Scheherazade

creative nonfiction by Seven Liu

I am writing this from Hong Kong. From my window, I can see skyscrapers full of people, entire lives cased behind glass. Tiny windows, where meaning can just barely pull itself through.

In translating memory into language, and in translating language into another language, something escapes. A lacuna, from the Latin meaning “hole,” is the absence created by the translation of a word from one language to another. A gap widens. Things leak out. It is in this spillage, in what cannot be communicated, in the very inaccessibility that translation rebels against, that meaning emerges.

Everything here feels lost in translation.

Language, like memory, like photographs and news footage, is a kind of tomb. The preservation of an event is also its destruction. In order to memorialize, one must betray. Language is a knife in the back of memory. In telling a story, I cheapen it.

I’ve wanted to be a writer for so long, but the scope of my experiences felt so limited in comparison to others. My life seemed shortsighted. I wanted more. I wanted to have something to write about. I’ve lived my life in accordance with this desire, for better and for worse. I’ve loved and I’ve hated in equal, astonishing measures. Many people have told me their stories. Many people have asked to be a part of mine.

Here’s a story I promised to tell:

Before I left Paris, I spent a few nights, which turned into a few days, with a man I will call A. He was awful. Repulsive, even. Surly and ill-tempered, with cold, pale eyes that seemed like those of a fish. He was a Muscovite and five years my senior, though he spoke with the insolence of a haughty child. When I met him, he was behind the camera, barking orders at me in his terrible accent. I hated him. How he looked at me then, never directly, it was as if he were looking past me. I looked back. I watched him the whole day, studied him, took stock–the cigarette tucked behind his ear, his greased-back hair, the hugeness of his voice that contradicted his small, tense body. He was handsome, in a mean way. He seemed perpetually disappointed. He would not say where he was from; I had to guess. He looked at me as I did, from half-lidded eyes–his gaze hard and expectant. I got the feeling that he was challenging me, daring me to be correct.

“Russia,” I said.

He smiled, for the first time that whole day.

“I owe you a drink. No one ever guesses right.”

I was sure that was a lie.

“Alright.”

“What kind of drink do you take? Probably that girly shit. Vodka cran. Or that Italian thing. The orange one, whatever they call it. Am I right?”

“No, just buy me a beer when we get out of here.”

That night, A met me at a bar near Bastille. His choice. The terrace was a nearly impenetrable blockade of esthète 20-to-30-somethings and leggy fashion models. A pair of old men kissed each other in the doorway. One was wearing a sailor’s uniform, his belly ballooning over his pants.

A was waiting outside, in the same ratty jeans and t-shirt. Beside him was a boy from the set. Thin and sunburned, his red hair was shorn close to the scalp. He wore an Adidas jacket. He was all bones, likely a former model. His eyes shone huge and purple, twin bruises. He didn’t smile. I realized I’d forgotten his name.

A lit a cigarette, then offered me one.

“You cleaned up real nice, beautiful dress, fancy. You knew this was a shithole, why’d you dress up? Not for me, right?”

“Never,” I said.

He started to laugh. I did too, not because anything was funny, but partially because I was a bit embarrassed of the whole thing, of the cliche. I was a model, meeting some douchebag photographer, at a bar full of douchebag photographers and models.

“Let’s get the star a drink.”

He ordered me a beer in English, disregarding my attempt to order myself. “Don’t pretend to speak French,” he told me, “I hate it. You know I hate Americans. That’s something you should know about me.”

We sat inside. They spoke to one another, only in their language, guttural, all throat. It frightened me. No one in the bar cared that they were shouting. It was packed full of foreigners. A hundred different languages swelled and bellowed around me. A tower of Babel. I could feel his eyes on my skin, even as I looked away, as I watched the scores of overdressed, underfed socialites pour in–all stylishly jetlagged, quick to declare how they’d just got off a plane to anyone who would listen. I drank fast. I wondered if I should leave.

“You know,” he began, leaning towards me, nearly spilling his fourth beer. “I love the dress, it’s,” he smirked, “so fucking major.”

He ordered us vodka shots, beer, and more vodka, which he drank without flinching. The boy, whose name was Dimitri, began to turn red. He told me he’d just gotten out of a six-year relationship. They had been teenagers together. I let him put his head on my shoulder. When A returned from smoking, he shouted at him in Russian, a couple of syllables, which seemed angry and without tenderness, but a smile crawled across Dimitri’s face.

“Come, let’s smoke, let’s leave poor Dima to his sorrows,” he said, tapping my shoulder.

Outside, he unwrapped a new pack. “While you two were fucking, how do you say, kumba-something, I was getting this, only night-shop open now, cost a fucking fortune.”

He lit my cigarette, then his own, before sighing.

“I hated today,” he said.

“You hate everything.”

“There’s a lot to hate. I hated that fucking—blyat! What was his name? The other model. That Danish idiot.”

“Klaus,” I offered.

His eyes shone.

“Klaaaaaus,” he repeated, his voice twisted and shrill.

“I didn’t mind him.”

“Of course you didn’t. You like the pretty boys, eh? I bet he liked you, too.”

“I didn’t say I liked him, I said I didn’t mind him.”

“So what’s wrong with you?”

“Huh?”

He took a drag, the smoke drifting lazily up from his mouth.

“I mean, you models, if you’re not dumb, you’ve got something wrong with you. So what is it?”

He was looking at me, not past me, this time, without the hardness I’d grown accustomed to over the course of the evening. Or maybe I’d just imagined it. The street seemed to howl around us, delirious with sirens, traffic horns, and the tail-ends of half-shouted conversations. I’d drunk a lot that night, and the heat made me drunker than usual. Suddenly, I felt compelled to tell him everything. This perfect stranger, repulsive in every way. So I did.

“Tell me where to start.”

“Anywhere, just try not to bore me.”

Later that night, I slapped him. I told him I wished he were dead.

“You’d be better off!” I cried out, wrapping my hands around his neck.

He just laughed and laughed, which only angered me more.

We spent the day in bed. His apartment was enormous, more like a gallery than a home; the hallways were stacked with shoeboxes, and no wall was unadorned. Beside the bed, there was a painting of a woman, bound and gagged.

“It’s not mine,” he explained, noticing my concern, “nothing here is mine. The woman who owns the place is like a mother to me. Very good woman.”

We lay next to one another, slick with each other’s sweat. We were too exhausted to make love. Light assaulted our eyes. My head ached, as if it were being cleaved apart.

By now, the day had grown much too hot for us to comfortably touch, yet he insisted on it. He liked to put his head on my chest, to look up at me, with those cold eyes. He liked to listen. He asked me a lot of questions but told me very little about himself.

“I think about myself all the time; I want to think about someone else.”

I told him about my parents, my childhood, my tumultuous adolescence—the drugs, what I saw behind my eyes as I lay seizing on the patio of a suburban house, eighteen and in over my head, the lovers—the first boys, jaws just darkening, all nerves and terrible kissing, then the French, long-haired and distant. I told him all of it, everything terrible and gorgeous, this mess of sinew, pigments, and blood, I called a life.

“Promise me one thing,” he began, “promise you’ll write about me. I want to be a story. That would be the greatest gift you could give me.”

I laughed, “You don’t want to be a story, trust me.”

“Why not?”

“If you want to be a story, you have to tell me about yourself.”

“What do you want to know?”

“How did you end up here?”

“I never ended up anywhere. ‘Ending up’ is for Americans. Russians don’t end up anywhere but Russia. I came here, to ‘the Paris,’ I came to it alone. It was a lot of effort for me. Visa, plane ticket, then bus ticket. No money, a couple of euros, maybe. I used what I had on the tickets. I slept on the street on, first night. A park bench and a pack of cigarettes. That was my first hotel.”

“How are your parents?“

He laughed and began to kiss my neck as he said, “fucking dead.”

“Oh, I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be! If the car did not kill them, I would’ve finished them off myself!”

I took his face in my hands, studying it, the jaw, how it tightened, the shadows beneath his eyes. He looked at me, just like a child. I watched him forget me as he was looking at me.

“It’s sad, for me, you leave so soon,” he said, “maybe for the best, before we could fuck it all up.”

“I like you,” he continued, “I like you a lot. You are funny. I like your stories. The way you use your words it’s not like anything I’ve ever heard before. I wish for more stories; you could just tell me stories forever, and I would be happy. I could just be here and listen. We wouldn’t have to leave here. I could keep you.”

“If you kept me, I would run out of stories.”

He smoked on the terrace, lighting his cigarette with the butt of the one before, looking down at the street, the trickling of passersby, the exodus of a late Sunday afternoon. He wore only boxers and dark sunglasses, light pouring over him. He flinched when I came to him, kissing the hot lobe of his ear.

We watched a mother and her children emerge from the huge, beautiful apartment building across the street. The children, a boy and a girl, stomped down the street, shrieking in French, laughing, while the mother watched on. They seemed to shine with happiness. A man–likely the father–followed close behind. He sat on a city bench, and the mother sat beside him. They talked and smoked, yet never took their eyes off the children. I tried to picture myself in the place of the mother, to assume her joyful yet concentrated expression. The girl fell and began to cry, so the mother, without hesitation, ran to her, took her in her arms, soothed her, and inspected the ruddy hillocks of her knees. The girl buried her face into her mother’s neck. I realized I was staring. I glanced away, ashamed, as if I had been caught peering through their window.

“I hate the sun,” A said finally, then took a drag.

“Then come back to bed.”

We had already begun the process of forgetting. I wanted to scream, to tell him all the awful things I had done in my life, to berate him, as I did that first night, to make him turn and run. To make him remember me. To be as repulsed by me as I was by him. But I said nothing. I kissed him again. I threw my arms around his neck.

“Tell me another one,” he said.

And so I did.

✶

Seven Liu (she/her) is an American writer currently living in Hong Kong.