Seahorse by Janice Pariat Page A

Unaccomplished. And un-concluded.
    David will only be David.

    At first, I was gripped by nothing less than exhilaration. The clutch of excitement at inexplicably arbitrary times. While paying for oranges at Tesco’s, or waiting to cross the street. Questions flying out like small sharp arrows—Why? How? What did he mean? What would happen now?
    And then it faded.
    The note transformed into a paperweight. While I wasn’t looking, it changed shape.
    We are perpetually chained. Compelled to want and not want. To complete and leave incomplete. Eventually, though, the note conjured annoyance. Somehow, even a trace of fear. By meeting Nicholas at the concert, I’d finally acquire what was called a verifiable outcome. It could be changed from the poetic to the quotidian. The lushly imagined to disappointingly real. There would be a continuation. Possibly even an ending.
    Quod erat demonstrandum.
    What if it couldn’t compare to everything I’d imagined all these years?
    What if that was all we ever wanted? The things that didn’t happen.
    As though that was the only way to free ourselves from the responsibilities of the real.
    And yet. And yet there was the tug of it.
    The sudden proximity of the threads of our lives. Perhaps they’d been running closer than I ever fathomed. Perhaps, in the way that we like to believe these things are fated, we were meant to always touch.
    It was a constant swaying. The pendulum-gut feeling of it.
    Over many nights, I don’t know how long I lay awake in the darkness. Moving fitfully into the hours most deep and silent. The bed soft and warm beneath me, the quilt cast aside. In the distance, the sounds of a police car, an ambulance. The startling emergencies of the night. At some point, I would drift away, without knowing, into the black void of sleep. The next time I opened my eyes it was morning, I would hear the sound of rain. Water. That’s what usually woke me. I was searching for water, holding in my hand a blue and silver fish, running through a building that could only appear in dreams—stitched together from many others, familiar but difficult to place. In my dreams, I was looking for a room with an aquarium.

    After my fall in the forest, I awoke wrapped in near darkness.
    It was a long disorientation, stretched out, those seconds, wondering where you are, when the familiar is veiled momentarily by strangeness. This time, the veil didn’t lift. I was in a place I’d never seen before.
    The curtains hung thick and voluminous, shielding me from daylight. I reached to my left, touched a bedside lamp, and fumbled to switch it on. It was a large room—easily twice the size of the ones back at the student residence—and the furniture, all heavy, polished wood, looked quietly, confidently luxurious. Both Kalsang and I could probably fit into the cupboard in the corner, a beautiful piece, carved around its edges into something elegant and floral. The full-length standing mirror next to it tilted upwards, reflecting the plain, clean geography of the ceiling. In the centre, a low table held a cluster of carvings—an elephant, a fish, an ox—and a pile of magazines. Not the ones I usually saw in people’s homes and my own, Femina or India Today, but thick, glossy foreign publications. Everything struck me as tastefully subdued. The only clemency of color came from a row of paintings on the wall, which now I would recognize as intricate madhubani. At thetime, though, the peculiar figures only seemed to amplify the alarm I was beginning to feel.
    I’d awakened in a stranger’s house, in a stranger’s room.
    Then I remembered the hands that had lifted me, their careful benignity. They hadn’t hurt me last night; nothing would harm me now. The silence was commiserative. In here I was safe.
    My clothes, like my surroundings, were also not my own. I’d been stripped of the jeans and t-shirt I was wearing—they