Expectation

There’s no curtain in my bathroom and so I see out into the night sky and below to the glittering patterns of street lights. For many long years from perched on top of this mountaintop, I’ve watched with ever more suspect gaze, as if one day those habitats might sneak away.

Two lamps hang down in front of the bathroom mirror and render half of it invisible and the other half too bright, because my wife recently changed the bulbs and they make too much light. Water keeps pouring out of the faucet, doing a wonderful impression of a waterfall while also washing away the last bits and pieces of blood and today’s meals. With my right hand I rub vigorously at the specks and flecks of vomit, cleaning it so my wife doesn’t have to. The marble floor underneath my feet shakes.

Last month I bought my son a flat screen TV and a surround sound system so that he can watch the dozens of contrived action films I’ve also bought him. Right now it must be a battle scene, because though his room is a floor below, I feel like I’m sitting there with him. But nobody is with him. My only daughter is at one of the best schools in the northeast, paying no part of the way. In fact, she also has an apartment, an expensive car and plans to study Persian in Iran (my wife told her to study Urdu in Pakistan, but she refused). My dear wife of thirty-five years is in the kitchen downstairs. We have two, in fact, both of which are fit for a dozen but cater to far fewer.

In my garage, there is one German sedan and two German sports utility vehicles, all black outside and black inside, an effect wonderfully heightened by the tinted windows and sports package. They scream muscular virility, an aggressiveness that has marked all of my career, as I have gone from one conquest to another, feeling none of it as much of a burden upon me. Whenever any of our many family friends arrive for our frequent parties, I make sure to open the side door instead of the foyer entrance, taking care to give the guests a glance at the luxuries of my life, so that they might know before even seeing me the fantastic things I have accomplished.

I want to die.

Since graduation from college, I’ve been doing well in everything I’ve taken part in, but all of these achievements ring hollow. At times, I wonder if I possess things only to satisfy others – parents, wife, children, society, standards – and not myself. In fact, for most of my life, I’ve never shared my private dreams with anyone, because they are too much. Indeed. Could I tell those I love that maybe I cannot love them? That in fact, I never have? All of this has been a show and now I wish the curtains up. And away.

Several years ago, my body began to give in. Every month I’d wake up with blinding pains, and none of the doctors I knew (all of whom saw me and diagnosed me for free) could do a thing, despite all their claims to so much knowledge and so much science. Soon enough, monthly troubles turned to weekly, and then eventually weekly to daily, till I was bent over at the sink each evening and emptying the contents of my intestines into the sink, leaving me spent of all energies and burned out, washed out and worn out. My throat had been so scarred by the flows of internal acid that soon enough it barely works except by mid-day each day, by which time it’s had some time to recover. To suffer again.

But my wife has been the best of partners. Every day and every night she leaves full pitchers of water at my bedroom table, to help soothe my almost unbearable pains, and even antacids as well. After I vomit, she wipes the sink and prepares the bed, where I rest till the morning, only to sit home and wait for the torment to begin anew. That is, I have enough money in my savings account to give us all the lives of kings and queens without me having to go any farther than my master bath. Eventually one gets tired of seeing one’s successes. One wishes to fail and wishes to find happiness in this.

So I wish to go somewhere else and I do not intend to tell anyone, especially not my wife, that I am leaving for good. She will find out once my soul is gone and only my body remains behind. She will weep and she will cry and she will beat her head into the wall, wondering why she hadn’t seen the signs and why she hadn’t done anything to stop me. That is because she loves me.

My wife has been everything a spouse could be and a thousand times over. But I have been unable to return such devotion, because my life has only been in search of conquest and never comfort. But seeing her untiring attention to my sickness only wracks me with the worst kind of guilt. I cannot return the depth of attachment that she feels, for I am an ugly traveler really, who attempted to accumulate worldly positions in hopes of weighing himself down and keeping himself on Earth, but it was not to be. A failure can pretend to be a success, but only pretend.

Now how much of life can one take? First we want and hope only this to attain, but on its satisfaction, a thousand more desires rear their heads and speak onto us, driving us mad with their ever-increasing cacophony, till finally one can hear nothing but endless babble. Incomprehensible, but what thoughts it spurs, that we wish only to silence them, to rid ourselves of that first desire which betrayed us and led us to such an impasse. That is, the desire to live. Were it not for this empty dream, which I have seen after more than five decades to be in fact a nightmare.

I don’t feel so bad about leaving my children behind. They are in the bloom of youth, enthralled by the potentials of life, and my worsening condition only hurries the inevitable realization. Better my son goes on watching action films, believing heroes never die. At least until later. Better my daughter studies Persian, thinking this will give her life immortal. At least until she’s older.

Next to my bed is a black pistol, prepped for one shot, which I will fire into my head. My son will confuse it for the gunshots in the film he’s watching and will not lift himself off the couch even if he suspects the sound to come from somewhere else. I will do it lying down on the mattress, a pillow underneath my head, my eyes focused on the patterns on the ceiling above me. It will be the last thing I see and I think it is a good thing for me to see. There will be no thoughts in my head, because all I have had for these many years are the many thoughts in my head.

So, now, the time has come.

But just as I get into the bed and position the barrel only a bit above my ear, my wife walks through the door with some towels in her hand, ostensibly to clean the bathroom with. She screams, “What are you doing!”

I only mumble, “I’ve already cleaned the bathroom…”

She runs in and then a second later walks out, happy for this favor I’ve done her. Then her face begins to sag, her eyes heaving towards her nose and her nostrils towards the edge of her lips, and her ears in fact to her shoulders. A step forward and she is close enough to touch me, and indeed her right hand extends, but with a towel in it. She tucks the soft white cloth, scented like a summer breeze though it’s the dead of winter, against the headrest, and then the other to the cabinet set to receive the remnants of the expected bullet. Then my dear wife pulls back, admiring her work with a smile and I am at a loss for what to say.

“Don’t make a mess, meri jaan.” She returns to the bathroom, shutting off the lights and making her way out of the bedroom, but not before finishing her thought. “I just cleaned the sheets yesterday and I don’t want to wash them again.”