Deep Breaths by Ismael Hussein
In a post-apocalyptic world where breathing is a privilege, Aden is accosted by a mysterious old man with a device he claims can recapture precious lost smells.
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| Image generated with OpenAI |
“He was foolish,” I said.
“Who was, Aden?” asked my wife Hawa.
I mused out the window of our seventh-floor hotel. Down below, on the Milan street, lurked a man with eyes like a mad scientist.
“Him,” I mumbled. “Down there, somewhere…”
It was still fresh in my mind. Just a few hours ago, I had turned a corner, and there sprung the old man from a crouched position along the pavement and into my face. And he said, in the most disturbed of voices: “Tell me, sir, do you remember what the beach smells like?”
His tone grabbed me. I hesitated.
“The beach, sir,” the old man repeated when he noticed the puzzle in my eyes, “can you remember what it smells like?”
The old man’s breath held a burning stench of hunger. His pupils swam in it. He must’ve known me to be a tourist.
I glanced at him. “Sure can.” Then I looked beyond him, down the sidewalk, for an alibi.
“Well?” said the old man, raising his eyes to new heights, beckoning.
I began to force feed words into the summer air.
“The beach, I mean, obviously, it smells like -” my voice trailed off. I pondered over it again, thinking then of the warm destination, from a faraway memory, drawing a deep inhale as I did; but my mind returned empty.
The beach, as it turned out, was odorless in my mind.
“You can’t do it, can you?” said the old man. His eyes skimmed over me like a circling hawk.
The old man laughed, a loud, hearty laugh. And without knowing it, I grew irritated in his presence.
“It’s salty and sweet, sir,” he said, with a smile. “Salty and sweet.”
I couldn’t remember if this was true or not, and it made me all the more agitated.
“All right, then.” I gave the old man a cold nod, and started up the street.
In the same moment, a hand stabbed my arm.
I looked down, and there his fingers were like long skinny claws, wrapped tightly along the edge of my sleeve.
“Would you,” the old man began, slowly withdrawing his hold over me, “like to know how I knew that?”
“I have no money,” I said to him.
The old man let out a peeved chuckle. “I’m not a beggar,” he said, plainly. “I don’t want your money. What I want is your time.”
Again, I hesitated.
“It’ll only be a second.” The old man quickly spun around, and like a great hoarder of things, he hunched over a shopping cart, and started rummaging through it for several moments, his tongue poking his cheeks, his eyes flicking with intensity, his hands moving frantically between the intense clutter as though it promised treasure.
Finally he seized an object and turned back to me.
“Here.” He held a mechanical mask up to the midday sun like it was the cure to all suffering.
Several people hurried past us, their glares like the kind you’d give a poor fellow caught in the web of a strange man whom you had learned to avoid.
But it was all new to me at that time.
“How quickly we forget!” the old man shouted at me, but it was more of a public proclamation. Then, more restrained, he inched closer, and said, in a lower register: “See this – it’s just like ours, eh.” He tapped the center of his face where his own mask lay. “But it’s not just air that it turns, it’s the air of places. Places we once loved, once breathed. Back when we didn’t have these things suffocating us. Do you understand? I made it myself. Me, and no one else.” He shook the metal mask in his hand many times like it was a sweet tambourine. “You seem like a nice fella, so I want to pay it forward. Just a sample. I promise, you won’t regret it. Once you smell the beach, it’ll be with you forever. Wouldn’t you like that, sir, to never forget?” His words had an urgency about it, and a suppressed excitement. He was a frail man, nervous, and jittery, and there seemed to be an immeasurable distance in his gaze, as though his brain was further away from where it should be in his head.
It was quiet for several moments. All the while the old man kept speaking softly to himself, watching me at the same time the movements of the mask tapped against his chest like a bad tick. All the while he couldn’t keep his mouth from twisting into curious shapes, his fingers from fidgeting, his eyes from widening as though shooting stars had passed across them.
The old man’s concentration rose in intensity. He straightened up, and said: “This is the part where you say, ‘yes’.”
At that exact moment, there was a strange buffering in my head. It was the conviction in his voice that perplexed me. Here he was, equal parts drunk and cogent, saying things that were total nonsense, and yet, his belief in them was palpable and was the very thing keeping me where I was.
But I just couldn’t bear his fiction.
“Thank you for the offer,” I said. “But no.”
“No. You don’t want to?”
I shook my head.
“Not even a whiff? You’re here, you might as well. Don’t you care to know?”
Again, I shook my head.
There was a pause. “All right,” the old man said. He looked down at the ground, then he reached up and began gently massaging the lobe of his right ear.
“I understand,” said the old man. “I understand.” There was another pause. And I could see he was having a hard time raising his head.
Right then, the old man lunged at me, reaching up for my face.
“Hey!” I snapped.
“If you’d just let me -” said the old man. “Hold still, still I said -“
“Stop! Quit it!”
It was there that we jostled along the sidewalk, arms in faces, and the old man managed to lift a part of my mask above my nose, exposing it to the cruel air. As soon as it filled my lungs, I started to suffocate like a fish snatched from water and flung toward a hard surface. My body convulsed. I staggered back, flailing my arms, with blurry eyes, while my lungs burned. They burned so much that I could feel the deepest fire traveling up and down the cavities of my chest. My eyes stung. And, again, the old man’s hand reached for something that I couldn’t see, and, with my head cocked back, not knowing where he was, I threw my hands out, shoving something away from me. The old man stumbled over the curb from the force, spilling out into the street, on his back, the mechanical mask in his hand skidding out on the pavement.
I quickly fixed my mask squarely back on my face, gripping it for my life, taking several long and deep breaths, waiting for the air to freshly turn, to cycle, and for the moment I could exhale again.
A number of people took notice, surrounding the old man, some of them helping him back on his feet. But even when he was upright, he was only concerned with one thing. He staggered to retrieve his creation, picked it up, examined it, turned it over, around, calmed his nerves. “It’s all right.” The old man patted the mask like a fallen child. “There, I gotcha. You’re ok. You’re ok.”
“Then what did you do?” asked my wife Hawa from the other room.
“I left,” I said. “I told you, the man was a lunatic.”
Hawa walked out from the hotel bathroom, rubbing perfume on her palm, then under her neck. “So he just wanted you to try it on? That’s it?”
“Yes,” I said to her. “But it was the way he went about it. You should’ve seen him. I thought he was going to kill me.”
“Kill you?” she said with amusement.
“Yes! Goodness, I thought that was really it.” I swallowed. “And the air… it was…”
“Deadly.”
I nodded coldly.
“Isn’t it always?” Hawa slipped into her heels.
The more I thought about it, the more I couldn’t help but wonder. My feet moved toward the window, looking out over Milan and the sparkling of the city. And below, the street, where he had been, and where he might be, tomorrow.
“These beggars,” said Hawa. “Every street is like a feature film. They wait in the corner for the hero to appear.”
“Do you remember?” I said to the window and to my wife.
“Remember what?” Hawa peered at me.
For a moment, it was like an earphone had been placed in my ear. And for a moment, a faint murmur was what I heard, for a half minute, of three words, fading gradually fainter and fainter. I ran my fingers over the tip of my nose.
“Never mind,” I said, turning around. “We should get going.”
Hawa’s heels clicked the floor. “When is the reservation for?”
“8:30,” I said.
“Perfect. I’m starved.”
I walked over, opening the door.
We were halfway out when Hawa said: “Wait, I almost forgot.”
She turned back, surveyed the room, the bed, and the floor.
Finally, she said: “Here it is.” She held her mechanical mask in her hand.
“Lord,” said Hawa, “you sound bothered.”
“I’m not.”
On the walk home from dinner my wife said: “If you care so much, why didn’t you just let him do it?”
“Because,” I explained patiently, “it seemed crazy at the time.”
“It’s only been a couple hours,” she replied.
“I know,” I said, shaking my head, “but so much has changed.”
We walked lightly over the quieting Milan street.
I rocked myself into a halt, looked over at Hawa and said in the tremendous and natural silence: “Not even a penny did he ask for. Why is that?”
She had a thought. “He must be a clever man.” I felt Hawa’s arm loosen to mine. “How many masks did you say he had?
“It was just the one.”
“Are you sure it was even real?”
“I don’t know.”
Hawa said, doubting: “I bet he’s got a whole collection. You know counterfeits are all the rage.”
“Think so?”
“Oh, yeah. Anything for a quick buck. The world’s a desperate place as it is.”
Hawa continued: “Take it from me, it has scam written all over it. And a cruel one, too, having people believe they can smell things that they can’t.”
I didn’t answer.
“And worse, he’ll have people open their wallets wide, thinking that the truth will be found in some knock off mask. He’s fooling honest folk.”
“But he didn’t ask for anything,” I contested.
“Suppose he did,” she replied. “Then what? What would you have given in exchange for it? One million? Two million?”
I snorted. “Don’t be silly.”
“But just suppose.”
“I don’t know.” I looked ahead as I walked. I put my head down, rubbing my hand along the thick warm glass mask over my face. “How could you put a price on that sort of thing?”
We walked onward for a distance.
“Anyway,” said Hawa, after a time of thinking. “I’m sure Substandard and Falsified are on top of it. Be surprised if they weren’t, already. He’ll be found one of these days.”
I opened and closed my mouth, swallowing knots in my dry throat.
“Maybe we could put in a call, help them do their jobs sooner. 411 should patch me through to SAF.” Hawa patted her pocket for a phone.
My face darkened. I backed off a little distance. “No.”
“Gosh,” said Hawa, “you really are all spun up.”
She took a beat, before pointing down the sidewalk with fervor. “Wait, could that be him, right over there?”
I gasped. “You’re…”
Hawa cut across me. “Your face!”
We went on walking for a while, me quiet, still collecting my breath, my wife still chuckling on my arm. There was a great rush of words circling my head. They began sinking deep into my shoes, testing my toes and ankles.
“All right, say it,” Hawa said after a few minutes. Again, we halted along the still sidewalk.
The whining of the wind grew stronger. I looked back, checking to see if the coast was clear. “What if it were true?” I said to her, finally, “Everything he said, about the places, and being able to breathe them again.”
“It couldn’t be true,” she said. “Please don’t be so ridiculous.”
“But, Hawa,” I said, feeling my heart pound, squaring my shoulders to her, smiling bravely, “what if it was. Isn’t there something you’d want to inhale a second time? Think about it.”
“Who knows what to think anymore. Ohhhh, I don’t imagine I could ever bring myself to such an idea.” Hawa shook her head. “It’s just too hard to believe. And besides, Nature is against us. I don’t think there’s a damn thing that can change that.”
“But you don’t know that,” I told her. “People are always inventing stuff. So what if there are counterfeits out there. When did that ever stop creation? Not to mention we’ve got nothing left to do than to reckon with our problems; so why not throw some faith behind it. If it means we’d be able to breathe again.” I stomped my feet. “I tell you what, I get so mad, having to put on a mask all the time. I feel less like a man and more like a prisoner. It’s not human!” My voice cracked and skidded down the asphalt-paved road. I was breathing hard like I’d run all night in my nightmares.
Hawa put her arms around my neck. “Aw, hon, no one’s calling you crazy. You know, I could do without these things, too.” She caressed her mask for a moment with her other hand. “Remember how my face used to look in the sunlight? Now I spend half the day looking like a damn bug.”
“Yeah.”
“I have dreams too, you know.”
I looked down at the pavement. There was a broken instrument in me, and the strings ached the sound. “We deserve a change.”
Hawa changed the subject. “Speaking of which, did you know they’re making them with built-in phones now?”
My eyes flickered a different, lost color. I withdrew my plea.
Hawa went on.
“I heard a woman at the bus stop, just the other day, talking her head off. At first I thought she might’ve been off her rocker, but no, she was talking to someone else, through the mask. How’s that for change? What’s next, broadcast television?”
Hawa looked at me, trying to find the sunnier side.
“Well, anyway, the government’s got to make the best of a bad situation. So just let it be what it is, mhm?” She laid her hand on my shoulder tenderly. “No use getting so worked up.”
Right then, there was a late breaking wind in my sails. “What if we never needed a mask?” I said. “Think of the possibilities, we could go for a carefree ride through the countryside, windows down.
“Are we still in a fairyland?” said Hawa.
I explored my mind. “And when we got hungry, we’d find ourselves an ice cream stand and eat sundaes, big as we please, under the sun, while we talked about this or that.”
Hawa didn’t say a word.
“And we’d go for a long walk, and let our noses lead us somewhere, maybe to a gyro truck. You know the ones.” My eyes glistened. “Wouldn’t you like your gyro with all the works? Mmmm.”
Hawa shrugged.
I studied the streets as if I saw everything in perfect detail.
“Then we’d hop back in the car, to the gas station, to fill her up, for more road tripping. And maybe a few drops might fall from the nozzle onto my fingers. You always did love the smell of gasoline,” said Hawa.
I sprung up from her voice like a trampoline. “And if anybody offered such a promise, we would accept it, huh, Hawa? Invention or not. We’d be foolish not to!”
My wife shook her head wearily. “Well for heaven’s sake, Aden.” There was a kind of disengagement as she lost my arm and walked on.
“I wonder,” she said, “when my husband will stop believing what a crazy beggar says.”
“He’s not a beggar,” I said, quickly following behind.
There was a silent admission to her anger, I thought. How many thousands of October and November nights had we missed, how many thousands of July and August days had we abandoned. The calendars were always changing and if someone had blindfolded us, how would we even tell the difference?
How much might they weigh if put to a scale, all those missed senses?
With lungs none the wiser, we walked together in the gentle summer night, and I spent quiet moments thinking about the man who wielded a promise of old air, touching my mask periodically, breathing safely behind it, wondering what it’d be like to live without the harness, thinking, pondering, all the way until we reached the hotel.
In the days that followed, as I roamed the streets of Milan, I found myself peeking around corners, into alleys, over busy streets, through windows, and finally down at the sidewalks that I strolled past.
But in looking toward the pavement, the only thing I saw were the normal, everyday beggars sitting there, hugging a cardboard sign, in their eyes a kind of robbery like someone had stolen their first name and they were searching for it through the eyes of every stranger that walked past.
And in those moments, I gave them my attention. There was an obligation to it. And a strangeness in how my hand slipped into my pocket and out from my wallet came a bill that I then gave to their outstretched arms. Each day, one, two, three, four beggars and each day one, two, three, four bills added to their palms. And in my head the ledger that I believed was adding up in my favor and would bring me that much closer to a corner where the old man was. It was all karma well spent.
But a full three days went by and he never showed his face.
On the fourth day when I returned to the hotel to find Hawa on the balcony, taking in the sun, she turned to me, lowering her book for a moment, and somehow she already knew of all my efforts.
“It’s hard making a living on the street,” she said beneath her shades.
I made a face as if to appear confused by her statement.
Hawa returned to her book for a moment, turned a page, sighed, then said: “He’s gone. Now forget about him.”
Still, the old man’s disappearance didn’t stop the once upon a times from surfacing in my head. His initial question haunted me. The allure of the beach seized my mind with two hands, shaking it with memories of sandy toes, and crashing waves, and sounds of youth and innocence. But the memory was incomplete without the aroma, that singular intoxicating fragrance.
God, how great was it all. God, how far we’d strayed from those chemical reactions. Thinking of it all then, I felt as if I might explode into a million bits. There was a silent agony within myself. I wanted to wind the clocks back. It was only luck that I grew up in this era. Sheer luck. And who could have ever imagined such a world? To inhale and exhale all the time, but never really doing so, not in the way it counts. It was all a direct violation, a walking contradiction. Terrible!
When my mind was finished speaking, I began looking at the others, those strolling like I was along the sidewalk in the great sunshine, their faces entirely consumed by metal masks, concealing eyes behind the tempered glass like two peepholes on a door. The colors of the masks were blacks and grays and browns, some sprinkled glitter, and flairs, pronounced and personalized, others more neutral or reserved, a sea of characters in an otherwise upside-down world. It was something out of a masquerade show; I shivered from the observation beneath the rising sun. And of course there were the children, in their tinier masks, enjoying this forever Halloween affair, wholly unaware of what it must feel like to draw fresh air in the lungs and to not have your body reject it for the very thing that it was.
What poor things, I thought to myself.
Later that week, as I was walking to the market, feeling too fatigued in thought to produce any sort of hysteria or desire from the days past, I heard a commotion up ahead. There was the cobbled Milan street with the day wind blowing from one side to another. And directly across me, in front of a shop, stood two men, their backs to me, their voices releasing a bundle of energy as though a bag carrying the sounds of a circus had been unzipped.
It must be the beggars, I said to myself. They had a way of applying pressure to the afternoon like a heavy migraine.
I had written the sounds off and was now recalling what food my wife had requested of me, reading signs and menus posted on the walls of the passing restaurants, when all of a sudden another barrage of voices stunned and stopped me in place.
A certain and sure sense of the dramatic moved slowly me to the curb, my head making several adjustments to the scene across the street. The two men shielded me with their backs, their voices diverted toward something in front of them.
I drifted forward, into the inner edge of the street, then the center street, then the outer edge, then the opposing curb, until I reached the corner where they were. I peered over their tall shoulders in search of a secret. What the two men heard was noticeably blasphemous and irreligious and more than egregious.
“I have no time for this!” one of the men exclaimed, his hand over his head.
“Patience, my friend. This is a demonstration.”
“This is nonsense,” said the other.
“No, there is sense.”
“What?”
“It’s here! The sense you speak of.”
And then, one of the younger looking men looked over his shoulder right then to find my face and in it an expression so pronounced that it must’ve registered as a lifeline to him because he said to me, relieved: “He thinks he can make us smell the beach. Can you believe it?”
“We’ve been listening to him peddle us fantasy,” said the other man.
My feet walked forward with tender steps, and the two men parted themselves like the wing doors of a saloon.
“I know him,” I whispered, finally laying eyes on the old man. Here he was, five feet tall, booming with confidence and the hunger of living. His lips quivered in sporadic directions. He was exactly as he was before. All the answers that I had been searching for were now swimming in his widening eyes. They were multiplying on top of each other.
“What?” The two men returned stares at one another.
I cleared my throat. “I said, I know him.”
The old man’s face brightened luminously.
Soon, the natural silence unenthused the two men and they started heading off in the opposite direction.
The old man inched closer to me, carrying a fat grin in his eyes. He wasn’t surprised to see me.
“Care for a walk?” the old man said.
“A walk?” I said.
“Just down the road.”
“I thought you left town,” I said, in awe.
“I never stay in one place for too long.”
“Why?”
“They’ll catch me that way.”
“Who will?”
“Never mind that.” Then he extended his arm down the road. “So, what do you say?”
“Who will look after your belongings?” I pointed to the shopping cart behind him.
“No one.” The old man paused. Shall we?”
“Well,” I hesitated again, “my wife is expecting me. I was supposed to return with dinner.”
The old man’s face swelled with wisdom, and in the next words: “By taking a walk with me, you’ll return with a gift much better than food. You can share it with her. How’s that?”
I wrung my palms together.
“Come,” the old man said, gently grabbing my hand without ever doing so.
We were walking now, the evening sun fading below the horizon, giving way to softer rays.
“Look at that.” The old man pointed nowhere in particular.
I looked.
“We battered the air so much that you can even see the abuse.”
There was an orange haze floating in midair all through the streets and open field. It was a thick and ever-present smog, parked wherever one looked.
“The bruises are there,” the old man said. “And they’re not the kind that go away, either.” He sucked his teeth. “So much for smelling the flowers, eh.” He paused to glance at me, but the damage was already done. “Oh, friend,” said the old man, regrettably. “I didn’t mean to upset you.”
We continued walking.
The old man, sensing the importance of the moment, pulled a bag off his shoulder, unzipped it, and raised a mechanical mask from it.
He then handed it over to me nonchalantly.
“Put it on,” he instructed.
I blinked.
“Don’t stop. Let’s keep walking.”
I held the mask in my now trembling hand, each step more unsure than the last. It looked just like an average mask, no different in size or shape. Even the weight of it was the same. It was a mask indistinguishable from a pile of government mandated masks.
“I don’t understand.”
“You do,” the old man replied.
I looked closely at the old man’s face. He didn’t turn toward me. “My wife thinks you’re crazy.”
“And what do you think?” The old man was still facing forward.
I considered it for a second, taking one sharp inhale that funneled through my mask. “I want to know for sure.”
He met my gaze and said, with bursting eyes: “There, you said a good thing! Then there’s one way to find out!”
I took a deep breath. With shaky fingers, slowly, I unlatched the corners of my mask, on either side of my ears, then the safety strap along my chin, and as soon as I did I started to cough involuntarily. The natural air was an immediate cruelty.
“Swap them, quickly,” said the old man.
I stood in place. Strangers walked by, peering at us with moments of interest as I fidgeted with the new mask, my eyes blurring, my chest burning.
More eyes centered on us, their intrigue morphing into concern. Their strides came to a crawl.
A patrolman strolled ahead of us, on his chest a bright red patch embroidered: SAF.
“Be calm,” the old man whispered to me at the sight of the dark blue uniform and the three bolded letters. He quickly grabbed my original mask, tucked it behind his trousers, and folded his shirt over it.
I suppressed the wheezing the best I could, still fidgeting with the mask, and centering it. But it wasn’t all quite there. And the old man knew this, because he pulled me toward the side of him, in the most subtle of ways, away from the street and closer to the adjacent buildings.
“Slow breaths now,” the old man said, more to himself than to me.
The patrolman was footsteps away, and I could feel his wandering gaze looking toward me. I felt myself being scanned and analyzed and turned over by the man, all while a flow of lava ran down my throat, and a twinge overcame my eye. All I managed was a weak nod at him, half bowed.
The SAF officer treaded away.
“They’re a downright danger to us,” the old man muttered several moments later, without turning his head. “The true parasites to ingenuity.”
And in the next instant, through the mask, came the turning of new air to replace the old. My lungs sighed with relief. I hardly noted what the old man had uttered.
We started walking again, looking this way and that. The passing eyes relinquished their gazes on us.
“Well, how does it feel?” the old man asked,
“I don’t know yet,” I said, breathing with caution. “The same?” I frowned slightly.
“It won’t work unless you imagine it. Up here.” The old man tapped his temple. “Where do you want to be, right this second?” His tone was serene.
He smiled at me, stared for a hard moment, then looked away, as if to allow me to come into it on my own.
Soon, a wind blew and in my head a gust like a train departing, onward, faster, faster, until it reached its last cart at full speed, gone fast in a hurry.
And then, it was like the string of balloon had been cut and I felt a detachment drifting me somewhere far away, to a blue sky, and palm trees, and seagulls that soared overhead, and in the water, spotted sails, and swimming figures, and the reflection of the sun leading a pattern back to shore. And under the surface, like a scooping hand, a scent, growing stronger with each passing second, into focus, until it let itself in and shut the door.
Inhale. My nostrils crinkled.
Inhale. My eyes bloomed.
Inhale. My heart pounded.
Inhale. My brain catapulted, higher, higher.
Forgetting to release, the next breath was blown out through my mouth.
I stopped, winded. Bells rang in the tower of my mind. My mouth was open like a thirsty dog.
“I know,” the old man said. He was by my shoulder, but his voice felt like it was twenty feet away.
“But – but how?”
“The electrodes, they search your brain,” he said, tapping the corner of my mask “to translate a signal, a memory, actually. And voila. A brain-mask-computer interface, I call it.”
“It smells… so real.”
“What makes you think it’s not?” The old man gave a satiric smile.
My senses felt bright and young, assaulted and supremely sensitive to the salt, and the seaweed, and the sunscreen, and the fish, and the grilled food, and the herbal scents of a beachside I had stepped foot on once without a mask.
The old man’s face was coated with pride. “The world could do with a good deal more smells, if you ask me.”
“I – I…”
“Do you need to sit down?” the old man asked.
“No,” I said. “I’m all right. It’s just, the scent, its -“
“Salty and sweet,” he said, grinning.
I nodded. The remembrance was now my own, no longer estranged. There were a thousand flashing colors in my chest. With each breath came the beach.
“What’s funny?” asked the old man.
With each breath I drew escaped a small laugh of disbelief. I gripped the mask with complete dependence like a man returned from the depths of the sea, depressurizing lungs through steady breaths. It was only days that I had carried a torch of wish, yet it felt as though it were a lifetime.
I laughed quietly and solemnly. The fierce aroma cuddled me, sticking to my chest, tender to my heart. I felt glorified in its warm power. Inside the walls of my mind, a thought went screaming and it said: again! again! again! And I obliged. Breathing. Breathing. Slower, longer, and fuller.
I must have been babbling aloud to myself, because the old man turned and glared at me.
Several minutes went by. We walked down the road silently as the sun set in the distance. “Take it home with you,” the old man said amiably.
“What?”
The old man made a speech. “Before you speak, listen. One night. That’s all. Just until the sun comes up.” He nodded to himself. “That seems fair enough.” Then he looked at the sky and did some mental arithmetic.
“Twelve hours, thirteen, fourteen, maybe more, maybe less. You’ll bring it back to me. But not before you go chasing perfumes.” The old man exhaled inside his mask. “There’ll be so much of it that you won’t sleep a wink. No, you’ll frolic the seasons: fall, spring, summer, winter. It’ll be the greatest merry go round of your life. I know because I did it myself.” The old man stepped closer. “Only then will you bring it back to me.”
I gulped. And my train of thought severed the beach from my lungs. It was just the normal air that the mask now cycled.
“Where will I find you?”
The old man hummed softly to himself. Now he swayed. He put his hands to his dewy and sweat-filled face. Then he glanced at the opposing street.
His face held an expression of assurance. “That corner,” he said, “where we first met. Do you remember it?”
I nodded.
“Yes,” the old man said, very firmly. “That’ll do.”
My hand started to tremble again, just for a breath, and I said: “What if I decide not to meet you?”
The old man didn’t answer straight off, as if fascinated by the question. “Well,” the old man said, “that would be up to you.”
Again, my hand trembled. “I mean, you’d never find me, if I did. I could leave the country with it, for all you know.”
“Yes, that is true,”
It was silent for a while. We walked on.
“Was that awful to say?”
The old man’s voice was calm in return. “Not at all. You’ve got to say these things out loud, and hold them to the light.”
The night had now replaced the day. The sidewalk was growing in number with several people hurrying off this way and that.
The old man became rather stern with me.
After a minute had gone by, he said with his hands: “Go to her. Share it with her, as I have with you.” He turned to me, scanned my face and said: “Save your decision for the morning.”
I stopped moving, digesting his words. A final question ached at me. My great hands wandered along the shore of my shirt. “What will it feel like, the rest of it?”
The moon hid behind a cloud. A gust of wind blew into the street.
I saw the thin rising sand in his eyes in deserts only he knew of. Then the old man said, like a soft knock at the door: “It will feel like time, mostly. And oldness and memory, and lots of other things too big and too small to be summed up with words.”
The old man’s voice spoke in a faraway rhyme and I was familiar with the syllables. At the moment, I did not seem to have the words to respond. And the old man, having observed me closely, his eyes softening like pillows, spared me as much. He began moving, going his separate way, down the street, until I could no longer follow his shadow.
On the way back, I gazed down at my feet as if they had carried me into all this madness. My cheeks were rosy and hot. Through the dark streets, I clutched the mask in my hand, thinking then of what the old man said.
When I entered the hotel room, my wife was sitting on the foot of the bed, a phone to her ear.
I came to a dead stop. “Hawa,” I said, suddenly out of breath.
“-er.” Hawa half leaned her head to her shoulder, pointing to the phone.
I lunged toward her before she returned a separate sound.
“Gosh!” Hawa blurted when I seized the phone from her hand and pressed it dead. “What on earth did you do that for?”
Irritated, she stood upright for several moments.
Quietly, I took a seat on the foot of the bed, not meeting her sight. I eyed the mask in my lap, gauging the future through it. It was whispering to me, and the words were traveling through a vast open library to reach me.
In degrees, Hawa lowered herself. I felt her gaze on me.
“This,” I began, speaking from the bottom of my chest, “will be hard to believe.”
I told her everything.
Time stood still. Neither of us moved. The moon poured in through the hotel window in milky white beams.
We sat, motionless, held and frozen.
“We have to tell someone,” said Hawa after the first hour.
“Yes, we must.”
“But who?”
“Yes, who.”
Ten o’clock. Ten-thirty. Eleven. We sat upright, awake, taking turns on the edge of the bed, wiping cobwebs clear off of our minds.
“I should ring my mother,” Hawa said, eventually.
“I’m sure she’d love that.”
Hawa fawned over the mask that laid in her lap like it was the baby that she always wanted. Her eyes brightened and dimmed momentarily.
“I really should call her.” Hawa shimmied her way to the phone by the bedside, lifted the receiver up, tangled the coil over one finger, and began nervously pressing for numbers. She stopped just short of the final digit, her finger suspended over it.
“Something the matter?” I said.
In slow order, Hawa hung the receiver back up. Then she sat back against the headboard as though a spell had struck her.
“Maybe it can wait until tomorrow.”
“Oh.”
Having contemplated a great deal, Hawa sat where I was on the bed, and said, almost direly: “One night. That’s all we get. What good is it to interrupt it more than we have to?”
It was after eleven-thirty when we stood up and went by the balcony window, watching the streets below with a great disturbance as though a thousand sirens were ringing out all over the city. But it was only a hushed emptiness in our view. Then we looked at each other, dumbfounded, and saw the atom bombs detonating in our eyes. Despite the window being closed, there was a breeze that flowed through the room like an unlit stream, like a hand that touched us where we stood, forever motioning us back the mask, as though it had a gravity of its own.
At midnight, the hotel clock struck softly, and we sat on the bed again, taking turns with the mask like it was precious oxygen neither of us was ready to be without.
We looked at one another. Then handed the mask back to each other, and sat stiffly, waiting, the world unreal to us. Hawa, for all her doubting, was a new woman, in her skin a radiance I had never seen before.
I sat looking at her, fondly, watching her close eyelids flicker through the tempered glass. There was an inner light dancing on her cheeks.
“Are you sleeping?” I whispered to her.
“No, I’m waiting,” she said, smiling faintly, eyes still shut.
Only the quieted breathing could be heard.
“I know now, we haven’t lived,” said Hawa, in a hush. “Not in all this time.” Her body stirred. Her head tremored. She drifted forward and backward on the bed as though on a rocking chair, clutching her shoulders for comfort. Something was growing in her. Then she uttered an unusual thing: “I take back what I said before.” Tears came.
“You had no way of knowing,” I said.
“Oh, Aden.” She seized my hand on the bed. Her smile remained constant. “How long will the smells stick to us?”
“A lifetime, at least.”
“You mean it?” she said, breathing in then out.
I did not answer for a long moment, and said, very slowly, “cross my heart, and hope to die.” In my veins and arteries moved strong blood tides.
“Hurry then. You have forty seconds left,” I told her. Thirty-nine, thirty-eight.
Hawa shook in place. “Dear, that’s fine, fine! Self-recycling oxygen, my childhood, my adult years. It’s all so nice…”
Drifting, spinning, her hazel eyes fell across the darkness, her head swiveling as if set in motion by God’s breath.
The light in the hotel room was raw and bright and I felt as if we were on a stage. I stood and went for the switch, and the darkness set in coolly, illuminated only by the moon.
And before long, it was my turn again.
The mask was worn. Concentration was given. The memories were summoned, treading lightly upon a water of years. They stayed afloat, gloriously. And no sooner than that, it was science’s turn and the tiny electrodes glowed and the mask went to work, silently stitching together faraway samples from eras past, pulling them from somewhere beyond and bringing them near. So many of these beautiful senses lost to negligence, to heedlessness, but now they were being resurrected, dusted off, shined, and offered through to my nose.
I ran my hand over the glass in anticipation. The mask was warm and snug as a blanket. My heart hummed softly.
And in the next breath, flowing swiftly through my lungs was the smell of bonfires, and in the next breath, freshly mowed grass, followed by the first snowflakes of the season, and the seconds before a thunderstorm, and the wind off the sea, and charcoal burning, and gasoline spilling, and the dust of fireworks shot off through the streets, and the night fragrance of winter beneath the stars, and the intoxicating blend of mariposa and the perfume of orange blooms and of lilacs and honeysuckles and magnolia, and wild mushrooms, and red huckleberries, and calypso orchids, and the flirtation from the redwoods. They were scents like a symphony, a poem, a song, indescribable.
Here was the hotel room, in the twilight, and here was Hawa and I, clutching to one another for dear life, not wanting to let go.
My pale eyes found my wife. “All these years,” I said to her. My voice was so faint it was like a small pulse beat in the throat.
I was about to cry out when I heard Hawa say:
“Must we give it back?”
We found ourselves silent again. The crazy happenings of nature and technology lay still on the bed.
We gave the object our backs while we thought of a plan. It wailed out at us like a fussing baby.
We rationalized it, but each answer spoken seemed less and less feasible, and the wailing grew louder, and we were tormented and tethered to the bed.
Minutes ticked away, painfully.
There was judgment hanging over my head. “We have no choice,” I said, finally. “It’s not ours to keep. Tomorrow it’ll be with the old man. And after that, who knows.”
I sat muted over the implication racing through my chest, jealous, hardly in belief.
A color of sorrow changed Hawa’s face. “Something like this, it deserves to be felt forever. Why can’t we feel it forever?”
“Because we’re not meant to.”
Hawa shook her head, fending off the words.
“But we were good once, weren’t we?”
“I can’t remember, to tell the truth,” I said, less charitably. “It’s been all downhill for years.”
“Where did it all go wrong?” asked Hawa.
I couldn’t make head or tail of the question. My brain experienced the habits of grief before it reached me.
“When was it ever truly right?”
My voice stuck a pin in her balloon, because Hawa rose to her feet. She took small steps forward, and held tightly to the windowsill for support, desperately wanting to open it, but never doing so. The air on the other side wasn’t fit for use. It would tattoo her lungs the color of crimson in a matter of seconds. And she knew that. And yet, her hand remained there, trembling on the ledge, as though the verdict was still in doubt.
It was only hours ago that a hope had expanded and built upon itself in me, changed and matured and reproduced. It lived and died.
Dead.
How foolish, I thought, the need to breathe, ever, ever. Silly, silly, unnecessary, nightmarish.
I felt the silent agony within myself grind slow. All the excited whispers and muttering were now gone, replaced by the setting grimness of disease. How could we hope to heal when all we ever did was take and nothing was of value? I thought. One of the few things of beauty that we knew, the air, which changes. But we never changed, therefore there is no more beauty, no more art.
Hawa finally turned away from the balcony and toward me. “It’s been a nice movie, hasn’t it?” she said, borrowing a smile that was not her own.
I tried to get my voice in order. “It has.”
“Well,” she started, venturing for her words, “I guess we should make the most of the finale.” She walked over to the side of the bed and went for the mask.
She held it in her hand for a while.
“What’s this here?” she said.
Behind the mask, was a tiny compartment. Hawa pulled at it with her fingertips until it gave and a tinier paper fell from it onto the bed.
I stared at it as it hit the soft mattress.
Hawa began to unravel and unfold it until it doubled and tripled and quadrupled in size.
Now, it was a sheet of paper that she held to the light.
She offered it to me, but the wind in my chest was already rushing away, out of town, out of country, out of orbit.
Hawa looked at me, hesitated, and nodded a quick nod. Almost immediately, she wet her lips. She studied the paper for a long while before finding her voice.
Each breath would say it’s precious
It would tell you if it could
How the next one holds fortune
To inhale is to know, that all mountains you let go
Each breath would say it’s gold
Hawa sighed a long and deep sigh.
I couldn’t look at her as she read, instead I stared at the mask on the bed as if I had seen it somewhere long before birth.
There in the moonlight I went silent. My mouth did not work. My eyes did not shift. The high was wearing off, reality was now setting in.
Hawa folded the piece of paper up and set it on the bed.
My heart began to beat wildly.
Hawa stood up and looked ahead, eyes squinted. Then she said: “We shouldn’t worry anymore, it’s only wasteful. Before we know it, the sun will be up, and that’ll be that.”
Stunned by the circus of emotions, in need of nudging, Hawa nudged me: “It’s your turn, hon, for the next two turns.”
Thawed, and tender, I deliberated. My eyes looked and found one o’clock on the far wall. This fatal experiment had a shelf life.
“Five hours left,” I said to no one, while Hawa gently pulled on my shoulder, grabbed the mask, then started to fashion it on my face with love, like a helmet on a young boy on their first ride down an open street.
“Four hours, fifty-nine minutes, five seconds, four, three, two, one…”
“Shh. Shh,” said Hawa.”Just focus. Let it do its job.”
I felt the mask secure in place. I felt the physical impact of the emotion.
“There’s never been a finer night,” she said. “Or happier people. I wish we could have this night for a thousand years, this perfect night, in our own world, our old world, where we make our memories and live by them.”
“But we’ll make do,” said Hawa. “Do you hear me?”
“We’ll make it last?” I said, unsure.
“Yes.” She took great interest in the sentence, clutching it with a warm embrace. “Shall I tell you why?”
A great hot breath filled my chest, awakening me.
“Because,” said Hawa, “there’s no time. No tomorrow, just right now.”
Her words were good to hear. The electrodes glowed along the corners of my head.
“It’ll be autumn soon,” she said.
“Yes… yes…”
“Summer’ll be over. You know what that means.”
The mask purred quietly. The memories traveled, far and wide.
Lights out, I laid back halfway as though gravity had been neutralized, watching Hawa negotiate my feet over the covers, far away down there at the end of the bed in the moonlight, her face glowing and free of burden.
Then she came over to the bedside. “Deep breaths,” she said to me. “There’s never been a finer night.”
Slowly, slowly, her voice faded, and into the voyage I went, where the smells of autumn gentled and rocked me away till the morning came.