Hangman by Maya Binyam

Author:Maya Binyam [Binyam, Maya]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

NINE

So, I stood where I stood, waiting for my life to happen. However, no one seemed interested in talking with me, which is how important life events usually began: with strangers imposing themselves in pleasant or unpleasant ways, forcing another person to react, regardless of whether or not they were prepared for the interaction. Sometimes life events would occur one right after the other, and sometimes years and years would go by without any life event, such that a person would begin to forget that they were an individual at all. That was how people became naive. They started to believe that they existed in the world in an anonymous, supportive capacity, providing the means by which other people could feel their lives coming into focus. But no one was so lucky as to live a life that was completely indistinguishable, even if they had already lived through so many universal life events, birth, death, oppression, whatever, as to have fulfilled what they wished to be their life allotment.

I wondered to what extent my theory had been gleaned from experiences in my own life versus what I had observed in the lives of others. In some ways, I really had become a supportive figure, fielding my brother’s requests for money, medicine, and the like, which had surely pushed him toward positive interactions with strangers, i.e., unknown but potentially knowledgeable doctors, who in turn pushed him toward similarly positive life events, i.e., healing. But I just as often denied my brother’s requests for money, medicine, etc., which might have made me seem to him a cruel stranger, given that the brother he knew, or claimed to know, would have done anything for a brother in need, even if it constituted a financial burden. If that had been the case, if my brother viewed me as an unsympathetic person despite our close biological relation, my refusal to fulfill his requests might have constituted an imposition of the unwelcome variety, inducing in his days a series of negative life events, i.e., getting sicker.

Unfortunately, I didn’t have much time to think on that front, because another life event was heading my way, this time taking the form of another official-seeming man. I waited for him to ask for my name, admission fee, identification documents, or some other meaningless but supposedly essential thing. But he didn’t do anything like that. Instead, he just said hello, smiling as if it was completely normal to greet strangers with kindness, even ones who had completely lost their influence on the world, their family, and their own personal life. I said hello, trying to make my face match his expression. These days, I couldn’t make my face do anything. It just did what it wanted: smiled, frowned, dangled around, whatever.

The man wasn’t wearing a uniform or any kind of hat. In fact, his head was completely bald, even more so than my own. He looked to be about seventy-five and was dressed in a shirt and pants almost identical to the ones I was wearing.

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