The Reluctant Fundamentalist by Mohsin Hamid Page A

tentatively, attempting to steel myself against what I might find. What I found was not at first particularly alarming: Erica reclined on her bed, pale, yes, as though she had a fever, and with hair that had gone some time since it was last washed, but seemingly in good spirits. She patted the space beside her and offered me her forehead to kiss as I sat down.
    We spoke for a while as though nothing unusual had happened and we were meeting under the most ordinary of circumstances. I told her about my project in New Jersey—the negative reaction to our presence by the employees of the cable company, Jim’s words of advice—and about the day-to-day occurrences in my life since she had seen me last. She told me about her doctor and her medication, how the drugs made it difficult to concentrate and so her days seemed to slip away with nothing to show for them. Given the relaxed manner in which she described it an observer would have been forgiven for thinking that her condition was not serious and she was on the mend—until I asked about her novel.
    I immediately regretted doing so. Her eyes began to wander, and her voice became less sure. “I can’t seem to work on it,” she said. “Every time I try, I just get upset. I haven’t been taking my agent’s calls. Poor guy. He must think I’m a lunatic.” I remarked that writers were known to be eccentric and so it was unlikely her agent was particularly perturbed, and then I tried to change the subject, but she would not have it. “It doesn’t help anymore,” she said. “I used to turn to it, my writing, when I needed to get something out that was stuck inside. But I can’t get it out now. It pulls me in, you know? I dwell on it instead of writing it.” I tried to prevent myself from asking her what it was—whether because I thought it would upset her or because I thought it would upset me, I do not now know—but I failed. “It’s whether there’s something left,” she explained, suddenly and unsettlingly calm, “or whether it’s all already happened.”
    How can I describe to you, sir, how much her words disturbed me? She glanced away, and I saw her recede into her mind. I placed my hand next to hers, hoping as I had done innumerable times in the past to lure her out of her thoughts. I watched our skin—mine healthy and brown, hers sickly white—separated by a distance not greater than the width of an engagement ring, but she did not notice me. I waited for my proximity to make itself felt to her; a minute passed in this fashion. Then she removed her hand from where it lay and—without ever looking in my direction—covered it with her other hand on her lap.
    When Erica’s mother entered shortly thereafter, I did not feel she was interrupting. No, she was not preventing the continuation of a discussion between her daughter and myself; she was merely bringing to an end my intrusion on a conversation Erica was having with Chris—a conversation occurring on some plane that I could not reach or even properly see. Erica waved a good-bye to me as I left her room, but she did so with her face averted, so I could not meet her gaze. Her mother thanked me for coming and asked me to wait for Erica to contact me before coming again. And with that, and a gentle kiss on the cheek, the door to the elevator was shut upon me and I began to travel down the shaft, alone.
    I returned to my apartment and spent that night in semidarkness, in the glow of the city’s lights entering through my windows, wondering as I would wonder for many months thereafter—indeed, as I sometimes wonder to this day—where Erica was going. I never came to know what triggered her decline—was it the trauma of the attack on her city? the act of sending out her book in search of publication? the echoes raised in her by our lovemaking? all of these things? none of them?—but I think I knew even then that she was disappearing into a powerful nostalgia, one from which only she could choose