Time stood still. Neither one of us moved. The moon poured in through the window in milky white beams.
We sat, motionless, held and frozen.
“We have to tell someone,” my wife Hawa said after the first hour.
“Yes, we must.
“But who?”
“Yes, who.”
Ten o’clock. Ten-thirty. Eleven. We sat upright, awake, taking turns on the edge of the bed, wiping cobwebs clear off of our minds.
“I should ring my mother,” Hawa said, eventually. “I told her I would.”
“I’m sure she’d love that.”
Hawa fawned over the mask that laid in her lap like it was the baby that she always wanted.
“It’s not fair, you know.” Hawa shook her head. “If anyone is deserving, it’s her.”
“I know. How long has she been on the waitlist?”
“Nine years, last November.”
“Terrible,” I said. “There’s really no rhyme or reason. That’s what they call it a lottery for. You never know who’s going to win.”
Hawa’s eyes brightened and dimmed momentarily. “I guess that makes us winners.”
“And for our prize …”
We both stared at the mask on the bed. It was a marvel to behold, every time.
“I really should call her.” Hawa shimmied her way to the phone by the bedside, lifted the receiver up, tangled the coil over one finger, and began nervously pressing for numbers. She stopped just short of the final digit, her finger suspended over it.
“Something the matter?” I said.
In slow order, Hawa hung the receiver back up. Then she sat back against the headboard as though a spell had struck her.
“Maybe it can wait until tomorrow.”
“Oh.”
Having contemplated a great deal, Hawa sat where I was on the bed, and said, almost direly: “One night. That’s all we get. People wait their entire lives for this chance. What good is it to interrupt it more than we have to?”
It was after eleven-thirty when we stood up and went by the window, watching the streets below with great disturbance as though a thousand sirens were ringing out all over the city. But it was only a hushed emptiness in our view. Then we looked at each other, dumbfounded, and realized the atom bombs detonating in our eyes. Despite the window being closed, there was a breeze that flowed through the room like an unlit stream, like a hand that touched us where we stood, forever motioning us back to the mask, as though it had a gravity of its own.
At midnight, the bedroom clock struck softly, and there we sat on the bed again, taking turns with the mask like it was precious oxygen neither of us was ready to be without.
We looked at one another. Then handed the mask over, and sat stiffly, the other one waiting, the world unreal to us. Hawa, for all her doubts, was a new woman, in her skin a radiance I had never seen before.
I sat looking at her, fondly, watching her closed eyelids flicker through the tempered glass. There was an inner light dancing on her cheeks.
“Are you sleeping?” I whispered to her.
“No, I’m waiting,” she said, smiling faintly, eyes still shut.
Only the quieted breathing could be heard.
“I know now, we haven’t lived,” she said, in a hush. “Not in all this time.” Her body stirred. Her head tremored. She drifted forward and backward on the bed as though on a rocking chair, clutching her shoulders for comfort. Something was growing in her. Then she uttered an unusual thing: “I take back what I said before.” Tears came out of her throat; she had tear ducts in it.
“You had no way of knowing,” I said. “No one could, no matter what they told us about it.”
“Oh, Aden.” Her eyes opened. She seized my hand on the bed. Her smile remained constant. “How long will the smells stick to us?”
“A lifetime, at least.”
“You mean it?” she said, breathing in then out.
I did not answer for a long moment, and said, very slowly, “cross my heart, and hope to die.” In my veins and arteries moved strong blood tides.
“Hurry then. You have forty seconds left,” I told her. “Thirty-nine, thirty-eight.”
Hawa shook in place. “Dear, that’s fine, fine! Self recycling oxygen, my childhood, my adult years. It’s everything they said it would be. It’s all so nice…”
The light in the bedroom was raw and bright and I felt as if we were on a stage. I stood and went for the switch, and the darkness set in coolly, illuminated only by the moon.
Drifting, spinning, Hawa’s hazel eyes fell across the darkness, her head swiveling as if set in motion by God’s breath.
And before long, it was my turn again.
The mask was worn. The concentration was given. The memories were summoned, treading lightly upon a water of years. They stayed afloat, gloriously. And no sooner than that, it was science’s turn and the tiny electrodes glowed and the mask came alive, silently stitching together faraway samples from eras past, pulling them from somewhere beyond and bringing them near. So many of these beautiful senses lost to negligence, to heedlessness, but now they were being resurrected, dusted off, shined, and offered through to my nose.
I ran my hand over the glass in anticipation. The mask was warm and snug as a blanket. My heart hummed softly.
And in the next breath, flowing swiftly into my lungs were the smell of bonfires, and in the next breath, freshly mowed grass, followed by the first snowflakes of the season, and the seconds before a thunderstorm, and the wind off the sea, and charcoal burning, and gasoline spilling, and the dust of fireworks shot off through the streets, and the night fragrance of winter beneath the stars, and the intoxicating blend of mariposa and the perfume of orange blooms and of lilacs and honeysuckles and magnolia, and wild mushrooms, and red huckleberries, and calypso orchids, and the flirtation of the redwoods. They were scents like a symphony, a poem, a song, indescribable.
Here was our bedroom, in the twilight, and here was Hawa and I, clutching to one another for dear life, not wanting to let go.
My pale eyes found my wife. “All these years,” I said to her. My voice was so faint it was like a small pulse beat in the throat.
I was about to cry out when I heard Hawa say:
“Must we give it back?”
We found ourselves silent again. The crazy happenings of nature and technology lay still on the bed.
We gave the object our backs while we thought of a plan. It wailed out at us like a fussing baby.
We rationalized it. To flee would almost certainly mean life on the run, and punishment soon after. It was the property of the government, the only one of its kind, a solution to humanity’s long standing deprivation.
Each answer spoken seemed less and less feasible, and the wailing grew louder, and we were tormented and tethered to the bed.
Minutes ticked away, painfully.
There was judgment hanging over my head. “We have no choice,” I said, finally. “It’s not ours to keep. Tomorrow night it’ll be in someone else’s home. The next lucky soul.”
I sat muted over the implication racing through my chest, jealous, hardly in belief.
A color of sorrow changed Hawa’s face. “Something like this, it deserves to be felt forever. Why can’t we feel it forever?”
“Because we’re not meant to.”
Hawa shook her head, fending off the words.
“But we were good once, weren’t we?”
“I can’t remember, to tell the truth,” I said, less charitably. “It’s been all downhill for years.”
“Where did it all go wrong?” asked Hawa.
I couldn’t make head or tail of the question. My brain experienced the habits of grief before it reached me.
“When was it ever truly right?”
My voice stuck a pin in her balloon, because Hawa rose to her feet. She took small steps forward, and held tightly to the windowsill for support, desperately wanting to open it, but never doing so. The air on the other side wasn’t fit for use. It would tattoo her lungs the color of crimson in a matter of seconds. And she knew that. And yet, her hand remained there, trembling on the ledge, as though the verdict was still in doubt.
It was only hours ago that a hope had expanded and built upon itself in me, changed and matured and reproduced. It lived and died.
Dead.
How foolish, I thought, the need to breathe, ever, ever. Silly, silly, unnecessary, nightmarish.
I felt the silent agony within myself grind slow. All the excited whispers and muttering were now gone, replaced by the setting grimness of disease. How could we hope to heal when all we did was take and nothing was of value? I thought. One of the few things of beauty that we knew, the air, which changes. But we never changed, therefore there is no more beauty, no more art.
Hawa finally turned away from the balcony and toward me. “It’s been a nice movie, hasn’t it?” she said, borrowing a smile that was not her own.
I tried to get my voice in order. “It has.”
“Well,” she started, venturing for her words, “I guess we should make the most of the finale.” She walked over to the side of the bed and went for the mask.
She held it in her hand for a while.
“What’s this here?” she said.
Behind the mask, was a tiny compartment. Hawa pulled at it with her fingertips until it gave and a tinier paper fell from it onto the bed.
I stared at it as it hit the soft mattress.
Hawa began to unravel and unfold it until it doubled and tripled and quadrupled in size. Now, it was a sheet of paper that she held to the light.
She offered it to me, but the wind in my chest was already rushing away, out of town, out of country, out of orbit.
Hawa looked at me, hesitated, and nodded a quick nod. Almost immediately, she wet her lips. She studied the paper for a long while before finding her voice.
Each breath would say its precious
It would tell you if it could
How the next one holds fortune
To inhale is to know, that all mountains you let go
Each breath would say it’s gold
Hawa sighed a long and deep sigh.
I couldn’t look at her as she read, instead I stared at the mask on the bed as if I had seen it somewhere long before birth.
There in the moonlight I went silent. My mouth did not work. My eyes did not shift. The high was wearing off, reality was now setting in.
Hawa folded the piece of paper up and set it on the bed.
My heart began to beat wildly.
Hawa stood up and looked ahead, as clear eyed as she ever was. Then said: “We shouldn’t worry anymore, it’s only wasteful. Before we know it, the sun will be up, and then that’ll be that.”
Stunned by the circus of emotions, in need of nudging, Hawa nudged: “It’s your turn, hon, for the next two turns.”
Thawed, and tender, I deliberated. My eyes looked and found 1 o’clock on the far wall. This fatal experiment had a shelf life.
“Five hours left,” I said to no one, while Hawa gently pulled on my shoulder, grabbed the mask, then started to fashion it on my face with love, like a helmet of a young boy on their first ride down an open street.
“Four hours, fifty-nine minutes, one second, two, three, four, five …”
“Shh. Shh,” said Hawa. “Just focus. Let it do its job.”
I felt the mask secure in place. I had the physical impact but none of the emotion.
“There’s never been a finer night,” she said. “Or happier people. I wish we could have this night for a thousand years, this perfect night, in our own world, our old world, where we make our memories and live by them.”
“But we’ll make do,” said Hawa. “Do you hear me?”
“We’ll make it last?” I said, unsure.
“Yes.” She took great interest in the sentence, clutching it with a warm embrace. “Shall I tell you why?”
A great hot breath filled my chest, awakening me.
“Because,” said Hawa, “there’s no time. No tomorrow, just right now.”
Her words were good to hear. The electrodes glowed along the corners of my head.
“It’ll be autumn soon,” she said.
“Yes…yes…”
“Summer’ll be over. You know what that means.”
The mask purred quietly. The memories traveled, far and wide.
Lights out, I laid back halfway as though gravity had been neutralized, watching Hawa negotiate my feet over the covers, far away down there at the end of the bed in the moonlight, her face glowing and free of burden.
Then she came over to the bedside. “Deep breaths,” she said to me. “There’s never been a finer night.”
Slowly, slowly, her voice faded, and into the voyage I went, where the smells of autumn gentled and rocked me away til’ the morning came.
—–
Image: Dall-E remixed