Read Online City of Veils by Zoë Ferraris - Free Book Online

toward her unthinkingly. He noticed that she was clutching her purse, but the rest of her seemed relaxed.
    “I can’t believe it,” she said when he was close enough. She sounded amused, but beneath it he detected nervousness. “I thought I’d never see you again.”
    There was something cold in the words, as if she’d simply put him in a drawer and locked him away. He fumbled, fishing for any response but coming up with nothing.
    “How are you, Nayir?”
    “Good.” He had to clear his throat. “I’m good.”
    “You’ve lost weight.”
    He nodded. An expectant silence went by.
    “It’s nice to see you again,” she said hesitantly, with something like a question mark at the end.
    He felt like an idiot. “I’m sorry —” He twitched. Her name had nearly slipped out. It didn’t feel right to say it anymore. “I’m sorry. I came to ask you something.”
    She kept her eyes locked on his, but they showed curiosity. She still wouldn’t lift her burqa, and he had an irrational, frightening urge to reach over and lift it himself. He tucked his hands into his pockets.
    “It’s actually about a friend,” he said. “Who died.”
    All the kindness in her eyes vanished. He felt his chest tighten.
    “I see,” she said curtly.
    The anger in her eyes was unmistakable now. He wanted to say anything to make it right again, but he was attempting to speak a language he didn’t understand, and with it came all the humiliated fumbling of the undereducated. Never had he felt so utterly dumb.
    He blurted out the first thing that came to mind: “I’m only doing this for my uncle.”
    It was clear that it had been the wrong thing to say. She seemed to be trembling beneath her cloak, some low vibration of rage. She took a breath and clutched her purse more tightly, and that’s when he saw it. A ring. On her left hand.
    He looked away, but he couldn’t find anywhere to rest his gaze. The ring was everywhere—a small diamond, an ornate gold band. He saw it on the sidewalk, the buildings, the cars. The silence between them dragged on so painfully that he had no choice but to fill it.
    “You’re engaged now?” he asked, trying for casual and failing miserably. When she didn’t reply, he offered his congratulations.
    Her cell phone rang. She fumbled in her purse and answered it. “Excuse me,” she said and turned away.
    Nayir was lost in a desert memory. This often happened when something blew apart inside him. An overload of emotional currents sent him back to a world where his body was not the earth-ridden, lumbering form that crouched along the sidewalk beneath a blinding sun, but rather a kind of vessel for the expansiveness of the world. Typically, he felt this way only in the desert, where the vastness made him feel smaller than he actually was.
    Omran, his favorite desert guide as a child, had bragged once that he could make the desert sing. He took Nayir a few kilometers outside the camp, to where the dunes lay in a rippling, spotless infinity. They climbed the highest dune, which was so steep that Omran had to rope himself to Nayir to keep the boy from falling and setting off an avalanche.
    When they reached the top, they perched on a narrow swath of sand that formed the upper rim of a magnificent crescent dune. Its great amphitheater was the biggest he’d ever seen. It curved sharply down to a smooth little gully. No prints of any kind broke the wind-stroked surface.
    “No matter what happens,” Omran said, “you stay here. I’ll need you to run and get help if I don’t come back. All right?” Nayir nodded, and Omran bent closer. “You’re about to see magic, so be careful who you tell. You know the words of protection from the djinn?”
    “Yes.”
    “Good. This is our secret, okay?”
    “Okay.”
    Omran untied the rope that bound them together and in one startling movement, he leapt straight over the edge of the dune. Nayir saw him suspended for an impossible moment, then he dropped twenty feet.