I

Syrah. The one I love to drink. Plum red in an olive green bottle. Sitting beside me; half empty, unappreciated. I am not one to drink alone.

It is 12:30 am. Sunday morning. I was given an assignment almost two weeks ago. But in the absence of a direction, I’m falling off the page. Monday and Tuesday and Wednesday and Thursday and Friday and Saturday... they collided into each other. I thought maybe this way, maybe that. But no. I have lost all track of time. Or maybe I’ve just lost my mind.

I sit staring out my window, through the scaffolding and all: empty night. Dark alleys. Karachi streets. The city sleeps. The burning embers of my Marlboro Light, my occasional vice, glows incandescent in this dark and colorless world. Just as its last ashes scatter onto the sidewalk below, a light flickers on in a room across the street and a man walks in.

I scramble off my perch and grab my binoculars from my closet, the ones I didn’t think I would ever use here in this city; the ones I had forgotten I owned. I sit back down in my window and pull the binoculars to my face.

II

The empty space on my too large bed. The scent of her skin on the pillows. Strands of her hair, tangled and twisted, still grasping the elastic band she forgot on the bedside table next to the lamp. The light falling against the golden strands; reflecting. It hurts my eyes. I turn away.

I’m tired. The bar was packed tonight with all the students coming back for the fall. I have never liked students. They order beers like there is no tomorrow, they snap their fingers to get my attention, they leave no tips. They are young kids with too much money in their hands. What do they know about the value of it?

Sanaa didn’t come in tonight. She had promised she would and I waited for her. What a fool I am. Her laugh. Her laugh rings melodious in crowded, noisy bars. It echoes in my head now, though it has been five days since I saw her last. And then when I called her this morning, she said she missed me too and would come see me at the bar. She lied.

I need a drink. On my way to the kitchen, I pass the mirror in the hallway. My short hair, rumpled and greasy. My eyes, dark; sinking into the bags around them. I have not slept for days. My goatee, unkempt. My heart, reflected on my face, reflected in the mirror: heavy with emptiness.

Shaking my head, I turn around and enter the kitchen. I pull out a bottle from the wine rack, a glass from the dishwasher, and a corkscrew from the drawer. I head back to my room and sit down at my desk; a window behind me, a window beside me. Syrah. My Syrah. My companion in my solitude, Syrah. Loyal Syrah.

I pour myself a glass, tilt it to my mouth, feel the cool liquid burn on my tongue, and look out the window next to me. Still night. Clear sky. From a window across the street, something falls and crashes, shattering on the sidewalk thunderously.


III

My head exists exclusive of my body. I sit staring into my glass. The deep red sits so clear and still it is hard to imagine that it once reminded me of the blood running through my veins. Running free, yet bound. Bound by the lack of an opening; held hostage within my body. But unlike then, it is now my drink of choice. It is like a trip down memory lane, where memories are the long lingering bouquet of red wine in a glass. For a while they consume you, growing fainter and fainter over time, and eventually all you have left is the slight tint of red at the bottom of the glass, to remind you of what was once there.

I lie back into my bed trying to find something to lose myself into; to be still. The dog barking outside, the sharp slippery sound that I imagine could only come from a small dog; its body’s volume too shallow to allow a deeper “woof”. The sound of the bus… it’s electrical, string instrument sojourn along the web of wires above the Karachi street; fingers passing over the frets of a guitar. The cars. But I cannot see any of it; my back is to the street. There are blinds drawn against my open windows, and then a layer of sheer red curtains. I stare into the red. The blossoming red. The pulsating red. Of strawberries, of blood, of the insides of a vagina, though I have never seen it, but it feels like it must be red. I want to be this curtain. I want to hang there in iridescent catatonia. Shimmering sheer and blushing, like the rouge on the cheeks of a Russian Babushka doll.

I am melting into my bed; my wine and I, we are one. Within the swirling confines of my inebriety, all is heaven. I need not think of her. I need not remember the pain. They do not exist. They are a red tint at the bottom of my glass, at the back of my mind.

Syrah. My local anesthesia. I put my glass down on the windowsill and stretch. I pull my covers up and sink further into my mattress. The blinds swirling against the edges of the window calm me; a lullaby, until: Crash!

Aroused from my beckoning dreams I pull myself upright. What was that sound? I look out the window. Pieces of glass, shattered two stories below. The empty space at the windowsill where the rim of the glass had left behind a red ring. Looking back down to the street, my head spinning, I care and not-care at the same time.

Footsteps, loud against the empty sidewalk, echoing in the street silenced from the trauma below me. A man. He looks up. Our eyes meet.

IV

A sign. It must be a sign, I think. I look up at the sky and see a face. Lost.
I woke up this morning from a pounding headache, my mouth dry as cotton, my stomach empty, and my bed sheets covered in red. It took me a few minutes to realize what was going on. I remembered going out last night for some drinks. I remembered a cop, a messy train, and an angry cabdriver. I was puking in the cab, and he had driven me around for a while since I was too intoxicated to tell him exactly where I lived. It all came back to me. I took a shower, cleaned my sheets, threw out my clothes, grabbed a bottle of water and walked out of my house. “We thought you were dead,” the cop had said, mistaking the pool of puked red wine around me to be blood. I was as good as dead.

My heart felt like a chunk of stone sitting heavy in my chest, and I felt estranged from it. Detached. I was all body: Muscles, skin, and bones. I ran on brain power only, but that was slowly ebbing out. I had left my house in search of something. What? I wasn’t sure. I had walked for hours thinking, not looking where I was going. When my legs grew tired, I found myself lost. I had walked so far that I no longer recognized my surroundings. And now, here I stand alone. With shattering universes beyond me.

I bend down and pick up the largest, the brightest shard of glass from the glittering gems by my feet. I can see the shadow of red gleaming along its edges. Definitely a sign. In each piece of glass I am someone else. Every reflection of me is a reflection of somebody new. Why am I so many different people all at the same time?

I am broken.

I am all these people. Not wanting to drink by myself, but finding myself drowning in it anyway in my solitude as I resent my loneliness. Realization freezes me. I watch time pass by. Hours, minutes, seconds; in slow motion, melting, melding into one another. I am the blade of grass ruffling in the wind behind me. I am the road I stand on. I am the breath that consumes me. I am time.

The wine that brings it all together, the wine that lets it not matter, the wine that eases it all… the drunken stupor of wine, is only a bubble. Beyond it: Shattering universes.