The Symptom 15 – Faryal Rashid
December 30, 2025
1
Yesterday, I learnt that the sabertooth blenny, a parasite that looks a lot like a cleaner wrasse, administers a bite that marine biologists have likened to opioids. I was bored and scrolling some kitschy blog, presumably from 2006. To the left of my screen, pixel dolls and blinking marquees in comic sans. Their mouths are large and gaping. The gums are not pink. The blenny, it would appear, mimics the dance of a wrasse, a fish that actually does clean the dead tissue off the underbellies of larger dumber fish. I imagine its fat striped body staring at itself long enough to believe its own deception. Tracing its reflection in pursuit of a perfect forgery. These kinds of thoughts invariably arrive for me near open drains. This time, it is the kitchen sink, against which I have been leaning for nearly an hour. The fridge is sparse. Wrapped in foil, silver chrome, the yogurt from last month. Two days till expiry. A can of sardines.
Eventually, I leave the house because I need groceries and also possibly hair-dye. It’s been months since I went to the salon, which is too expensive and predictably involves a little too much talking. I walk to a store a five minute walk from my house. Go here once a week probably, usually for cigarettes, sometimes a Diet Sprite. The man working the counter knows me too well, maybe, well enough to know what I’m going to ask for before I ask for it. I find the cosmetics section quickly, it is upstairs. The stairs are narrow. My hands land on a pink box, a L’oreal Excellent Care. Chocolate brown. Fortified with keratin apparently. I am tempted to steal it but have found that cheap objects tend to multiply quickly when stolen. Plus, it is a pain to be caught. In my drawers, I forgo the Sprite for things I have no apparent use for. There’s the blue-silver eyeshadow, a giant crack in the middle. Huge aluminum hoops, sort of awkward-looking. Because my ears are not pierced, I find myself clipping them onto scarves and belts and often my school bag. Inch-long rhinestone nails found at the Penny Arcade, pasted on with super-super glue. Nylons patched with thick globs of nailpolish. The swishing tails of objects collected and discarded. They trot ahead. I’m not sure this can ever be avoided.
2
The autumn I sat us in the car, it was winter really. The Uber did what Ubers do in Karachi. Too fast. No heating. I thought about whether my driver was drunk. A few teeth missing from the front. He did not seem to notice. It was difficult when he smiled. To me, he says dancing is one of the freedoms. Because the mind is a dancing machine, to focus on one thing generally helps stave off any unnecessary images. For this purpose, I kept a contraband Nokia tucked in my sleeve. The phone had been bought at a one-stop shop near a chicken place. It had no SIM. I kept it anyway. Sometimes a hand needs a little to do. Like a fox when lonely, I find and hold it. The grip of a finger that does not rhyme nor count.
It occurred to me that the driver may have suffered from some kind of dementia. Whether there was any actual plaque in his cerebral cortex was not for me to say. But he kept swerving into off-streets and service lanes until the destination seemed fairly out of reach. I blamed the GPS. We passed the same street thrice. Eyes on the steering wheel, he jerked his hand away. The frail fact dropped on me at this point that I was afraid. Out the window, I saw a child not older than five trip on his laces. He bares his tiny teeth in pleasure. I realized quickly that he was some type of fall junkie. There is great joy in repeating the downward descent into a storm drain or a gutter. Both appear to be prevalent in Karachi. Each year, the floods bomb the city. The young ladies are unable to be seated outside. The drains overflow. There are sandals with plastic petunias on nearly every street corner.
Perhaps in these dreary surroundings I’d finally make use of the cowpiss and concrete and unseemly McMansions. Shopping mall-developers, their wives who all looked identical to me with bad platinum balayages and monogrammed LV purses, large parking ramps filled with black Range Rovers. The leather inside smelled like antiseptic to me. Lavender-hand sanitizer and baby-boosters. I don’t remember being an ergonomic child. There wasn’t any time.
3
Through years of intermittent practice, I had learnt how to sit very still and watch the world outside my shitty Honda’s window. There was no better opportunity to test these skills than parked near a field. No gas. Just wheat for miles. The landscape is the greatest illusion of all because from the far corner, you see men shaped like farmers working in the fields. The criss-cross lines, which are legs, I realize, move with frenzied repetition. Upon closer inspection, and the eye sometimes inspects instead of roaming, I noticed them sprawled out on lawn chairs, sipping little tumblers of home-grown moonshine from plastic soda bottles. It could just as well be soda but the cut on the bottle, which has been slashed clean in the middle, suggests something more makeshift. They have no money presumably. It is said to make the world go round. Moonshine is said to make you blind, though most of them seem to have retained their vision. Swag is said to…and so on. The car is cramped and sleepless. About the only thing I trusted now was sleep and that would not arrive until much later.
One after the other, they climbed back up the hill. There is no time to dwell on the fact. I had been sitting in the car for roughly ten hours at this point, had slept then woken again to night which is frightening so I slept again. In my sleeping nostalgia, I imagined my hands to be grains, infested with weevils, insecticides pumped in steadily. Tiny labouring feet spin circles around the infected areas. Black twigs, presumed to be infected, fertilized nightly. On my left, standing against the squamous wall of oily eucalyptuses, a gigantic dog tied to a yellow nylon rope. High as the hairs on his hip, I watch him. The whole funnyfarm of him, his singing seeds. He sings all night. In the deadyard, I sleep.
Night peels my face daily. By morning, I wake.
4
In the off-hours, your neighbors hear you speak to yourself. Each Friday, you are reported launching into a language made entirely of snarls, monosyllables and sudden eager appeals. Each night they fold back the sheets so that your secret may lie naked. Your phone pings pings pings often. You do not pick up. At the hospital you are taken to the doctor with Hermès glasses and a nice smile. Carbamazepine rolls out of his fingers. You ride home with him sometimes. A good man in your corner can make a difference, she says. No it does not.
His voice sloshes through the night, in the cab there are four types of wound drainage. In your case, two appear to be particularly pertinent. Serous drainage, which is clear and watery, indicates healthy healing. This sort is usually best left alone. When it is not, you might observe a thick yellow pus like discharge instead. A purulent wound it is called. Here you are perfected.
A body does that when inert. All bodies make noises to register pleasure or pain. This is sometimes somatic. The elbow twitches at random. You try to time it. It twitches off the clock. Other times the voice of the body becomes the voice of the mouth which is to say it speaks in erudite sentences, under it the crackling of secret transmissions, the hush-hush, the passenger pigeons. Who do not speak. Some instances it begins leaking fluid without cause. It is what you’d notice if you took a scalpel to a stem and split it down the middle, the waxy goo that seeps out. Cropbody oozes a bloody dew. Flows from throat to throat then rolls off into the heart of the flatland. Engulfed by white fields whose walls have neither planes nor curves or angles. Composed thus of a single satiny membrane. In motoring motions, it zigzags across you. The body travels in packs.
We work this step continuously. This is a preventative action. The more we work this step the less we will need the corrective part of this step. This step is a great tool for avoiding grief before we bring it on ourselves. We monitor our feelings, emotions, fantasies and actions. Non-negotiable. The guidelines that keep our institution alive. Shit and death have to be invisible. Smoking not preferred. Gossip is not encouraged but may be employed as necessary. Sometimes I hear people in the meetings, it is said. It’s hard to know what’s going on with the world…I don’t know, it’s just a really hard thing to ignore. It’s not a healthy place for me. I just wanted to get that out of the way. It’s a struggle because. I work my steps, I go to the beach. I think about the houses in New Cross, past Goldsmiths into the leafy inner white stucco, pram-lined, Refugees Welcome admittedly, the total absence of strife. I’d like to share next. I wish for. Their heads impaled on bamboo brushes, charcoal toothpaste, Aesop, scraps of opening my stepworking guide… I had a lot of fear to restart my steps. I felt like it was just yesterday. The sculpted scalp after a religious pilgrimage, I realized, lent me a false sense of security, 25,000 steps around the Kaabah, did not lose a single pound. In my condo in Florida, I feel much more refreshed.
Three rings, some blemishes not accounted for, a dark spot near the mouth, hotpants that roll into the skin like dough. I used to be a bone-aficionado. Push the skin deeper and deeper until it is compelled to say, wishing doesn’t work in recovery. This is not a program of magic. I am wiping the stain with my finger, rubbing furiously, wetting the tip of the thumb, smearing it into my coat. It just disperses. I am thinking of the light-colored fuzz on some people’s necks, and the dark curly baby hairs that coil serpentine on others and how I have neither. It is not magic after all. Suddenly, I am remembering to lock the doors at night, check the knobs on the gas. I never did that sober. Grateful to have the technology. You can buy it online, smaller, compact, it’s just 12.
Years ago, I had an addiction counsellor tell me. You may need a more beautiful design for living. As the undisputed leader of the hypothalamic-pituitary portal system, I’m inclined to believe her. Two jumbo copper lions I saw in her house, standing defiantly pale against the night. Moonlight bounces off the marble. Entertainment! or something like it, heard elsewhere, in the foyer. This is a house with a foyer. Green stems on the table and Murano glass bongs like in the show Weeds. No one said a word to me. What greater prophylactic can there be but silence. Sometimes we slip into the melodrama of wishing what could be. Really one of the best things I can remind myself. It’s not really complex. Just kill the wish.