Threshold

Threshold

I filled the oversized pockets of my coat with heavy stones before I swallowed 50 sleeping tablets, then threw the empty bottle into the lake. As I waited for the pills to take effect, I walked to my truck at the edge of the water, clutching the note to my mother in one hand. I had written the message on the back of a shopping list she’d given me. I hoped it would placate her. I stuck the note under the windshield wiper so it lay flat and smooth on the glass. A light breeze slightly tugged at the corners of the paper, but it stayed in place. I looked up at the sky and watched the clouds begin to gather around the pale moon. For a brief moment, I wondered if it would rain and ruin the note? Then my vision began to haze over and I couldn’t afford to consider that thought any further. I dragged myself to the dock and walked across the wooden planks. It was a landing stage for jet skis and small boats, but there were no people on the lake tonight. Only the moonlight glinted on the still surface. I entered the lake, and my ankles sank into the cool wetness. I followed the streak of moonlight, and soon I was waist deep in the water, walking across slick pebbles and sand. Something dragged me down. Was it the stones in my pocket or the pills taking effect? The water was up to my chest and my feet were trying to come off the ground, but I was anchored there. I pushed forward, resisted the way my body urged me to go back. Blood rushed fast in contradiction with the urge to sleep. Fast heartbeats sent the message to my mind: Go back!Go back! Go back! I kept moving and submerged beneath the moonlight, shivering. I remembered my mother once telling me that when you shivered, it meant the angel of death had passed by and chosen to spare your life. I let the water carry me down, down, down.

~~~

Flashes of the worst moments of my life. Standing in the doorway of the hospital room and seeing the third degree burns all over his body and face. The bottom of my feet singed with knives made hot by the stovetop. Remember: Hell is where bad girls go when they die. My mother crawling into my bed to hide from him. Her tears, his laughter. Her excuses, my pain. My tiny, ineffectual fists banging against his legs. Bloodstained bed sheets. Waking up in the hospital when the makeshift noose broke. His word against mine. My hands scratching at his eyes, his vicious, covetous eyes. My hands red. His car mangled, windows smashed, headlights broken, dripping with gasoline, flames rising high. They are a wall of fire. A threshold. This is where bad girls go when they die.

~~~

Was I wrong about the wind? Would the note be carried away? Or would it be found by strangers or the police before reaching my mother?

~~~

I was lulled to a deep sleep, and then I sucked the lake into my lungs. I had done it. I was as weightless as moonlight, as fluid as water, as light and unburdened as wind. So this was what it felt like to die. I awoke and found myself hovering over my lifeless body, lying in its watery grave. Staring at my face, I thought of my mother. Regret hit me like a wrecking ball. She would die when she knew. How could I have done something so cruel?

For a long time, I lingered next to my body. Black wisps of hair floated around my face like smoke. My brown skin looked like ice in the pale moonlight shining down from above. I thought about the saying that people looked at peace when they were dead. I only looked still and empty. Was I at peace? I couldn’t fathom that I had finally done it, or what world I had transitioned into. Was I a ghost? I looked down at myself and I looked the same, but I didn’t need to breathe. I reached out to touch my dead face. My hand went right through my cheek. I floated away from my body, unsure where I was going. Looking at my drowned corpse was going to drive me insane. Small fish passed by and through me. I was no longer with the living, but I still felt very much alive.

~~~

I drifted away from the moonlit depths and into the darkness. I was beginning to think I’d come to a place that was worse than my living world - a place where there was only endless loneliness and regret.

~~~

He was standing by himself in the midst of darkness . A stormy cloud of light surrounded him, illuminating him in the murky depths of my grave. Somehow, I knew who he was. He was beautiful and dark, with a youthful face and ancient, dusky eyes. He smiled sadly at me when I approached. Was Death supposed to smile when you met him? I stopped a few feet away.

“Does this mean I’ve succeeded?” I whispered.

He didn’t respond, and I knew the answer from his silence. I recalled all the times when I thought about ending my life with a deep and irreparable cut in my veins. The thought of all the red had made me sick. I wanted a bloodless death. I remembered the noose I had tied around my neck when I’d jumped off the balcony. The noose had not done what I’d wanted it to do. It had broken and saved me from this misery. Why had he chosen to spare me until now?

“I only wanted to stop the pain,” I said. Could I still make tears? "This really wasn't what I expected."

"It's rarely what you expect," he said. His voice was like a velvety embrace.

"Why are you here? Aren't there others you should be reaping?"

"I'm everywhere at once," he said simply. "For now, I am your friend."

Every part of my ghostly body yearned for something, and I had no idea what it was. I was glad I wasn't alone anymore.

"I'm Neeran," I said to my momentary friend.

"I know."

"What's your name?"

"I have many. You may call me Azrael."

“Azrael.” His name was familiar on my tongue. My mother never used that name when she spoke of him. Malak al-Mawt was how she referred to him. The Angel of Death watched me patiently, his hands clasped behind his back. I wondered what he was waiting for.

“Well, now what?” I asked.

“I’m going to take you somewhere,” he said, holding his hand out for me to take. “Don’t be alarmed when you touch me.”

Tentatively, I placed my palm in his. He clasped my hand tightly and suddenly, we were swept out of the darkness. I shut my eyes at the feeling of being yanked. When we were still, I opened my eyes and beheld the place he had brought me to.

~~~

My mother once told me that when I was being born, all she could feel was fire. She was all alone in the hospital, and my father was at war. The infection nearly killed us both, and she had been given a choice. My life or hers. She’d chosen to save me, and somehow she lived through it. She said that holding me for the first time had revived her. What would it be like if they ever found my body? Would she hold my watery corpse?

~~~

We were in the hospital room where I was born, and later, where my father had died from the burns. The overhang of a burning building collapsed on him when he was fighting the others. My touch had not been enough to revive him.

The smell of death invaded my nostrils like the men who’d invaded my city. Death was imminent when I had been born. Death was there when I watched my father scream and then, when he no longer could scream. Death was at my side as I stood in the doorway, only now he was not my enemy. He was my companion.

“Why am I here?” I hated this place.

“Because you need to be,” Azrael told me.

I looked steadily at the empty hospital bed. It was stained with patches of dried blood. Walking over to it, I traced my hand over the bedsheets. My ghostly touch did not slip through. Confused, I turned to Azrael.

“How is this possible?”

“You can interact with the living world if you want to. When the time is right, you can even let them see you, if you wish.”

I stared down at the bloody sheets, at the IV that hung nearby, at the dead monitor screen.

“This is when he died, isn’t it.” I said. I didn’t need Azrael to confirm when or where we were.

“Was it because of me that he went through all that?” I wondered.

“I can’t answer that for you.”

“I feel responsible.”

“You and I have always been good friends, you know. Even when I reaped the ones you loved.”

“I suppose I always knew - one day, you would reunite me with them.” My uncertainty made it sound like a question.

“That depends on you.”

I went past the bed and ghosted over to the caged window, looking through the dusted glass at the flat, hazy rooftops. In the distance, I could see a woman hanging laundry on a clothesline. At the same time, I heard the sporadic, perpetual pops of gunfire. Smoke lingered in the air.

“This home is my love. This home is also my war. Wherever I go, I’m at war.”

I could feel my father’s presence lingering somewhere nearby, only just out of reach. I laughed darkly to myself. What a joke to think that Death would bring me peace.

I turned to Azrael. “God is cruel, and you are a traitor.”

Azrael did not reply.

“Take me somewhere else.”

He held out his hand. I closed the distance between us in that stark white room and took it.

~~~

She was a Sunni, my father was a Shia, and I was the product of the anomalous liaison between them. Their families condemned them long before I was born. Their differences didn’t seem to matter when it came to war. We were left with nothing. After he was lowered into his grave, I remember her eyes touching on mine as though she had nothing left to offer but her love.

~~~

The General was my father’s friend and leader in combat. He visited our sparse house often, his covetous eyes roaming over my mother as they had many times before. He would check in week after week, giving her money. Once, he’d brought me a china doll with shiny blond ringlets and pale blue marble eyes. I’d gone up to our rooftop and let it fall to the ground as he was leaving our house. It shattered into a million little pieces on the hardened sand, missing him by only a few inches.

The sun struck his eyes as he glared up at me. I did not turn away.

~~~

He did not tell my mother about my attack, and so it came as no surprise when he asked her to marry him.

~~~

The sound of splashing water filled my ears. My father’s voice was an echo above the splashes. He told me to keep kicking.I remember. This was before the lake by our house dried up. I tried to follow his voice, but it was drowned out by loud claps of thunder in the distance. I tried to kick my way over to him. The water was too heavy.

~~~

I don't know when I forgot how to swim.

~~~

Death’s whirlwind carried us away and through time to the airport where we arrived in our new country. For a few moments I was alone, drifting behind my ten-year-old self, walking next to my mother. There was a space between our bodies. The General had his arm clasped possessively over her shoulder. She leaned into him, followed him like he was her compass.

I ghosted past them, past the memory, soaring fast above curving highways speckled with flashing red and yellow lights. I soared past the skyscrapers, the harbors full of yachts and dreams ever beyond our reach; past the evergreens and the slanted rooftops in all the neighborhoods we lived in; past all the years spent migrating between houses that did not belong to us. We were always moving, always waiting, but we never arrived.

~~~

Who was to know our migration would only lead us astray?

~~~

The rules were clear when we arrived: the man she married wanted nothing but her perfection and our isolation. She bent and bowed and broke under his strikes, his words. In the end, it was I who stood between them.

~~~

“There’s nothing worse than a woman with a fire tongue.”

My mother lay in the corner by the shattered coffee table where he’d smashed her head. Son of a bitch! I’ll cut your hands off! I’ll kill you! I’ll kill you! The crescents of my bite marks on his neck dripped with blood. He’d tossed my tiny body over his head, and my spine had met the hard edge of the kitchen counter. My mind was with my mother even through all the agony. Was she still alive? I could taste his blood in my mouth. I would kill him. I would kill him.

I watched him take a kitchen knife and light the stovetop, turning the heat up to the highest level, just for me. The knife glinted in the fluorescent light like the devil’s smile as he held it over the fire. I couldn’t move. I waited for him to do it.

“Let me show you what the fire feels like,” he said, then placed the white hot knife against the bottom of my feet.

I refused to scream, but the pain made my vision go black.

Hell is where bad girls go when they die.

~~~

I could not fathom the pleasure he gained from my pain. He stood above me after my feet were burned and my back had been struck. The fluorescent light surrounded his head like a halo as he gazed down at me with that awful glint in his eye. It was not the first time he’d looked at me that way. It did not surprise me. It only surprised me that he waited this long to act.

~~~

My screams and pleas only seemed to urge him on.

~~~

I dreamt I was swimming in the lake again with my father. His skin was almost all burned off. I could see the white bone of his skull and his arms. He smiled, wading through the water, wearing the Iraqi army uniform. The skeletons of his hands fluttered delicately in the water. Something like sunlight shone down on us through the waves. When I looked up, I realized the entire surface of the lake was on fire. How did the flames get all the way over here? But I didn’t mind. I wanted to stay there forever, even if it meant I would drown.

~~~

He had fought for something, hadn’t he? He died for something bigger than himself, but not for himself. He had burned for a purpose that was not his own.

~~~

The image of a waving American flag invaded my memory. I walked across the freshly mowed lawn, surrounded by a dreamy white fence. I walked with my childhood friend up to her house where they were preparing the Thanksgiving feast. Her father and grandfather sat on the porch. My friend made her introduction Her dad was a soldier like you, Grandpa, she said. Where is he now? Her grandfather asked. He died, I told him. I’m sorry to hear that. Thank you. Where did he serve? Baghdad. That’s where we’re from. He smiled kindly. Must be hard. I smiled timidly back. Yeah. Her father looked expectantly at me. You ought to thank him for serving. Her grandfather shifted uncomfortably in his seat. Thank you for serving. I said. When we went inside, her grandfather gently put his hand on my shoulder.

~~~

Would my father’s legacy live on, or would it eventually fade into the darkness, as I had?

~~~

I was at another hospital. This time, the bed was not empty. My twelve-year-old self was cocooned in the blankets, feet wrapped in gauze, an IV hooked to my arm. The bedsheets were stained with blood. My eyes were closed.

“Why couldn’t it be like the dream? Why couldn’t I be in the lake with him?” I whispered to Azrael as I looked down at myself. He appeared next to me in a silent flutter.

“Because it couldn’t.”

“What would happen if…?” I asked, my hand hovering over my sleeping face.

“Do it and see.”

My hand shook, and I hesitated. I couldn’t give myself what I really wanted. I drew my hand back and stepped away fearfully. Azrael watched me with expectant eyes. There was nothing else I could say to him. “Away,” I breathed.

~~~

We were in the new house my mother moved us to after she left him. My room was the smallest. It faced the street and had a small window with metal casing. The room was completely empty. I wandered over to the window and placed my hands on the glass, looking out at the street and feeling like an imprisoned bird. I leaned against the wall beneath the window and sank down to a fetal position on the carpet, and wept.

Azrael sat on the floor on the other side of the room and waited in silence.

~~~

When the noose broke, I landed on the soft spot of grass just beneath my balcony. The breeze was perfect and balmy and gave me chills while the ache in my neck raised pleasant goosebumps on my skin. I had heard soft wings fluttering somewhere, and I knew my friend was somewhere nearby, only just out of reach.

~~~

The restraining order kept him away for only a little time. I saw him circling our house in his old car like a vulture lurking over what was left of our lives. I went after him shortly after he found out where we lived. His car was parked in the driveway of a small, flat house in the suburbs. I smashed the headlights with a crowbar. My blood rushed at the sound of shattering glass. I watched the fragments flutter to the ground, sparkling under the light of the moon. I raised the crowbar over my head and struck the windshield, delighting in the webbed crack that appeared on the smooth glass. I lifted the crowbar again and busted the surface. The splintered pieces of glass cascaded over and into the car like a sparkling waterfall. I went to the windows next and smashed those too, then the back window. Each thrust was my retribution against every thrust that had invaded my body. I stabbed each wheel with a pocketknife my father had given me. The air escaped the tires as I imagined the sound of his dying breaths. My heart beat with exhilaration. I grabbed the container of gasoline and poured it all over the car, watching it drip down around the sides. The smell aroused me, spurred me on. I lit the match and flung it at the top of the car. Bright white and orange flames erupted, blooming before my eyes like a wall of fire. I waited and waited until the smoke and light baited him out of the house. He stood at the doorway in nothing but a bathrobe. The bottle of liquor dropped from his hand and shattered on the ground when he saw the fire. His frightful, bloodshot eyes met mine. I walked away from him, leaving the destruction blazing in my wake.

~~~

The war inside me raged on and on.

~~~

“The General sent my father on the mission to die, didn’t he?”

He was quiet for a few moments. I waited for him to say something, but the silence stretched on. He didn’t need to say anything. I had always known.

“Are you human?” I asked him when I managed to stop convulsing.

“I am the Angel of Death.”

“That’s not what I meant.”

The pain in my chest was still there, unbearable, unshakeable even in death. I looked up at the caged window and cursed the moonlight that poured over me, not granting me the darkness I wished for.

~~~

“I know what I need to do.”

Azrael reached out and I took his hand.

We were in his house, broken liquor bottles strewn all over the carpet. The pungent smell was almost too much to bear. He lay on the couch, passed out, his arm dangling down and his fingers brushing the floor. How would I do it? I suspected there would be more alcohol in the fridge. I could pour the liquor over him and light a match. No. Fire was too pure. I walked around the house, searching. It was a complete mess. A fetid stench filled my nostrils when I entered his bedroom. On the floor, I found a long leather belt thrown in among dirty clothes. I picked it up and went back to the living room.

Crouching next to the couch where his head rested, I tied the the belt into a noose and slipped it over his head.

~~~

Azrael and I watched the scene take place. These were my last hours before I’d walked into the lake. The sound of his choking and struggling jarred me.

When he stopped struggling, and his body went still, I watched myself sink to the floor. My face was twisted into a mask of agony. My mouth opened, but no sound escaped from them.

“Are you happy now?” Azrael whispered.

~~~

I couldn’t stomach it for much longer. I knew what would happen next. Brushing Azrael’s shoulder, I found myself hover briefly over the lake, watching myself go into the water. Ripples marred the surface where I’d submerged.

The note on the windshield was tugged into the air by the wind. I caught it in my hand, looked at my feeble message that deep down, I never wanted my mother to see. That was why I left the note here, where it would be stolen by the wind.

I’m sorry about what I did. But now you don’t have to be afraid anymore. I’ll tell Baba you miss him.

Love, Neeran.

~~~

Azrael whisked me away to our house, where I left the note on the kitchen counter. A few hours later, the police were there, speaking in low tones to my mother. They were telling her that they had located my truck and found the empty prescription bottle by the lake. She sat on the concrete steps leading up to the house, her black wool hijab uncharacteristically messy around her head. Her eyes were red. She did not speak or look at any of them. I realized with earth-shattering regret that my militant love had not done either of us any good.

I’m so sorry I’m so sorry I’m so sorry I’m so sorry.

~~~

“This wasn’t what I needed to do, was it?” I whispered to Azrael. He shook his head.

“What’s next, then?” He held out his hand for me, and I wondered at how many more places and memories and tragedies I needed to witness before I could finally rest. When I took his palm, we appeared in the hospital room with my twelve-year-old self again. She was still asleep. In sleep, she was stripped of her militant facade, completely and agonizingly vulnerable.

I did not hesitate this time. Walking over to the bed, I lay next to her and embraced her tiny, fragile frame close to mine, and cried.

~~~

I was in the darkness again. Azrael hovered a small distance behind me, emitting a soft glow.

“What am I doing here?” I said.

“You’re almost at the end,” Azrael said. “I’ve been thinking about what you asked me before. To answer your question, no, I am not human. I am simply a part of your human experience. That is what brought me to you. It has been difficult with you; war lives inside you. But you have done well, considering.”

A trail of flames burst forth from the darkness in front of me, blinding me. I turned to Azrael, frightened. His dusky eyes held neither sympathy for my comfort or reassurance.

“This is where you go now,” he said simply.

Despite my terror, I was drawn to the flames. I slowly reached out to touch them. It was like a cold, refreshing waterfall gliding over my skin.

“It...doesn’t hurt,” I said, turning back to Azrael. He was gone.

Alone now, I considered what lay beyond the fiery threshold for me. I didn’t know if it was Hell, or the endless mercy of God, but just behind the flames, I spotted a familiar, shadowy figure. The sound of splashing water filled my ears, and my father’s voice rang out, telling me to swim.

I walked forward and let the flames embrace me.