in those days was full of war and migrants and nativists, and it was full of fracturing too, of regions pulling away from nations, and cities pulling away from hinterlands, and it seemed that as everyone was coming together everyone was also moving apart. Without borders nations appeared to be becoming somewhat illusory, and people were questioning what role they had to play. Many were arguing that smaller units made more sense, but others argued that smaller units could not defend themselves.

Reading the news at that time one was tempted to conclude that the nation was like a person with multiple personalities, some insisting on union and some on disintegration, and that this person with multiple personalities was furthermore a person whose skin appeared to be dissolving as they swam in a soup full of other people whose skins were likewise dissolving. Even Britain was not immune from this phenomenon, in fact some said Britain had already split, like a man whose head had been chopped off and yet still stood, and others said Britain was an island, and islands endure, even if the people who come to them change, and so it had been for millennia, and so it would be for millennia more.

The fury of those nativists advocating wholesale slaughter was what struck Nadia most, and it struck her because it seemed so familiar, so much like the fury of the militants in her own city. She wondered whether she and Saeed had done anything by moving, whether the faces and buildings had changed but the basic reality of their predicament had not.

But then around her she saw all these people of all these different colors in all these different attires and she was relieved, better here than there she thought, and it occurred to her that she had been stifled in the place of her birth for virtually her entire life, that its time for her had passed, and a new time was here, and, fraught or not, she relished this like the wind in her face on a hot day when she rode her motorcycle and lifted the visor of her helmet and embraced the dust and the pollution and the little bugs that sometimes went into your mouth and made you recoil and even spit, but after spitting grin, and grin with a wildness.

? ? ?

FOR OTHERS TOO the doors came as a release. In the hills above Tijuana was an orphanage called simply the House of the Children, perhaps because it was not precisely an orphanage. Or not only an orphanage, though that is what it was referred to by the college students from across the border who would sometimes come here to do volunteer work: painting, carpentry, the hanging and spackling of drywall. But many of the children in the House of the Children had at least one living parent or sibling or uncle or aunt. Usually these relatives labored on the other side, in the United States, and their absences would last until the child was old enough to attempt the crossing, or until the relative was exhausted enough to return, or on occasion, quite often, forever, because life and its end are unpredictable, especially at a distance, where death seems to operate with such whimsical aim.

The House sat on a ridge at the crest of a hill, fronting a street. Its chain-link-fenced and partly concrete-floored play area was at the back, facing a parched valley, on which the other low dwellings of that street also opened, some of them rising on stilts, as though jutting out to sea, an effect that was incongruous, given the dryness and lack of water all about. But the Pacific Ocean was only a couple hours’ walk to the west, and besides, stilts made sense given the terrain.