The Thirty Names of Night

by Zeyn Joukhadar

  I haven’t seen Aisha in five years, since before you died. I roll onto my back and fake that I know how to swim the backstroke to buy myself time, splashing and flailing. It’s hopeless. Aisha passes me without recognizing me, a knife of contentment and elegance, and between one stroke and another I have convinced myself that this was a terrible idea. I turn over and swim faster, trying to reach the other side before Aisha realizes it’s me. I clamber up the ladder on the side of the pool and shake the water from my ears. My breasts are a weight on my chest again, still swollen and painful from the IUD, and the rest of my body has returned. Every step across the wet pool tile heaves my chest up and down, and a despair rises in me that I can’t explain, that alarm bell that has been going off in me every day since I began to change, that agonizing feeling that this body does not belong to me but to all the people who insist on how I should exist inside of it, that unshakable twinge that tells me that something, perhaps everything, is very, very wrong.

  “As-salaamu alaykum!”

  Pool water sluices out from between my toes and forms chlorinated puddles at the pool’s edge. I turn, and my wet soles print dark moons on the cement. Suddenly the floor has become very interesting.

  “Wa alaykum as-salaam.” I clamp my throat around the shaking in my voice, trying not to let Aisha know that wearing this swimsuit makes me feel like I want to die.

  “I haven’t seen you in years.” Aisha adjusts the hood of her burkini, loosening water from her ears. “Masha’Allah, you look just like your mother. Are you still painting? I haven’t seen you at the masjid since your teta stopped going. And whatever happened with that job at Columbia that Reem was applying for?”

  Normally I’d stiffen at any mention of Reem, but this time the muscles in the center of my belly relax. This last in the wave of questions saves me from having to mention that the only canvases I paint now are the sides of abandoned buildings, or from trying to explain why I don’t feel comfortable entering a masjid from either the men’s or the women’s entrance, why I feel uncomfortable as soon as I clasp my arms across my chest for salah.

  “Reem ended up finding a consulting job up in Boston. She hasn’t had time to visit since she started.”

  A group of young boys not yet in their teens begins to splash one another. They rock the water back and forth between them, and the pool overflows. Pool water, that unnatural shade of crystalline blue, swirls around our ankles, then the creases at the base of our calves. It is a flood, and the whum-whum of water droplets thrums in our ears.

  I follow Aisha out of the pool and into the locker room, wrapping my arms around myself and avoiding all eye contact. The pool water has smudged the ink on my stomach, and a wet gray line snakes down the inside of my thigh. I glance at my face in the mirror.

  “How is your teta doing?”

  “Hamdullah. Still in remission.” I turn my body away from the women blow-drying their hair and reapplying mascara.

  “Alhamdulillah.” Aisha gathers her clothes, a towel, and a travel shampoo from her locker. “You should bring her to jum’ah. It would be good for both of you.”

  “Sometime, insha’Allah.”

  But Aisha knows as well as I do what I mean by that. She turns to me with a tenderness I am not expecting. “What happened to your mother shouldn’t separate you from God. You know that, right?”

  After you died, I tried to pray, but I wasn’t sure what I was praying for. When I was a child, I believed God would set everything right. When I found out about the Nakba, I was sure that one day my friend Ahmad’s grandmother would be able to return to her house in Palestine. I waited for the day our teachers would explain the theft of the land we lived on, the way our textbooks spoke about Indigenous people like they no longer existed and all the books we read were written by dead white men. I was sure that the school bullies would be punished, that the police would stop pulling over my Black friends’ parents late at night, and that my classmates with undocumented aunties or grandparents would one day be able to stop worrying they’d be taken away. Allah is the remover of obstacles. But after the fire, after your burial, after the police dismissed the threats you’d received—by then I’d understood for a long time who had built this system, and for whom, and I’d long since let go of my ideas of justice.

  I dart in and out of a shower and yank my binder over my head in a bathroom stall. Looking down at my chest and being able to move my arms without jostling anything, I feel relief for the first time since I entered the Y. My body feels less like an ill-fitting sweater and more like skin. My head clears, the perpetual lump in my throat dissolves, and my movements become less clumsy. I pull on my jeans one leg at a time, wiggling damp toes in my socks. I am alive again.

  I come out to find Aisha adjusting a lilac hijab. I sit down on the bench beside her as she pins her scarf in place. She’s wearing her favorite accessory today, a thin silver barrette with a rhinestone bird that the two of you found together on a trip to Casablanca years ago.

  “Listen, Aisha—” I hesitate. “What can you tell me about Geronticus simurghus?”

  “Oh, Lord.” Aisha’s smile crumples. “So she left you her notes after all.”

  * * *

  It’s not the first time they’ve cut funding to Aisha’s bird sanctuary in Forest Hills, but it looks like it’ll be the last. The sanctuary has been open for eight years and saved—Aisha tells me with pride on the R out to Queens—more than five hundred birds in its years of service to the avian public, an impressive number given its size, tiny budget, and skeleton crew of Aisha and two assistants.

  I haven’t been to Forest Hills since I was a kid, visiting a colleague of yours who lived in what seemed to me at the time a gigantic mansion on a tree-lined street. I have a similar impression now, walking through a stone arch away from the traffic and into a quiet, lush neighborhood of neo-Tudor houses with stucco faces and timber trim. Aisha walks beside me with sure strides of her bright yellow Pumas. We stop at her favorite teahouse for a ginger-and-turmeric tea along the way, where Julio Iglesias is singing on the radio. While we wait, Aisha tells me about the time the owner’s daughter brought her a stunned mourning dove with a sprained wing, how she carried the bird like a newborn at her chest, swaddled in her mother’s daisy tea towel.

  Tea in hand, Aisha leads me down a few more blocks, and then we turn onto a smaller street, a quiet residential block with more substantial lawn space than I’ve seen anywhere in Brooklyn. We pass a gigantic elm, and behind it sits a large split-level house with wide bay windows. Gardenia bushes encircle the front porch in glossy jade leaves. A squat owl box sits atop a pole in the front yard, just the kind of goodhearted eyesore you would have helped Aisha install.

  Inside, the house is a clean, white-walled space with worn hardwood floors. The air is filled with squawking and the trills of passerine birds. Plants in terra-cotta planters dominate the space, spider ivy cascading in clusters and young figs arranged in miniature groves. The large front windows flood the space with light. The house is set up like a veterinary office, with the open main space—once a palatial foyer, dining, and living area—divided into enclosures by mesh wire, the floor beneath them covered with old newspapers to protect the wood. Smaller birds are housed in large, airy cages suspended from the ceiling. A metal cart serves as a staging area by the door, with buckets of food and water, two pairs of thick gloves, and a half-filled notepad scribbled in purple ink. I spot a dozen species before I have time to blink: a turkey vulture with a wrapped leg, a barn owl with one wing in a splint, a one-eyed hawk with its bandages still on, an ivory egret.

  At the edge of my vision, a third set of hands trails along the mesh. When you mouth the names of species, your words arise from within my own skull, as though your thoughts, even after death, are my own: Phalacrocorax auritus—double-breasted cormorant; Megascops asio—eastern screech owl; Falco peregrinus—peregrine falcon; Ardea alba—great egret; Corvus brachyrhynchos—American crow.

  “Let’s go back t
o the office.” Aisha has not seen you. She coos at the birds and checks her notes for who’s been fed and who’s gotten their medicine. “It’s gonna be tough when the funding runs out and I have to let my assistants go. This city isn’t just hard on its human population, but on its avian communities, too. I guess it’s too late to make people see that.”

  We make our way to the back of the house and into an office. Two eighties-style metal filing cabinets serve as supports for a heavy wooden plank, a makeshift table for Aisha’s laptop and a stack of files and medical charts for each of the birds. A milk glass vase holds three white gardenia blossoms, plucked from the bush outside. A speckling of dirt has fallen onto Aisha’s keyboard, and she clucks her tongue and rummages in her bag for a wet wipe to smooth it away. Aisha prepares for everything.

  “What you might not know from your mom’s notes,” Aisha says, sitting down at the computer, “is that she managed to tag one of the birds in Lower Manhattan before the rest of the building was demolished.” Aisha opens a database and scrolls through, tapping the mousepad with purple nails that match her hijab.

  “That was five years ago. The tags must be useless.”

  “Some species of cockatoos live in captivity almost as long as humans. Even in the wild, an albatross can live to be almost as old as I am.” Aisha looks up from the puddle of tea in her paper cup and raises an eyebrow. “Wanna hear a weird story?

  “A few years back, I shared the tag numbers with some of our sister sanctuaries on a whim. I heard nothing for a while. Then last fall, early one morning I get a call from a sanctuary outside Detroit. That time of year, migratory species come south through the Mississippi Flyway from Canada or the Arctic circle. The sanctuary picked up a large white bird with iridescent contour feathers, dazed, probably concussed. The sanctuary thought it was some kind of egret or cormorant at first, or a juvenile ibis with unusual coloring. But you don’t normally find those north of the Carolinas. Then—take a look.” Aisha points to two entries in two separate spreadsheets. “The numbers match your mom’s tag. What it was doing in Michigan—that’s anybody’s guess.”

  The ornithologist who first identified Geronticus simurghus, Benjamin Young, studied in New York City in the twenties, though records of him, like most Black students and scholars in the first part of the twentieth century, are scarce. Legend has it that he spotted G. simurghus while on a trip in upstate New York as a research assistant. He claimed to have discovered a new species following an unusual migratory pattern, heading westward rather than north-south. He tracked them for a week, observing their size, markings, and habits. Eventually he concluded that they were members of the Geronticus genus, which contains only two other members: the Northern bald ibis or waldrapp, found around the Mediterranean Sea and once thought to be a member of the same genus as the hudhud, and the Southern bald ibis, found only in subtropical southern Africa. Young hypothesized that the species had undergone divergent evolution, possibly due to its unusual migratory route across the Atlantic, a feat shared only with a few birds such as the blackpoll warbler and the Arctic tern. The length of this migration is what inspired Young to name the bird simurghus. According to his writings, Young had studied Persian during his undergraduate years and had a copy of Attar’s twelfth-century Sufi poem Mantiq ut-Tayr, The Conference of the Birds, with him in the field. In the poem, thirty birds, led by the hudhud, embark on an epic search for the mythical bird called the Simorgh, who is to be their king. When Young returned to New York, his colleagues didn’t believe his claims, accusing him of inventing the new species. Young defended his findings for years, but over time, G. simurghus dropped into obscurity and legend. Everyone seemed to have forgotten about Young’s mysterious bird—everyone but you.

  I pull my chair closer to Aisha’s. “Was it simurghus?”

  “It was never formally identified,” she says. “The poor thing started to go wild at sunset, screeching and throwing itself against the fence. They have a bigger place over there, with mesh enclosures that back up to the woods. A couple hours after it was brought in, somebody found the wire twisted open. The bird had wrenched the enclosure open and taken off into the forest.”

  I slump in my chair. “So where does that leave us?”

  “Not with much.” Aisha shuts the laptop. “It had low body fat, so it could have been migrating long distance. But it wasn’t the right time of year for that, and anyway it should have been flying south, not west.” Aisha rubs her eyes. The sun has shifted in the front windows, casting a slice of citrus light under the door. The afternoon here is so peaceful that it’s hard to imagine this place will be closed soon. But that’s the thing about money, isn’t it, that it’s a slippery, shifting thing. Money can be the difference between sleeping in a bed or a bus station, can help build a home for thirty different kinds of birds, can pay rent and electricity and ease your grandmother’s anxiety so she stops rationing her medication. But it’s not that simple, is it, when the money has to come from somewhere, or someone, with power.

  Aisha lays a hand on my arm. “Sometimes we have to say Alhamdulillah and move on.”

  I wait for Aisha to feed the birds as the sun slides down the windows of the house. I draw the curtains. Aisha moves between the cages, her face dappled by the shadows cast by a lemon tree. The fringed end of her lavender scarf swings between her shoulder blades as she adjusts a water bottle. A trio of sparrows dips past the window and into the elm outside. I bend down to fill a bowl with seeds, and a pigeon with a bandaged leg hops over and nudges my hand. My mind is quiet; the pigeon is soft. I allow my thoughts and my shame to slide away. Maybe it’s true that we become what we love most, that we exalt the nameless by losing ourselves in it.

  SIX / LAILA

  THIS LONG WINTER IS dragging into spring. Khalto Tala has promised to take me one of these days to see the countryside beyond the city, but just when the crocuses poked their chins from the ground, another snowstorm covered the roads, and Khalti decided the weather wasn’t fit for traveling. I’m starting to see how people go years without ever leaving this island. Life moves quickly here, and a day is gone before the coffee grows cold.

  I miss you tonight. My life here is dull, so dull that it’s hardly worth mentioning. I wake before dawn to help Khalto Tala with the chores, eat breakfast if I’m lucky and it’s not too late in the month, then go to school for a few hours before I join Khalti at the linen shop. I don’t know what I expected of New York, but it wasn’t the sore back I’ve gotten from bending over garments in Mr. Awad’s shop or the cough from the haze I’m always fighting. Sometimes, on summer nights, the auntie on the floor below us who owns a gramophone puts it on in the window that faces the courtyard, and all the other families open their windows and listen. She likes to play “Amrika Ya Helwa,” and I like this Arabic version of “America the Beautiful” best. My father is usually reading one of the Syrian papers printed in the city. In the evenings he pores over reports on the activities of the Gibran Society, articles on how the Holy Week was celebrated in Damascus, and news of which Syrian boys have won scholarships to Colgate or Harvard. All of this is sandwiched between crossword puzzles, advertisements for Syrian-owned rug, radio, and travel companies, and abbreviated reports of crime affecting the community. The latest of these headlines thrilled us all with shock and fear—ARSON SQUAD STARTS INVESTIGATING INTO BURNING OF BOSTON CHURCH (that’s the St. George Syrian Orthodox Church; the fact that our church here in New York bears the same name surely added to the commotion). My father alternates his nightly reading between the English-language Syrian World and the Arabic Al-Hoda, whose articles often have conflicting opinions. One night my father will go on and on about the importance of abandoning Arabic and tradition in favor of assimilation, and the next he’ll be wagging his finger at us and complaining that Issa and I always talk to him in English. My mother likes to support my father on this last point, since she rarely leaves the neighborhood, and her English isn’t as good.

  I should have known when w
e boarded the ship for Amrika that things weren’t going to be the way my father had promised. The first three weeks at sea without you were some of the hardest of my life. I expected you around every corner, entertaining the wildest of fantasies: that you’d stowed away, that we would receive word in New York that you were coming to join us, that the ship would turn around and I would steal away to your mother’s garden. Sometimes, even now, I sit watching the girls hang laundry in case I glimpse you in a crowd.

  You’re probably married by now. Don’t be surprised that I know, B, my mother told me everything. I remember the night well because it was still early spring then aboard the ship to Amrika, and the sea was stormy. It was my habit to go up to the deck after dark, once everyone was asleep, and let the terror of the waves tossing the ship drown out my thoughts. Besides, the air in steerage was rank with spoiled food and sweaty men.

  On this night, the waves were particularly bad, and no one could sleep. My parents started to speak of home and of our neighbors. My mother’s exact words were: Soon, will be a married woman. She told me your mother had found a good husband for you before we left. And why not? has a successful silk business, he can give you a good life. I should be happy. I should wish you well.

  Over a meal of tinned fish and hard bread, my parents began to murmur about my own future, ignoring the stench of seasickness and the roar of the engines to dream of better things: that first glimpse of the statue that stood watch over New York Harbor, college for my brother, a job embroidering linens for me at the store where Khalto Tala had found work. The constant rocking of the ship made my stomach ache. I laid back on my cot and pretended to sleep, but my mother went on dreaming a husband for me. She told my father about the man who would come along one day, a beautiful milk-skinned American who always had his shoes shined and his hair parted. He would be a doctor or a banker. My mother would rub my face with turmeric and rose water to lighten my skin, she said, and make me look like a beautiful dark-eyed French girl. My future husband sounded so alien to me that I felt nauseated at the thought of lying beneath him. My parents spoke as though Amrika, with her fair-haired men and her torch, would cast a spell and transform us all into charmed, unrecognizable creatures.