A gray pickup truck entered the gas station lot and parked at the pump in front of us. On the bumper was a sticker in Arabic: . Kafir, meaning unbeliever or, sometimes, atheist. I’d been warned about the people who think it specifically means non-Muslim. I knew enough to know it was aimed at people like us.
Two white men got out of the pickup, one in camouflage with a military-style crew cut and the other in a neon-orange hunting jacket. Camo jacket stepped to the bed of his truck and leaned on the bumper. They stared at us. You hesitated, your hand on the ignition, and I whispered, Let’s go, let’s go. That moment lasts forever in my memory, though I already knew, from the way my teachers told me I looked like my father as though it were a compliment, that it wasn’t me they wanted to intimidate.
Even now, I sometimes run over in my mind all the men who catcall me the moment I step out my door, the men who corner me on subway platforms, the man who reached under my dress at a parade once and slipped his finger beneath my underwear. I think of my father complaining to my mother that the dishes weren’t washed, or of the time they fought over something stupid and he called her a camel to shut her up. I grew up with dozens of boys who would one day become the same kind of man. Sometimes the world is one long chain of men from whose anger there is no protection, an obstacle course I run to stay safe.
I don’t want to look in the mirror and see my father’s face.
Yet as black hair falls to the floor, there you are instead—in my nose, in my jaw, in my brow. There is Jiddo. After a moment, when I blink and part my lips, there is Teta, too.
There’s a knock on the bathroom door. Sami is standing there with a pair of scissors. He cuts my bangs without speaking, then takes the clippers and fixes the back of my head. We are still damp with exertion and the humid night, tendrils of cereus vines still tangled in our shoelaces. Sami smells like owl feathers and the empty lot near Ozone Park. He stands so close to me that the two of us are staked together like two unruly vines of myrtle. Dancing with Sami in the field of cereus, I felt the same thing I felt in the club in Bushwick: that sense not of shedding my body, as I almost did on the basketball court, but of growing into it the way a vine unfurls itself to inhabit a broken fence. I rub the soft, bony places on the back of my skull. The remnants of moonflower leaves are laced into the black rings of hair on the floor. I have been the ghost of myself, but this has never been about waiting to be raptured out of my own body. If I am a fox-hearted boy, then so be it. Call me king of the foxes, king of untamable, unreadable things.
Sami and I emerge from the bathroom at dawn, just as Teta is fixing herself a cup of tea and settling into her easy chair. She motions me over, and I pull away from Sami and come.
“You remind me of someone I used to know.” Teta runs her hands over my fade and through the short curls on top.
I bow my head under her hands. “I couldn’t do it anymore, Teta.”
“My storm of the storms.” She tips the top of my head toward her and kisses it. “You never had to try.”
TWELVE / LAILA
ILYAS AND I DIDN’T ride in the same truck from Toledo to Detroit, and I didn’t see much of him today until we were in the south end of Dearborn, under the smokestacks, when I helped serve coffee to the men after dinner. Well, that’s not entirely true—we did stop once on the ride into Detroit, along the western shore of Lake Erie. We’d passed so many miles of picturesque white cedars and maples that everyone began to complain; why didn’t we stretch our legs, they said. And it was beautiful, the lake so big below it might have been an inland sea. Someone pointed out a group of loons, and Ilyas spotted the one set apart from the others, a rare, red-throated bird.
After that, I didn’t see him for hours. We split up when we got close to Detroit, parked the trucks and went off on foot. I went with Maryam, stopping when she took hold of my elbow. She gets out of breath sometimes when we walk too long; she blames it on her poor diet and these last long months of mourning in her apartment. She sat down on the steps of the last house on the last long block, a neat little two-level house with cream siding and a wooden porch. We’d barely made any sales by then, and the afternoon was dragging on under a drizzly spring sky, and I was thinking of all the things I could buy with a bit of pocket money. By now I know the things to say to try to make a sale: You got a daughter, ma’am? Or Maybe you got a friend who needs somethin’? But today, the women who opened their doors just weren’t interested.
When I rang the bell and the knob turned, I knew right away this last woman, in this last house, was going to be more of the same. She was dressed in a prim pearl-buttoned blouse with a long skirt, holding a satin clutch as though she were about to leave with her husband for an evening out. In desperation, I glanced around for something I could use to make a sale. A jeweled enamel of a swan was pinned to her blouse, so I asked the woman if she liked birds and pulled out a scarf I had embroidered under Khalto Tala’s direction. It was decorated with hand-stitched cranes, their necks bowed and wings spread. The woman seemed delighted. She bought the scarf and asked me if I had any other items with birds. I didn’t have anything else with me, so I thought quick and tore out a page from my notebook. I had sketched a pigeon with my field watercolors, his ruff of iridescent feathers puffed, his eyes curious.
The woman was disappointed, naturally, the pigeon not being the most regal of birds. I started to tell her what I loved about the pigeon, how noble a bird he is, how underrated, how anyone may conclude the same for himself. She seemed impressed with my English and didn’t chase me from her porch, so I went on about how he is a clean bird, always preening himself, and how he regards a person with an intelligent expression very near human. He is a kind and gentle creature, the pigeon, never as aggressive as a grackle, for example, who will even attack people for food or territory, nor as temperamental as the goose. The pigeon has a quiet, hardy dignity about him, visible to those who are willing to look.
As I spoke, something shifted in me. The feeling rose that this woman, if she were to deem the pigeon unworthy, would also be judging me, and Khalto Tala, and the widow Haddad. It was an absurd thing, but there it was. A second sense came on its heels, something I had never felt before and which frightened me: the sense that I could not convince this American woman, whose judgments dictated my livelihood, of the value of things and people I cared a great deal about.
When I had run out of words, I stood on the porch, red-faced, as though I were about to burst into tears. The woman must have taken pity on me, or at least wanted to get me off her porch. She took the drawing from my hand and replaced it with a folded two-dollar bill that smelled of her clean linen pockets. I took it and turned back to Maryam, who regarded me from the steps of the house, and I was still standing there when the woman closed the door.
That was how we came to Detroit, or entered the sprawl of it, anyway, before we arrived at Abu Majed’s house. Abu Majed is the aging uncle of one of the boys in our group who offered us a place to stay in Dearborn. He says he came from Highland Park nearly two decades ago to work at the Rouge, after Ford announced the five-dollar workday. His son Majed is grown now, and Abu Majed’s grandchildren were outside scrubbing the family car when we arrived. We coughed when we got out of the trucks—the air smelled so bad I couldn’t imagine hanging laundry out to dry—but the children seemed used to it. The steel particles in the air settle on the cars, though, and they have to scrub and scrub to get the stuff off, or it will eat the paint.
Abu Majed and his family seem to love it here. The men all walk to work at the Rouge, and the neighborhood is full of Syrians and a smattering of folks from other places—Italy, mainly, and a couple of Polish families. A lot of the Syrian families in the south end are Muslim, more so than back in New York; they even built a masjid in Highland Park, before most of the community moved out to Dearborn, and they’re working on building another here. We walked the neighborhood after dinner with Abu Majed’s grandchildren, and they called out their hellos in English to all the n
eighbors sitting on their porches. It’s easy to forget where you are, here, so much seems to revolve around the Rouge. You walk down Dix and find everything you could want: three different Arab restaurants, two Arab grocers, three coffee houses, a halal butcher, and lots of other businesses owned by immigrants—a theater, a laundry, a five-and-dime shop. Everybody knows one another here, or seems to. Just like back in New York, the shopkeepers here give credit to their neighbors, even the ones they know can’t pay these days with so many people out of work.
But there’s a point, too, when you cross the T-bridge and this neighborhood ends, and I know—because we drove through it—that these two Dearborns don’t much go together. Walking around the rest of Dearborn, ringing the doorbells of the white families with big houses, you get the sense you’re being watched, or maybe that you’re not wanted, or something a little like both. Buy somethin’, buy somethin’, you say, and some of them just stare at you and close the door in your face.
The Black families in Detroit are kinder; one couple even let Maryam and I sit out a downpour on their porch. Abu Majed says the Arabs and the Black folks get the harder jobs at the plant, like at the foundry or the stamping factory, because we work hard and tend to stay, even if a drill sends up sparks and scars you, even if the rest of the men on the line call you names. Factory work is hard, Abu Majed says; you have to make your quota if you don’t want to be out on the street, and you can’t talk to the other workers on company time. But Abu Majed takes a kind of pride in that, I think, and he says it’s not just cars he’s helped make, but America herself.
Abu Majed and his family insisted we stay the rest of the weekend, since today was Saturday, and they want us to stay for Sunday dinner tomorrow. We stayed up late—or rather, the men stayed up late after dinner, talking. Ilyas was speaking to Abu Majed about the union at the Rouge when I came out to bring the coffee, so absorbed that he hardly thanked me. They talked about the union well into the night, until the women scolded them and stopped refilling their cups so they’d run out of steam. Abu Majed was the last to give up his monologue, clutching his demitasse in his lap, his gray shirt still stained here and there with the faint brown of automotive grease. He reached his hand upward to emphasize a point. He had rolled up his left sleeve, and where the fabric met his skin, you could see the red bumps of a rash starting around a dark stain of motor oil. He rolled it down as soon as it appeared, but I began to wonder at what he had endured that remained unspoken, and Abu Majed, too, knew that we were imagining this, and knew that we were pitying him. I understood my outburst about the pigeons then, and understood why our neighbors played “Amrika Ya Helwa” on the gramophone from across the courtyard, and understood, too, why my parents always listened, even my father, who had long since stopped reading Al-Hoda in the evenings.
* * *
Yesterday was Sunday, and Abu Majed’s children piled the table high with mezze for Sunday dinner, not just hummus and Syrian bread and muhammara and baba ghanoush but chicken liver in pomegranate molasses, bowls of tabbouleh with cilantro and purslane, two dozen skewers of kofta, and stuffed grape leaves. After we ate our fill and toasted our hosts, someone brought out an oud, and another a rabab. The young men, who once again refused to go to sleep, began to trade stories of their time in America or back home, but the elders grew tired of this nonsense and began to tell their own fantastical stories.
Khalto Tala joined the circle and began to speak. She told us about her days prospecting for silver in Canada before my parents brought Issa and me to join her in Little Syria. Silver had been discovered in Ontario, she said, and lots of people had traveled west from New York to pursue it. There were thought to be large veins of silver out there, the kind a person could live out his life on, rich enough to send money home. But it wasn’t that simple. Khalto Tala had arrived in the tiny boomtown of Cobalt almost thirty years before, in her young and wild days, with nothing but a canvas bag and a pair of gloves and boots. A few months later, she cut her losses and headed back to New York after an encounter with a mother black bear and her cubs, which Khalti took as an omen that it was time to return. I pictured her facing down the mother bear with a calm in her eyes that I could never hope to possess, inscribing in the space between them not terror but wonder and portent.
After, I dreamed of you. Astaghfirullah, I have not stopped dreaming of you since the day we left Beirut. Sometimes you come to me in a white linen dress, and other times you come to me wearing nothing but the sea along the corniche, pulling yourself up on the rocks by your purpled elbows. Tonight you came to me as a bird, and I could not tell the difference between you and the holiest of lost things.
I haven’t been able to get back to sleep, not after that. I got your wing out from my tin of pencils and set it on the windowsill, where the moonlight has soaked into it like milk. I take good care of it and keep it hidden always. The feathers are still smooth; none have fallen out from your stitching. I counted each one and tried, as I do every night, to stitch you into my memory. I can’t remember you without writing you down. I am afraid to forget you, afraid that in my darker moments I wish bad things on you in the hopes that, one day, we might cross paths again and you won’t love another.
As dawn approached, I brought my paints to the window and began a watercolor of a red-throated loon. I painted until the pale green light was in the sky, when Maryam rose with a hand to her belly. She watched me paint in silence for a few minutes. She says I have real talent, that I could sell my pages and be an artist, God willing. When she left to wash up, I took a pin from my hair and pinned the page to the wall so I could step back and look at it, imagine it hanging in a gallery or in the foyer of the public library. The room began to wake then, and I hurried away to the bathroom to ensure I’d have enough hot water to wash my face. I only realized later, after we’d left Dearborn, that the red-throated loon was still pinned to the wall beside the window where I’d left it, a fine layer of soot darkening the corners.
* * *
B,
The further north and west we go, the less spring seems to have advanced, and there is still stormy weather. While New York enjoys mild days and chilly nights and purple crocuses, Michigan is still struggling to break from winter’s grip. Maryam wasn’t feeling well since we arrived in Detroit, and earlier today, as we headed for Chicago and the shores of Lake Michigan, she blamed the water and the food and the jostling of the trucks, ignoring the remedies Khalto Tala suggested for her hard, swollen belly.
We were only an afternoon’s drive from Chicago, but the spring storms that had threatened all morning broke violently about two hours outside of Detroit, in a desolate stretch of road through flat farmland where not a single house could be seen for miles. The rain turned the road to mud in places, and first one truck became stuck, then the other. When the second truck mired a wheel in the mud, Ilyas got out to check on it. The tire was flat. Khalto Tala murmured to Maryam in the back seat while I hopped out to help lift the sunken wheel from the mud. There was no changing the tire in this weather. The rain picked up and lashed us, and after a few minutes of sliding in the mud, Khalto Tala came out of the truck, frantic.
“Maryam’s fainted dead away,” she cried.
Someone spotted an old barn not far off, and so we carried Maryam to the barn, where at least it was dry and warm. It looked as though the barn had once belonged to a farm that had been abandoned long ago, the only structure around for miles.
Maryam was delirious. Khalto Tala listened for her heart, then laid a hand on her belly, which was stiff as a stone. She asked Maryam when she had last had her cycles. I felt Maryam’s swollen belly, hard and higher than I’d realized. Khalto Tala told me her fears: that Maryam could be pregnant after all and not have known it.
We did our best to make her comfortable, bringing blankets and linens from the trucks to keep Maryam warm. We propped her up in a corner of the barn and kept her wrapped up, one woman rubbing her feet while another brought her water and stroked her foreh
ead.
If it was a baby, it was coming too soon. Ilyas, seeing that I was troubled, knelt beside me and reached for my hand. “Tell me what to do.” He squeezed my hand. “I’m not afraid.”
The labor was long. Maryam’s contractions lasted well into the night as the rain lashed the sides of the barn. She was in a good deal of pain, and as her contractions continued, the linens beneath her became soaked with blood. We didn’t have the equipment for a transfusion, so I sent the younger boys—who were pacing the barn and whispering to themselves—to go out and try to free at least one of the trucks so that someone could go for a doctor.
But Maryam was losing blood by the minute. I forced myself to see Maryam’s face rather than your mother’s, Ilyas’s hands rather than your own. Even so, the night was as deep, and the blood smelled of the same iron.
The baby’s head slid out first. I caught the smooth dome in my hands. But Maryam wasn’t responding. Khalto Tala batted her cheek, cradling the younger woman’s face in her hands. “Maryam!” Khalto Tala blew air into Maryam’s mouth. A shudder went through all of us, and just like that Maryam was gone, and I was holding a red-faced baby in my arms.
Later, those who were there said they saw a second shape jolt up from the amniotic sac, that a white-throated sparrow bit through the umbilical cord and wriggled free to bolt for the rafters. As it beat its wings, the tip of a feather touched the newborn’s cheek, and where it had touched her it left a purple birthmark, like a drop of hibiscus tea. The bird shook itself in the air and shot upward, shattering a high window. It was gone. Through the jagged glass, we peered up at the clearing sky.
The Thirty Names of Night Page 16