Excerpt: I Never Said That I Was Brave by Tasneem Jamal

Excerpted with Permission from House of Anansi Press

I SHOULD TE LL YOU straight away that Miriam and I had been out of touch for almost two years before she died. No phone calls, no letters, no emails. Nothing. She didn’t want to speak to me, and I respected this. I would go so far as to say I understood it. I carried on with my life and she carried on with hers (as far as I know). It was a particularly busy time for me in those days, what with a new house and a change in job. My life was moving forward rapidly.

Then Miriam died and the undercurrent of my existence shifted. Certainly, I continued to do what I had done before, to wake up and go to work, to make dinners and water the plants, but I felt, if not stalled, slowed down, as you are, for example, in the moment before you change direction. The new coat of paint I had wanted so keenly to add to my living room walls no longer seemed important. My colleagues, undoubtedly frustrated by my repeatedly turning down lunch requests, stopped inviting me to any social events altogether. At night, I had terrifying dreams, usually some manner of the following: I am inexplicably on a ladder or a mountain or a balcony high in the sky in some nebulous place, so overcome by the fear of falling that I cannot move; I am walking in a park in the city and encounter a bear (or a lion or a tiger), enormous and terrifying. I always woke up before I fell, before I was devoured, but with adrenalin coursing through my veins. And, so, I would lie in bed staring at the darkened ceiling, desperate but unable to sleep. All too soon, images of Miriam would come, unbidden. Miriam when we were children. Miriam when we were at university. Miriam during those final, terrible years. 

During the day, I would feel her presence in small, strange ways. For example, sometimes when I was driving my car, I would catch myself holding the steering wheel as she used to, with her left hand only, her right hand limp by her side, habitually freed to shift gears after years of driving a manual transmission. Once in the springtime I sat on the back deck and blinked slowly as I stared at a warbler jumping from branch to branch on the largest maple tree in my yard, and it was Miriam who was blinking; it was Miriam who was living this moment in my life. Initially, these experiences were startling, but I grew accustomed to them. They weren’t unpleasant so much as disconcerting. It’s difficult to convey how these episodes left me feeling except to say that during and immediately afterwards I was over- whelmed by a sense that Miriam was present, not as a ghost upon whom I laid my eyes but as a presence indistinct from my own.

At the time of her death, Miriam had been staying in a small house in the BC Interior. I don’t know if she owned this house or if she was renting it or how, for that matter, she was paying for it at all. I don’t know how long she had been living there. I know only the following facts. One November day, probably early in the morning but no one has pinpointed exactly when, Miriam started her car, a Honda Civic manufactured in the 1980s and not equipped with a catalytic converter. This detail is important because of what happened next. Miriam let the car’s ignition run with the garage door closed and the car’s windows open. A day or two later (it is not clear, as I say, when exactly she started the engine) she was found dead in the back seat of the Civic. Miriam’s four-year-old daughter, Zara, wrapped in a flannel blanket and her mother’s arms, was also dead.

Miriams work or —as she described it to me many times—her “calling,” was to understand the darkness in the universe. I mean this literally. Miriam was an astro- physicist and her research focused on dark matter. The visible universe is only a fraction of what scientists such as Miriam know exists. The majority of the universe is invisible, mysterious. And this mystery is what stirred Miriam, what excited her as nothing else in her life could do. I can see her now, her dyed brown hair pulled into a messy bun, her slender frame covered by a bulky black turtleneck on a cold winter night—a choice much too heavy, as it turns out, for this steamy Indian restaurant on Bloor Street, her favourite, not mine.

I can hear her.

Dark matter holds the universe together. It’s what keeps everything from coming apart. Do you understand? But she doesn’t pause for me to respond, to remind her she has told me this before, many, many times. We know dark matter exists because it distorts what we can see. The more dark matter there is, the greater the distortion. So, it’s like this: We can’t perceive dark matter because it doesn’t interact with light. But it does interact with gravity. Therefore, we can prove dark matter exists because we can see its effect. The distortion in the visible reveals the unknown.

Do you get it?

She is leaning towards me, beads of sweat on her upper lip, the makeup she had on earlier now absorbed by her skin so that her face is ghostly pale. Do you understand?

This is what Miriam does to me. Always. She demands my attention. But I don’t understand. There is so much I don’t understand. I am speaking now of things beyond gravitational forces and cosmology. And here we have arrived at my motivation for telling you about Miriam and about everything that happened, from the beginning. You see, if I try to make you understand, perhaps I will understand—not only Miriam’s choices, but also mine.