I gave up heroin and went home and began the methadone treatment administered at the outpatient clinic and I didn’t have much else to do except get up each morning and watch TV and try to sleep at night, but I couldn’t, something made me unable to close my eyes and rest, and that was my routine, until one day I couldn’t stand it any more and I bought myself a pair of black swimming trunks at a store in the centre of town and I went to the beach, wearing the trunks and with a towel and a magazine, and I spread my towel not too far from the water and then I lay down and spent a while trying to decide whether to go into the water or not, I could think of lots of reasons to go in but also some not to (the children playing at the water’s edge, for example), until at last it was too late and I went home,

On the boat we were mostly virgins. We had long black hair and flat wide feet and we were not very tall. Some of us had eaten nothing but rice gruel as young girls and had slightly bowed legs, and some of us were only fourteen years old and were still young girls ourselves. Some of us came from the city, and wore stylish city clothes, but many more of us came from the country and on the boat we wore the same old kimonos we’d been wearing for years – faded hand-me-downs from our sisters that had been patched and re-dyed many times. Some of us came from the mountains and had never before seen the sea, except for in pictures, and some of us were the daughters of fishermen who had been around the sea all our lives. Perhaps we had lost a brother or father to the sea, or a fiancé, or perhaps someone we loved had jumped into the water one unhappy morning and simply swum away, and now it was time for us, too, to move on.

On the boat the first thing we did – before deciding who we liked and didn’t like, before telling each other which one of the islands we were from, and why we were leaving, before even bothering to learn each other’s names – was to compare photographs of our husbands. They were handsome young men with dark eyes and full heads of hair and skin that was smooth and unblemished. Their chins were strong. Their posture, good. Their noses were straight and high. They looked like our brothers and fathers back home, only better dressed, in grey frock coats and fine Western three-piece suits. Some of them were standing on sidewalks in front of wooden A-frame houses with white picket fences and neatly mowed lawns, and some were leaning in driveways against Model T Fords. Some were sitting in studios on stiff high-backed chairs with their hands neatly folded and staring straight into the camera, as though they were ready to take on the world. All of them had promised to be there, waiting for us, in San Francisco, when we sailed into port.

On the boat we often wondered: Would we like them? Would we love them? Would we recognize them from their pictures when we first saw them on the dock?

On the boat we slept down below, in steerage, where it was filthy and dim. Our beds were narrow metal racks stacked one on top of the other and our mattresses were hard and thin and darkened with the stains of other journeys, other lives. Our pillows were stuffed with dried wheat hulls. Scraps of food littered the passageways between berths and the floors were wet and slick. There was one porthole and in the evening, after the hatch was closed, the darkness filled with whispers. Will it hurt? Bodies tossed and turned beneath the blankets. The sea rose and fell. The damp air stifled. At night we dreamed of our husbands. We dreamed of new wooden sandals and endless bolts of indigo silk and of living, one day, in a house with a chimney. We dreamed we were lovely and tall. We dreamed we were back in the rice paddies, which we had so desperately wanted to escape. The rice paddy dreams were always nightmares. We dreamed of our older and prettier sisters, who had been sold to the geisha houses by our fathers so that the rest of us might eat, and when we woke we were gasping for air. For a second I thought I was her.

After Jin-Ah got the call from the doctor’s office, she gazed out of her living-room window. Thick clouds, black and hulking, stared back. It was mid-November, and drizzling. The low, grungy sky looked more like a wall than atmosphere. Even Will’s favourite tree across the street seemed raw and thin, but little brown birds still whipped in and out of it as if it were spring. Jinny took this as a good sign. Only happy birds flitted about like that, she thought, and decided that she might also be happy. Then, just at that moment, a little brown bird, the size of a coin purse, flew straight into her window, making a crisp clunk.

Jinny shrieked.

She dropped the phone which she had forgotten to put down after the doctor’s call. The battery pack and bits of plastic scattered across the wood floor. Damn it, she said to herself, and got to her knees, making sure not to move too suddenly for now a tiny something was starting inside her, dividing inside her. While putting the phone back together she couldn’t help but laugh at herself for having shrieked when no one was around to hear it. If Will had been home, she wouldn’t have made a sound. Will liked silence. He liked for the air to remain still. Sometimes they went entire evenings without talking and Jinny had simply grown accustomed to this.

She popped in the battery pack, scrunched in the wires. The baby, of course, would not be silent. Fearing Will’s reaction, she considered telling him the news in public. Dinner at a restaurant, perhaps. A place with candles and circular booths of velvet. The idea cheered her up. The baby news would melt them back to love. Maybe they would sit side by side and hold hands, though they hadn’t done so in a while, not even in private. She would look into his eyes, and if the moment felt soft enough, she would playfully hint at being pregnant by reciting a poem. ‘I’m a riddle in nine syllables,’ she would start, and after saying the final lines (I’ve eaten a bag of green apples, boarded the train, there’s no getting off) she would make Will guess what she was, the way she made her AP English students guess. Will was a dentist, not a man of literature. He stared into mouths in search of disease. But he did enjoy puzzles and might like solving this riddle-poem. Jinny looked out of the windows again, the screens now jewelled with raindrops. They could take a cab to Lincoln Park and then, if time allowed, stroll to whichever restaurant caught their eye, light drizzles and grey skies be damned.

You wet your hair in the sink, then comb it back, slick as a new trash bag. You look nice. OK, so your name is Ricky. You are twenty-three years old. People say you’re sweet. You say to them, ‘No, I’m not.’ But you are. You know you are. You can’t help it. It’s like there’s a piece of candy hidden deep inside you and everyone is trying to find the easiest way to get it out.

Your cellmate, Donald Budke, he’s like Rasputin, or Genghis Khan, maybe even Napoleon Bonaparte. No one tells Donald he’s sweet. His motives are serious, and he’s got acne scars which make him look like a criminal. He is a criminal. He’s ten years older than you, is on his fourth year of a fifteen-year sentence for manslaughter. You’re just a high-school history teacher from southern Indiana, or at least you used to be.

On the day you were arrested, the US Customs agent said, ‘What the hell are you doing, Ricky?’ like he knew you or something, like he was really disappointed. ‘Who’s the vehicle registered to, Ricky?’ You told him it was your grandmother’s. You gave him your driver’s licence, your car keys. He asked you to sit in the back of his patrol car while he searched your trunk. You watched through the windshield, waiting for him to find the five cottage-cheese containers full of oxycodone you’d hidden beneath the spare tyre. The sky was pink, like a drop of blood in a glass of water. You thought, Mexico is like an art film. You thought about the ten or so pills in the pocket of your pants, wished there was some way of keeping them so you could eat them later, in the event you were placed under arrest. You didn’t want to eat any of them right then. You were already as high as a butterfly. You fished the handful out of your jeans pocket and put two in your mouth anyway, waited for the spit to come, swallowed. The rest you chewed into a paste and spat on to the floorboard of the patrol car while the customs agent rifled through your roadside emergency kit.

They are very rigid, stubborn women from Bolivia. They resist and sabotage whenever possible.

They came with the apartment. They were bargains because of Adela’s low IQ. She is a scatterbrain.

In the beginning, I said to them: I’m very happy that you can stay, and I am sure that we will get along very well.

This is an example of the problems we are having. It is a typical incident that has just taken place. I needed to cut a piece of thread and could not find my six-inch scissors. I accosted Adela and told her I could not find my scissors. She protested that she had not seen them. I went with her to the kitchen and asked Luisa if she would cut my thread. She asked me why I did not simply bite it off. I said I could not thread my needle if I bit it off. I asked her please to get some scissors and cut it off – now. She told Adela to look for the scissors of la Señora Brodie, and I followed her to the study to see where they were kept. She removed them from a box. At the same time I saw a long, untidy piece of twine attached to the box and asked her why she did not trim off the frayed end while she had the scissors. She shouted that it was impossible. The twine might be needed to tie up the box some time. I admit that I laughed. Then I took the scissors from her and cut it off myself. Adela shrieked. Her mother appeared behind her. I laughed again and now they both shrieked. Then they were quiet.

In 1907 a woman from San Francisco named Alice B. Toklas arrived in Paris. She was going to meet a fellow American living there already. She was excited because she’d heard a lot about Gertrude Stein.

In 2011 a woman from London named Louise was travelling by Eurostar to Paris. Louise was troubled. Louise was travelling alone because she was trying to understand something about love.

Louise was in a relationship; it felt like a ship, though her vessel was a small boat rowed by herself with a cabin for her lover. Her lover’s ship was much bigger and carried crew and passengers. There was always a party going on. Her lover was at the centre of a busy world. Louise was her own world; self-contained, solitary, intense. She did not know how to reconcile these opposites – if opposites they were – and to make things more complicated, it was Louise who wanted the two of them to live together. Her lover said no – they were good as they were – and the solitary Louise and the sociable lover could not be in the same boat.

And so Louise was travelling alone to Paris.

I am Louise.

Carlitos loved the United States. He papered the walls of his room with American flags and tourist posters from odd places, like ‘Idaho, Home of the potato’. He said all the words he could in English, for example ‘Hershey’s’ or ‘Chuck Norris’, and when he did, he chewed on the syllables until they sounded the way they did in movies. I suppose he pronounced the language really well, because nobody understood anything. People had to ask him several times what exactly he had said.

It isn’t that Carlitos was trying to take anyone in. Just the opposite. I never knew anyone as authentic. He was incapable of pretending anything he didn’t really think, though he really didn’t think about too many things. If we became friends, it was because neither of us had more ideas than were strictly necessary. That brings people together.

Carlitos’s father, an extremely fat man, was an officer in the Peruvian navy. He had studied in panama, in the School of the Americas, and then somewhere in the United States in a place whose name I’ve forgotten, something like Naples. In the outside world, he moved around preceded by an escort car, dressed in a black uniform and a white visored hat, which helped to hide his bulk. But indoors he was always in his shorts and undershirt. Seeing his enormous belly about to burst through the undershirt, no one would have imagined he was so important.

Granta introduces Jamil Ahmad with this tale of two lovers who spark a blood feud when they elope. They find unlikely shelter at a desert garrison and there establish a quiet life, punctuated only by the seasons of desert dust and heat. But even as they make a home, the past slowly stalks them. Rich and lyrical, this remarkable tale evokes a harsh climate, an unforgiving tradition and the stubborn optimism of love.

As cadets, we rubbed Coca-Cola on our soles so we wouldn’t crack open our heads while playing outside. The dew soaked the concrete and we glided on the court like an aeroplane when it rains, our hands hidden in our fists, the pavement greasy beneath Saturday’s frost, and just at the mouth of the airport, eleven pale giants fastened to the seats like packages, the pilot narrows his eyes so that the nose meets the blue lines, the wind, the rain, all of the gods’ lightning illuminating our enormous jaws. On those winter courts, how we broadsided those boys from the Salesian school, there go the boys having taken communion – we used to say – there go the boys parading their embroidered crests, no one breathes until the aeroplane rushes on the runway and the pilot releases the brakes. A pitch-dark night: the sky falls in pieces over Treviso, it always rains in Treviso, what does it matter if from here to the hotel and from the hotel to the field we’re watched by the guard dog, oh, how we bit as cadets, how we rushed at anyone, and one Saturday they came to see me from La Caja and they shook my hand like a gentleman, they said, aren’t your parents home? Damn, you can really hit it, how would you like to try spending some time with us? La Caja! With Izquierdo and Lafuente and that tower of curls who was shooting at just fifteen years old, a trunk with elephant ankles who moved slooooowly like a mimic, but when he got it down court, oh, La Caja. My folks said fine, but only if you go on with school, and there was Mom, crying as if I were going off to Antarctica, don’t cry, Mommy, I’ll come home every weekend, all those hours on the bus that brings back the San Fernando recruits, heads shaved and bone-thin as lepers, sad and gloomy-faced with their backpacks hanging at their shoulders, their noses covered in pimples. Two breakfasts, meat at lunchtime, fish for supper, piles of vegetables on tin trays: we also made up an army, an army of gigantean kids with sharpened hands, prominent Adam’s apples and the shadow of a moustache.

First her ears hear; they open. Then her eyes can see; they open. Her face, a revolving door, swings open and shut, open and shut. She no longer sleeps at night; it’s too hard to breathe after four breast-implant operations. She drops, like rain down a window, collapsing in fatigue, breathing through her mouth, and even exhaustion seems miraculous. Then during the daytime, tiredness and lack of sleep bring on momentary, frenzied fits of rage. She’ll walk into a shop and, if no one rushes to help her, she screams and causes chaos. The people around her turn to look. Mónica can see their faces – they’re disgusted, they’re shocked – she feels their eyes look her up and down, feels them on her, climbing her legs, hanging from her hips, her breasts, their eyes. When she walks out into the street, their eyes tinkle like little bells jingling from her flesh and that brings back her smile; for days now there’s been something new in the world: her body bathed in their looks, but, like acid, something has coursed through her and eaten away the sweetness. Even the house has changed; it’s been all chopped up. There are times when she wants to go to the bathroom and ends up in the kitchen, and vice versa.

‘It’s because I’m not sleeping,’ she thinks.

But not sleeping is as familiar as the pen marking the page in her operation diary, suspended there, like a thought containing everything. Who is that, walking at night? Who makes that noise, those footsteps that are suddenly beside her bed and then stop? It’s as though someone were really sitting there; she feels their weight, in the middle of the night, and thinks, ‘Now they’re going to touch me.’ And she plays with that touch, she whets it. She changes position again, opens her mouth again, as wide as she can. Inhales. Even the air is weightless now, no longer dense enough to fill her lungs, to oxygenate her blood, as it used to. Her breasts hover on either side of her body, she’s suffocating. She tries sitting up and then lies back down. She thrashes around, loses consciousness for three hours and then suddenly regains it, flails her white arms, startled.

‘Tomorrow I have a film shoot,’ she says aloud.

Immediately she wonders if she really said it aloud or only thought the words. She wants to say them aloud, and so touches her fingertips to her lips to make sure they’re moving this time.

‘Tomorrow I have a film shoot,’ she repeats.

In the beginning, the great river was believed to flow out of a lion’s mouth, its size reflected in its ancient name – Sindhu, an ocean. The river was older than the Himalayas; the Greeks had called it Sinthus, the Romans Sindus, the Chinese Sintow, but it was Pliny who had given it the name Indus. One night under the vast silence of a perfect half-moon and six stars, a mosque appeared on a wooded island in the river, and Leila was woken by the call to prayer issuing from its minaret just before sunrise. It was the day she was to be blessed with a son.

As she knew there was no mosque within hearing distance, her initial impression was that the air itself was singing. Leila manoeuvred herself out of bed and went towards the door, making sure not to disturb her mother-in-law who had taken to sleeping in the same room as her in these last days before the birth. The servant girl appointed outside the door had fallen asleep, and as Leila moved past, a bad dream caused the girl to release a cry of fear.

Leila was fourteen years old, thin-framed with grey, glass-like eyes and a nervous flame always burning just beneath her pale skin. She pursued the song of faith drifting in the fifty-roomed mansion that had been in her husband’s family for several generations. The river with its boats and blind freshwater dolphins and drowned lovers was half a mile away, and there was nothing but rocky desert and thick date orchards between the riverbank and the mansion.

Long after the voice withdrew, she continued her search for its origins, now and then placing an ear against a wall. Earlier in the night she’d heard momentary fragments of other songs from the men’s side of the mansion, where her husband was celebrating the imminent arrival of his first son in the company of musicians and prostitutes. No doubt they were all asleep by now.

The windows in the women’s section of the house were inaccessible, nudged up against the ceiling, so the light poured in but not enough air. Leila was looking up at one of them when she heard someone come in behind her.

‘You shouldn’t be down here,’ Razia, her mother-in-law, said, unable to conceal her alarm. ‘If you needed something you should have asked one of the servants.’ Her attenuated face was wheat­coloured and pitted with smallpox scars. She had long white hair and every other year a doctor would inject liquid gold into her bones and joints to counter the ravages of time. ‘You should be resting,’ she said. It was the tone she had employed a year earlier when Leila came to the mansion as a bride, a tone suitable for the child that Leila had been back then. Someone who longed for her dolls and frequently misplaced her veil. But as soon as she became pregnant there was no end to Razia’s devotion and love. Along with the abundant care came the vigilance, an ever-present awareness that the girl was not mature enough to know the importance of the asset taking form inside her body.

I hear the window shatter. There’s no air conditioner on to muffle the sound. I get out of bed. I wish I wasn’t my age. I wish I was as old as my parents. Or as young as my son. I wish it didn’t have to be me telling my wife to stay where she is, saying everything will be fine in a voice she doesn’t believe and I don’t believe either. We both hear the shouting downstairs. ‘Put on some clothes,’ I’m saying to her. ‘it’ll be better if you’re wearing clothes.’

The electricity’s gone so I use my phone to light the way. Already there’s the sound of men running up the wooden stairs. I shut the bedroom door and lock it behind me. Shadows are jumping and stretching from multiple torches. I raise both my hands. ‘I’m here,’ I say to them. I want to say it loudly. I sound like a whispering child. ‘Please. Everything is all right.’

I’m on the floor. Someone has hit me. I don’t know if it was with a hand or a club. My mouth is full of liquid. I can’t get any words out. I’m gagging and I have to let my jaw hang open so I can breathe. Behind my back my wrists are being taped together. It feels like electrical tape, the kind of tape you wrap around a tennis ball for street cricket when you’re a kid. I’m lying on my face and there’s a grinding pain from that so I make some noise before I black out.

An editor at Le Monde calls to invite me to write a short story for their summer series. These are supplements that appear on the weekends and enjoy a significant readership, it seems. Seven or eight thousand words on the subject of travel. My first impulse is to refuse, because I can’t come up with an idea, and then I remember that Sophie had once asked me: Why don’t you write an erotic story? For me. I’d said: I’ll think about it. And I do think about it. In fact, I call the journalist back to say that I’ll take him up on his offer after all, but under one condition, which is that I can choose the date of publication. That can be arranged, he says. So, great. It’s the end of May, and I want the piece to appear in Le Monde as a surprise for Sophie on 20 July, when she will be taking the train to join me and my family on the Île de Ré. I polish off the story in three days, just before leaving for Kotelnich. I don’t tell Sophie anything about my plan. I have no idea that this story will horribly damage my life, and I don’t think I have ever written anything with such ease and delight. I’m not brooding over my grandfather any more. I’m having fun, laughing out loud, quite pleased with myself.

The lottery to choose her next husband was to take place at the Imperial Palace. Kiyoko got up earlier than usual and headed down to Odaiba. The inlet, covered with black stones, was always gloomy, and it was hard to believe it was in the South Seas. Hemmed in by jutting cliffs, the seawater appearing to rise up so much it blocked the entrance, it was an oppressive site. Kiyoko felt locked in and just couldn’t bring herself to enjoy the beach. This was the very spot where, five years before, she and her husband Takashi had stumbled ashore after their cruiser had been wrecked. In the midst of a terrible storm, as she spied the island in the distance, she’d been overjoyed, but now she spent each day gazing back out at the ocean knowing she couldn’t escape.

July 28
Duane Moser
1077 Pincay Drive
Henderson, Nevada 89015

Dear Mr Moser

On the afternoon of June 25 while on my last outing to Rhyolite, I was driving down Cane Springs Road some ten miles outside Beatty and happened upon what looked to be the debris left over from an auto accident. I got out of my truck and took a look around. The valley was bone dry. A hot west wind took the puffs of dust from where I stepped and curled them away like ashes. Near the wash I found broken glass, deep gouges in the dirt running off the side of the road, and an array of freshly bought groceries tumbled among the creosote. Coke cans (some full, some open and empty, some still sealed but dented and half full and leaking). Bud Light cans in the same shape as the Coke. Fritos. Meat. Et cetera. Of particular interest to me were the two almost-full prescriptions that had been filled at the pharmacy in Tonopah only three days before, and a sealed Ziploc bag full of letters signed M.

At some point during the lecture Sándor would get up, point a finger at Professor Teleki and accuse him of lying – and Teleki would gasp and sputter and grow red in the face and the audience would love it. But it wasn’t an act, and Teleki had approached Sándor many times – either personally or through his agent – to ask what his problem was. He even offered him money, which Sándor accepted, only to break his promise and show up at the lectures again – to the point where audiences started expecting him, as if Teleki’s presence was secondary, playing the straight man to this hectoring, vindictive blind guy who was the star of the show.

The employees could tell that the company was floundering and that some of them would lose their jobs soon. For a whole morning Tian Chu stayed in his cubicle, processing invoices without a break. Even at lunchtime he avoided chatting with others at length, because the topic of layoffs unnerved him. He had worked here for only two years and might be among the first to go. Fortunately, he was already a US citizen and wouldn’t be ashamed of collecting unemployment benefits, which the INS regards as something like discredit against one who applies for a green card or citizenship.

Around mid-afternoon, as he was typing, his cellphone chimed. Startled, he pulled it out of his pants pocket.

At first they thought the white things in the trees were plastic bags. You saw that back in Brooklyn all the time: scraps of sheeny litter caught in the branches of sidewalk ginkgos and sycamores. But out here in the middle of the French countryside it was a shock.

Today, my brothers, Mohammed and Rubel, are going to foreign. Mohammed is going to Africa and he wears a very handsome uniform.

(Our mother has died.)

Rubel wears an orange jumpsuit.

On the river island where we live, the water has turned to salt. The fish have disappeared, and only the shrimps are left. Mohammed has a lucky forehead, so he is going to foreign, and Rubel, whose forehead is unlucky, is also going to foreign, because he wants to be like Mohammed, and not take money from Mohammed, and marry his girl Komola.