238693456934

Saeed was more melancholic than he had been before, understandably, and also more quiet and
devout. She sometimes felt that his praying was not neutral towards her, in fact she suspected it
carried a hint of reproach, though why she felt this she could not say, for he had never told her to pray
nor berated her for not praying. But in his devotions was ever more devotion, and towards her it
seemed there was ever less.
She had considered rolling a joint outdoors and smoking the weed by herself, without Saeed,
concealed from Saeed, and it had surprised her to be considering this, and made her wonder about the
ways in which she was herself putting barriers between her and him. She did not know if these gaps
that had been widening were mostly her doing or his, but she knew she still harbored tenderness for
him, and so she had brought the weed home, and it was only when she sat beside him on the car seat
they had bartered for and used now as a sofa, that she realized, from her nervousness, that how in this
moment he responded to the weed was a matter of portentous significance to her.
Her leg and arm touched Saeed’s leg and arm, and he was warm through his clothing, and he sat in
a way that suggested exhaustion. But he also managed a tired smile, which was encouraging, and
when she opened her fist to reveal what was inside, as she had once before done on her rooftop a
brief lifetime ago, and he saw the weed, he started to laugh, almost soundlessly, a gentle rumble, and
he said, his voice uncoiling like a slow, languid exhalation of marijuana-scented smoke, “Fantastic.”
Saeed rolled the joint for them both, Nadia barely containing her jubilation, and wanting to hug
him but restraining herself. He lit it and they consumed it, lungs burning, and the first thing that struck
her was that this weed was much stronger than the hash back home, and she was quite floored by its
effects, and also well on her way to becoming a little paranoid, and finding it difficult to speak.
For a while they sat in silence, the temperature dropping outside. Saeed fetched a blanket and they
bundled it around themselves. And then, not looking at each other, they started to laugh, and Nadia
laughed until she cried.
• • •
IN MARIN THERE WERE almost no natives, these people having died out or been exterminated long ago,
and one would see them only occasionally, at impromptu trading posts—or perhaps more often, but
wrapped in clothes and guises and behaviors indistinguishable from anyone else. At the trading posts
they would sell beautiful silver jewelry and soft leather garments and colorful textiles, and the elders
among them seemed not infrequently to be possessed of a limitless patience that was matched by a
limitless sorrow. Tales were told at these places that people from all over now gathered to hear, for
the tales of these natives felt appropriate to this time of migration, and gave listeners much-needed
sustenance.
And yet it was not quite true to say there were almost no natives, nativeness being a relative
matter, and many others considered themselves native to this country, by which they meant that they or
their parents or their grandparents or the grandparents of their grandparents had been born on the strip
of land that stretched from the mid-northern-Pacific to the mid-northern-Atlantic, that their existence
here did not owe anything to a physical migration that had occurred in their lifetimes. It seemed to
Saeed that the people who advocated this position most strongly, who claimed the rights of nativeness
most forcefully, tended to be drawn from the ranks of those with light skin who looked most like the
natives of Britain—and as had been the case with many of the natives of Britain, many of these people
too seemed stunned by what was happening to their homeland, what had already happened in so brief
a period, and some seemed angry as well.