The Arsonists' City

by Hala Alyan

The biology texts could be impossible to read, but their very dreariness gave them a certain sanctity; somebody, Ava realized, had loved this enough to make it.

They were still so young; everything had potential. Mimi could be magnanimous with encouragement because he was getting it as well, from his music professors at the university, from friends, from a club booker who’d recently told Mimi he was the next Jimmy Page. There was time. That’s what everyone said when Mimi was twenty and then twenty-three and then twenty-seven, that’s what he and his friends told one another, a refrain among their group, the phrase as soothing as an aperitif. There’s time, they’d assure each other, he and Harp, there’s still so much time, and it truly felt that way, time like a lake of water they strode toward, jauntily, certain it was bottomless. But when Mimi turned twenty-eight, the language changed. This is the time, they’d say to one another at dinner parties. If I don’t move now, I’ll never do it.

He could be the adult, the one who recognizes, given the sheer number of years he’s spent breathing and fucking and walking on this planet, that not all itches need to be scratched, that sometimes you have to look desire firmly in the eye and say, Not today.

“I never thought of it that way. All those self-portraits in museums. They’re predecessors to the selfie.”

“I’d rather be misunderstood by what I say than what someone says for me.”

“You grow up being eyed through a certain lens, that’s how you act. Women have learned to colonize themselves.”

Films make people sad, Mazna is slowly understanding. They remind people of a time that is over or a time they’ve never been part of. Even the happier films, like Sabrina and The Wizard of Oz, sadden her; she will never go to those glossy dinner parties, see those Technicolor skies. Theater is the same. It’s heartbreaking because it will end, because people will become a part of the story and then be abandoned by it.

The city is largely unchanged from her childhood and it never before occurred to Mazna that there’s something precious in this, that she once fought with Lara in front of the same downtown statue where she was briefly lost as a child while shopping with her mother. Damascus remains the same as it was for her grandmother and her grandmother, and Mazna knows it will always be. The truth is she can’t unsee herself in relation to the city. No fantasy of leaving for California or London is complete without the fantasy of return; she can imagine herself returning transformed to the corner grocery store or the hair salon, a few years older and triumphant.

Girls in Beirut . . . Mazna thinks as she wads up toilet paper. But she doesn’t know how to finish the thought. She doesn’t know whether she’s supposed to condemn them

Where once she’d looked upon him with gratitude for all he’d shown her, now there’s only exasperation with him for spoiling the view.

She feels as though she can suddenly understand all the lessons in physics from school, the boring teacher who’d drone on about time and space existing only in people’s imaginations. Time is a lie. She has been lied to. All these years, thinking it’s something that can be measured and organized into days, hours, minutes. How peculiar to name it; it’s like trying to arrest air.

During both pregnancies, she’d craved Duane Reades the way other women craved watermelon, their fluorescent lights and predictable shelves. She’d walk through the aisles and rub her lower back, sometimes crying a little, always soothed by the bright hair dyes, the seasonal ornaments, the medications, all those promises. She was afraid of having children, like most women, afraid of all the ways the world could wreck them. But those stores reminded her that there were myriad tools for repair. There were ointments for insect bites and minor burns and headaches; syrups for coughs; lipstick and hairspray for broken hearts. Everything had a remedy.

“Like I feel all I’m doing is working with a bad memory. I have an idea. Usually it feels very urgent. I want to bring my neighborhood back. I want to show my mother her city. But something happens when I make the work. It erases the intention.” She looks expectantly at Naj. “Right,” she says. “I get lost in the details. Then I realize I cannot remember very well. Or I am working with other people’s memories. They are slippery, like fish. And so then you start to make little things up. Or you start to get distracted with the performance. Do the frames go with the wall paint? Should the chairs be in a row or a circle? Then it’s opening night and you are distracted even more. Did enough people come? Are people complimenting me? Are people upset? Suddenly, it’s not about the idea anymore. The idea has been lost for months. Now it’s all about you.” She stabs a fry into the hummus. “You feel like you’re changing the world, but really all you did was get some paint on people’s hands.”

She always forgets this, how being around her family means beholding their aging. Since Naj is the youngest, in her earliest memories, her parents are in their prime, attractive, already relaxed by a couple of children. Ava was curvy and arresting as a teenager, and Mimi the perennial heartthrob. But being the youngest means entering your prime while the rest of the family are leaving theirs. It isn’t fair.

Fee’s handwriting is tucked in the corner: You Don’t Need Bones to Be Dead. The entire room looks haunted. “It’s all native to Aleppo,” Fee explains. “All the flowers and plants. Some men I know have been smuggling them in through Tripoli. Some animals too. It’s for the painting series—for each live woman, a dead creature. We’re so desensitized to images of bodies. Let them look at the carcasses of flowers. Let them feel something, anything, even if it’s because of an insect.” The hairs on Naj’s arms stand up. “You’re a genius,” she says slowly. “A morbid little genius. People are used to looking at blown-up kids? Scale it back. Make them feel bad for orchids.”

“I think some things we can keep to ourselves. That’s the core of a healthy relationship.” “Lying?” “Unburdening. Yes. Sometimes keeping your mouth shut is, I don’t know—kind.”

If you live a life long enough, it becomes yours.

There’s a woman wearing enormous sunglasses and pushing a baby stroller. Her dress is a little loose, but she looks serene and comfortable, one hand holding a cup of coffee, and Mazna envies her deeply because she’s not Mazna.

She can smell her daughter’s Dorito breath, and for a second the kiss feels a little transgressive, as much of motherhood does. There’s so much nakedness: cleaning the soft folds of a child’s labia, taking baths together, her nipples in and out of Ava’s mouth for nearly a year.

There is a melancholia to numbers. They are nonnegotiable. She will never be the same age at the same time as her mother and daughter. This strikes her as unspeakably sad. The day will come when her daughter too is forty, but by then she’ll have moved on, drifted to another decade, another set of worries.