had to remind myself, for a second, that the scenes hadn’t taken place—or, as I saw it, that they had not yet taken place.
And what of Skandar, of whom I had also dreamed? Well, in that spell of late winter, he didn’t yet feature in my fantasy life. He would have to wait, quite literally, until spring.
Let me explain that, in spite of myself, for several months—and in some less pressing way, for several years—this state of fantasy was, in the wake of “the Fabric Weekend,” which might more aptly have been called “the Fabrication Weekend,” the country to which I largely decamped and in which I preferred to stay.
I knew it was potential rather than actual, but I didn’t understand then that it wasn’t Real. I didn’t see that I’d made it up. When Sirena took my hand between both of hers and said, “What would I do without you? You are my angel, my heart’s best love,” I believed her. When Reza said, “I never want you to go away,” I believed him. I built houses, and entire lives, upon those beliefs. If you’d told me my own story about someone else, I would have assured you that this person was completely unhinged. Or a child. That’s always the way.
6
I was happy. I was Happy, indeed. I was in love with love and every lucky parking spot or particularly tasty melon or unexpectedly abbreviated staff meeting seemed to me not chance but an inevitable manifestation of the beauty of my life, a beauty that I had, on account of my lack of self-knowledge, been up till now unable to see.
I was crazy. I was crazy in the way a child is crazy, in the way of someone who believes, with rash fervor, that life can be—that it will yet be, and most certainly—as you would wish it. How could I have been so foolish? My mother, of all people, had taught me by example, by the whimsical panicked procrastination of my childhood and then, more brutally, by the prolonged, involuntary shutting-up-shop of her body, that this was a preposterous dream, that fate was a jailer. But I chose, in that time, not to heed her lessons. We wouldn’t be proper children if we didn’t disregard our parents’ most vital instruction.
My mother, toward the end, had said to me, but with a sweet smile, “Life’s funny. You have to find a way to keep going, to keep laughing, even after you realize that none of your dreams will come true. When you realize that, there’s still so much of a life to get through.” And I’d been offended, because I wanted to believe, as her child, that I’d been a dream come true; but above all, I’d pitied her. I’d still somehow believed I’d be different from her. I hadn’t yet had my Lucy Jordan moment, a moment from which the Shahids had granted me a long but finite reprieve.
Happy, crazy—the name for it doesn’t matter. It was like the world was filled with light. This is the trouble with clichés: they describe something truly, and that’s why we use them over and over again, until their substance is eroded to dust. But these things are true: I woke up earlier, more refreshed. I had more energy; my mind moved more clearly, more quickly. I caught no colds, I had no aches, I was luckier, I got on better with people, I laughed more, I worked more, I slept better. I was awake in my life in a way completely new to me, and I knew that anything—ah! my art!—anything!—was possible.
It’s also true that I developed a constant, unignorable itch, the side effect of the love drug. The itch subsided only when I was with one Shahid or another, or when I was working. As soon as the last school bell rang, my itch was there, waiting. I might be walking around the reservoir with Maggie, who taught sixth grade, or driving my father to see the orthopedic surgeon about the pain in his hip, and I’d be apparently listening to and even participating lucidly in the conversation (“Yeah, it’d be great if Ling’s father could do a Mandarin after-school unit next fall—I think a lot of kids, and parents, would be really into that.” Or, “Well, I think Dr. Fuchs’s take on the replacement is that the pain is totally worth it, and you’re up to the rehab. He wouldn’t have suggested it if he didn’t think you