and I guessed that I was the first to use it. It looked almost like a store room; several boxes were stacked on top of each other, an exercise bike was facing the wall, a large painting lay face down on the floor. A faint sound of machinery came from downstairs, a steady thud. I tugged open the curtains. The sun reflected on the snow and hurt my eyes. The path and garden were even more packed than yesterday, in confident clumps several feet high. My Civic was completely covered, which meant that it had snowed again during the night. It made me wonder whether I would be able to leave anytime soon. Far to my right the hills were a sweep of white and then below, the river was clean and flowing rapidly. A movement close by caught my eyes; powdery flakes drifting from a black and white tree. A strip of white on the black branch. My eyesight blurred and I moved away before an aura fully developed. I could not cope with a full-blown migraine now, not when I was away from my flat.
I had thought that if I discovered what made me anxious, I would be able to find a cure. But all I could do was learn to control it. The symptoms started when I was young. At a fancy-dress party, I kicked and screamed at a child with the head of a wolf and the body of a seven-year-old-boy. I knew that the wolf’s head was fake. I myself was wearing a Red Indian wig with two thick braids pleasantly heavy on my chest. I was not even unduly frightened of wolves. Whether stalking the three little pigs or behind bars at the zoo, they were thrilling and worthy of respect but they did not make me ill. It was the disproportion of the wolf’s head to the child’s body, the shock of the half-human, half-beast, the lack of fusion between the two. There was no merging. It was a clobbering together, abnormal and clumsy, the head of one species and the body of the other. Later, a picture of a centaur in a library book and I vomited over the pages. Then as a teenager, a scene in a horror film of a dog with a man’s head made me faint. The video was the 1978 version of Invasion of the Body Snatchers – the product of an innocent time when aliens from space were more threatening than Muslims from al-Qaeda.
The explanation became clearer as I grew older. I was seeing in these awkward composites my own liminal self. The two sides of me that were slammed together against their will, that refused to mix. I was a failed hybrid, made up of unalloyed selves. My Russian mother who regretted marrying my Sudanese father. My African father who came to hate his white wife. My atheist mother who blotted out my Muslim heritage. My Arab father who gave me up to Europe without a fight. I was the freak. I had been told so and I had been taught so and I had chewed on this verdict to the extent that, no matter what, I could never purge myself of it entirely. My intellect could rebel and I was well-read on the historical roots and taboos against miscegenation (the word itself hardly ever used now), but revulsion and self-loathing still slithered through my body in minute doses. The disease was in me despite the counselling and knowing better. Natasha Hussein would always be with me. I couldglimpse her in the black-white contrast of a winter branch that was covered on one side with snow.
The machine noise and the thudding turned out, on investigation, to be Malak on a treadmill. I stood and watched her. She was wearing a black training suit and there was an olive bandana around her hair. She jogged for two minutes, then walked for one with the machine up on an incline. I had never visited a gym and so the procedure was intriguing. We talked about the snow, how it was even worse than yesterday, how the television had reported that a few had died, some were in hospital and commuters stuck in their cars for hours. I told Malak that I had called work but it was hard to get anyone at the department to pick up the phone. I had tried again with no luck to get a taxi to come and pick me up.
I had thought that if I discovered what made me anxious, I would be able to find a cure. But all I could do was learn to control it. The symptoms started when I was young. At a fancy-dress party, I kicked and screamed at a child with the head of a wolf and the body of a seven-year-old-boy. I knew that the wolf’s head was fake. I myself was wearing a Red Indian wig with two thick braids pleasantly heavy on my chest. I was not even unduly frightened of wolves. Whether stalking the three little pigs or behind bars at the zoo, they were thrilling and worthy of respect but they did not make me ill. It was the disproportion of the wolf’s head to the child’s body, the shock of the half-human, half-beast, the lack of fusion between the two. There was no merging. It was a clobbering together, abnormal and clumsy, the head of one species and the body of the other. Later, a picture of a centaur in a library book and I vomited over the pages. Then as a teenager, a scene in a horror film of a dog with a man’s head made me faint. The video was the 1978 version of Invasion of the Body Snatchers – the product of an innocent time when aliens from space were more threatening than Muslims from al-Qaeda.
The explanation became clearer as I grew older. I was seeing in these awkward composites my own liminal self. The two sides of me that were slammed together against their will, that refused to mix. I was a failed hybrid, made up of unalloyed selves. My Russian mother who regretted marrying my Sudanese father. My African father who came to hate his white wife. My atheist mother who blotted out my Muslim heritage. My Arab father who gave me up to Europe without a fight. I was the freak. I had been told so and I had been taught so and I had chewed on this verdict to the extent that, no matter what, I could never purge myself of it entirely. My intellect could rebel and I was well-read on the historical roots and taboos against miscegenation (the word itself hardly ever used now), but revulsion and self-loathing still slithered through my body in minute doses. The disease was in me despite the counselling and knowing better. Natasha Hussein would always be with me. I couldglimpse her in the black-white contrast of a winter branch that was covered on one side with snow.
The machine noise and the thudding turned out, on investigation, to be Malak on a treadmill. I stood and watched her. She was wearing a black training suit and there was an olive bandana around her hair. She jogged for two minutes, then walked for one with the machine up on an incline. I had never visited a gym and so the procedure was intriguing. We talked about the snow, how it was even worse than yesterday, how the television had reported that a few had died, some were in hospital and commuters stuck in their cars for hours. I told Malak that I had called work but it was hard to get anyone at the department to pick up the phone. I had tried again with no luck to get a taxi to come and pick me up.
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