M Lynx Qualey
Fair Copy
Cee knew what she planned to request was not strictly legal. She just hoped the plastic surgeon would conveniently forget some of the letters of the law. After all, the woman in the photo had been dead for more than a century, so there could be no private info unlocked by an uncanny resemblance. No living relatives to swindle, either.
Still, eighteen-year-old Cee shivered as she put the photo away, slipping it into its sweetly chemical-smelling plastic sheath, then hiding the sheath inside an old book that had belonged to that long-ago woman. Cee wouldn’t start with plastic surgery. No, the woman hadn’t started with that face—she had grown into it. And, as they say in that old proverb: “first things first.” In this case, Cee felt, the first thing was the language.
**
Once upon a time, Cee’s great-great grandmother had spoken this language with her parents, her friends, her teachers, her neighbors. Then the war came. The family had fled first to a village, and then they had crossed a border, walking hundreds of kilometers to a country where people shouted and spat and told them to leave. While the family hid in a basement apartment, waiting to be resettled, Cee’s great-great grandmother met and fell in love with her great-great grandfather. Neither family approved of their relationship. But the two insisted, leaving everything behind and moving across an ocean to the US.
Their new life and new language were exhausting, and Cee’s great-great grandmother didn’t manage to teach her two daughters the old ones. Although the girls could understand, they didn’t use the old language in their daily lives, and they didn’t speak it with their children. By the time Cee was born, down this long human chain, the language had become just a few curse words, a prayer, and some half-remembered lyrics that Cee’s mother sang to her when she was sick.
None of the aunties, uncles, or cousins cared about the old language. It was gone, they felt. Their lives were here and now. But for Cee, the old language held an almost magical power. She sang the old songs when she was anxious or sad, and they made her feel as though she had slipped outside of time. Both utterly separate and completely a part of everything that had ever been. And, God help her, she wanted more.
But when she reached the very lip of adulthood—when she was seventeen, and she had to make a choice about the direction of her life—she found no university departments that taught the language. Her parents were relieved. They had thought her obsession with this language was a childish fancy, and “What kind of future would you have, studying that? It’s a dead language.”
Outwardly, Cee had acquiesced. As far as her parents knew, she had decided to work days and study toward an engineering degree at night, locked up in her bedroom. And it was true, she worked days at a call center. But secretly, after a grueling search, Cee had found an old woman in a far-off city who agreed to teach her the language. In exchange, the old woman didn’t want money. Instead, she wanted Cee to drive in when the old woman had her foot surgery. “And,” the old woman said, “you come here any time I really need you.” When Cee hesitated, the old woman said, “Oh, never mind, never mind. Let’s forget all about this.”
Cee felt unsteady for a moment, as though her future could go in either direction. But then she agreed to the woman’s conditions.
In the first few meetings, which were every night after Cee finished work, they argued politely about how language should be taught. The old woman wanted to start with grammar. “These are the bones of a language,” she said, clacking her yellowed old teeth together. The old woman had kept her mother’s paper schoolbooks, and now, she squinted as she held them up in front of the camera. The old woman had a special passion for tenses and declensions, and she gave a rambling speech about the old language’s verbs.
But Cee believed that life didn’t begin with bones: it began with one cell, and then two, and then four. She wanted to start with “mamma” and “baba,” “yes” and “no”—and with the silly, rhyming songs that people sang to babies.
“Is that what you think of my language?” the old woman snapped. “That it’s only good for baby talk?”
“I didn’t say that, Ma’am,” Cee said, keeping her voice low, so that her parents wouldn’t overhear.
“Then we’ll do it my way,” the old woman said.
Cee had taken the long-ago photo out of its hiding place and set it on her desk. Now, as she stared at it, she felt a wave of frustration. “I agreed to take care of you, right? So shouldn’t I get some say in this?”
That was a mistake, because the old woman puffed up and said she had no need to be taken care of. In the end, Cee had to apologize and tell the old woman she was sorry, she hadn’t meant it, she was looking forward to the trip. After two more days of negotiations, they finally came to a compromise: half grammar, half talk.
At least, the old woman believed that Cee had compromised. In truth, Cee lived her nights as a small child: eating mush, crawling around, letting her mind wander as she repeated first words and listened to recordings of the old woman. For months, Cee managed to hide all this from the old woman. But one Saturday night, Cee made the mistake of asking about traditional baby foods. The old woman told her to fear God, and she hung up.
“Something wrong?” Cee’s mother asked when she came out of her bedroom that night. Cee had been crawling, and her knees hurt like hell. Her mother gave her a narrow look. “Are you having trouble walking? Should we see a doctor?”
“No,” Cee said, rubbing reaching down to rub at her knees. “Just a little stiff. Studying hard, you know.”
Cautiously, her mother nodded.
The next day was Sunday, and the old woman didn’t answer Cee’s messages. But the old woman always took Sundays off. So Cee went to work at the call center, and she saw her boyfriend in the evening. “God, I’ve missed you,” he said, kissing her mouth so hard her teeth hurt. He grunted as he struggled to unfasten her shirt. “You’ve been working too hard, angel.”
“Mm,” Cee said.
As her boyfriend tugged off her trousers, Cee was thinking about the old woman. Was the crone still mad at her? Was she going to ghost on their next lesson? Cee had finally started to make some progress! She couldn’t stop now.
“You feeling good?” Cee’s boyfriend murmured, as he rolled off her. She moaned into his ear. “So good,” she said.
Thank God, on Monday evening, the old woman answered Cee’s call. Of course, Cee didn’t mention baby food. And she waited several days before asking a grammar question about food.
Cee knew she couldn’t do this the way she wanted: in real time. She did some quick math and decided to start walking after a couple of months, using full sentences after six months, and learning to read after a year. Magically, for that whole first year, she managed to keep her two worlds entirely separate. She would see her parents briefly in the morning before she went to work at the call center; she would spend the day fielding calls, staring at people’s computer screens, and helping them fix problems with the company’s software; she’d have sex with her boyfriend two or three evenings a week, on the way home, plus longer on Sundays. When she got home, she would grab something from the fridge and say hello to her parents. Then she would lock herself in for the night and travel to another place and time.
For that whole year between eighteen and nineteen, Cee’s parents and her boyfriend thought she was studying toward a degree. Her boyfriend thought she was working hard so they could afford an apartment together and eventually marry. Blessedly, for that whole big year, the three of them left her in peace.
**
Then the honeymoon was over. It was a Tuesday after work when Cee’s boyfriend demanded she stay after sex and “have a real, live, actual conversation.” They were on his mattress, in his room at the young Methodist men’s dormitory. She nodded and started to dress, and he grabbed her wrist and said he was serious.
“Karl,” she said, looking right into his wide brown eyes. “I have class in forty-five minutes.”
“Take the day off,” he said, still holding onto her wrist. “Call in sick. We never talk any more. This is important. Us is important.”
“I hear you,” she said. “We can talk on Sunday.”
“You never have time for us.” He said, his voice rising. “Seriously, you’re like a machine that never does anything if it’s not on the schedule. You love your schedule more than you love me.”
As she looked down at his hand wrapped around her wrist, she thought maybe he was right. She did love planning things. And for their relationship, there was nothing more to plan.
“If you don’t give us the time, you’re going to lose us,” he said, his grip slackening.
“Ok,” she said, half-listening.
He let go, as if stung, and she finished dressing. “Is there someone else?” he asked. “Or are you really this much of a clanker?”
She felt suddenly exhausted. “I have to go, Karl.” Then she stood, sealing up her trousers, wrapping the blouse around her breasts and stomach. She touched her lobes, making sure she still had her earrings. When she felt everything was in its place, she stepped over the mattress and walked to the door.
“You’re going to end up alone,” he said, loudly but steadily. “I’m not even trying to hurt you, Cee. I’m just telling it like it is.”
“Ok,” she said.
He lunged toward her at the last moment, reaching for her arm, but she drew back and stepped out through the door, out into the dormitory’s shit-smelling hallway.
It was probably good that they were breaking up, Cee thought, as she took the bus back to her parents’ apartment. After all, she told herself, he’s nineteen. And I’m only six years old.
She cried a little when he sent her the official break-up message. But she reminded herself that she had a greater mission.
**
It was far more difficult when Cee’s parents discovered she wasn’t actually studying toward a degree in engineering. She didn’t want to disappoint her parents, who loved her and worried about her future. As it happened, her mother wanted to give her a gift. She had messaged the university, trying to pay her daughter’s fall tuition. In the process, Cee’s mother discovered that her daughter wasn’t actually enrolled. Stunned, she went into her daughter’s room while she was at work, and she discovered all manners of old-fashioned baby things. Was her daughter pregnant? When Cee got home from work, both parents were standing, teary-eyed, in the main room.
“What happened?” Cee asked, breath disappearing from her lungs. Was her mother ill? Had one of her aunts died? But her mother said, very quietly, “You lied to us.”
Cee blinked.
“We know you’re not studying. Tell us the truth,” Cee’s father said, in a low, coaxing voice. “If you do, then we can help you. Whatever it is, we can help.”
Cee frowned. Telling them the truth would break the wall between worlds. So, she told them she was very, very sorry. She had been late to apply and too embarrassed to tell them the truth.
“Are you pregnant?” her mother asked, cautiously.
“What? No.” Cee shook her head and almost told them she’d broken up with her boyfriend. But she held the tail end of that confession and reeled it back into her mouth.
Her parents made her promise that she would enroll in the engineering program for the next semester. And from now on, she had to tell them the truth. About everything. “Promise us,” Cee’s mother said.
Cee had tipped her head sideways, not promising. The next day, she made another difficult decision.
**
It wasn’t easy to convince the crone. First, the old woman corrected her grammar. Then, as an added insult, she answered in English: “Move in with me? Definitely not.”
Cee slowly explained that she would pay rent, cook for the old woman, and run errands. Plus, she would look after her, post-surgery.
“I like my privacy,” the old woman said.
“Just think about it.”
“No,” the old woman said, making a sour face. “I have thought about it already.”
“Think about it some more.”
The call ended in a stalemate. But the next night, while Cee’s parents thought she was applying to engineering school, she secretly packed up, choosing all the best pieces from her room, the ones that were from the long-ago country. She took care sealing her belongings into nine boxes, which she concealed in her wardrobe. Then she used all her savings to rent a van that she could drive up to the old woman’s city. She made an agreement with work: she would continue to answer calls remotely for six hours a day, and they would pay half her previous salary. Then she waited until the old woman finally conceded.
“I have conditions,” the old woman said.
“Ok.”
“We will get serious about grammar, yes? We will speak only my language. You will be tidy. You will not make noise after 10 p.m. You will not invite people to my apartment. You will not flirt with the neighbors. And you will not embarrass me. As far as anyone knows, you are my niece, who is visiting. Yes?”
“Yes,” Cee said, even though granddaughter would be more believable. “Agreed.”
“And you won’t invite any young men?” the old woman asked, her voice high and thin. “You agree about this?”
“Absolutely,” Cee said. As far as she knew, the woman in the photograph had been alone. Cee would be alone, too.
**
As she drove the moving van up the citizens-only road, Cee imagined that she was traveling both through space and through time. She was slicing her way into a different and parallel universe, where the old country still existed, where the old language was still spoken, where those old ways had flourished. She could feel her body changing. Pieces of her were rearranging. She listened to old songs in the old language the whole way, played by bands that had been popular in the long-ago country, and she sang along with these recordings, trying to match their pitch and pronunciation. She was almost eight years old (21), which meant it was time to get serious about music. During that drive, she felt so giddy with expectation that it felt like there were two of her. She had doubled; she had given birth to a second self.
When Cee arrived, jittery from the long journey—the very longest she had ever made—the old woman didn’t answer her door. Or her phone. Luckily, a young man who lived in the building was sympathetic (“I’m her niece,” Cee lied) and he let her carry her boxes into the lobby and leave them there. “Don’t worry,” he said. “I’ll keep an eye on them.” Reluctantly, she drove the van to the pickup point and took a city bus back. When she jogged up to the building’s front door, she was relieved to peer inside and find all her bags and boxes exactly where she’d left them. Still, the old woman didn’t answer.
Cee sat down outside the building. Night fell. After a while, she couldn’t help it, she started to cry. The longer she cried, the more stupid she felt. What if the grammar crone never lets her in? Slowly, a new feeling unfolded its wings inside her, and shame crept out of all its feathers. She had sold everything she owned, and for what? For a foolish dream in a foolish language that nobody even spoke.
She remembered what her mother had said: “Language is about communication. What’s the point of knowing a language you can’t use?”
Still, Cee had stubbornly believed that knowing this language would transform not just her, but the people around her. She had believed she could retrieve something of the destroyed past and weave it into the present. Now, of course, that seemed crazy. She fell asleep hunched up in the damp night, head in her arms. The same man woke her up and said, “Let’s get you inside.” He helped her carry her nine boxes up to the old woman’s floor, and they took turns knocking until the grammar crone opened and said, “It’s too late. Come back tomorrow.”
Cee started to cry again. When the neighbor said, “But Lula, this is your niece,” the old woman stared at Cee and blinked. Then she said she was only joking. “Come in, girl. Come in.” So, Cee stumbled in, and the neighbor—who looked only a year or two older than her—helped her get all nine boxes inside the door.
**
In the cold light of morning, Cee sat on the old woman’s small guest bed and regretted all her life choices. She wasn’t going to change the world by learning a dead language. (Obviously!) That had been the idiotic fancy of a girl of fifteen. (Clearly!) She was almost twenty-one now, and it was time to grow up. She touched the earrings she wore: first one, and then the other. They were replicas of the ones the woman had worn in that long-ago photo.
Change the world, Cee huffed. Ludicrous. But when she pulled out the long-ago photo, she found that, somehow, she still wanted to do it. So, she walked out to have breakfast with the old woman, who snapped in English that Cee had slept too late, and that, in this house, people woke early and got started on their day. After that, the old woman shifted to the old language. Cee didn’t totally understand, but she nodded as she followed the old woman’s gaze to the dirty dishes on the sideboard. She got up and began to wash.
**
Sometimes, when Cee cried at night in that lonely bedroom—because learning the guitar was hard, and learning the language was hard, and being alone was hard—she couldn’t remember why she had wanted all this. Why was she borrowing the dream of this long-ago dead woman, who had lived more than a hundred years ago? Why couldn’t she make up her own fucking dream? But in the bright afternoons, when the old woman woke from her nap and got out her own guitar, and they both played and sang songs from that country-that-was, then Cee knew. She felt a thinning in the walls between present and past, and she thought she could almost catch hold of it, the elusive why of her dream. She didn’t have words for it. But sometimes, it seemed like it might fly right into her chest.
When Cee had finally saved up enough money for the first round of plastic surgery, she didn’t tell the old woman what she was doing. She just told the crone that she needed the day off, and then she went out into the city. She was twenty-four now, and this was the first time she had been outdoors, on her own, in three years. Everything was louder and closer and faster than she remembered. People’s faces appeared and loomed in front of her, both strange and familiar.
She was afraid: of both the pain, and of doing something irrevocable. Each choice turned her into a different person; she knew that. But she forced herself to keep walking.
“Good morning,” the door assistant said, when she reached the small hospital. “Please hold your phone to the keypad.” When she did, the door assistant said it hoped she had fasted, as per the doctor’s instructions. “Yes,” she said, and the door slid open, so that she could climb through the beautiful, sweet-smelling space to the second floor. She passed a woman whose face was entirely swathed in gauze, and a mother and teenaged daughter holding hands, identical pen marks on their faces.
Cee wasn’t in the waiting room for long. When she was called back into the doctor’s office, he stared at her. He looked down at his phone, then back at her again. His upper lip curled. “It’s doable,” he said. “But why this? I could make you a lot more attractive.”
Cee shrugged. She didn’t want to explain. She knew an explanation would tear apart the fragile tissue of her dream.
He squinted at the photo. “Some boyfriend with a historical-realism fetish?”
When she didn’t answer, he said, “Let’s get started on that nose then.”
So, they started with the nose. Cee went back on the bus that evening, feeling woozy, her nose covered in a bandage.
“Hi,” a man’s voice said, as she stepped off the bus. It took her a moment to realize it was the neighbor who had helped her move into the building three years ago.
“Oh. Hi.”
He touched his own nose. “You get whacked?” He made a little wincing face and said, “Ouch.”
Cee smiled at him, and he laughed as he told her that a broken nose was character-building. “You going back home?” he asked. “I wasn’t expecting you to stay with your aunt this long. It’s really kind of you.”
And the man—who had a slightly crooked nose, and thick black hair, and a little dimple when he smiled—gave her a tender look. Cee laughed and said it wasn’t kindness, since she was living rent-free.
“Well, maybe it works out to kindness in the end,” the man said, and he told her his name was Gerald, or Gerry, and Cee told him hers. After that, Cee snuck down to his apartment when the grammar crone was taking her afternoon naps. She wasn’t sure if it was causing damage to her project, but she told herself that these were business trips to another country, where she briefly spoke English and played American videogames. The man didn’t make any comment when the bandage came off her nose. Maybe he didn’t remember what she had looked like before. It had been three years ago, after all.
But he didn’t make any comment after she had the procedure on her eyes, either. Or on her chin and jawline, even though by that time, they were having sex in the afternoons, when the old woman took her nap. Video games and sex and salty snacks—Cee thought these were pretty excellent business trips. Sometimes, when she nuzzled against Gerald’s chest, she was tempted to stay a little longer. But he had work, which meant getting back upstairs before 3:30 p.m., when the old woman woke, irritable, asking for help getting to the toilet.
**
After Cee had been in the building seven and a half years, when she was twenty-nine, the old woman had a stroke. Cee, full of swift and sudden terror, managed to get her to a hospital. There, Cee sat at the old woman’s bedside, clasping her hand. Gerald came and sat, too. The old woman slipped away without even opening her eyes one last time. Things went so quickly after that, Cee barely understood what was happening. The landlord’s office informed her, in English, that she had to be out of the unit in nine days, and that there would be an auction of the old woman’s possessions. If anything in the unit belonged to Cee, then she had to get it out before assessors came.
“And when is that?” Cee asked the strange-looking avatar from the landlord’s office.
“Day after tomorrow,” the cheerful, machine-generated voice said. “Do not take anything for which you do not have proof of purchase.”
Cee hurried to bring her nine boxes and assorted bags down to Gerry’s apartment on the second floor, apologizing as they dragged things inside. She did steal one thing—the old woman’s guitar—since it looked exactly like the guitar in the photo. That night, Cee put on the earrings and a dress from the old country, and she held the old woman’s guitar. She looked at herself in Gerry’s mirror and found that, yes, she was a fair enough copy of that long-ago woman. She brought the guitar into the living room, where she sang Gerry some of the old songs. After, when they sat on the carpet and talked, their legs splayed out, she felt a sudden warm vulnerability, and she pulled out her phone and showed him a few old video clips of that woman. In them, the long-ago woman laughed and said she wanted to travel the world with her guitar. That had been just before the genocide, Cee explained. The woman had died before she’d gone anywhere.
They sat on the soft carpet in front of his couch, and she set aside her phone. She waited for his response. “I know it’s kind of weird,” she said. But Gerry picked at the carpet and shook his head. “Carrying on the thread of someone’s unfinished dream?” He looked around him, then shivered, as though he too could feel all the dead moving around them: the echoes of their breaths, the long tail of their words.
They spent the night talking through Cee’s journey. After her final surgery, she had gotten a passport, which she now dug out of a bag. She had wanted to change her name—so that it was the same as the long-ago woman’s—but a judge had rejected her request. Still, she told Gerald, “I’m going to perform under that name.” She held her breath, expecting Gerald to laugh, to tell her she was crazy, or maybe that she was disrespecting the dead. Instead, he echoed himself. “I’ll keep an eye on your boxes.”
Cee told him she wasn’t sure how long she’d be gone. The long-ago woman had never gotten this far. Now Cee was out past the script, on her own.
M. Lynx Qualey is a translator and the founding editor of ArabLit and ArabLit Quarterly, as well as co-host of the BULAQ literary podcast. "Fair Copy" is from a collection-in-progress of the same name. Another story from the collection, "Echoes of a Dead Language," won Prairie Schooner's Virginia Faulkner award. Freedom & justice for Palestine, always.