“No one today is purely one thing.”
— Edward W. Said
The Train
I can see the bones under the skin of her hands. She is plump but her hands are bony, like a skeleton’s. Pale as wax, she has haunted eyes. Dark green. She is looking at me but her gaze goes right through me as if I am not there. We are sitting in opposite seats of a BART train, second or third car from the back.
At six in the afternoon, on a Bay Area Rapid Transit train, you are at the epicenter of all that is Bay Area. Morning commute is reserved for corporate drones like me, but at this hour you have all genders and skin colors and sexual orientations. But the woman sitting opposite me is a corporate slave like me, grey skirt that doesn’t match her grey jacket. Black pointed shoes. Three-inch heels, probably to compensate for her height. The shoes are new and hip and look out of place. I have seen her before. She always gets out at the same stop I do. She lives in the same community I do, a group of a hundred townhomes with russet roofs. I have seen her walk out to her cul de sac, P— Court. It is the one parallel to mine. She has a mole on her forehead and little dark spots around it like a solar system. Mid-forties, I guess.
The sun is on the other side of the train and in my face now. I can’t read my book so I get up and go to her side. She has to move her handbag to let me sit.
“Thank You.”
She does not say anything but her lips curl down in a vague expression of annoyance. She looks like someone with space issues. I wonder if she thinks I moved seats to be close to her.
“How are you?” I say, knowing it will annoy her.
She opens her mouth to say something. Uneven teeth, a little stained. She closes her mouth.
Forget her, I think. I draw book from my briefcase and begin reading. We go on a bridge, pass a canal with wide barges. Almost home.
After a few seconds I can hear her turn her head.
“Are those words?” She points to the Perso-Arabic script.
“Yes. You read them right to left.”
I could tell her that is the quatrains of Omar Khayyam, bilingual Farsi and English version. I could tell her that they’re love poems, I could also tell her I was brought up in California and cannot read the Farsi. Or I could tell her that Omar Khayyam was the first to provide a solution for all third-degree polynomials by using the intersection of two conic sections.
Instead, I say, “It’s a manual.”
She repeats the words slowly. “A manual.”
“It’s in code,” I say.
“Code?”
I devour her prejudice. It is refreshing.
“It talks about Allah, how he is inscrutable.”
“Allah?”
Her face does something funny. She is pallid now. There is a glint of a pajama top where her V-shaped sweater dips at her bosom. I imagine her getting dressed in a hurry.
We are two stops away from our station.
In an almost timid voice, she says, “Are you an Arab?”
“I was born in the Middle East. Does that count?”
“Oh,” she says, “what country?”
“The Kushan Empire,” I say. Technically, I think it is not entirely incorrect.
She nods, not having a clue what I’ve said.
“But, you know, no one today is purely one thing,” I say, quoting someone.
She nods, then gets up slowly, picks her purse and goes to the doors. I notice the handle of her purse. It’s broken and she has taped it with Scotch tape. After we cross the Berkeley Hills Tunnel, she takes out her cell. A timid look at my direction and she presses a few digits. She speaks for a few seconds, too quiet for me, and gets out at the next station. It’s one station too soon. Her station, the same as mine, has not arrived yet. The moment she gets off, I know.
At the exit of the Pleasant Creek station there is an ICE agent and two uniformed cops, BART cops, one male, one female spread out in front of the fare gates. I am intercepted as I tap my Clipper card and pass through.
Step this way sir. Yes, here. Thank you.
I am nudged to a corner, holding my briefcase. The trio forms a semi-circle around me.
….
Last short story I have written, looking for a home…