When the news was broken to him, B did exactly what he thought he could never do. In fact, he couldn’t bring himself to believe that any thinking, self-respecting person could ever do it.
A conversation had spawned from a scene in a movie. One of those black-and-white classics that was endlessly eulogized in intellectual circles in Calcutta. It was in such a circle, where, between nursing dregs of whiskey and releasing perfect smoke rings, he had scoffed at his friends, who deemed the scene not only believable but brilliant.
The scene he had half-forgotten, and the lesser actor’s face was a blur, but he had argued vociferously and at length about the foolhardiness of the act in the otherwise sublime movie. The scene, which was shot on a terrace near a rail yard, unfolds this way. First, the breaking of the news of the protagonist’s young wife’s death. The bearer of the news is the wife’s cousin. Then, the registering of the news manifested in the shifting lines on the protagonist’s face. Now, the pained, almost sheepish look on the cousin’s face. Meanwhile, a goods train passes in the distant backdrop, its whistle mingling with music that crescendos at the exact moment when the hero commits the single act of violence and slaps the other man so hard, he crashes onto the parapet.
In reality, our protagonist B had not slapped any cousin—either his own or his wife’s. But when his old domestic help brought the news of his wife’s passing, his hand met the hapless man’s cheek with such force, it left welts. People talked about it for months—the uncanny coincidence of how he had ridiculed the scene, and yet, in a way, had given it life. Some friends sensed in him something feral and avoided him. Some thought he had become too sad to be around. Others conjectured that his wife had been the one to nurture familial and friendly ties, which, they felt, he simply didn’t care to maintain.
Often, when B’s mind was quiet, he went back to the moment of the slap, which took him back to another day. Many years ago, he had been on the Space Mountain roller coaster in Disneyland. A work trip had led to a rendezvous with old friends—a man and a woman who had married each other and moved to America. With B was his new wife, who was practically a stranger to him then. She suffered from vertigo and had offered to wait outside with the couple’s baby. The ride was housed inside the dark cavern of Mount Matterhorn. The man was B’s closest friend in college, and all those years later, in that distant continent, they’d started to pick up where they had left off. As they lined up near the mouth of that dark hollow, the nearness of the man’s wife filled B with an old longing that pricked his skin and made his heart patter wildly. For years he had been secretly, madly, in love with this woman, knowing she would never become his. By the time they boarded the ride, he was hyper-aware of her presence in the seat in front of him and was hit by a sudden sadness he could barely contain. He decided he would confess to her later in private if he had the chance.
But then, with the swiftness as such things were wont to do, the ride started. Within moments, all thoughts and feelings left B. He closed his eyes, gripped the thin, cold railing, and consigned himself to the twin enormity of darkness and motion. The roiling went on till he became one with it, and the thin veil between his own being and that of the deep silence within his mind dropped away. By the time he came outside, his mind had returned to a restful state, and he was almost relieved to see his own wife, waiting with the infant that wasn’t theirs.
Just like that roller coaster ride, the slap had changed something in him.
It took some time, but B forgave himself for hitting an elderly man for whom he now had only the deepest empathy. For the director, who he had thought was mediocre, he found new respect. The slap had tarnished his own image, provided fodder for gossip. Yet, over and over again, he calmly relived the moment when his hand had left his side and risen to strike another man. His mind had become a void, unconditioned and pure, acting of its own accord. His body had followed suit, stretching itself outward, culminating in the single tremendous act. He had become one with the whole trajectory of the motion, and this understanding alone sealed in him the belief that he had cared for his wife after all. The woman he had ignored throughout the entire time she was with him. The woman he thought he had never loved.
grew up in small-town India and writes from the Seattle area. She has work forthcoming in Alan Squire Publishing, Emerge Literary Journal, and West Trestle Review. She has placed work in Contemporary Haibun Online, The Ekphrastic Review, Gone Lawn, Heavy Feather Review, TIMBER, Wordgathering, and elsewhere. This season, she is participating as a fiction mentee in the AWP Writer to Writer Mentorship program.
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