That night, Suleiman felt that there was something quite different about his wife. She shot up from the bed as though from the depths of a nightmare, and scanned her hands feverishly across her chest. Then she raised her palms to her face and found they were not the way she had remembered them to be. Riyah gave them long and careful observations, turning them over in slow order like they were strangers to her. She did this for several minutes. And subsequently, she misremembered other things: her nightgown, the ceiling, the room, the bed. Everywhere she looked there was another mountain staring back at her. Her recollections could not keep pace with what her eyes witnessed.
She even misremembered Suleiman.
“Goodness!” Immediately she jerked away from her husband as though he were a known disease.
“Riyah?” asked Suleiman, softly, “Are you all right?” He had been watching her the entire time.
“Do I look all right to you?” she replied.
“I don’t know.” Suleiman rose halfway on the bed so he could see her better.
“Riyah?” he repeated, in an even softer tone than the first time, placing a tender hand on her shoulder. She would not turn toward him, and any weight his hand possessed slowly started to falter and fade. After half a minute, he withdrew it altogether and placed it limply on his lap.
Whoever she was at that moment, Suleiman could not tell, and he was either stirred by the next words that she uttered or by her physical presence, or both.
“You’re alive,” answered Suleiman.
“But I died.”
“No.”
“Yes.”
“What’s this about?”
“I’m dead!”
“But you’re here,” he said.
“And I shouldn’t be.”
“Where should you be?”
“In the hospital, that’s where–” her voice gave out. She began to sob without any tears falling down her cheeks. “This isn’t right. It simply isn’t.”
Before Suleiman could settle her, Riyah rose, lightless and removed from slumber, and darted for the bathroom. In the ensuing minutes, a series of profanities carried out above the running sink, rising in intensity. There was a thumping sound on the counter, and a fumbling noise like so many objects colliding at once, and a hysterical laughter like one who has only just survived a near death experience.
Finally, Riyah returned, wearing a damp face, her eyes as wide as disco balls.
“What are you doing?” asked Suleiman.
“I was dead,” she said. It was a bold assertion sharply undercut by her deep breathing. “But now…” She exhaled.
“Riyah, please.”
“Shoshana.”
“What?”
“My name is Shoshana.”
“Well that just isn’t true, now is it,” said Suleiman like it was a simple accounting error on her part. And in a playful tone he said: “You’re my wife and your name is Riyah.”
“But I don’t feel like Riyah.”
Suleiman considered in a business-like way the practical implications of this sentence.
“So you don’t feel like yourself. That’s fine.” He nodded, a warmness across his features.
“Can’t you see that I’m not your wife!” Her arms grew animated and she launched her mind. “ Sure I look like her. But I’m not her, not really.”
Suleiman scrunched his face. “Come to bed,” he said. “You’re having a nightmare while awake.”
At that moment, she slipped away from her husband’s grasp before he had the chance to reel her in; she ran to the window of their two second story townhome. Then she spun around.
“Quick, when is my birthday?” asked Shoshana.
“Huh?”
“My birthday,” she repeated, “when is it?”
“You’re not serious.”
“I’ve never been more serious in my life.”
Suleiman gave a long and fretful pause.
He knew the shading of her voice to be earnest. Eventually he was inclined toward her quiz, for she had agreed to return to bed in exchange for an answer.
“Very well,” he said. “March 11th.”
“October 17th,” said Shoshana. “1998.”
The information connected improperly with Suleiman’s brain like a botched handshake, and he frowned as a result. His wife was born in the summer twenty-six years earlier.
“Whatever game you’re playing,” he said politely,” I’d like you to stop now.”
Shoshana turned to face the window, inhaling the dark streets, her eyes travelled and jumped and hopped along the pavement like a ladder of chalk scratches and she heard herself whisper:
“I can’t go back …”
“Back where?” Suleiman was up out of the bed and on his feet, inching toward her, slowly. He had a premonition of the supernatural which filled the space of the room like a soundless scream.
With an outstretched arm, he placed the back of his hand against her forehead as if to assess for illness; he withdrew his hand after several moments, convinced of everything and nothing at all.
At last, Suleiman felt the heat brought into the room by her silence like the presence of the sun.
“If I go for a walk,” said Shoshana, “will you come with me?”
He hesitated. “It’s three in the morning.”
“And there’s no hope for sleep,” she said.
“I’ve been up for ten minutes already,” she continued. “I’m going for a walk. Come along. Or don’t, it’s up to you.”
**
They stood in the center of the perfect, hushed road, over which one set of footsteps, Shoshana’s, had speed walked, leaving Suleiman to follow behind. Now, they were walking in great slow strides. The town was as silent as a stopped clock.
“My goodness,” said Shoshana. “It’s so early. I’ve never been up at this hour. Listen to everyone sleeping.”
They listened to the ruffling of the trees far away and the silence of the homes in this early summer hour, the hour when animals were asleep and the stars glimmered and the moon was center stage through the passing clouds.
“Where are we going?” asked Suleiman.
“Does it matter?”
Shoshana led the way, whirling, pointing in several directions. “Let’s go into town.”
It was the precise hurried cadence in her stride that was notable to Suleiman now. Here she was, wandering through the roads like she was in great pursuit of a treasure, and yet she was burdened by choices and found herself halting at several points, silently deliberating, until she was assured she was going in the right direction and she pedaled her feet where her heart instructed her to go.
And all the while Suleiman kept pace with her, arrested by her movements at the same time that he tried to say the scary in a truthful way.
“You’re not Riyah,” he whispered to himself.
“What’s that?”
He said it again. Strange, he thought, his voice for the first time did not falter.
Shoshana paid him little mind, her fixation laid upon the structures to either side of her. She pointed toward the homes as though she were a conductor, giving them a mandate with her fingers. “Up and at em’!”
The rain came as a pleasant surprise.
It lasted only a few minutes and it smelled of freshness in the summer air, falling from the high, parched sky. A faint breeze had lifted Shoshana’s long hair, releasing a sigh and then, as she and Suleiman began to walk toward the sidewalk’s intersection, the raindrops started to fall down again, this time much harder, and together they hurried across the soaking pavement for cover. In just a few short seconds, every part of them was drenched.
“This way!” cried Shoshana.
And they reached a movie theater with a protruding sign so large they took shelter underneath it like an oversized umbrella. Shoshana squeezed in next to Suleiman as though they were boarding a crowded train, making both of them shiver, the raindrops still on their foreheads and cheeks. She started laughing and then leaned over and gave the bridge of his nose a tiny peck.
“Hey!
“Drinking water!” she exclaimed.
A brief bubble of shock and warmness overcame Suleiman. He quickly buried it for fear that it might encourage her.
They listened to the rain, the strong envelopment of the world, evoking odors new and old. They heard the splashes of twilight tires driving through the downpour. Above them was the drumming of water against the roof of the theater sign, heavy, and heard, falling every which way in the wind. There was serenity in the gale and there wasn’t much in that moment to add or subtract from, or explain away the beauty.
“I almost died on a night like this.”
“You what?” said Suleiman
And there Shoshana revealed the curvatures of her car accident and the hospitalization which devastated her body. She spoke of her mind state in that time, in the closest approximation she could remember, and the fragments of memory she had with her family. It was trauma of the brain that she suffered first, and her ribs which had been fractured in several places, resulting in internal bleeding and organ failures, so much so that the doctors had no choice but to declare her case as lost. She rubbed the part of her chest where she had been operated on. “I thought I would never leave that bed again. Here lies Shoshana, gone and forgotten. ” She pronounced the last words with a feverish tenor which gave a firm eloquence to her words.
Then she tried to articulate what amounted to the final days and hours before everything went dark for her.
It was a wrecking ball.
“It’s awful, I know.”
“But you–” Suleiman tried. He was seized with a trembling fear in his chest. He had never lived in Kansas or been made aware that Riyah was ever involved in such a horrible car accident as had Shoshana described. But then he remembered that this was not his wife and these were not her memories.
And the pain that Shoshana recalled was intensified when Suleiman mentioned his confusion over how she came to adopt a body that was not her own.
He had not meant to but his subsequent words caused Shoshanna to raise her hands above her head, and shout loudly, and then he saw her helpless hands run over her body.
It was only a dim outline of an apology he mustered up.
Suleiman tried a different way. “How… long will you be like this for?”
The sentence returned like a pulled punch to the back of her skull. “I don’t know,” she said, after a moment. “I hadn’t thought that far.”
“Now is as good a time as any.”
She considered it. “And if I don’t want to?”
At that instant, Suleiman felt for the second time a great distance separating them. “I guess that’s up to you.” There was an ingredient of resignation in his voice, and he watched the rain fall on the quiet street.
“Don’t look like that,” said Shoshana after a minute.
“How should I look?”
“Not like that.”
Rather than devoting himself to the emotion, Suleiman took a breath. “I don’t know what to say.”
“How about your condolences.”
“But you’re alive.”
“Then a celebration. Gosh, I shouldn’t have to tell you twice!”
“I’m sorry,” said Suleiman.
“You really know how to put a damper on things.”
“Funny, my wife says the same thing.”
“Well I could’ve told you that.”
“You just did.”
“Want me to tell you again?”
“No thanks.”
The rain finally stopped, and they made their way back out on the sidewalk, their strides imperfectly staggered.
“You’ll forgive me, but I’m still having a hard time making sense of all this,” said Suleiman, his tenor soft and low again. His lips made an oval of fright. What Suleiman said next, he realized, inadvertently brought into focus the topic of her existence much more quickly than he intended.
And what Shoshana said next brought into focus the unaccounted for pain and turmoil of her death, and the absence of life, the very thing she envied of him.
“Why can’t you just be happy for me?” She gazed directly into his eyes. “Is that so much to ask?” She made no effort to minimize the turbulence of her speech, and there was a large and daunting vacuum created by her question which Suleiman could not possibly fill. He was depending on some small piece of the universe to help him answer her.
Suddenly, Shoshana stopped dead in place and clutched fiercely to Suleiman as if at any moment her life might be wrestled away from her hands if she was left to herself.
She looked both ways on the sidewalk as if to shield her speech from the world. “Listen,” she began, “I realize how strange this must be for you.”
“You do?”
“Yes,” she said, fortifying her grip over his arm. “I don’t know who put me in this body or why. All I know is one moment I’m on a hospital bed fighting for my life, then next I’m waking up in a bed with you. That’s as far as I understand it.” She paused, shaking her head as if with the major marvel of it all. She was seemingly at a loss for words to recite. “But maybe I’m not meant to understand beyond that,” she went on. “We must find something good to hold on to, even if we can’t explain it. There’s beauty in the unexplainable.”
“Um.”
“Death and life are in the power of the tongue. That’s poetry, is it not?”
Suleiman did his best to nod in the affirmative.
“Well right now my tongue is light and I feel free. Nothing lasts forever so I might as well be a sport about it,” said Shoshana.
Suleiman waited while he absorbed her observation, and asked: “What are you saying?”
Shoshana said nothing, but looked at him easily and without making him uncomfortable. “
“Will you agree to an experiment?” She gave his arm a tight squeeze which contained something more than he could quantify.
“What kind of experiment?”
“Nothing crazy,” she said. “It’s simple.” She described the experiment, flattening nuance and complexity in the process.
“Let me finish!” cried Shoshana, fearful of his judgment. “There is a force, a divine force, something, and it has given me this chance to live.”
“A chance?” Suleiman wondered.
“I wasn’t sure I wanted to be revived on a night like this.”
“Well, what night would you like to have been revived?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “On a holiday, maybe. I always did love watching the fireworks.”
Silence floated between them.
“Do you think you can do it?” she asked.
“Do what?”
“Treat me like Shoshana even though I’m Riyah.”
Suleiman hung his head and looked at the ground. “I don’t know. I don’t know.”
It was like she was standing on her tiptoes without ever moving herself, waiting, as if his answer would sustain her through the last phases of this unnamed miracle.
“It would mean the world to me.”
Suleiman felt, rather than saw, her hand move toward his. He allowed his fingers to open that were already stiff and cold, and strange to manage, and she pressed hers into them.
“If I told you who I am, you might not be afraid,” she whispered.
He said nothing. She breathed in and out.
“It’s me,” she said.
“Who?” he said, so faint and so weak it was a small pulse-beat in his throat.
“I’ll tell you.” She breathed. “Don’t worry, I’ll tell you,”
——
Image: ChatGPT remixed