We walk, and the grackles circle us. Threads of purple cloud rise up in the east. Qamar has a pair of old-school fabric-covered headphones on that leak high, thin notes of Arabic. When they notice me staring, they show me the ancient Walkman in their pocket.
“You’ve still got one of these things?” It’s heavier and squarer than I remember. Qamar has covered it in stickers and written their name on the front in Sharpie, a kid’s handwriting: Qamar Benjamin Young.
“My grandpa Ben gave it to me, back in the day. I’m named after him. Wanna take a listen?” They offer me the headphones.
I slip the hard plastic over my head and adjust them. Ya ta’ir, Fairouz sings—O bird—
Qamar watches me. The grackles stop circling and dart off uptown in shimmering waves. Reem steps off the curb to cross the street and tosses her hair over her shoulder. There is a breeze coming off the Hudson tonight, warm and close with the clean scent of a coming thunderstorm. Tonight is the kind of night to make a person glad to have a body. I think of Reem’s mechanical birds with their transparent chests and wish my friends could see through me to the flashing circuit of my heart.
Eventually we find a spot on the stoop of a brownstone to sit down and eat our noodles, which Sami and I wolf down and Reem savors, determined not to get a speck of sauce on her dress. Qamar tugs their headphones down and lets them dangle around their neck while they eat, letting Fairouz’s voice drift into the street. When Reem is finished, she sets aside her takeout box and tucks her sandaled feet on the step below her. Sami hands her his tobacco and rolling papers and gets out his oud. As he plays, drunk college kids stumble by down Bleecker, headed for the pirate-themed bar or the Irish bar or the faux-swanky Italian place that still pronounces a hard g in sbagliato. Reem rolls a cigarette for Sami and one for herself; Qamar doesn’t smoke. Sami hands Reem his lighter. She glances over at me. “You mind?”
“Aren’t you afraid Teta’s gonna find out about your smoking and tattoos?” My voice is harsher than I mean it to be. I get up and take hold of the trunk of a slim gingko in the tree box in front of me, then walk around it, avoiding Reem’s eyes.
Reem raises an eyebrow. “There’s dog shit in that box.”
Sami takes a drag of his cigarette and sets it on the step, then goes back to plucking his oud. Qamar taps the step with their foot. A light comes on in the brownstone across the street from us, and the silhouette of a woman comes to the curtained window, listening.
Sami exhales. “Back to the sibling rivalry.”
“Shut up, Shaaban.” Reem turns her icy glare on me. “Not all of us have the luxury of doing things our way all the time. Some of us have to respect the way things are done.”
I shoot back, “Then you better hope she doesn’t see the ink on your neck.”
Reem narrows her eyes and takes a drag of her cigarette. “You wouldn’t dare.”
Sami and Qamar avert their eyes. Reem wasn’t there the night the sparrows fell, or the night you slipped off the fire escape, or the string of dreamless nights I spent lying awake in Teta’s apartment, drawing fire across my belly in ink. “Why are you here, Reem? Did you expect things to be just like they were before you left? Before you abandoned me to take care of Teta by myself?”
“I had to make a life.” Reem is close to shouting.
“And now you’re worried about me.” Sami has stopped playing and is resting his hands on the strings, his cigarette hanging out of the corner of his mouth, watching. “Because I didn’t end up respectable, with a successful boyfriend and a good job? Fuck your guilty conscience.”
“Khalas!” The round brightness of Reem’s voice bounces down the block. “There is no job, all right? My team lost a deal, and they let me go last week. No health insurance, no unemployment. You want to be the one to tell Teta that?”
“Hey, hey.” Sami springs up, takes his oud in one hand, and crushes his cigarette underfoot. He sets his hand on my shoulder. “I didn’t invite Reem as an intervention. She saw my knot project on social media and called me. I said I was worried about you. Okay?” He raps his hand against his chest. “There. My fault.”
“Noodle.” Reem used to call me that when I was a toddler and she, already a teenager, babysat me for our parents. “What the hell is up with you?”
I close my eyes. Fairouz reaches me from Qamar’s headphones.
O bird—take me—if just for a minute—and bring me back—
* * *
By the time we arrive back at Teta’s apartment, it’s late. We take the elevator to the roof, where there’s an unused firepit and a few forgotten bags of trash. This could be a nice spot to watch the lights if it were cleaned up. The rooftop faces Manhattan; Queens gives off a soft glow on our right. The subway clatters by somewhere below us and then dissolves into the muffled complaints of the Brooklyn night. Sami rolls another cigarette and dangles his legs over the roof’s edge. I want to ask him if he was awake the night the sparrows fell from the sky. I want to ask him if he saw, the next day, like I did, a white-throated sparrow splayed on the windshield of a parked car.
I look up at the stars, inviting vertigo. You used to say you saw the pair of birds gliding in to roost at night, when the moon was full enough to see by. I take the cigarette from Sami; it tastes like last winter, like the couch in Sami’s last apartment.
Qamar has their Walkman out again, nodding their head to the music. “Hey.” I rummage around in my messenger bag and pull out a sleeve of cassette tapes of Fairouz, Umm Kulthum, and Abdel Halim Hafez. “I found a bunch of these in my room the other day. My player doesn’t work anymore, but since yours does, I figure somebody should enjoy them.”
Qamar grins. “Oh, cool! Thanks.” They go through them one at a time, then laugh when they find a cassette of Arabic kids’ music. “Oh my God, ‘Ha sisan, shu helween’—I haven’t heard that in years. I had this same cassette growing up.”
Reem puts out her cigarette. “Mom used to put that on to help me sleep. You, too?”
“After Mom got divorced,” I say, “when I couldn’t sleep, and she’d be watching cooking shows at two in the morning, I used to stay up and listen to it.”
Reem is silhouetted against the orange arc of the Brooklyn Bridge. “I used to call her up at night to check on her. She had to keep it together for you.”
“At least she talked to you.” A cockroach crawls over the toe of my sneaker, and I let it clamber down the other side. “I always thought that was why she got involved with saving the Washington Street building. To get her mind off things.”
Sami has come to stand closer, silent and swift, between me and the eight-story drop.
Qamar lowers their headphones. “Wait, I remember hearing about that. That was your mom? Was she the one who—the fire—?”
“Yeah, that was us.”
“Allah yarhama.” Qamar’s voice is soft now. “She was an ornithologist, too, right? Before she became an activist.”
“The activism just kind of—happened.” I avert my eyes. “She was trying to document a pair of rare birds in the area when she died. I found her notebooks in Teta’s closet.”
“Astaghfirullah,” Reem says, “you haven’t been going through all that, have you? What good can it do after all these years?”
Maybe she’s right. Remember the day I picked the lock on the older tenement, the one you were trying to save, the one that’s now long since leveled? I crawled onto a ledge five stories up to prove that the birds you were protecting did not exist. It was a Tuesday, late morning, while you were out buying groceries for Teta. The August heat had burned off the clouds, and a damp had settled over Lower Manhattan, slicking the brick. There had been no sightings of the birds for a few days, and most people were saying that either there was no nest or the birds had moved on because of the noise and pollution.
Still, you chose to go on believing, and I envied you. In the end, it wasn’t the ornithologists from Boston, or the press, or Sabah or Aisha who were the first ones to tell you
you were wrong. I was the first one to doubt you.
I climbed onto the ledge where the nest lay because I was jealous of your ability to believe. Do you know how many years it took me to realize that you were the only thing I believed in? You spent so much time away that summer, your notebook always in hand, sketching or taking notes on the lengths of wings and the potential for eggs in the nest you’d never even seen. You told me the birds were going in and out of a ventilation duct reachable by a crack on the side of the building. No one had been able to get a clear look at it, but you claimed you’d seen the birds flying in and out of that crack, bringing in gingko twigs and bits of insulation.
I don’t remember you rescuing me from the ledge, though the pictures made the paper the next day: a hijabi woman gripping a lanky teenager by the forearm on a ledge no wider than a two-by-four. There was a fear in my eyes that I don’t remember feeling. What I remember was the warmth in the bottom of the nest, and my hand touching cool softness, and the shame of my disbelief, and your hand on my arm pleading with me not to let go. It wasn’t the first or the last time I felt I was perched above the end of all things. But miraculously, you got me back inside and into your arms.
“If she really saw something,” I say, “and I can show the world she was right about it, it would be a waste not to try.”
Reem turns to me. “She’s been gone five years, Noodle. You almost died that night. How many miracles are we permitted in this life?”
I’ve always put my faith in things that I could touch and hear and see: you clutching me on the ledge, your fingers in the crook of my elbow, the answer to a prayer I’d been too proud to pray. You, reciting to me when I was nine, a single mother broken free of the jaws of a man, brushing back my hair and telling me that surely these are signs for those who have eyes. The first dream I had after the fire swallowed you, after an abyss of forgetting had devoured three years of dreams, was of climbing to the very top of a tree where a gathering of birds was convening, asking them to take me away from this world where the smell of your scarves in my closet was a cut that refused to heal. The birds took me up by my sleeves in their beaks and their talons, lifting me from the tree. I had this dream over and over again for months, always with the same ending: I was no longer a child, and the weight of grief had made me too heavy a burden for the birds to carry. I’ve accepted this weight, this wanting to disappear. But I’ve never had faith in anything so much as my hand in that nest, those speckled blue eggs, the heat of life pulsing against me whether I believe in it or not.
* * *
When Qamar heads home, I tell Sami and Reem I want to sleep and lock myself in my room with a mirror and a sketchbook I haven’t opened since you died. I tug off my shirt and Teta’s shapewear and set myself in front of the mirror. I sketch my face, that defensive look, and then I remember why the female Impressionists—Mary Cassatt, Berthe Morisot—so rarely painted other women naked. I don’t want my breasts or my body on the page. I’m drawn, like Laila Z, to observe, to find the truth of things, but my truth isn’t inscribed on my body. It lives somewhere deeper, somewhere steadier, somewhere the body becomes irrelevant. Nothing must be changed for this to be true. If I am in a state of becoming, it has no endpoint. I imagine replacing the memories of everyone I’ve ever spoken to with the impression that they have only ever seen me as a being clothed in light. In the early part of the twentieth century, homophobes and eugenicists joined forces to study what they called inversion, an early term for homosexuality, gender nonconformity, and transness. They believed they could read and police queerness on the body. Maybe this is why I don’t want to make myself legible. I want to erase the meanings that have been ascribed to my breath, to my sweat, to my hair and fat and skin. I trace the green veins in my neck that branch down into my breasts as feathers. I am painting myself as the bird that, to the world outside this room, does not exist. I draw myself clothed in wings and tell myself that even the angels are sexless.
I tug my shirt back on and replace the mirror. A rectangle of cleared dust sits where the pile of your old cassettes once lay on your work table. I am thinking of the Sharpie on Qamar’s Walkman when it hits me that Laila, too, once knew a Dr. Young.
TEN / LAILA
SWEETEST B,
I haven’t written since my father’s accident. It’s easier to forget the days when you don’t mark them, and sometimes, when I lift my pencil, all my unsaid words start to screech like a tea kettle, and I can’t bear to say anything at all.
My father hasn’t spoken in the forty days since the accident. Sometimes I dream of the machine chewing his words in its iron teeth. He’s languished at home these six weeks, unable to work, twirling his cane on the unfinished floor while my mother clips laundry to the sooty line. Children chase one another down the hallways the same as ever, their mothers scrambling after them, the stink of smoke thick in the building. My father is too worn down to complain about all this, to mourn our coming here and say that we lived better when we were in Syria. My mother has held in her panic about our finances by going off by herself during the day when my father falls asleep in his chair. I followed her, once, and found she’d taken to haunting an abandoned apartment in which she’d found a broken rocking chair. I spot her through the window from the roof, across the courtyard, and sometimes, if Khalto Tala lets me go home early from the linen shop, I might even catch her wringing her hands in that empty room and talking to herself.
My mother has resigned herself to my father’s injury. She’s taken on work as a seamstress, bending her sore back over trousers and wool dresses. The pay isn’t near enough, but there are few jobs to be had here for an unlettered woman from the bilad. Probably this is the reason Khalto Tala approached her in the evening last week, after the washing and the cooking were done, and told her she planned to take me along with a group of families from the neighborhood who were driving west to sell provisions—rosaries, laces, trinkets, foods from Syria, things like that. It’s not as common now as it once was, but some of the parents or the jiddos in the building did it at one time or another, walking door to door with a heavy kashshi full of goods for sale hanging from a strap around one’s neck, and this depression has made us all desperate. Even my mother, who often warns me in hushed tones about the lewd behavior and lost honor of women on the road, bowed her head and gave her blessing. For a month or two, I’ll be one less mouth to feed.
If you were here, B, you’d notice the photo I’ve slipped in on the opposite page. Khalti and I were packing tonight—we leave tomorrow morning for the journey—when she called me into the bedroom to give it to me. My father watched the fire in the kitchen while my mother busied herself with a pot of lentils and rice. From the pocket of her skirt, Khalto Tala pulled out a small piece of cream-colored paper.
I’ll admit, my first thought was that it was a photograph of you, not me. I am ashamed to admit that I’ve been thinking of you less and less these days, when the cockroaches come out in the dark and the bitter-cold nights make me resent the memory of warmth. No boy has ever moved me the way you did that afternoon on the corniche. This is not how I am supposed to feel. The lack of you hurts. You are the knife with which I cut myself.
Khalti got the photo from a friend of a friend whose husband worked as a translator on Ellis Island. It was taken the day our family arrived. I have to admit, B, it doesn’t look much like me—not that I ever see myself, except reflected in the window of the linen shop to adjust my stockings or my hat. It occurred to me then, for the first time, that other people were looking at me, perhaps really looking and judging, and I remembered what my mother had said periodically throughout the spring: that soon her friends would come asking about me for their sons.
I asked Khalto Tala if she thought I should get married. She took a long, hard look at me, the kind of look she used to give before launching into one of her stories about the forests of Canada or the silver claim she’d once staked there, one of the many adventures she’d had before she’d settled dow
n in New York. After a moment she said, “There are lots of ways to pin a woman down, Leiloul, but most of them involve a man.”
After that, I gathered my pencils and my notebook into the wooden box inlaid with mother-of-pearl that Khalto Tala had brought with her from the bilad. I’ve been keeping your wing there for months, well hidden. Khalti gave me the box “for precious objects,” she said once, and it’s become my single private space in this cramped apartment. Aside from a few old dresses, this box will be all I bring with me on the road.
My only regret about tomorrow is I won’t be able to say goodbye to Dr. Young. I’ve escaped a handful of afternoons of work over the last two months to take the subway uptown to the public library on the days when they turn the pages in Audubon’s book. Khalti sometimes gives me a bit of money to see a movie with a friend from school. I can’t go too often or people will start to talk. But Dr. Young is always there, and we talk a little about winged creatures, and he puts names to the new birds I’ve seen around the city since I’ve last met with him.
I ran into him at the library one other time, with my mother, as he was coming out and we were walking past on our way to the post office. He tipped his hat to her, and she nodded, and though I wanted to tell my mother who he was, my stomach went cold, and all I managed was a meek hello. For the rest of the afternoon I felt like crying without knowing why. It wasn’t until later that I realized that I couldn’t picture Dr. Young walking into Mr. Awad’s store—how could I, when Mr. Awad warns us to always check for the back of a cloche hat or a curl of yellow hair before we step out to dress a mannequin, so that the American women won’t see our dirty hands? The white Americans might be ajanib, but my parents say we’re white, too, or we must be something close to it if we are both Christians, and I think they really believe that if we keep our noses in our work, a day will come when we’ll earn more than their disdain. In the meantime, my mother whispers about the widow Haddad and scrubs my face with turmeric, and my father warns me against dating like the American girls, saying, Do you know how hard we worked to get you here? Neither of them know what Mrs. Theodore taught me about my color in the back of that Rolls-Royce. In that moment with my mother and Dr. Young, little wing, when I felt the cold drip of fear in my stomach, I realized that an infinite number of moments had instilled in me a reflex as potent and inescapable as a sneeze. It was like seeing the shape of something large coming toward you in the dark.
The Thirty Names of Night Page 13