It wasn’t the first time this was happening to me.

  In the photo, she was sitting in front of a wall that we had painted blue. The light from the window made the curls of her hair look lighter. Her head was tilted towards our son on her lap.

  How could I lose the only photo that I had recovered from the negative? The only photo that connected me to them, to this previous life.

  Now, they had that photo, and I had a pilot certificate in French.

  I was reading an old newspaper in the laundromat when I saw his name. The name of the dead man was the same as the name of the contact. I’d been supposed to see the contact on the day that my wife didn’t let me leave the house.

  The contact’s body had been found on the shores of the ocean in a foreign city where he’d travelled for business. Based on the newspaper, local and international police were still looking into the cause of death.

  The newspaper in the laundromat was from four months ago, so the police should’ve resolved the case by now.

  I’d always imagined that the contact was arrested and hanged. If he was arrested with all of the documents, he wouldn’t have been left alive. If he wasn’t arrested, there was no way for them to know about my role.

  Now, years later, on another side of the world, I had to ask myself if the contact had been actually hanged at the time.

  What if the documents were only recently found? What if that was why he’d been murdered now? Would they come after me again after these many years? They had mercenaries in every corner of the world.

  I cut the piece from the newspaper and glued it into my notebook.

  I had to go to the public library and look into the archives. It was a short walk from the laundromat to the library. I decided to leave my clothes until they dried and come back after.

  No matter how much I enjoyed the smell of dust, of old paper, and of the silence beneath the high ceilings, my visit to the public library wasn’t the same trip this time. I looked into the archives of the newspaper, reviewing every single day after the date of the first report. I couldn’t find anything. I reviewed other newspapers, too, but that wasn’t helpful either.

  I wondered if pretending that everything was normal was still the best way. Maybe I had to go somewhere where they couldn’t find me.

  I remembered that I had left a message to see Lily on Wednesday. How stupid of me to suggest Wednesday instead of today. I couldn’t leave without seeing her. But wasn’t I putting her into risk by meeting her again?

  When I returned to the laundromat, my underwear and shirts were scattered on the floor. An old man was sitting in front of my dryer, solving a crossword puzzle.

  After my sister in law’s visit, I left the house more. One day, I rode my bike down to the river, my fishing rod on the back basket. I paddled through the reeds, my father’s boat on the muddy river.

  It was a cool day with a breeze. I stopped the boat in a narrow stream, watched the gulls guarding their eggs. My fishing rod into the river, I heard the roaring of a motor boat. The calling of the gulls became louder. Two men were on the boat with tanned faces and bare hairy chests, wearing loose khaki pants. One of them held a copper cable connected to the motor, the other one held a net.

  The first man inserted the bare cable into the water and started the engine. The boat bobbed and dead fish floated to the surface of the water. The birds on the water froze with their wings half open.

  The other man collected birds and fish in his net. He separated birds from fish and put them in a separate bucket.

  The first man took a cutlass and started skinning the birds. He broke the necks first, and made two cuts into the flesh. With two movements of his hand the skins swiftly came off.

  I started to paddle my way out through the floating fish and the calling of gulls attacking dead fish.

  On Tuesday morning, I tried to call the number on the map, but I got the voice message again. I decided I would wait until Wednesday before I packed my knapsack and left the attic.

  I took my binoculars and tried to look into the massage parlor. The curtains were pulled and you couldn’t see anything except the sign “OPEN” on the door. The black car was still parked in front of the massage parlor, but nobody was inside the car. I watched a middle-aged man enter and leave the place.

  I wasn’t planning to leave the attic room on that day, but when I went to the kitchen, I didn’t find any eggs in the fridge. I didn’t remember if I had any before and if I had eaten them or if they were stolen again. But who was stealing my eggs if it wasn’t the French man? I had seen all the eggs in his room before he disappeared.

  I went to the grocery store to get some eggs and I saw the two men with beards there. I pretended that I hadn’t noticed them and went to look at the lobsters in the bucket. Looking at the lobsters always helped clear my mind. For a moment, I thought maybe my main lead was the pilot certificate. It had to belong to someone, and if I knew whose it was, that would help me understand what was going on.

  When I came back to my room, someone knocked at my door.

  It was the landlord again.

  Mister, there was a phone call for you.

  I thought Lily, and I could feel blood flowing in my veins.

  Did she leave a message?

  No. No message. No one call you. Only you call. No one call. Okay?

  Okay.

  I ran to the room with plants to call her, but got the voice message again.

  When I was kept at the cell at the garden, every day a miniature door on the bottom of the door opened and a pair of hands pushed a steel food plate inside the cell. Every day, I begged the hands to talk to me: let me know where I was, why I was there.

  I begged them to give me paper and books.

  One day the mini door opened and on the plate was a pile of paper and a book.

  On Wednesday, I went to the bus station and looked for Lily. People moved around the station, their paper cups in their hands. The place smelled of burnt coffee, perfumes, bread. On the bench where we had sat together, a young girl sat with her eyes closed.

  I walked around the station, and then went back to where the bench was, but didn’t find any sign of Lily. I was standing there, my left eye twitching from sleeplessness when somebody tapped on my shoulder.

  Bob? She said.

  She was a girl with a bony face, short black hair, and a big glasses frame. Beneath the glasses, she had small blue eyes.

  This is Sheila. I am Lily’s roommate. I got your voice messages.

  Where is Lily? Is she okay?

  I thought you might know something about her, Sheila said. She hasn’t come back home in the last five days.

  It was difficult to trust her. What if she was sent by them? What if they had just heard the phone conversation and had sent her to lead me where they wanted me to be led.

  Lily was talking about people following her the day before she disappeared, Sheila said. She also talked about meeting you at the coffee shop. I think you should trust me, Sheila said, and tell me whatever you know.

  I don’t know why, but I started to.

  The house was blue, its door was red. They had a shared living room, one bedroom, a den. The den was separated with a black velvet curtain. In the living room, there was a beige sofa bed, a desk. A painting on the wall behind the sofa. It was too big for the small living space. The portrait looked like Sheila.

  I wished the first time I’d gone there was with Lily.

  Nice painting, it looks like you, I said.

  That’s one of Lily’s, Sheila said. She painted me.

  I didn’t know she painted.

  You don’t know a whole lot about her, do you? She doesn’t paint people anymore.

  What does she paint?

  She paints lame horses.

  Are you sure you want me to stay here?

  I think so. After what you told me, we’ll both feel safer this way. You can sleep on Lily’s bed, or on the sofa bed, if you prefer. When we were afraid, Lily and I would sleep together on the sofa bed here.

  You seem to be pretty close.

  Sheila didn’t respond to this and just looked at me from the corner of her eyes.

  Lily’s bed was a single bed with white sheets and a hand-knitted colorful bed cover. I got into the bed wondering if this was how she smelled.

  At night, I woke with the sound of a horse neighing in my head. The wind was moving the black curtain. I could hear someone breathing, could see a pair of white feet beneath the curtain.

  Sheila, I called.

  The feet moved across the floor.

  During breakfast, Sheila talked more about Lily, about a period that she had become a nun in the Nepalese mountains. I loved the way Sheila talked when she talked about Lily.

  What do you think made her return here?

  I don’t know. Maybe she was tired of escaping.

  I imagined Lily, her head shaved, white cotton wrapped around her. For some reason, I pictured her pregnant. I put my head on her belly.

  Sheila held my hand. I didn’t talk about what I had seen last night. Maybe I had dreamed it, and if not, then what?

  Sheila, I think it will be less risky for you if I stay back at the attic, I said.

  But what about you?

  I’ll be careful.

  I think you need to leave the pilot certificate with me.

  I agreed.

  The book they gave me in the cell was about the birds of the world travelling to find their king. I still had the book below my pillow, although I knew its contents by heart. I wanted to give the book to Lily.

  It was in China, late one moonless night,

  The Simorgh first appeared to mortal sight –

  He let a feather float down through the air,

  And rumours of its fame spread everywhere;

  I wondered whether I would have to go hide in the water treatment plant, but I was still hopeful that Lily would come back and we could leave together.

  I wanted to know Lily more, to know everything about her. I’d found a diary in her room, but reading it would have been unfair without her permission. I wondered whether Sheila had read it. I resisted reading it.

  The sun had painted yellow strips on the wall behind my bed. I missed hearing the sound of the French man crying. There was still no sign of him being back. I opened the drawer and took a dry loaf of bread to eat, swallowing it with some water. I think I had gone to sleep, when I heard someone knocking at the door.

  When I looked through the peephole, I saw it was the woman from the massage parlor.

  Open the door, she kept knocking.

  When I didn’t, she slid a note in through the door gap.

  They’re planning to take you down tonight. I happened to overhear them talking. I’ll be waiting for you in the back alley with a red car at 5 pm. We don’t have time.

  Why would she want to help me? I thought about her soft big hands.

  She was waiting there at 5 with the red car. She suggested driving me to the border, but then agreed with my suggestion for hiding in the water treatment plant.

  I could feel you’re different, she said, as I laid my hands on you.

  I had everything I needed packed in my knapsack and a small suitcase. I had a sleeping bag, too.

  Will you share your bag with me?

  I didn’t know how that was possible, but I nodded.

  We passed corn farms and abandoned factories. She drove slowly and pushed her foot on the brake forcefully when we got close to another car.

  Do you know why they’re after me?

  I think it might have something to do with your neighbour, she said.

  Did you tell them about the pilot certificate?

  What pilot certificate?

  How did you end up working there? Did they force you?

  No, she said. I responded to a job ad.

  How did you know where I lived?

  It wasn’t too hard to find out. Relax!

  Her right hand slid below my shirt, rubbing my belly, then moved under my pants. Her left hand kept to the steering wheel, eyes on the bumpy road.

  The sky was gray. The leaves of the trees had fallen, waiting for snow. I could smell the ocean.

  I had to saw off a small door into the entrance door to be able to get into the plant. The building had high ceilings and red brick walls. There were narrow passages between the walls and the pools. Most of the pools were empty, mold covering their walls. The pumps and pipes had rusted, their surfaces flaking.

  I suggested staying in the control room. The control room was blue. The paint peeled on its walls. There were still desks in the blue room, a dilapidated sofa, two chairs. The room’s big windows were covered with old newspapers. Inside the desk drawers, there were cigarettes, coffee mugs, spoons. Whatever the reason was, people had left the place quickly, leaving their traces everywhere behind them.

  I unzipped the sleeping bag and spread it on the floor. I offered her bread from my knapsack. After eating, she took off her pants. We went to sleep with our jackets covering us, our legs rubbed.

  The wind howled through the gaps of the window. I could hear waves crash against the cliffs. Her body was warm. It was as close as I had slept to a body after Ava had left.

  Every day, we would drive to a small town ten minutes away from the plant where there was a pub and a convenience store. We bought what we needed—cans of food, logs of wood, water, fire starter. I cleaned the control room and made a fire pit, where I made a fire every night. I put the logs into the pit and covered it with old papers. I poured the fire starter on the papers.

  Sometimes when I thought about the lost photo or about Lily, a pain would punch me in the chest. I woke up in the middle of the night, looking at the body beside me, unfamiliar, red in the fire light.

  I opened Lily’s diary and read through it. Her words soothed me, even though they talked about pain.

  We were running out of cash, my last welfare check was almost gone. We needed to have a plan. Or maybe we could go back and pick up the check and come back here. I told the woman from the massage parlor I would take the car to do this even though I hadn’t driven in years. I wanted to go to Sheila’s place and learn more about Lily.

  I hadn’t told the woman from the massage parlor anything about Lily.

  When Lily was five, her mother left them. It was her and her father after, the horses and cows in the barns. Lily passed most of her time in the barn with a pony called Peter. Was she able to ride the pony at that age? I hadn’t found anything about that in the notebook. I had never been in a barn myself.

  She woke up one night from a bad dream, and went to his father’s bedroom, found him passed out on the bed, eyes half-open, a syringe fallen beside him. His throat made noises like a boiling kettle.

  Two of their horses died. Lily’s father dug their graves on the back of the farm, on a patch of green grass. He tied their bodies to his truck and pulled them on the ground towards the graves.

  Lily went to sleep every night with the fear that she’d wake up and find Peter dead in the morning.

  When I was inside her, she asked me what I was doing. I was doing what I had been doing before, but my mind was elsewhere.

  This happened the same night that I took her to the pub in town to buy her beer. A biker in a black bandana bought her beer, too, and taught her how to play billiards.

  When I woke up that night, the fire had turned to ashes. There was no sign of a body beside me. I looked and looked. She had taken my suitcase, the car, the cash left from my last check. She had left my knapsack behind, but Lily’s notebook and my suitcase were gone.

  I didn’t have enough money for a bus fare, so I decided to walk back.

  The snow had piled on the road side and it was hard to see the car lights through the fog. The last time I had walked such a long distance was when I heard about the whereabouts of my wife. I never found out if she was actually where I’d heard she was.

  Whoever had told me about Ava’s whereabouts had also introduced me to the dog-faced man who helped me cross the border. I don’t think it was any of my old contacts that introduced me to the dog-faced man, since I would have been too afraid to get in touch with any of them.

  The dog-faced man came to meet me in our house in a tight black leather jacket to discuss the details of his plan. I sold whatever was left: my father’s boat, the truck, pieces of furniture.

  I used most of the money to pay the dog-faced man to pass me through the border.

  He hid us inside the tank of a truck. I couldn’t breathe. My lungs filled with something thick. Small children coughed and cried. I smelled of gasoline when I got out.

  Then, I rode a mule through the snowy mountains on a narrow road to where the dog-faced man had marked on my map. Someone was going to help me when I got to this spot.

  After two days of riding, the mule brayed and stopped walking. Its limbs went deeper into the snow. I had to leave it behind and continue on my own. I walked for two days, knee-deep into snow and ice-cold rivers until I got to the point on the map.

  When I was a kid, my mother used to take me to the public bath early in the mornings. The cold mornings, the river frozen, asphalt cracked, me and her walked through a tunnel of snow. After the tunnel, I knew the bath was waiting for me, the warmth of the steam, the smell of soap, the female bodies through the fog. My body would go numb with the sudden change of temperature. I soaked myself in the small pool and sat on the big white stone until my mother would rub me with her wash cloth, something growing in the pit of my stomach. I felt like I was falling, not wanting anyone to grab me.

  I reached the city at night. The cars sped past me. The snow had turned to rain and I arrived with my clothes soaked. On the streets, it was probably my smell that made people turn. I went inside a drug store, opened a bottle of cough syrup, had two gulps. My chest went warm. I put the bottle back where it was and left the drug store, still shivering from the cold. I couldn’t go back to the attic. I didn’t know who or what was expecting me there.

  In front of a laundromat, I warmed myself with the steam coming out of the curbside sewer and waited until nobody was inside. I went in and undressed, leaving only my underwear on. I ran a wet paper towel all over my body, and placed my dirty clothes into a washer, sat there on the bench. As I was starting the washer, a boy came in his sweatpants to pick up his dried clothes. He opened a drier and threw me a hot towel from it. I rubbed it against my face and became dizzy from the smell.

 

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