The tension with his wife mounted. Amar needed to change the subject. “Had any more of your past life stories?”
“Yep.” Sahara nestled down in the bed. “About you.” She liked these moments when she had him, when she tamed this unpredictable beast. “Arand spoke to me.”
“Arand? The husband in your suburb story?”
“Yes. I wanted to wallow in the bliss of that place. I visualized our house in The Suburb, Arand and Shaell’s house. And then he spoke to me.”
“You received my suburb story, as the husband, without me there?”
“Yes. It’s about a whole delivery of gifts he has brought forth, set up like a camp of boxes, crates, bales, loads.”
“Mr. Generous. Has anything changed?” He kissed her cheek. “Let’s hear it.”
The Tale of the Thirty-Seventh Birtheve Surprise
I sit in the living room, waiting for the carrier to pull up. It’s Shaell’s birtheve, her thirty-seventh, and I’m doing something special. Twenty-two, fifty, seventy-six, those are the ‘big’ birtheves in The Suburb, but poor thirty-seven, stuck in limbo between late youth and middle years, is a time ripe for depression or hollowness. It needs to be filled.
There isn’t a week that I don’t think about giving something to Shaell. I don’t fool myself into believing that the giving of objects replaces genuine warmth and caring. It just makes me feel good in some very quiet, assured place in my soul. Since half of gift giving is the surprise, I work just as hard on the unpredictable timing and delivery of the present as I do on the thing itself. For weeks I have been modest in my generosities as if I was gradually pulling out of my habit. I was just preparing for today’s surprise.
After lunch the carrier pulls up to the curb. I sign a form and watch the lawn fill with boxes. A second vehicle arrives, driven by two crusty Cityzens with an attitude against Burbans. Most of their load is containers that are devilish to open, with those awful sheaths and straps. They finish unloading as the third and fourth carriers arrive.
Shaell is away for the afternoon: I presented her with a chit for a skin and hair spa this morning, as if that were going to be my sole birtheve present. By the time she arrives home, she is unable to drive the vehicle anywhere near the house, and can only see the upper story since the delivered goods block every inch of the downstairs. She attempts to walk up the sidewalk to the front door but finds herself in a maze of my devising, which leads her on a path directly into my arms.
“Thirty-seven more,” I greet her, the birtheve catch phrase barely off my tongue before Shaell’s mouth meets mine. She is shocked and delighted and teases me for my trickery and excess. She is so eager to show her gratitude that it takes some doing to convince her that she should open everything first.
And so she does: a new set of burbain sheets and blankets for the bedroom; three distinct bouquets of wildflowers picked from a large monadnock located in the Plains outlying The Suburb; twelve rolls of decorative wallpapers with a pattern of sable roundels interlocking with sheafs of grain and feathery plumes (she is extremely touched by this gift but stood looking at them for a moment and then told me the pattern reminded her of something she could not remember); a free-standing candle-lamp that releases smoke in the shape of the Offmore insignia; all manner of products from the cetiver plant: fragrant perfumes, body oils, bath beads, woven doormats; six casks of frozen shellusks from the Bataveur littorals, accompanied by three vats of delicious dipping sauces; fifteen boites of sweet endbrains of the konnovie bird, a delicacy among the younger generation of Cityzens, not for everyone, but one of Shaell’s recent cravings; a fourteen-pass Commuter plassticket, good until next Chillester; an octelian necklace, all eight strands emblazoned with jeweled puckstones, matching earrings, and a contrasting bracelet made of beige rainbeads; a set of three fur-lined dildos, small, medium, and large, an apology for the next long business trip I will be taking; a lifetime supply of Oaken Bits, Shaell’s favorite breakfast food; a pet yurid, the common variety without the epipubic bones, inside its own subterrarium, whom she immediately christened Foster; eleven bags of yurid food (on sale at eleven for seven); and a miniature yurid parcourse complete with flaming wheel and headstand; twelve hundred cases of Igmidian Plantlife, the miracle growth used for garden, kitchen, and cosmetic purposes; a signed copy of “Figments” by the Astron-Aburbanian writer Farough Manleaif; two chthithoprint screens of underwater life between Suburb and City (11 X 6.5); eight dozen squirrel-driven ankle belts, for —
ق
“Sahr! Enough!” Amar held his wife in his arms, drawing her back from the trancelike litany. “The gift list got away from you,” he said. “You lost control.”
“You lost control,” Sahara said, reaching for a glass of water on the nightstand. “I hadn’t even finished — that was just one birthday, imagine the rest, the regular presents, the other birthdays, the surprise appearances of gifts in later years….”
“Where’d we get all the money?” Amar said, quizzically.
Sahara finished drinking and put down the glass. She had to be patient with his questioning. The recalls might be the salvation of their relationship. She tried a new tact.
“In Islamic literature, like the Nights, there’s no such thing as fiction. Fiction means lies, untruths, a sin. So the stories use narrators: I heard this from so and so who got it from so and so. It’s a way of verifying the tale as truth, a recounting of a real thing.”
“So Arand spoke to you and that makes the tale a truth? From your lips to Allah? Because you’re an Arabic student I’m supposed to believe in past lives?”
Amar had crossed a line, Sahara thought. Arabic ‘student’ instead of ‘scholar’ or even ‘Ph.D. candidate,’ the very thing her husband was preventing her from pursuing. That verbal slight alone was worth turning over and pretending to go to sleep. Then there was the tone of disrespect for Islam. And the discounting of her recalls, her gift.
Despite the joyous marriage of their two souls in the past life tale, Sahara and Amar have a horrid secret plaguing them in The Qaraq. Tensions continue to mount between them, and the stories don’t always bring relief. Can Sahara quell this danger and become a modern Scheherazade, pacifying her violent King? Find out in Book One of the 1001 series.