Escape
1
From a distance, it was not much. Just a small hump, barely protruding from the brown sand. He came running down from its peak towards me, sitting by the drinks stand, eyes shining with an impossible light. I did not know what he had seen, but I knew that it had been a long time since he was this excited.
I asked the stand owner (or perhaps he was just an employee?) for a Pepsi. But on the principle of not killing him quite so soon, I reconsidered and asked the owner to swap it for a Gatorade. The owner tossed over the pale blue bottle, turned back, and resumed checking this afternoon’s horse racing results. I half-collapsed in my chair, watching the landing sun push his shadow slowly towards me.
By the time he reached the stand, half the sun had sunk into the heavy sand sea. Gasping, he took the Gatorade, shook his head, went to the owner and exchanged it for a Pepsi, did not wait for the change, then stood beside me breathing hard. I did not want to look at him. I thought that after drinking this Pepsi he might drop dead within seconds. I did not want to watch someone drop dead.
I had thought for a long time about why he liked Pepsi so much. He liked neither sparkling water nor sugary water on its own (the latter is a guess; I once saw him throw away a half-finished Pepsi, saying it was no good flat). Since he disliked the two components separately, I could never work out why he liked them combined. But he did, Pepsi in particular. He claimed Pepsi tasted far superior to Coca-Cola. I never confirmed this. I have always felt that there are only two kinds of people in the world: those who can distinguish Pepsi from Coca-Cola by taste, and everyone else. I believed that I could. But he seemed to have advanced further than most, developing a firm ideological commitment to Pepsi, even propagating at one point the nonsense (?) that drinking Coca-Cola causes cancer.
I vaguely recalled another peculiar claim about Coca-Cola (though I suspected 90% fabrication). Apparently, in 1960s America, car sex was popular (I wondered whether this was related to the baby boom), and women would afterwards insert a Coke bottle for contraception.
I lowered my head, continued reading my Kindle, and let slip: ‘Coke kills sperm.’
‘The American car-sex story is false,’ he said.
I said I knew. Though I did not. I mean, I did not truly know. This was not a justified true belief. I was merely guessing.
‘Even if it were true, so what? I don’t need sperm. Let it kill away.’
I disliked the faintly suggestive tone with which he said this, and the air of expertise he affected (the air of an air of expertise; something about this clause feels odd when read back). I said oh come on, stop, hahaha, but felt slightly aggrieved. I always sensed he wanted everyone to think he was the dominant one (for instance, he had just said that extremely loudly; the stand owner had definitely heard).
‘Relax, they don’t understand Chinese.’
‘OK.’
The sun sank into the brown sand sea. The rim of the dune shone with an impossible light. I suddenly recalled the similar light in his eyes when he came running down. I had expected him to tell me about it unprompted, but no. He was drinking his Pepsi.
The episode more or less ended there. We had been sitting together on the dune; I said earlier that from a distance it was not much, but anyone who has actually climbed a dune knows that however flat a rise appears, it is just as steep when you climb it. Anyway, we sat together on the dune, quietly waiting for the blinding sun to shoot its light at us from far away.
There were no clouds. The wind came headlong, curling the sand beneath us into shapes like chloroplasts. Even now, at seven in what he called the ‘ling-wan’ (a word he had fabricated: if there is a ‘ling-chen’ for the small hours of morning, he reasoned, there must be a ‘ling-wan’ for the small hours of evening), the wind still roared through our silence. I listened to the sound of bubbles dying in the Pepsi and thought about where to eat.
The truth is: neither of us had much patience for this sort of thinking. I am not a person of strong opinions; he does not care about food (this is what I dislike most about him). In the end we ate kebabs at a small food truck on the edge of the desert. I ordered three skewers of chicken. He said he was not hungry, so he ordered only three of lamb. I began scrolling through Facebook. He sat beside me, half-awake, yawning, occasionally flicking through his Kindle.
His Kindle was new: the six-inch Kindle Voyage, about a thousand dirhams. I had previously suggested we share one, since I mostly still preferred paper. He said no. His logic was that he frequently lost things, and if he lost mine I would probably threaten to break up with him again. I said I would not get angry so easily; mine was the lowest tier, the unnamed one, bought in China for five hundred yuan, no backlight; the moment the sun pulled its daytime curtain shut I was reduced to reading by clip-on lamp. But in truth, although I offered to share, I was privately terrified he would spill Pepsi on my screen.
The kebabs arrived quickly. The waiter, perhaps noticing our listlessness, asked if we would like coffee. He waved the offer away. I ordered a latte. After the machine started, I glanced around. A small roadside kebab shop, seating six at most, and his Peppa Pig rucksack was occupying one chair. The truck faced away from the road, which at this hour still carried some traffic. We sat facing the road: the school road on the left, wilderness (only because I had never been there) on the right. Two tungsten bulbs cast a struggling light; the owner’s skin, weathered by a day’s work, reflected their amber glow out towards the deep desert.
‘What did you see up on the dune?’ I asked.
Neither of us is given to large gestures. He barely looked up, still staring at his new Kindle. He said nothing much; just that the sunset plunging was astonishing. An off-road vehicle had climbed a distant dune and then tumbled back down the other side.
I thought he was clearly violating Grice’s Maxim of Quality. Things could not be that dramatic. He was exaggerating.
‘It was fun,’ he said. ‘I thought for a moment it was Faizah’s car.’
Driving off-road into the desert was a favourite pastime of the local rich. Faizah was a very wealthy girl in his department. Not in the sense that her family was wealthy, but that she herself was truly wealthy, because her mother had died. I had always felt mildly averse to Faizah, because…
‘Her dad is related to the headmaster, did I tell you? The old man doesn’t give a damn about anything, just appoints his own people, stuck her dad in some facilities job.’ He took a sip of my latte. ‘I find it revolting. Her dad knows nothing. She’s better than him.’
I thought this was probably kin selection, but that was not the point. He had recently had a confrontation with the headmaster. Ostensibly it was about academic matters, but most classmates believed that it was about our relationship. The headmaster was, in other respects, a decent enough person; even at his angriest he would not swear. But at least on that occasion, his voice could be heard from the biology lab on the roof of the building next door.
Though the economy had developed rapidly, the UAE’s laws on homosexuality remained unlike those of countries to the north. The headmaster spoke of wielding the ‘weapon of the law’ against him (‘us’), but whether he meant it, we did not know at the time.
A cold ‘hah, men’ flashed through my mind. I did not know why. I remembered my sister’s face when she said it. I had always opposed this kind of stereotypic judgement that treats an entire group as one, but the more I considered it, the more something felt off…
‘Let’s go.’ He placed three bamboo skewers, still bearing traces of lamb, into my kebab box. ‘Take your chicken and eat on the way. I honestly don’t know what you’ve been thinking about; you haven’t finished a single skewer.’
I licked the skewers he had placed in my box. Come to think of it, I had always preferred lamb; only recently I would order chicken and realise the mistake afterwards. Lamb always had that extra smoothness and naturalness of texture; chicken simply could not match it. I crouched beside his motorcycle with the box and ate. He stood and watched me eat. When I finished I put on my black helmet, climbed onto the back seat. He put on his burgundy (‘bought at great expense’) helmet, climbed onto the front after me, turned the key, clamped the brake lever tight with his left hand (he had this habit of pressing everything too hard), turned the throttle with his right. His movements were practised enough, though one could see he was trying hard (perhaps that was why he clamped the brake so tight). I placed my hand lightly around his waist, as usual, and leaned against his broad back.
And so we kept going, in the opposite direction from school, escaping all the way. The black helmet, incidentally, was a gift from him (which is why it looked so much cheaper than his burgundy one). Not pretty, but surprisingly soundproof. On the road I quietly resumed the thinking I had begun at the kebab truck.
I reconsidered, and decided the ‘hah, men’ was not unreasonable. It was merely one instance of the overgeneralisation everyone performs daily for convenience. My sister had said it after a breakup (naturally), and I had thought of it after recalling the headmaster’s conduct; we were both projecting a handful of observations onto an entire group. At the kebab truck I had sensed a serious flaw in the thought, but could not articulate it. To me at the time, my sister’s judgement of men as a group, his judgement of Coca-Cola as a group, and my judgement of chicken as a group seemed indistinguishable. But on the back of the motorcycle it suddenly occurred to me (and I was fairly certain) that this was a matter of homogeneity. The reason I felt comfortable making value judgements about cola and meat was that (at least as I saw it) there was no meaningful variation between one piece of meat and another, one can of Coca-Cola and another. Humans were different. Humans are diverse, disorderly, complex, and cannot be summarised by stereotypes.
Thinking this, I was beginning to drowse against his back, but reason told me I must not fall asleep on a motorcycle. I tried to keep thinking, and the more I thought, the less it held up. The homogeneity of Coca-Cola I could accept, but on what grounds was there no meaningful variation between one piece of chicken and another? However one sliced it, humans at least belonged to genus Homo, whereas chicken and lamb were not even in the same genus; surely the degree of homogeneity between them was lower than that between men and women? So perhaps this was merely a question of personhood: the reason I felt chicken and lamb could be generalised over was that they lacked personhood, lacked the standing for exchange on which social life depends. But what was this ‘personhood’? I recalled Mary Anne Warren’s argument that personhood requires the capacity to communicate with ‘us’. Perhaps, I thought. I was still rather sleepy.
The worst thing about a cheap helmet is that it lets in wind, a problem demonstrated vividly when he hit the main road. I kept feeling the helmet was about to be torn off by the dusty gusts from the front right, so I pressed it down with my left hand and tilted my head slightly. At this hour the road was nearly empty. He switched on the headlamp; I could just make out the sand at the road’s edge. Homogeneity and personhood kept circling in my mind, and gradually my thoughts drifted towards purpose. These chickens and sheep, I thought, were bred by humans specifically to feed humans, just like Pepsi and Coca-Cola, Mount Lao mineral water and Pocari Sweat, Suzuki and General Motors. Their purpose was solely to serve us, and when we were dissatisfied, we had licence to reduce them to fully homogeneous, non-personal objects and judge them wholesale. Humans were different. The purpose of men and women was not to serve Homo sapiens; ‘we’ had neither the possibility nor the right to domesticate ‘Homo masculinus’ or ‘Homo feminus’. From this angle, I could say lamb was nobler than chicken, but I could not say a chihuahua was nobler than a Caucasian shepherd.
I still felt the reasoning was wrong, but the motorcycle seat was too uncomfortable and I wanted to shift. I shouted at his helmet. No response. I supposed his helmet was soundproof too, decided to leave it until we stopped, and leaned against his back again.
2
I do not know how long I slept, but when I woke the sun was about to escape from the silent sand. The motorcycle stood in a shallow pit by the road. I knew that it was a pit because in the damp sand at the toe of my right shoe, a puncturevine had poked its head out. He sat in the front seat, turning a map. I swung off the bike, crouched, and contemplated the uninspiring puncturevine.
He said he did not know where we were. I said fuck off. I have always considered my morning temper severe, and at that moment I was very angry. But there was nothing to be done; he was the driver, and I did not know the roads. In such circumstances I appeared to have no resources beyond profanity. Besides, from the beginning I had never known where we were going. I only knew that we could not go back to school. Not exactly two teenage rebels, but things were probably worse than we imagined. The immediate priority was not to be seen by the police, which made riding our sole asset along the highway seem a poor choice.
He decided first to find a guesthouse that did not require ID. He said we should head south, keeping the sun on our left. I said fine, you look. But we found nothing; in an overdeveloped country, hotels check ID. So we settled on a deserted stretch of coast and made camp, intending to think of something. I suspected things were deteriorating faster than anticipated, but there was no perfect plan, and this would have to do.
We got back on the road, continuing south. He proposed stopping at noon, on a beach to the right of the highway, and pretending to be hapless tourists venting at the sea over the confusion life had inflicted upon them. I said nothing, but felt vaguely that the state he described embodied my own: I was indeed hapless, indeed confused, like a parasitic wasp expelled from the colony, for whom flight was the only alternative to death.
We pitched the tent near an artificial island. While I was inflating the edge frame, I watched him kick off his shoes and run into the sea to urinate. When he came back I asked if he found that disgusting. He asked why he would. I said, did he not think that urinating in the sea meant his feet were also contaminated. He considered this and said probably, but it was fine; he did not find it disgusting.
He asked: since urine is part of our body, why do we find it disgusting? I said I thought it was the same as the headmaster finding our relationship disgusting.
He said nothing and took the pump from my hands. I sat down and rummaged through my rucksack for the two Kinder Surprise eggs I had saved. But while searching, the question of purpose returned. What mattered was perhaps not that urine was part of the body, but what its purpose was. I had never considered this; perhaps urine had no purpose? Perhaps only the act of expelling it had a purpose: the removal of waste nitrogen? If so, the explanation was simple: even though urine was part of the body, its significance lay only in the purpose of its expulsion. From this angle, the parts of a body were by no means ‘all equal’.
I wondered: in that case, is this still the same as the headmaster finding our relationship disgusting?
I did not know.
I found only one Kinder egg. I looked at him, pumping air into the roof structure, and thought the other had probably been eaten by a dog. I lay down, leaned against the rucksack, and focused on a seagull defecating in the sea.
3
By the time the rain began, it was late. Far away, a seagull rode the sun beneath the sea, raising a lucid breeze.
He was reading in the tent (something about the ‘Dark Forest’ in The Three-Body Problem, he said; I forget the exact words). We ate some bread, and then he pulled his Peppa Pig lamp from his rucksack, set it in the centre of the tent, adopted a spellcasting pose, and clicked it on. He crawled to one side to continue reading. I took out my laptop and began to write.
Then the sky went completely dark.
4
I told him. I said I wanted to write this down. He asked, write what. I said, what has happened between us. He asked what had happened between us. I said, what do you think. He said he did not know either. I said, why are you so difficult, I just want to write it down. He said fine, write it if you want. Then (with a mouth that had not yet been brushed) he kissed my forehead, darted into the ‘bathroom’, and zipped up the flap.
A few seconds later, The Verve’s ‘Bitter Sweet Symphony’ started playing from inside. Quiet, but recognisably the Radio Edit. I was about to say I disliked the fade-in on that version when he turned it off. I asked what happened. He said, through what sounded like a toothbrush clamped between his teeth, that he had bumped his hand.
I said right. Then I sat in a corner of the tent and resumed thinking.
Before all of this, I had not known that homosexuality was illegal in this country, nor that a report could carry the death penalty. I stared at his Peppa Pig lamp and felt that I was an aberration here. I had no choice but to continue along the line of ‘purpose’: so why were they permitted to generalise over us? Why, in this situation, were we treated the same as lamb and chicken, Pepsi and Coca-Cola? If it was a question of purpose, then what was the purpose of a relationship between two people?
These questions felt profoundly stupid. Yet I also felt, sincerely, that they carried an urgency. I did not want to think any more; I was sleepy. I told myself this was perhaps only a blind urgency, then lay on the tent’s inflatable pillow and looked up through the transparent ceiling.
When he came out of the ‘bathroom’ he had already changed into tomorrow’s clothes. He was the sort of person who would buy six identical white T-shirts so that he could wear the same thing every day. (On Sundays in the dormitory he generally wore nothing.)
He switched off the Peppa Pig lamp, and the tent went dark. Through the thin plastic ‘skylight’ very large stars were visible, and I felt suddenly close to the sky. Moments like these always made one feel one’s smallness with the whole body and mind: not only a smallness of scale, but another, more profound kind. That kind had been engraved in me for a long time. Its profundity, I had always felt, lay in this: it made me understand that however singular, however brilliant, however mediocre, however obtuse I might be, I was still small. Compared to the pure, scalar smallness of seeing a manta ray at the Abu Dhabi aquarium, this kind carried more of a helplessness.
I closed my eyes and resisted the urge to stare at the stars. Then a warmth surrounded me. I felt his slow, gentle breathing flowing around my left temple. The silence of thought surged through the darkness. I felt his arm, his wrist, his elbow, and the fact that he was a full head taller. I felt stillness and life, fragility and courage. I felt ignorance and death, transgression and expanse.
But for one moment, more precisely for a brief stretch of time, held in his arms, I did not feel that smallness.
I felt that I was free. And he was freedom.
5
Today is the twenty-seventh of April. I woke early and began writing this to its end. I have a vague sense that there is something important left to tell, but I cannot now remember what.
The sirens started a few minutes ago. Despair sounded in my mind, but my ears would not obey. I do not know what will happen. He (probably because of the sirens) has also woken. He probably does not know either. We might walk towards the sea; we might ask the hermit crabs for help. All futures are unknown; all pasts are history.
Through the ‘skylight’ I look at the morning, raked by distant police lights. The way they flash reminds me of the Porygon episode I once looked up out of curiosity.
The sirens are getting closer. He says, suddenly, let’s go. I say, OK.
Originally published in Chinese as 「逃」 on 阿莫東森的無聊生活. The philosopher’s name has been corrected from ‘Mary Warren’ to Mary Anne Warren.
