And there she is again, the girl with the silver eyes, twitching like a moth in a pair of dirty gray track pants and black oversized hoodie. I watch her over the rim of my glass and even in the dark of the club I can see in the girl’s face something that reminds me of my own. She is tall and thin and her black hair is lank and stringy and there is a kind of madness lurking in her eyes. I want to call out to her—ARE YOU FOLLOWING ME?—but my words won’t carry over the music. She bites her nails, scratches her head like a wild thing then holds herself tight, right knee shaking. When our eyes meet, she moves towards me and I slip off the stool and dodge the many elbows and bare sweaty shoulders to find the powder room where Fira and Natasha are cutting lines. Finish it off, Fira says and heads back outside and Natasha slips off her thong from under her blue sequin mini. I met someone, she says. He’s taking me for a ride in his Diablo. She presses her lips on my neck and disappears and I take two lines and turn to find the girl with the crazy eyes staring right at me, a napkin twisted around her fingers. I hadn’t heard her open the door. In spite of her height she takes up so little room, like she’s a wisp of black smoke I can blow away with a single exhale. Do I know you? I ask.

She shakes her head and continues to stare. She’s a wretched thing and frankly I’m a little surprised they let her in the club like this but perhaps she got in through some back door like a bone thin alley cat. I call her that in my head—Alley Cat. She parts her chewed up lips and mutters under her breath. Go back home before it’s too late, she says in a barely audible whisper.

Before what’s too late?

He took me to the Lightning Field.

Who did?

Tariq.

And?

Nothing was the same after that, says the girl now tearing up the napkin in her hands. He might decide to keep you for himself. She nods as she says this as if I’ve given her the impression that I’ve grasped her meaning and I catch sight of her wrists and see that there are cuts there, some old, some new.

Look into the mirror and you’ll see what I mean, she says, stepping up close, reaching out to me with long thin fingers.

I walk out the door and back into the crowd where I find Tariq and tell him I’m going back to the hotel. What happened? he shouts over the music.

Some crazy girl is following me around.

We step into the cool black night and he lights my cigarette. Did she say anything else?

Something about a lightning field.

Tariq raises an eyebrow. This happens all the time in Dubai, he says. A new girl comes along and all the others get jittery.

I saw her earlier too.

They do that. Follow the new one around. Get obsessed. Be careful.

We are twenty-three girls, all in black Tom Ford heels and Skims underwear in varying shades of nude, the same red Mac color on our lips—Feels So Grand. Childish Gambino’s This is America starts on a speaker somewhere, the opening gospel fills the studio and I wait for that first gunshot and time a punch in the air. I step in front of the white backdrop and an assistant holds up a light meter to my cheek, my breasts, my abs: flash, flash, flash. The assistant has swirling tattoo sleeves and I fall into the pictures which I notice are identical on each arm; white rabbits with red eyes on the wrists, She-Ra on her flying horse on the deltoids, twins from The Shining in the crook of each elbow with REDRUM in bold cursive writing underneath, all on a sea of vines and creepers. When was the first time you realized you were this beautiful? yells the stylist and I look into the eye of the camera and think of diamonds on the surface of a dark green sea, songs of the deep in my ear, the lick of salt on my lips. Beirut summer. Papa drove half a day to get us to the beach in Byblos and when Maman untied the bow at the back and pulled up my frock the heads turned in my direction. I felt the looks on my skin like hot laser beams as I walked into the water and when I stepped out a trio of Italian brothers called out to me. Bellissima! they yelled, waving their hats as Maman rushed over to cover me with a towel.

My Polaroid is pulled from the camera and pinned to the wall, a red star drawn in the corner as I come to life from the white.

In the Uber Tariq says little but squeezes my knee as I look out at the citylights and think of what Maman said at the airport. Give the photographers whatever they ask for okay, make them happy. They’re your gateway! At his studio the other day, Tariq had walked around me in circles as I stood there in my Calvin Klein underwear, the pale gray backdrop paper under my bare feet, my eyes on the Helmut Newton prints on the back wall. I thought of the boys at school and the pictures they used to draw of me in their notebooks. In summer I was the placid lake to cool their suntanned skin, in winter I was the fire to thaw them out. I know what they saw when they looked at me. As for the sweet ones, I only ever saw them wipe the sweat from their lips. But Tariq’s look is different, like he’s hedging his bets to see if this is a face and a body he wants to put up there, on that shelf, with the other girls he’s made big and turned into stars. Some girls are for the magazines and some I keep just for myself, he said tapping his heart as he took some quick shots. He has a Dune-inspired dystopian desert shoot in front of the Richard Serras at the Brouq Nature Reserve for Vogue Arabia and the agency sent me and three others. He’ll pick only one and we won’t really know till next week so till then I have to do whatever it takes.

The invitation to the sex party came not in an email or on WhatsApp but old school style, on a white card with gold writing. The envelope was made from a page torn out of Yasunari Kawabata’s House of Sleeping Beauties. The villa is on the east coast in Fujairah, on a hill overlooking the Indian Ocean, old-fashioned with a central courtyard and a fountain surrounded by frolicking lovers and snow white baby goats that have escaped from their pen and fallen asleep under the stars. Natasha ran silver mascara through my hair and tied it in an intricate style with many twists, knots and braids and drew eyes on my nipples that stare out now from under my pale pink tulle Gucci bodysuit as I play Razz with four men including the host, a Khaleeji boy with a Bugatti dealership. Natasha lies curled up on a chaise longue watching the game in her Agent Provocateur bra, her eyes lined with green glitter, peacock feathers sticking out from her butt. The men fold one after the other and I realize I’ve won not just the game but also the chance to choose who to sleep with and I choose the Khaleeji boy who I figure out is a bookish sort because as he cups my breasts he tells me a of a story he read once about a girl who had eyes instead of nipples forced to live in a house of women monsters patronized by men with a penchant for freakish sex. I wonder how they all looked to her, I say and he laughs and rubs his thumbs over my breast eyes smudging them till they are nothing but pale clouds of gray.

Soft warm light bathes us both and I close my eyes, bite my lips and try to lean into the red core of intensity as Tariq takes photos. I want to know what your face is capable of, he’d said as he ordered a bottle of Brut to the room and when I started to sway, he slipped off my dress and got out the tiny camera he’d had in his jacket pocket all along. He’s shooting on film and in between the sounds of the shutter I can hear a small voice somewhere in my head telling me that this may not be such a good idea but I’m drunk now and the words that come out of my lips are meaningless, pathetic gibberish and my arms are too weak to push him away in any case. I think briefly of my first ever go-see when the photographer had called me as pretty as a prize-winning pony, telling me to get on my hands and knees. Tariq pulls back his long black hair with his hands and for the first time I see the wolf in him that I see in every man.

We have matching French braids and stand at the edge of an infinity pool in identical white keyhole swimsuits, white frame Chanel sunglasses in front of our eyes as gold reflectors bounce the sun back to us where it wraps around our bodies adding an otherworldly shine. I hold a falcon perched on my gloved hand, Fira the leash to a full grown cheetah, real diamonds in his collar as the rapper Jamil aka Chic of Dubai stands in the water, red and white ghutra on his head mouthing the words to his song which tells tales of private jets and ruby mines, palm leaves and sipping some rare Hennessy cognac straight from the Baccarat bottle. This mansion in Sufouh is Jamil’s own and holds his considerable art collection which includes a Frank Moore painting, To Die For, the one Gianni Versace commissioned but never lived to see. Somewhere in the house, Kate Moss’s decapitated head lies dripping blood on a marble floor with eyes frozen in awe, snakes rising from her scalp instead of hair. After the shoot, Jamil asks us if we would like to come to a party and he takes us in his gold Rolls Royce to a nearby palace with a real Japanese maple tree in the center of a dimly lit drawing room under a skylight surrounded by supine Asian girls nearly naked, delicate rolls of sushi lined up on their bodies. Around two Fira leaves with Jamil and I with a Saudi princess, Monira, who takes me to her condo, offers me a white Russian and hands me a whip to strike her ass. It looks like a peach by the time I’m done and she asks me to stroke it and I do so but gingerly. I think of my cousin Lianne who’d asked me to pour candle wax on the back of her legs one Easter break. I’d watch the hot white wax land on her skin, cloud up and harden to a shell as she’d bite into a towel, face turning red, tears leaking out from behind her thick black lashes. She’d tell me to wait a half hour then get me to crack the wax off, something I found oddly satisfying and I’d watch her skin come out streaked with pink looking like a map with its raw rivers of pain. When I asked her why she did it, she said it was to help her forget, though forget what, she wouldn’t say.

I’m in the dusty Industrial Zone on the edge of Dubai where Tariq has his studio and as I step out of the cab, I hear someone cry my name from across the street. I look around, shielding my eyes from the white tremulous sun the city is so famous for and then I see her, Alley Cat, like the specter of death, running through the traffic towards me, her black wispy hair flying around her face, her gray t-shirt clinging to her body with sweat. Hey! she yells and I hear her voice crack, like she hasn’t used it since the last time I saw her at the club. Don’t let him finish the roll on the Pentax!

I see her thin body quake with all the ferocity it can muster and I get back in the car and tell the cabbie to drive on. When we circle back around ten minutes later, she’s gone.

I lie on my side on the navy velvet divan in a silver Emporio Armani dress and heels, my hand on the neck of a black Pharaoh’s hound. I feel the warmth of his muscular body, the subtle pulse under his skin, the slight rise and fall of his breaths. His ears point up and give him the look of supreme attentiveness while my body is at ease because there is something we both know—that he has guarded the kings and gods for thousands of years and that I am his to protect and yet also his master. The perfume we’re selling, I’m told, has notes of Palo Santo smoke, vetiver, black pepper, ebony and leather and I am wearing it now and wonder what the hound makes of the scent. Does it make him see what I see, make him hear what I hear? I see Fares, the boy I lost my virginity to back in the village when I was fifteen. He used to work with horses and his fingers had this scent, the one now in my orbit, the sweaty leather note. He used to love pressing his hand into my mouth when he came and he’d always tell me to bite it and one time I bit so hard I drew blood and his grunt turned into a yelp of pain. He said that it was the most beautiful feeling, licking the blood off his hand, that he wished he could keep it within him forever. He took my fingers and ran them over the scars on his back, from his Papa’s belt he said. There was a liquid moon in the sky that evening and it trembled like a big white yolk behind the boy’s head, behind the trees that stood tall over him buzzing ever so slightly at their green edges, privy by then to all of our whispered secrets and the sight of our young bodies making love in the buff.

Farah behind the Mamiya looks up from the viewfinder, shutter release cable ready in her hand and as her thumb presses down, the liquid moon explodes in front of my eyes.

I am swimming at the Versace Hotel, slicing through the water like a shark, my eyes on the floor of the pool where there is a mosaic of Medusa, the snakes of her hair writhing around her face ready to strike. This may be a city of beautiful people but gorgons lurk behind every corner. When I slide out and grab my towel, I see security leading away a girl in sweatpants and a baggy t-shirt. Alley Cat leaves quietly but turns to look at me with timid flames of anguish in her eyes and the stoop of defeat in her shoulders.

The dark henna on my arms is a design of thick vertical stripes, running all the way from my shoulders to my fingertips, a souvenir from the shoot this morning. I am at an art show and on the walls hang photographs of young girls in jalabiyas, their faces covered with animal masks, sipping from tiny coffee cups. I think of Uncle Azad, how every year on my birthday he’d sit me down in his studio and take a photograph to mark the event. When I was little, he’d get me to hold one of my dolls but as I got older he’d hand me a bouquet of wild flowers he’d assembled himself just for the occasion. It was he who sent my photos to the agency, pushed me onto this path, always cupping my face with his hands and saying I couldn’t be this beautiful for nothing. His studio was a small room at the back of his house, with sky blue walls covered in pictures of mostly the village boys always dressed up as cowboys, policemen or sheikhs and there was one boy Ali, like me, who Uncle Azad photographed every year. His pictures were clustered in the corner; pirate, Tarzan, king. I found naked photos of him once in a drawer when Uncle Azad was making coffee in the kitchen. Ali, around fifteen, lay on a bed with flowery sheets, his green eyes half closed looking into the camera as if daring it to come closer, a subtle smile on his pink, rosebud lips. He went missing a year later and when they found his body in the river his hands had been tied behind his back and a dog collar buckled tight around his neck. The police never found out who did it but for months the village children did not step outside alone.

I stand with my back against the wall, Tariq on his knees in front of me like a pilgrim, his hands on my breasts—black Rick Owens Open Splint Kiss heel boots, the only armor of fashion on my body. We’re heading to Qatar tomorrow for the shoot and I’ve been fitted into all the pieces which are packed and ready to go. Look at yourself, says Tariq and I open my eyes and look at the long horizontal mirror on the wall in front of me. My eyes are glossy, limpid, my lips parted for the gasps I cannot stop. This is the girl I want in the desert, he says.

Reaching fifty feet into the sky, the four tall dark steel plates of Richard Serra’s East-West/West-East stand behind me as the stylist fixes the gold chain-link veil on my face. The sand is packed hard into the earth and speckled with native shrubs and small rocks. The monoliths seem like alien creations, inserted here into the desert for some dubious unknown purpose. I think of what people will make of them a thousand years from now and wonder if they will see them as the art that they are or perhaps as something funerary like the Pyramids and wonder were there kings here once. I am in a black Esther Perbandt dress and her Lune boots looking like a queen of darkness, my hair styled like a punk and fingernails fitted with gold press-ons. My kohl-lined eyes peer out from behind the gold mask and I see Tariq pull out his small Pentax again so I put my hands back on my hips and give him all that I can. In the distance a flock of camels crosses the shallow dusty dunes with little interest or regard for what goes on here. They have nowhere else to be, no one calls out to them for a smile, a sigh, a tilt of the head. Tariq says my name and I look back into the camera as he steps up to me, leaning in for a close up. I dip my head back, frame my face with my hands. I’m going to keep you for myself, he says as a desert wind swirls around us. You’re one of a kind.

I wake up one morning to find that I’ve lost my reflection. In the mirrors and on the phone I don’t see myself at all. My image is gone. Heart beating fast, I jump into a cab and call Tariq but there’s no answer so I head to his studio and when I get there, the door is locked. And then I see her again, Alley Cat, her demon eyes hidden behind silver sunglasses this morning. She lays her thin fingers on my wrist and I let her and even without words she knows why I’m here. She slides back her glasses and I look into her eyes, the pupils large though the light of the day is bright and unremitting. He took me to the Lightning Field, she says. To shoot a fall/winter Prada collection. After the shoot, he took out his small camera, 35mm, said he wanted to keep me for himself. That was two years ago. I’m still waiting for my reflection to come back.

She lights a cigarette and I watch the smoke unfurl in the space between us. How do you know you’ll come back? I ask. Did he tell you?

He said he could only keep the capture for so long, that eventually the image always slipped away from him and went back to the girl. He said it’s the nature of the medium. There’s no permanent fixer.

Why does he do it?

He says he’s a collector of youth and beauty.

I raise my hands to my face and feel around; my nose, my lips, my cheeks. I think of the tribal bedouin sitters of those early nineteenth century photographs I’d seen at the Louvre, how they’d thought that the camera would capture their soul.

We’ll come back, says Alley Cat squeezing my arm. We’ll come back.

I am at the top of Burj Khalifa, on the observation deck, the curve of the earth visible beyond the Arabian Sea. I fly back home tonight and Alley Cat suggested taking in a view I’ll never forget. I haven’t been out much since the capture but this time I yielded to her demands. She’s sort of taken me under her wing, shown me the ropes to this new way of living. When she picked me up from the hotel, we took a few minutes to line each other’s eyes, flick on mascara and fix the lipstick, her face reminding me so much of my own that it was almost like looking into a mirror. She told me about the other girls, the ones before us, how they’d all gone back home to wait it out. She’d stayed on in the city because she didn’t have much of a home to go back to, as an orphan from an Uzbek mountain village. She told me stories of the village, the looks of all the boys, how they always said that her eyes were dangerous, a gift from the devil himself. She’d met Tariq at a Puma launch party and he’d framed her face with his fingers right there on the dance floor.

One night we snuck into his apartment with knives and hammers, thought of breaking all the cameras we could find in there, of setting the whole place on fire but when we got there, we found him ready. Do anything to me and you’ll never come back, he said.

I asked him why he’d done it and he ran his fingers through my hair and said that he didn’t like sharing his girls with the others, that once he picked a face for his pictures he wanted to keep it for himself. I looked up at him and saw in his silhouette the wolf I’d seen there before and it was then that he handed me a photograph of our time in the desert. Even with all the sun that day he’d blasted me with the flash, bleached me white, melded me into the silvery sand I lay on in that flesh-toned dress, my feet bare, toenails chrome, face wrapped in a white Hermès scarf bedouin style and all that rose from the photograph was the blue smoke of my eyes. When I looked at them closely, my eyes seemed to move in a silent appeal as if they already knew that something essential was flying away from them at that moment.

Tariq mussed my hair. This way, you’ll always be beautiful, he said.

Afterwards Alley Cat and I went to a sake bar in Deira and got a booth where we sat facing each other playing a mirror game taking turns to do exactly what the other one did. I’d fix my hair and so would Alley Cat. She’d lift her drink to her mouth and so would I. We cried at first then laughed and laughed and I’m sure the other patrons thought we were crazy. Two days later I got a call telling me that Tariq had died in a car accident. His Camaro went up in flames somewhere in Downtown after crashing into a Brabus. The first thing I did was check the mirror but the spell he cast on me had yet to break.

The sun dipping into the Gulf is an orb of pink orange milk casting long shadows on the deck and I glance down at the hotel Alley Cat points to. They found a film star dead in the bathtub a few years ago, she says. I turn away from the view and hold up my hands and watch on the floor the shadow of the misshapen bird I’ve made. I move my fingers and the bird flutters its wings and I realize then that this shadow bird is a picture that’s still mine.

[Editor’s Note: Publication of this story was made possible by a gift from Rebecca Halsey during our annual Kickstarter.]

Editor: Kat Weaver

First Reader: Hebe Stanton

Copy Editors: Copy Editing Department

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