Annie Q Syed

No. 4 in the series Tuesday’s Torrent.

Photograph courtesy of Tim Corbeel.

Around the bend of Fort Street is a local dive bar which is easy to miss even if you are walking. The “No Smoking Inside” metal sign, which reads “O Smoking Inside” because the “N”  faded off too long ago for Nusrat, the owner, to recall fixing it, gave the dive bar its name: “O Smoking.” Inside, a fog of stale smoke mixed with recent exhales welcomes. Winter nights are worse. The eye inflaming smoke is all the more thicker since the tabagie refuse to huddle outside to light their cigarettes.

Usually the workers from the factory plants in the surrounding area stop by after the their shift for a couple of beers. None mind when the beers aren’t as chilled as the televised advertisements make them appear. However, every once in awhile, some people from a town fifteen miles north or twenty miles south stop by on the weekends.

Emerald Reeves decided to stop by “O Smoking” on an evening which was on the lookout for a rainy night. She was on her way home further south right after work up north. She had stopped at a nearby gas station which had one pump unit to buy a pack of cigarettes. She became nostalgic for Paris all of a sudden where she could buy one cigarette from a passerby instead of a whole pack at a store. But that was long ago.  Now that she was no longer pregnant she could smoke even though she was not a smoker. After her first cigarette in over a decade she felt hungry. She asked the young man behind the counter if there was a diner within the unfrequented area. He informed her there was none but there used to be one next to the dive bar. Emerald became aware of her urge to touch the man’s lightless eyes. Did her eyes appear similarly to him too? She couldn’t decide. He wasn’t sure if they served food at “O Smoking” he told Emerald as she walked out to her car.

She stepped inside “O Smoking” and trudged past a few glances towards her—more because she was a new face and less because she was a decent looking women in her late 30′s—and sat on one of the stools at the bar. Nusrat was bar-tending that night. She was relieved and saddened to be left alone.

After an hour, Nusrat finally said to her, “If you gonna keep drunken’ like that whose gonna drive you home?”

Emerald didn’t respond other than, “I am taking it easy. Don’t worry.”

The kitchen was closed because Baru, who ran the kitchen which served hot dogs and fries, had called in sick. Emerald drank for another hour, trying her best to pace the no-brand whiskey drinks until she felt sick. A few minutes later she found herself inside the smallest restroom, even for a dive bar, with two toilet stalls, one of which worked. She took her projectile vomiting as a sign that indeed God wanted her to drive home safely. Exhausted she sat on the dirty floor, back against the toilet. She tilted her head to put the wooden stall door in perspective. Why didn’t the door touch all the way to the floor? She almost giggled at the thought that maybe these doors were intentionally made this way for such occasions, so she and others in her predicament could crawl out from underneath because they couldn’t stand up. Emerald decided to sit there just a little longer and stare at the montage of scribbled notes on the wall: Call Tina for a good time 312-6695. Star and Rody forever inside a drawing of a wobbly lined heart. She couldn’t make out if it was Rody or Rudy. She gleaned over many other notes with names, some followed by numbers.

Emerald decided to take out her black pen—the one that was part of “office property and no one should take out of the office” but everyone did—and wrote a line from the poet Rilke:  How can I keep my soul in me, so that it doesn’t touch your soul? How can I raise it high enough, past you, to other things? And then added, Call Emery if you have a soul followed by her number.

She drove into the light rain without saying goodbye to Nusrat. Once home she told her husband she didn’t want to speak to him or sleep next to him and never wanted to have children with him.

One year later Emerald received a call from a man who said he was calling from a phone booth near “O Smoking.”

“Is this Emery?” he asked.

“Are you there?” he said gently since there was no response.

Did this really happen? Did people actually call people whose numbers they found in bathroom stalls? Emerald was at a loss for words.

“Hello?” he spoke into the phone.

“Yes. I am. I am here.”

“Hi. Is this an okay time to call Emery?”

“Yes. Emerald. All who called me Emery are long gone,” she replied, unsure why she had added the last bit of information.

There was silence but the awkwardness had already passed. She was too embarrassed to inquire how he had come upon her number in a woman’s bathroom stall. Moreover, her body repulsed at reliving that day and evening. He too was glad she didn’t.

For the next month, every Tuesday night, Sefu called Emery from a phone booth near the factory where he worked during the day. Sefu was handsome but didn’t appear interesting and for a man, unlike a woman, that equated to no allure for the opposite sex.

Once during their phone conversation he told her about the Ka, the Egyptian concept of spiritual essence, that which distinguishes the difference between a living and a dead person, with death occurring when the ka leaves the body. Sometimes the ka was slow to leave the physical realm.

Another time, Sefu told Emerald about the False Door. It was a wooden architectural element inside Ancient Egyptian tombs in front of which funerary offerings were usually placed. A false door usually is carved from a single block of stone or plank of wood, and it was not meant to function as a normal door. Located in the center of the door is a flat panel, or niche, around which several pairs of door jambs are arranged—some convey the illusion of depth and a series of frames, a foyer, or a passageway.

“The False Door served as a link between the living and the dead,” Sefu added.

“How old are you?” Emerald asked.

“What? What does that have to do with anything?”

“I want to know how old you are, Sefu.”

“One,” he replied and giggled.

“Don’t ever call me again.”

“What?”

“I don’t want to hear from you again.” Emerald hung up the phone. When her husband came home from work she finally told him they could have had a child and he would have been one. She just never wanted to have his children.

Sefu understood nights as a segway between the now and then. He didn’t understand why he was called to assist others release the ka.

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