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Nadia knew people stayed at the cooperative, but she did not know how the policy worked, and no
one had told her. For although she was a woman, and the cooperative was run and staffed
predominantly by women, her black robe was thought by many to be off-putting, or self-segregating,
or in any case vaguely menacing, and so few of her colleagues had really reached out to her until the
day that a pale-skinned tattooed man had come in while she was working the till and had placed a
pistol on the counter and said to her, “So what the fuck do you think of that?”
Nadia did not know what to say and so she said nothing, not challenging his gaze but not looking
away either. Her eyes focused on a spot around his chin, and they stood like this, in silence, for a
moment, and the man repeated himself, a bit less steadily the second time, and then, without robbing
the cooperative, or shooting Nadia, he left, taking his gun and cursing and kicking over a bushel of
lumpy apples as he went.
Whether it was because they were impressed by her mettle in the face of danger or because they
recalibrated their sense of who was threat and who was threatened or because they now simply had
something to talk about, several people on her shifts began chatting with her a lot more after that. She
felt she was beginning to belong, and when one told her about the option of living at the cooperative,
and that she could avail herself of it if her family was oppressing her, or, another added quickly, even
if she just felt like a change, the possibility struck Nadia with a shock of recognition, as though a door
was opening up, a door in this case shaped like a room.
It was into this room that Nadia moved when she separated from Saeed. The room smelled of
potatoes and thyme and mint and the cot smelled a little of people, even though it was reasonably
clean, and there was no record player, and no scope to decorate either, the room continuing to be used
as a storeroom. But Nadia was nonetheless reminded of her apartment in the city of her birth, which
she had loved, reminded of what it was like to live there alone, and while the first night she slept not
at all, and the second only fitfully, as the days passed she slept better and better, and this room came
to feel to her like home.
The locality around Marin seemed to be rousing itself from a profound and collective low in those
days. It has been said that depression is a failure to imagine a plausible desirable future for oneself,
and, not just in Marin, but in the whole region, in the Bay Area, and in many other places too, places
both near and far, the apocalypse appeared to have arrived and yet it was not apocalyptic, which is to
say that while the changes were jarring they were not the end, and life went on, and people found
things to do and ways to be and people to be with, and plausible desirable futures began to emerge,
unimaginable previously, but not unimaginable now, and the result was something not unlike relief.
Indeed there was a great creative flowering in the region, especially in music. Some were calling
this a new jazz age, and one could walk around Marin and see all kinds of ensembles, humans with
humans, humans with electronics, dark skin with light skin with gleaming metal with matte plastic,
computerized music and unamplified music and even people who wore masks or hid themselves from
view. Different types of music gathered different tribes of people, tribes that had not existed before,
as is always the case, and at one such gathering, Nadia saw the head cook from the cooperative, a
handsome woman with strong arms, and this woman saw Nadia seeing her and nodded in recognition.
Later they wound up standing beside one another and talking, not much, and just in between the songs,
but when the set ended they did not leave, they continued to listen and talk during the set that
followed.
The cook had eyes that seemed an almost inhuman blue, or rather a blue that Nadia had not
previously thought of as human, so pale as to suggest, if you looked at them when the cook was
looking away, that these eyes might be blind. But when they looked at you there was no doubt that they