Lock Your Doors
by Mehnaz Sahibzada
Freshman year in college, you dream of a dormitory that was once a mental institute. Your roommate chides you for colonizing the dresser with your make-up. You gawk like a tourist at Arizona sunsets.
Sophomore year, you move into a two-bedroom apartment with a pre-med student who shares your passion for vests but cries often.
Next, a home with two students who fall in love until they betray each other badly. Soon their cats wage world wars.
Friends drop by to study Russian, then take sides.
Senior year, you reclaim solitude, finding a studio close to the university where you plant poems at the start of summer. Ten duplexes huddle into a U, their doors opening to a serene courtyard. Your neighbor, a blond nutritionist, is kind but aloof.
Tucson means desert and cacti, silver and moon. You register for an astronomy course. In lecture, learn about the stars, black holes, and dark matter.
You gaze at the sky through a telescope and shudder at your own smallness.
The professor’s face gleams like a lightbulb. Her hair, always in a bun.
Keys jangle around her neck.
During a discussion on safety she says, Always lock your doors.
You can imagine her in a nunnery, enforcing the rules.
***
The studio where you live now is shaped like a dumbbell. The walls, painted burgundy. Often you forget to lock the doors.
The bathroom with its little window would discomfort a ghost.
While cooking dinner, you utter fragments of French.
One evening, a friend drives you to the movies. You return near midnight. Exiting the car, you spot a shadow lurking near your neighbor’s house.
Inside your studio, you slide into bed and turn to page ninety-six of Madame Bovary, removing the bookmark.
Minutes later, a scream shatters the night. You hear someone running across the courtyard, then a pounding at your door.
The book falls out of your grip as you cower in bed.
Picturing a lunatic with a knife, you freeze.
Moments later, you hear shuffling. A door creaks in the distance.
Frantic voices reverberate across the garden.
***
Peering through your window later, you spy two officers searching the grounds with their flashlights. You step outside in your robe to learn a stalker crept into your blond neighbor’s home. She awoke to a stranger’s hand caressing her thigh. When her screams forced him out, she fled her studio and came thrashing at your door.
But you sank into a sea instead of swimming.
After that night, you religiously lock your doors. Your sleep turns restless, and a dream shudders you awake.
In the nightmare, you roam a desolate house where the doors and windows sway open. A large man with frizzy hair stands in the living room, gazing at a pool in the backyard. He wears a red t-shirt over jeans. His face, a conundrum.
You try screaming, but the sound locks in your throat.
You wake up drenched in sweat.
Days later, the nightmare surfaces again.
Then again and again.
After astronomy class ends, you visit your family in Los Angeles.
The dream arises in your old bedroom where you mix English and Urdu.
You reach for your Quran.
***
Your parents talk of arranging your marriage to a good Pakistani man. When you imagine such a life, you sense contraction. When you imagine traveling to another planet, you sense expansion.
In August, the fall semester begins.
The dream keeps knocking while you sleep.
The man in red hovers in your mind like a roommate.
You fear closing your eyes as monsoons quake through Tucson.
You finish Madame Bovary, wondering what it means to yearn for more.
‘I deserve what I desire’ could be the nation’s mantra.
But what you crave most is the spine of a shaman.
One afternoon in September your blond neighbor knocks at your door, says she’s moving out. You gaze at her pale face, feeling a wave of guilt.
She says detectives still haven’t found the stalker who crept into her home.
You want to tell her about the stalker in your dream, but you hesitate.
In November, you ache to break your lease. The landlord agrees to let you go, but you hear the disappointment in his voice when you call to explain.
You find a one bedroom apartment in the heart of Tucson where the neighborhood twinkles like a new star.
You lug boxes to the second floor and place potted greens on the balcony, but the dream churns like a madness.
The winter of your senior year, you become a detective, summoning Jung.
You journal feelings, call friends, tell your parents.
Consult a counselor and a psychic.
Sleuth the nightmare into a poem.
You burn sage and incense.
Praying, you chant mantras.
But the dream returns often.
The details, always the same.
***
One day, for lunch near campus you meet Amy, the girl with pink hair who sits beside you in Arabic class. When you describe the man in your dream, she says, write him a letter and ask him what he wants.
Lugging a gray notebook, you head to a diner the next morning and order coffee. On a blank page, you pen your epistle, then tear it out. In the lot behind the restaurant, you burn the page with a lighter.
Wordless smoke rises, and something shifts.
The man in red disappears.
With a shudder, your heart contracts.
But you sleep soundly every night, dreaming of tulips.
After graduation, you search for a job in Los Angeles.
Your face gleams like a lightbulb. Your hair in a bun.
Keys jangle around your neck as you enter the classroom to teach.
In your townhouse, daydreams bring waves of expansion. Restless, you reread Madame Bovary. Sometimes you spy a shadow lurking at the supermarket. Other times you fall asleep wondering if you should find a roommate.
Evenings, you place tarot cards on your bed.
Ask the hermit, Where is that stranger who haunted my dreams?
Mehnaz Sahibzada received her M.A. in Religious Studies from UC Santa Barbara. Her writing has appeared in Ellery Queen, Jaggery, Strange Horizons, and elsewhere. Her poetry collection, My Gothic Romance, was published in 2019 by Finishing Line Press. She is currently at work on her first novel, a coming-of-age story set in post-partition Pakistan. For inquiries, contact Mehnaz through her website at www.poetmehnaz.com.