Pseudomonas

Ideally, Love should be a thing that happens on the fly, larger than four letters, more complex than what it is supposedly, chemical impulses blasting the limbic system with uncontrollable happiness, with agony. It is much bigger than an impulse, at least this is what she thinks, this is what Saba has always thought. She is constantly opening herself up to it, Love accosting her violently at any given moment, in any scenario, absolutely any scenario or setting, especially the incongruous. 

She has learned, through dedicated years of practice, to beam signals conveying her openness. She hopes, in fact, the long awaited love of her life will pounce on her in a place totally antithetical to feelings of tender warmth, of infatuation, for example at the dentist during a particularly hairy root canal, or maybe in a cemetery full of war criminals, outside the office of an oncologist, sitting with legs crossed at the knee on Chiavari chairs at another person’s wedding, the wedding of a friend, of enemies, of relatives she is fond of, or not at all, whoever, and this Love awaiting her, she knows, will come directly from either the groom or perhaps his father, but only if he is childhood sweethearts with the groom’s mother who will be in attendance too, dressed not matronly at all but like a person only accustomed to presenting themselves fashionably, sensually, someone worthy of robbery; only then will it be possible for Love to accost all the involved parties. 

The groom, or his father, she thinks, will tear themselves away from recently uttered, emotionally charged vows, vows that make the other guests weep, Saba as well, or they will toss longstanding marriages to the side, witnessing Saba at her most desirable, opening up like a flower, a corpse flower, titan arum, her body beaming compelling signals that cannot be ignored. And she will be receptive to this, to the death of one love, so hers can swallow the pain, using it as manure to grow stronger than ever. In her dreams, Love comes to her exactly that way, or also after she has given birth, after her dream self has labored for countless days, dancing a little close to death (because in these dreams she is usually hypertensive, just like her mother during her own near lethal pregnancies), squeezing out not one but two unbelievably loud babies from a slit in her deflating belly, flaps of her brown skin peeled back, pinned back, showing the red beneath, the pinks and whites, and in these dreams, these beautiful, harrowing dreams, the husband she is attached to is always faceless, he doesn’t require proper features, eyes, lips, a nose, crow lines, for the story to progress as it must. She is never in love with him. He is merely a plot device, a weak one at that.

Sometimes, she is struck instantly with endearment so pure for the attending surgeon, the same person making the opening to free the babies, minor plot devices, who also do not have faces but scream well enough without visible mouths, and other times, it is a custodian swabbing the floor of the delivery room with drenched mopheads for feet, a nice sort of man whose searching, kind eyes inflame her from scalp to toe, he possesses irreplicable dynamism, making him worthy of Love. She forgets the babies, the husband who has no face, and climbs off the unsteady gurney, her delivery bed of many days, unstitched still, her organs all over the place, and she runs into a sunset, it is always fluorescent, this sunset, with either the obstetrician, or the janitor. These dreams are the best kind to have, especially while she is ovulating.

It isn’t very groundbreaking, Saba’s reasoning, her uncompromising expectations. She exists because of love on the fly, not just that, love with no holds barred. None. Her mother has explained everything to her. Whenever strength permits, she will go over the first kisses, the first troubles, miniscule now but they seemed much larger then. The conception too is never left out of her detailed storytelling, but Saba’s favorite part of the Story of How She Came to Be, the most important story there is, is of course the Crossing of Paths, every love saga’s most important step. 

***

Yes, her mother was not available per say, in that she was a common strain of slime forming bacteria growing within the derelict pipes in Saba’s father’s home, the condemned warehouse he shared with nine other men of varying ages, factory workers and university students, archivists at the local opera house, one model, two cousins who did nothing but smoke and bicker. Anyway, this is what her mother was at the time, Pseudomonas aeruginosa, the biological cards she had been dealt. She thought nothing of it then. Everyone, every living thing must be something, and she was: germs. She was the sort of bacteria that loosely had some interest in the activity of men, surrounded as she was by them, what they ate, how they ate, the mysterious activities they got up to outside in the sunshine especially in the summertime, how they dressed and undressed, the ways they conversed with each other and with the women who would sometimes visit the condemned warehouse, the ways they put socks on or condoms, or retainers, hearing aids, how they earned livings and engaged in the messiness of onanism, sometimes out in the open, flopped onto mattresses that had no frames, rarely did those frameless beds have sheets, clean or otherwise.

Man was on her germy mind. Specifically, Saba’s father, one of the resident archivists, the more handsome of the two. He wore wireframe glasses and had a slight overbite, he suffered night terrors and ate Maltesers compulsively, while he got dressed for work, after he returned from the opera house close to midnight on an almost weekly basis, not too weary to rip open his chocolate reward, sweet packets he stored beneath his nightstand, two bricks with a square cut of wood set on top. When he masturbated, as all of the men in the warehouse did, he used no physical media, unlike the other men with their mountains of VHS tapes, their sticky magazines; he shut his eyes and there was movement in his mind, he created the stories with his brain, it was obvious to Saba’s mother, she could practically see the reel of film rotating behind his forehead, and she found this romantic. 

He also was unavailable, Saba’s father, still only a sweet-toothed archivist; his affections were tied up in an actual person with a robust external life, more robust than sliding around century-old pipes, someone with a name given to her at birth and a belly button she had pierced in her late teens, a navel she could suspend mass produced trinkets from, someone good at backgammon but terrible with time management, a woman who had platelets and leukocytes in her body, an occipital lobe, who menstruated infrequently, yes, she had the ability to shed uterine lining, she had uterine lining to shed. She visited Saba’s father often, coming in and out of his bedroom whether he was present or not, lobbing clear plastic bags stuffed with her overnight things onto his frameless bed, her underwear, her toothbrush, holographic lip gloss in cracked or cracking tubes, dental floss with no packaging, it was all free-range, just spools of thin white thread protected by nothing, extra pairs of trousers, skirts with hems that danced dangerously close to the crease of her upper upper thigh and her bottom. 

This is who loved Saba’s father when he was not a father yet, the backgammon savant, when he was thinner, thinner and more open to seeing the world as a cup that had so much to give, and it is who he loved at the time, lower case l, the ephemeral kind incapable of enduring all things, such as the will of a certain bacteria inside of his home’s derelict pipes, Saba’s mother. Will made her what she is now, a person, breathing polluted air like the rest of us, breathing with lungs, graying at the temples and also the nape of her neck, she willed humanity into herself, she made it so, out of Love, and that is the simple way she lost the bacteria shell. 

One evening, she tired of it, being bacteria, and decided it would not be who she was anymore externally, she pulled breath into her cellular wall, she sent the same breath out of her, the same breath and a little more, and the noise of the breaths turned things around for her, immediately she slid out of those pipes, up through the drain of the one bathtub in the warehouse (as a child, this is the part of the story that excited and frightened Saba the most, picturing her mother as she used to be, shuttling through dark pipes, like Saba at the waterpark inside too high, neon slides spitting her dizzy body, from its posterior end, into chlorine pools), and in the bath, there sat the backgammon player, flipping through a partly damp magazine, submerged except for her round chin and everything above it, except for the arms and hands turning the pages of the last publication she would read with her own eyes, a pocket of meat, a pocket ready for slipping into stubbornly, so that is what Saba’s mother did. She crawled right in, from an orifice beneath that foamy water, finding exactly what she wanted, popping through the drain when she did: legs, tits, a cunt.

How she struggled, the pocket of resistant meat, fighting something unseen but very much so felt, felt in the marrow and beneath the muscle, latching onto her brain stem, essentials she had never paid much attention to until then, but it was all being taken so of course now she noticed, she noticed and fought for it, neurons, ventricles, arteries, and her long, lean legs, legs made for micro miniskirts and riding mechanical bulls programmed to move irrationally, they thrashed about in the bath water, knocking bruises into recently shaved skin. Her round jaw, it stiffened under the weight of Saba’s mother’s persistent Will, she bit her tongue, the backgammon savant, wanting to retain custody of her own body, filling her own mouth with her own blood, with Saba’s mother’s blood. The mouth, everything in it, it no longer was the fading girl’s, was it? 

She was still there, in the tub, bent over, trying to take in every inch of it, this new, warm body with skin, hair and fingernails, toenails, wrinkly fingers from the long soak, twisting, turning this way and the other, when Saba’s father stumbled into the bathroom, drunk as a skunk, slipping on the tiles wet from someone else’s bath and Saba’s mother subsequent emergence not even an hour later. It was two in the morning, closer to half past two, on a Thursday. She tells Saba he would do this on Wednesday nights, drink until he found humor in every little thing, until one day bled clumsily into another. He found the spectacle of Saba’s mother especially humorous, this naked, slime-slick woman, cooing over beauty marks she had just discovered on her collarbones and thighs, prodding lovingly at cellulite on her bare bottom, petting newly acquired pubic hair with stolen fingers. He thought she was someone else’s, at first, not recognizing his backgammon savant lover underneath the slime seeping out of pores unused to forceful inhabitation; he assumed, just for a moment, she was another of his housemate’s friends or lovers, drunk like he was, for only a drunk person could engage in such inane activity, splashing around the unclean tub, slathering slime all over themselves. And it was easy to let him think this, easier than saying to him: alas, on the inside I am the kind of bacteria that cripples people with respiratory illness, the kind capable of body snatching too. She let him think she belonged to one of the others, a friend, a couch surfing reprobate, someone recently fucked in a drunken haze, fucked and forgotten, which was not beyond belief. All they did was fuck and forget. And after the slime receded, showing the backgammon player’s familiar face, tits, calves, she let him recognize the woman he knew, just a pocket of meat now, every ounce of her consciousness throttled into fierce submission.

She followed him out of the bathroom using newly acquired legs, and she pushed her toes into the corridor’s green carpeting, her heels too, sighing at the feel of the carpet, its abrasive softness, and she used her new lungs, powerful and new, inhaling as deeply as she could, and here is what she smelled: the sweat of Saba’s father’s underarms, whatever it was he had been drinking, artificial air fresheners pinned onto one of the corridor’s walls. She blinked up at the flickering lights on the ceiling, dome shaped lights surrounded by moths bumping drunkenly into each other, and here, she used her untested vocal cords, she said: I want to get into bed with you. She had never said a thing before this early, early morning but it was a sentence she’d practiced internally, a sentence she had heard from her, the backgammon savant, night after night, and Saba’s father, he was just a man, he was a man with honey in his ears, and a nude woman blinking up at him earnestly, at him then at the ceiling lights covered in moths, smoothing down the full bush at her crotch with wiggling fingers. Come on then, he said, and that was that. Really, it was that simple. One moment she was inside the pipes, the next she was in bed with the sweet-toothed archivist, yes wearing skin, running one hand up and down the part of him she had only seen from vents, from holes in the patchy ceiling, rubbing, offering the back of her neck as a handhold, and he held on to it, until he came. Just like that. Hers.

Saba knows something similar is coming her way, a meet cute as powerful, as moving as her parents’, a visceral, transformative love, something poets may steal inspiration from in the centuries to come, or lyricists, novelists, temperamental filmmakers. One day, soon. Whoever loves Saba is simply tied up in other anatomical situations making it difficult for Saba to notice them, or maybe not. Maybe they are occupied alternatively, battling a legion of vaporous evils, wicked creatures directly opposed to his freedom and by association, Saba’s happiness. On a cellular level she feels it, she feels its nearness, love’s nearness, the way an arthritis afflicted person senses apocalyptic storms on the horizon, in damaged joints and nerves. Love, her birthright, when will it come? Will it accost Saba while she is at school, solving meaningless, theoretical puzzles, listening to lectures on prokaryotes and eukaryotes, running languid laps around the university’s rugby field on Sunday mornings to keep her body’s size in the single figures? Will it flutter into her lap at her part-time place of work, the stationary shop owned by a microbiology lecturer she also nannies for over the summer, will it fall out of the till she feeds with coins and bank notes that have seen better days, or as she greets shy primary school students, their indulgent parents, while she shoos off shoplifting teenagers more lonely and awkward than they are violent, or is love not there at all? 

Is it stewing instead at the chapel her father visits often, seeking out unclear glimpses of God’s hidden face, seeking sanctuary and absolution, the chapel she accompanies him to willingly, dressed in her Sunday’s best, perfume borrowed from her mother’s vanity behind her ears, a burst of pearls encircling the narrow neck resembling her mother’s, resembling the subdued backgammon player’s? Love might be there, aye, embedded into the grain of the basilica’s pews, the rafters older than her paternal grandfather who is perhaps as mature as the Milky Way, as distant as the Milky Way too? Could be that it is in the presiding bishop’s swinging thurible full of eye-stinging incense, or within the pipe organ her father likes to photograph and film while it is being played, sobbing to himself, gripping Saba’s clammy hand, so his phone’s grainy videos, they are constantly shaky and his weeping overpowers the ominous racket spewing out of the organ. Her one great Love might even be the organ, and why not? Perhaps the organ is playing pretend during worship hours, moonlighting as a wind instrument out of ennui, rather than necessity, but after, could it also take on the form of a man, a man whose teeth release musical notes when touched? Do. Re. Mi. Re. Do. Wouldn’t that be grand, marrying a musical man?

Her mother will not follow along, she sends them off, father and daughter, to the services they attend for vastly different reasons, expecting different outcomes (father: everlasting life, daughter: life’s great love). She never does, although Saba wishes she would. She wants an extra pair of eyes, a knowledgeable pair, scanning every crevice of the holy place for Love, but Saba’s mother cannot do this; churches give her migraines unlike any other, churches with steeples or flat roofs, churches with puritanical Pentecostals or touch starved priests, Latin homilies, snake handlers, baptismal founts. The pain, it plants physical auras around the objects she looks at, around the inanimate and the animate, tambourine wielders, crucifix wearers, auras that are kaleidoscopic and sharp, they rotate, they surge and ebb these auras, nauseating her. Saba’s mother will foam at the mouth if she is made to cross a church’s threshold or touch a missal. Her jaw, the stolen jaw, it locks as well, her stolen teeth will clash, her nostrils spit thin bloodstreams. She describes the sensation flooding through her during these episodes, to Saba and her father, as molten lava in veins unable to withstand such heat, and it is not an easy thing to witness. 

Where has he put himself, her better half? If not in God’s house, if not in educational institutions or places of temporary employment, then where? How much longer will it take, the crossing of their paths? Lately, Saba has taken up clubbing. It is not so unusual, clubbing, not for a girl her age, with the stamina she has. It is strategic, this decision to place herself in vertiginous rooms with sticky floors, fog machines, strobe lights, and egotistical disc jockeys averse to taking song requests. God helps those who help themselves, yes, this is what her father’s bishop says constantly, and she must help herself, must she not? 

She typically embarks on this sort of quest alone, spending hours in her dorm room taking tight twists out of her hair first, teasing every coil out, massaging shea butter into her shoulders and her calves until they glisten, until her skin looks digestible, and afterwards, she rides in taxis, if she has amassed enough spare cash from the nannying she does under the table, or on the bus, practicing small talk quietly, widening her eyes, channeling the most fuckable ingénues in the fan service heavy anime she watches to fall asleep. She has read men like this, wide, hapless eyes, the eyes of something vulnerable, easily overcome. Saba does her eye-widening exercise throughout the commute, all the way from her campus accommodations to the nightclub, staring into a compact mirror she takes along to reinforce the integrity of her makeup after many hours of dancing.

And at her destination, she stands in the long queues patiently, alongside her peers and suited businessmen who want to fuck her peers, bachelorettes on hedonistic holiday, doe-eyed first years from surrounding unis, narcotic dealers and their euphoric potential customers. She is the most patient girl alive, Saba is, more patient than Job, Job and his temporary boils; she waits her turn, valiantly enduring creative trials dispatched by The Enemy, the yellowish clouds of pollen swirling about in the spring, pollen that does her no favors, activating seasonal allergies inherited from her father, former archivist, current zealot. In the wintertime she is similarly long suffering, she sways on her feet constantly to ward away the cold. Internally, Saba recites verses from the book of Psalms, channeling King David at his lowest, and yes, eventually, like David, she is rewarded, in her own way, granted access into the den of iniquity pulsating with electronic dance music and poorly constructed cocktails. The gatekeepers policing entry into the nightclub, overweight bouncers, stamp the skin below her knuckles in stubborn ink (the ink lasts even into the wee hours of the morning, resisting banishment in her standing shower). Saba knows them all by name now, Seydou, Mo, Clark, men her father’s age and similarly bested by the trials of late middle-life, built like tanks in breathable lycra, perhaps with more creative pasts than this, minding doors, manhandling violent drunks, and it is a pity none of them possess the spark she is opening herself up to.

Inside, watered down cocktails in hand, Gin and Tonic, Rum and Coke, little bit of this mess thrown over a little bit of that and also melting ice, she will get the lay of the land, keeping to the walls, never neglecting good posture; at all times, her back is plywood straight, just in case. The love of her life, he values good posture, she is sure of it, and if he is there, if he sees her slouching, Love may combust, leaving her perpetually thirsty. She finds sweaty pockets to insert herself into, soon after, pockets of space that widen or shrink as the night goes on. She dances, never with her eyes closed, always, they must be open, just in case. She dances, imagining herself as the unlucky protagonist in that Andersen tale, her feet stuffed aptly into scarlet shoes that pinch at the toes. Saba dances alone and with imperfect strangers, some of whom she kisses freely, right there on the dance floor, sloppy kisses. Others, the more reserved strangers in particular, she fucks on the premises, inside toilets that have not seen antiseptic in decades. The best sex of her life was had in the grungiest loo of this godless establishment, this nightclub seven stops (by bus) away from her uni. She remembers nothing about him, disburser of life changing orgasms, except the solid stench of his cologne, a spicy, cigar odor, and the feel of him, the full feeling of him. He could never have been her life’s great Love, not with that cologne. Pity. 

It is like her father’s bishop says, preparedness cannot be overstated. Just last week, he preached at length from the book of Matthew, her father’s favorite of the Synoptic gospels. No one knows the hour, the bishop said, he roared this, gathering his exquisite robes about himself, hammering his liver spotted hands down on the pulpit. Not one man, or woman or child. And the congregation made various noises of assent, as did Saba, as did her father but less sardonically, as did the pipe organ. Yes, let those with ears hear, and Saba, she has ears, they are her mother’s ears, the same shape, identical in size. She has ears and she is a resourceful person. In primary school, at the age of nine, an award was given to her on Prize Day, a rosette ribbon too, pinned to her uniform’s peter pan collar. On the certificate: Most Likely to Survive Shipwreck. And it is true, if circumstance finds her washed up on an atoll, on an undiscovered shore, Saba indeed will make do. Shelter, food, water, she would somehow find it within and without herself, provisions needed for her survival.

Her whole life, she has been making do, and of course it is simply the way things are, the way they have to be, what with a father whose decades of archival work amounted to almost nothing, nary a saving to be found for rainy days or even dry ones (the precious little he has saved, it lines offering satchels at the basilica), a mother more comfortable in dank, damp spaces, a mother who spent a great deal of Saba’s childhood taking siestas in her walk-in closet, no less than four humidifiers spitting steam from grungy spouts close to her reclined head, a mother who would emerge only to eat the portions of nearly rotting fruit Saba cut into crescents, the sashimi Saba ordered with self-sourced pocket money, yellowtail going furry from mold and salmonella, tuna, mackerel, all so pungent, Saba’s eyes watered while presenting each gone-off morsel to her mother (she would only eat gone-off things, Saba’s mother, the former germ), she would emerge only for this, sustenance and regurgitating the Story of How Saba Came to Be. 

Who taught Saba to use the stove and to iron wrinkled clothes? Who taught her to ride a bicycle, and to dress the many, many wounds obtained from tumbling off said bicycle? Who kissed her knee after it was skinned and drenched in iodine that felt like acid, not medicinal at all? Who let her know which sanitary towels to use when her flow was heavy, and how to pencil in her nonexistent eyebrows? Who took her to the annual book fair, and purchased the most affordable storybooks and novels, affordable yes but no less compelling than the hardcover, leather-bound tomes? Who helped with picking out the university she is attending now, studying microbiology, and who sat at the family computer weeks before her resumption date, selecting prerequisite courses, meal plans and the room she now sleeps in while at uni? Who found the stationery shop job, and subsequently the gigs nannying for tenured lecturers living more like emperors than teaching staff at a woefully underfunded university? While her father listened to taped recordings pilfered from his former place of work, cassettes of his personal favorites, Turandot, Madame Butterfly, the mezzo-sopranos, the contraltos projecting deathless notes, while he did this with dip under his lower lip, dip or fat Malteser balls, and consternation somewhere at his impoverished core, while he allowed the music to cycle on and on, muttering things to himself, fragmented sentences about backgammon and destiny ending cunts, about senile wives with split personality disorders, while her mother hibernated, dreaming about old pipes and former foes, other germs and pests and pathogens, dreaming of the most formidable foe whose body she has put on, who showered Saba in admiration for the sow’s ears she transformed to silk purses, if not silk then a very durable satin, against odds that perhaps were not the most terrible, but all the same, the odds were not very ideal either? Saba, Saba, Saba.

Ideally, love should be something that happens on the fly, incidental. Yes, she understands this, but tonight, she is approaching the situation differently, with hands that are not empty. She has the parable dissected by the bishop on her mind, of the ten virgins, the five with oil and the five without, standing close to the front of the nightclub’s perpetually lengthy queue. God, her father’s God, helps those who help themselves, who arm themselves. She has the Story of How She Came to Be in mind as well, the hurdles overcome by her mother to cement her place in Saba’s father’s life, a position not so enviable these days, or perhaps ever. What she saw in the man, a complete mystery to Saba, but love, it need not make sense to anyone but the parties involved. In Saba’s clutch, full of travel sized cosmetics and breath mints, she has brought along an unlikely accessory, it clatters next to the mascara and lip balm tubes: Rosary beads. Taken from the Basilica, every sphere blessed, of course, by the bishop, down to the crucified Messiah. Such potent tools, handed over to Saba without restraint, spiritual talismans, benedictions in Latin and in English, the less romantic of the two languages. Christ, have mercy, he said, her father’s bishop. Have Mercy. Miserere. And she felt the mercy, she felt some of it, the kernel of something else too was felt, an unassuming sensation, fattening in her, growing larger than the fibrous pit of a mango, it was felt throughout the body, her yet-to-be-loved body, at its root, her yet-to-be-loved heart, an understanding that through Christ and his lackeys, she could do absolutely anything, anything was permissible for the pursuit of love, Love the greatest commandment of all. Have mercy, she whispers it to herself, in the taxi taking her on the most significant of journeys, from campus to den of iniquity. Mercy ensures it goes well, no traffic, no red lights delaying the inevitable, no taxi man suffering from road rage or the kind of ennui that forces one to speak incessantly, a perfect odyssey, the hand of her father’s deity at work.  

Also God at play, Him or his mischievous adversary, who can say: Saba is offered a drink as soon as she crosses the familiar threshold of the nightclub seven stops away from her university’s campus, and the person doing the offering is part of a larger, boisterous group, men with top buttons undone and ties loosened, arrivistes from one or two towns over, programmers, she thinks, stretching the day as far as it will go before they are made to return to their tidy homes and families. He is someone else’s, the one who buys her the gin and tonic, she sees the tan line of a ring he isn’t wearing, even in the dark, the band of lighter skin gleams. He asks her name and she gives it. Saba, she says, and he says it back to her, her own name, he is drunk and it sounds different, coming out of a plastered mouth. Saba doesn’t want to know what he is called, not yet, so she does not ask it of him. She drinks the badly made cocktail, in one unhurried go, and says he must have one with her too, widening her eyes. She feels her pupils dilating. Programmers, are they not rumored to be otakus, and this one, surely he cannot resist forces greater than he, her mother’s perfume, the wide-eyed lure of a supposed ingénue? He tries to kiss her, so forward is he, and a little helpless, but she ducks away from the kiss. Not yet, she says breathlessly, pursing her lips. What do you want? She has to shout this; the egotistical disc jockey not ten feet away from them, on an elevated surface, has dusted off a crowd pleaser, something from the early aughts, and the club goers, they scream in unison, a prolonged sound that sends shivers down her throat, their faces blur from excitement, and their hands, their feet. Blood lust, that is the feeling in the air, brought about by the DJ and terrible drinks. She has to scream to be heard, what shall I get you? He is keen on negronis, the nouveau riche programmer, and more than that, he is very keen on her. Already, he has her bottom, the left part of it, in his large palm, and he hangs on to it, as they force their way to the front of the bar writhing with inebriated bodies. 

She buys the negroni he wants. She buys two, exchanges wrinkled bank notes for bad cocktails costing more than they are worth. Nannying has been good to her this month. While he is ragging on one of his colleagues, her plastered suitor, she pulls the rosary she has armed herself with out of her clutch, kisses it, pressing down so hard with her lips, an indent is left on the top and the bottom one. She wills the thing in her to become more robust and it does. It blossoms, so much so that she experiences what feels like a terrible case of heartburn. Quickly, she spits into the negroni poured by a frazzled bartender into a plastic cup, not glass; this establishment does not trust its patrons with breakable objects. She produces as much spit as she can, more than she thinks she is able to, emptying herself, her congenital gifts into the cup, and in the dark, it does not glow, the outpour is not incandescent, it does not let out a puff of hostile, green steam shaped like a skull and crossbones, or a wonky heart for that matter. Everything settles, and just to make sure, she plunges her pinky finger into the cup, she stirs and she stirs.

She is done by the time he turns back to her. Here, she says, and he takes it, his plastic cup of negroni, of fortified saliva. He does not sip first. No, he is too thirsty for that. The office worker comes up for air only after the cup is emptied, and his friends, they are jubilant. They clobber each other without restraint, a joyful, homoerotic kind of clobbering, eyeing Saba too, all of them. I reckon she’ll do, one says, and she pretends not to hear, she plays deaf. When Saba unbuttons his shirt later, the one with her bacteria hurtling down his stomach, perhaps in the loo, she will look for bruises. They rock to and fro together, Saba and the office worker, bobbing to the beat of crowd pleasers of the early 2000s. She wonders if her mother is asleep, or not. She must be sleeping, what else can she be doing, it is all she can manage, prolonged rest, but maybe she isn’t resting, bogged down by cardigans and rainboots none of them want to wear anymore, maybe she has pushed the humidifiers surrounding her to the side, maybe she’s thrumming with inexplicable emotion, in her walk-in-closet, sensing glorious change, not a moment too soon. 

And this man with Saba’s saliva in his mouth, every commanding drop sinking into his tastebuds, sliding easily past the uvula, will he be to her liking? Will she approve, Saba’s mother, exhausted germ, seizing hold of the one Saba has taken for herself, the second he is presented to her, will she knight him her daughter’s Beloved, and will he let the maternal embrace linger, nothing in his brain but a distortion of bacteria, the compelling microbes scraping away his sense of self? What if she does approve, will they descend into a different routine, different but familiar, the mother, the daughter, the daughter’s prized possession, all three of them sitting crosslegged on the sticky floor of the mother’s closet, feasting on moldy sashimi, awash in the radioactive glow of Love, the Daughter, the Beloved listening rapturously to The Story of How Saba Came To Be? She can hardly stand it, the wait, the strenuous wait, but what is a few more seconds, five seconds and then four, and now two? The office worker comes a little closer to her, Saba allows it, wraps her arms around his sweaty neck, and as his jaw starts to lock, stiffening under the weight of the negroni and a little something extra, Saba presses her lips to his ear. What are you called then?