FORGET, IF YOU WILL, the business of my hands.
Hello. My name is Yasmeen. I don't know who the fuck you are. But I'm here. Might as well talk about me, right?
I was born twenty years ago and I was born again several months ago. I am in no way shape or form a born-again Christian and I hold no prejudices against them, except of the usual kind. I am in fact Muslim, which is just about the only thing I can remember about myself. Anything else I know about me I can see in the mirror. Brown. Woman. Tall. Broad-shouldered. Wide-hipped. A little round.
Whatever I was before I took up the business of my hands, it's lost to me. Which is shit, but that's good. History distracts you from what you do with your hands, and I cannot afford something like that. Sophia tells me I can't, and Morsova thinks the same. Probably.
I am giving you the bare facts. Are you listening? Please listen. Words are a difficulty for me, despite the ease with which they come out. I am giving you fragments right now. Pieces. Bits and pieces. But sometimes pieces can be important. I should know. I pick pieces of people. The most important parts of them, usually.
A quick review of my job, if you need it. I take people who are on the verge of death and I push them over. There are more complicated things involved, but like how you ride a bike—I remember how to ride a bike, yes—you don't think about the complications. You do not think about the physics—I remember physics, too—you do not think about what could go wrong. You think very little, except for your feet on the pedal, the force of your body propelling you forward. It is like this. I do not think of the specifics, or the process involved; I only push. Or eat. Devour. Sometimes I do not know what it is I do. But I know I am helping. Morsova tells me this, and Morsova has been nothing but gentle with me. Why would he lie to me? Don't answer that. It doesn't bear thinking. But I have nothing to give, or offer, or lose. Nothing I own would necessitate lying. And Morsova seems too tired to lie.
What am I now? Not human. More than human. Definitely not the middle ground, which is human. Morsova tells me I am going to have to spend eternity like this. I'm not sure if I have the heart for eternity. Or the drive for it. But I've made it this far, so what's forever to me? A lot more distance, more ground to cover.
The question still remains: what am I now? Whatever I was, before I turned into this being, that no one can see or feel or touch or ache for. Not that anyone's ever ached for me. At least, I don't think. An interesting idea, to genuinely fall in love with something like me—not necessarily me. I should be telling this story in the right order. Beginning to bottom. End. But here I am. Distracted from the business of my hands. By you. Whoever you are. And whatever and whoever you are, I think you're important. You must be. So here I am, telling you something. I am telling you everything I can, starting from that night so many months ago where I stopped being me and started being me.
In other words, the night I met Morsova.
I lay out for you the anatomy of that night. Observe. Here I am, afraid, alone, invisible, made of nothing but instinct. And here is the night in Dubai in the less shiny parts; crowded, hot, glittering with the lights of the shops and grocery stores and tailor shops. Arabic script, English script. Men leaning on cars, their necks gleaming with sweat. Everything in present tense. Too vibrant and surreal to be put into the past.
And nobody is looking at me. Which is in itself a wrongness. I don't know how I know this, only that in Dubai, if you are a woman and you're in the less shiny parts of the city men will look at you if you are standing in the middle of the street and not moving. You don't have to be attractive. Just be a woman. But they weren't looking at me, despite me being a woman, and nobody rubbed shoulders with me on this crowded body packed narrow sidewalk and I was terribly terribly lost and all I had was my name and a scent in the air that ran deeper than the smell of too many people outside on a too hot night.
