fatima and freddie

sona verdi

FATIMA IS SITTING ON THE FLOOR of her childhood bedroom, her laptop open in her lap. She thinks of this space in the past tense, as the room that used to be her room, even though she has not lived anywhere else. There are posters of Freddie Mercury on the walls. On most of them he is striking a triumphant, victorious pose. His sweat sparkles like glitter and he has the same look in his eyes that her uncle gets when he’s talking about Allah. The glossy paper around the mustached lips is warped and matte from being French kissed on several occasions.

The room stopped existing in the present tense on the day of Fatima’s graduation. She walked across the stage and received her diploma from the vice principal. He called her by the nickname of her classmate, also a hijabi, who had received her diploma from him fifteen minutes prior. He looked straight into Fatima’s eyes as he raised his hand to offer her a handshake.

Despite her furiously shaking head, he still held out his palm. Sometimes she would just give in and commit the sin of casual indecency for the sake of convenience, but her father was in the crowd. So she stared at the hand apologetically until the man cleared his throat and lowered it. The photographer captured their photo and she wobbled off the stage. Her father printed twenty copies of that photo. It shows her and the principal looking remorsefully at the ground as she holds her newly earned diploma. She pinned one to the inside of her wardrobe door. The closet light is broken and so she never has to see it.

Most of Fatima’s friends moved away after graduation. It has been half a year since then. That’s when everyone started calling their bedrooms their “childhood bedrooms,” and Grand Rapids their “hometown.” She adapted, even though nothing had really changed for her. She still lived with her parents and uncle. Instead of school, she went to work at a local Chinese supermarket.

She mostly stocked the shelves and wrote fortune cookie prophecies. She scribbled them on unevenly cut slices of paper. The trick was to insert them into the cookies quickly, right after they were done baking and before she crimped them over the edge of a glass. She wrote anything that came to mind, like “a bad day only lasts one day” and “if God exists, he is too large to care about you.” Sometimes she would write things like “the person to your left is in love with you” and giggle to herself picturing her unsuspecting victims.

Fatima used to message strangers after school. There were chat rooms full of teenagers pretending to be prettier and older and sadder than they really were. Fatima liked to pretend to be someone blonde and cute, someone whose sadness was easier to label in known terms. But as she grew older the teens in the chat rooms grew inexplicably younger. Evicted from her safe space, she searched the internet for a substitute. She found only approximations.

Fatima opens her bookmarked window with an AI chatbot and types the first prompt.

> Write me a story: Freddie Mercury meets a 19-year-old named Fatima. They fall in love

The World Wide Web spits back an answer. Fatima reads it with furrowed eyebrows, slowly peeling dry skin off her toes. It is overly general and fails to make her feel anything. It downplays Freddie’s fame. It says she is “carefree” and “artistic.” Fatima needs both more and less specificity. She needs the protagonist to be worse than her, not better, so that Freddie’s involuntary adoration seems more realistic by comparison. She hovers her fingers over the keyboard for a few seconds, then types.

> He is famous and adored. The love he possesses has real power. It keeps half the world running. Whenever anyone sees a white wifebeater or a chevron mustache or the color yellow, they think of him.

> Fatima lives with her parents and writes lies for a living. She wears a hijab. It makes her even lonelier. Nothing reminds anyone of her. She reminds most people of someone else.

> There is symmetry in their extremes - excess and lack. It makes them equally lonely.

More paragraphs overtake the screen. Fatima searches the flowery text for truth and comes up short. There are only the beginnings of it, where the regurgitation most closely matches the prompt. It is not enough. She furiously types more.

> There is a hole in her chest. It screams as if on an inhale, as if it’s a wind tunnel, but only she can hear it. Inside lives a strange, untranscribable sadness. She feels like a foreigner even to herself.

Fatima holds her breath as her input is swallowed and digested and spat back out. The AI no longer improvizes - she recognizes her own words amidst better grammar and blocks of exposition. There is enough variation that she can trick herself into thinking that the story is written by someone else. She brings her fingers to the keyboard again. Her eyes flicker up to the poster above her bed. It is a black and white photograph of Freddie Mercury in his dressing room, smiling at the camera. The smile is sad and unconvincing. Freddie saved his convincing smiles for the stage. Fatima holds his gaze and types.

> What does he want to say to her?

Her eyes linger for a few seconds longer. When she looks back at the screen, there is text waiting for her.

> I love every part of you, even the sadness you carry. It’s a reminder that you’re human, that you feel deeply and profoundly, and that vulnerability is a beautiful and courageous thing. And that hole in your chest. I want you to understand that I hear it too. I know that it screams with a sadness that words can’t express. But Fatima, I want you to know that you don’t have to bear that weight alone.

Fatima reads the words once, twice, thrice, quickly, like it’s forbidden. She shuts the laptop screen and stares into the dark. There are eighteen pairs of sad brown eyes staring back at her from the walls of her room. She closes her eyes and reads Freddie’s words on the backs of her lids, ephemeral imprints of the screen. She smiles to herself, a girlish, timid smile. She prays. She goes to bed.