YOU TOOK TO death much easier than I expected. This was a good thing, of course. So many of us never asked for this. We asked for respite, not a job carving people's souls out of their bodies.
But you liked it, and in that you were different from some others. I was too afraid to ask you what your life before must have been like, for you have to found happiness in this. Our jobs aren't gruesome, but there is something melancholy about outliving everyone you will ever know. To never be truly noticed nor truly seen. It wears you down. I am what remains of a man born three centuries ago in Constantinople. Whittled down to the barest shape of a person. Scythed through countries and cities and wars, and here I am, before you, an inhuman thing doing an inhuman thing.
This city is young and thriving. In a century, it will probably burn itself out, or it will continue to live on its own old bones. Cities either kill themselves or cannibalize on themselves. There is no in-between. Live as long as I have, and you will see that it is true.
Dubai suits you, in a way. I am not speaking of the shiny part, not the gleaming skyscrapers nor the immaculate parks nearby. I am speaking of the creek, the old souqs, the plazas with the neon signs, the asphalt roads that stretch under the oppressive heat, the crowded tea shops that have none of the style of their downtown counterparts but all the flavor, the shabby apartment complexes that no one sees but everyone knows it exists. How fitting that you should have been born here, unlike your parents. You remind me of someone else, someone I'd fallen in love with a century ago, back when I still roamed the world in anger and loneliness. Don't worry, I am not in love with you. I keep my heart close, in my chest, where it should be.
Remember when I said I was too afraid to ask? I didn't need to. You found me. In this strange and twisted city, you found me. And you gave me your story to me, of your own free will. In increments. Over a kadak chai outside of a shop that only sold books in Arabic. In a hospital, while we were both struggling to wrench a child's life out of his body. While we stood in the sidelines of a racing track, watching horses race.
It occurs to me that I never gave you my story. You never asked for it, but you must be feeling the same fears that I did. Would it be a breach of this fragile trust we've cultivated between ourselves? Am I not allowed to speak of it, unlike you?
The problem, however, lies not in speaking of the past. It lies in the speaking itself. How does a man who has stayed silent for most of his life talk of something that spans years, countries, generations? And how does he remain accurate? My memory is as fallible as any human's. So I don't know where to begin. There is much I cannot remember, and what little I recall has been misremembered and colored by time. Fiction becomes fact, fact becomes fiction.
Was I here? Did I really do this? Did this actually happen? Has this really ceased to exist or did it never exist in the first place? Questions like that, all of them I ask myself. Doubt and doubt and doubt.
And I don't know how to put into words the feeling I get when I remember so much of my life has just been year after year, person after person, soul after soul, gray after gray. (There is probably a word for that in German. The Germans think of everything.) I blink, and it has been a decade. The world has changed. I have not.
But you have given me companionship and hope when I thought myself incapable of finding pleasure in the former and unable to accept the latter. You have given, and I have lived alone for so long that you'll forgive me for thinking that this was a transaction. You give, I give back. Yin for yang, tooth for tooth, life for life, and tale for tale.
One collector to another, Yasmeen. My truth is different than yours.
