Eve Out of Her Ruins Read Free Page B

made me sit bolt upright: I, too, saw colors in words. Just as the island unfurled its blues and oranges, so the words unfurled still more vividly purple rages in my head. When she was done she said, this poet’s name is Rimbaud.
    I am your brother.
    I am your double. I am your single. I have split completely and totally in two: I was Saad, sitting transfixed in my stiff chair (or stiff in my transfixed chair), and I was someone else, unmoored, observing things but pushing them away through his thoughts, his defiance, his mortality.
    That night, lying in bed, I took a marker and began writing on the wall by my head. Of course, I wrote about Eve. She alone occupied my thoughts. I began talking to her directly, saying you instead of she , guessing where she’s going, what she’s thinking, what she’s living. She doesn’t know that I’ve figured her out. I’ve written so much about her that sometimes I think I’m actually writing her life, and other people’s lives, and all our lives.
    I read in secret, all the time. I read in the toilets, I read in themiddle of the night, I read as if books could loosen the noose tightening around my throat. I read to understand that there is somewhere else. A dimension where possibilities shimmer.

EVE
    The water and its swirls. Its lines, its marbling, its abrupt changes in direction. I spend hours watching the stream run endlessly. Colors slip beneath its clarity when the sun hits it straight on. And I do too, I slip forward, carried by time, by nothing.
    The buildings are straight ahead. I’m not afraid of them. I dare them to look back at me. All of us born there are fated to die, but that doesn’t mean anything. Everybody is born to that fate. The babies’ eyes are drained of color and sky. I’ve known for a long time the coldness of metal. It’s imbued me with its liquid strength.
    This neighborhood was a marsh at the base of the mountain. They filled it in to build these streets, but they couldn’t do anything about the smell of wrack or the unsteadiness of the ground where only the corpses of brambles and dreams are still growing. Several buildings are starting to tilt. Soon, we’ll have our own Leaning Tower of Pisa. The eighth wonder of the world: Troumaron.
    Seated on a mound not far off, I’m smoking and watching them. There’s a guard at the end of each street. The fiery tips of their joints dot the closed circle. The boys swear oaths, declare rules, make alliances: a pack mentality. If you care about your life, your body, if you’re a girl, if you’re old, you’d do best to give them a wide berth. They spread a pool of oil around them in which their bored faces and their footsteps are reflected. Now, nobody walks. Everybody runs. It’s a dance to the death. According to them, most females carry the same heaviness: this hole that is an impassable yet open door that keeps its secrets. So they go and hunt, like thehundreds of feral dogs raging through the city and tearing it apart.
    Even Saad, who’s a little different, who thinks about something other than spreading our thighs, is part of a gang. He’s afraid to stand out, to be alone, to go off in another direction. He has no idea what’s in us.
    This troubled water, this murky world, this faraway smile like a moonlit night, when the wind comes to whisper things that make us pensive and sad.
    Saad talks about poetry when we’re alone. But he has no idea about the poetry of women.
    The poetry of women is when Savita and I walk together step by step to avoid the ruts. It’s when we pretend to be twins because we look like each other. We wear the same clothes, the same perfume, as if we’re dancing together. Our earrings chime. Her nose is pierced with a tiny jewel like a star. The poetry of women is laughter in this lost place, laughter that opens up a small part of paradise so we don’t drown ourselves.
    But those