The Giant Dark by Hasin Sarvat

Author:Hasin, Sarvat
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Dialogue
Published: 2021-07-08T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Twenty

They could have stayed at the kind of hotel that people wrote songs about. She was that powerful now, he was learning this every second. He’d heard her on the phone requesting a house instead, telling whoever it was who arranged these things for her in a hushed voice that she could really use the ‘space’. Everything she said sounded like a question. He couldn’t tell if it was her accent, which was thicker here in America than it had been when they were in Europe. It had the quality of being watered down in London, lighter and lilting the words around her. Now, this soft questioning tone, as if anyone was going to deny her anything, as if the world wasn’t completely hers, there for the taking.

People name drinks after her. They paint elaborate studies of her body and face and present them to her. Teenagers shuffle like crabs caught in a wave, so nervous in her presence that their otherwise warm glowiness goes brittle. Grown men cry openly when they meet her, reveal tattoos of her lyrics on their wrists, their bulging biceps, in the middle of their pale pasty backs. He notices one, the line about a screaming heart under a hot sun. It is his. He thinks about mentioning it to Aida but really, all of this seems to skim over her. In London, at the premiere, two youths screamed their love for her, leaning their bodies so far over the ropes that separated the red carpet from the plebeians that security had to physically restrain them. Aida had only blinked, her thick eyelashes fluttering darkly.

The world shifts to accommodate Aida, which is irritating even if he too benefits from this by association. Drinks are presented when they arrive places. Houses or hotel rooms are acquired everywhere without her having to pick. ‘A godsend,’ she said in one of the rare instances where she acknowledged this machinery that moved around her, a key being dropped in her hand as soon as they got to Montreal. ‘You know how much I hate decisions.’

‘Yes,’ he responded. ‘What would you do if you didn’t have someone to book your accommodation for you?’ And Aida, taking this more playfully than he’d intended it, had smacked him lightly on the arm.

Roger offers to take them around. Los Angeles is his favourite city, which doesn’t surprise Ehsan. Neither of them has ever been before. He is making Roger coffee in the long pale kitchen with duck-egg blue cabinets and lemony curtains, the kitchen that for the next six days is theirs. He rests his arms heavily on the marble worktop. Everything in the house is shades of white, like a church. The bedroom is marabou chic, feathery lampshades and pink nightstands, big candles, every fluffy adornment announcing the room’s invitation to fornication. He imagines fucking Aida on the shag carpet, holding her hair from behind as if posing for invisible cameras, the two of them simpering to the audience, choreographing their moans.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.