Outside, none of the streetlamps were on, and the porch lights seemed dimmer than they used to be; Mama Joon’s wasn’t working at all. When he jumped off the porch, he felt the night envelop him. His path illuminated mostly by moonlight and hope, he made a left onto St. Claude. Then he crossed Ursulines Street and came to St. Augustine, one of the three churches he had attended with Mama Joon, along with St. Jude’s and St. Louis Cathedral. He wondered less about the infrequency of their churchgoing than the itineracy.
“How come we came all the way over here?” he asked Mama Joon last Easter after they had made the longer walk to St. Jude’s.
“Every church is different,” she said. “Sometimes you need the Father, sometimes you need the Son, and Lord knows sometimes you need the Holy Spirit. It’s up to you to figure out which one you need and where to go get.”
He had frowned with confusion.
“Don’t worry,” she had said. “One day you’ll figure it out for yourself.”
But so far, he hadn’t. Sitting in any church he would wonder which part of the Holy Trinity he needed the most. The Holy Spirit? No—too ghostly. The Son? Wasn’t he a son? That left The Father. This heroic figure—even before Clarissa’s revelation—seemed closest to what he needed. Our Father. Bless me, Father. Forgive me, Father. Almighty Father! These all rang out as mellifluous as bells. But what resounded for the masses as song and salvation always left Ramadan feeling unfulfilled.
As he turned right onto Governor Nicholls Street, the moon cast the shadow of the cross from St. Augustine’s steeple onto the street in front of him. Sparks of irreverence, play, and a suspension of belief inspired his quick hop over the sacred T, and he scampered toward the store, which was just ahead at the end of the block.
Instead of going back to the spot where he and Mama Joon had broken the window—which he did not care to revisit—Ramadan ducked into a narrow alley jungled with overgrown weeds and strewn with cardboard boxes, milk crates, and old, rotting two-by-fours. To his right was a chain-link fence dividing the back of the store from a vacant lot. He made his way down the dark path, feeling the crunch of an aluminum can beneath his sneaker with one step, the slippery spin of a bottle with another. When he was about twenty feet in, a stray cat screeched and leaped up at him. One of its paws bounded off his left shoulder, and it launched itself onto the top of the fence. Ramadan clasped his hand on his shoulder and fell backwards, banging the side of the same red garbage container that a few hours earlier had taught him the word splat. The bin boomed once timpanically from the impact of his body and a second time when the back of his head thumped it. From his crumpled position on the ground, he looked up and saw the cat prowling along the upper line of the fence. Its silhouette strode in front of the moon before it dove into the darkness of the yard next door.
Rubbing his hand over the curls at the back of his head to soothe the throb of his minor injury, he looked up at a patch of starlit sky, and the blue-black night and the energy of the cat settled him. He rose, dusted himself off, and, more cautiously now, approached the back of the building, where he saw a closed door and a high, wood-framed, six-paned window. He went over and tried the rusting gold-plated knob, but it wouldn’t turn. He jerked it front to back and side to side, without success, and overcome with fury, rammed his shoulder into the door four or five times. Pain encouraged reason, and he remembered the milk crates in the alley. After a couple of trips, he had stacked four crates, in twos, side by side below the window.
“Yes!” he said, pausing to admire his work and catch his breath.
He hopped backwards on top of his makeshift platform and, once seated, scooted and rotated his body. Then he gripped the windowsill and leveraged himself to a standing position. Gazing through the lower middle pane into the back room, he was wide-eyed and searching. Ramadan at the Window (# 2).
The room was, of course, darker than the front of the store during the day, but the moon was helping. Remembering how he had seen the cracked door only after moving his head, he shifted to the left, and sure enough, moonlight poured into the room. He saw papers scattered about the floor, the whole back of the chair, and there on the desk, the thing that had glinted just as he toppled from Mama Joon’s shoulders: a laptop computer.
The room was the picture of desertion: yellowing newspapers, an elongated ashtray with the nub of a stick of incense, a brown-leafed bromeliad near the window, its spent, pale pinkish bloom slouching with decay. Ramadan fixated upon the laptop, the lone prize. Nothing else promised life. It wasn’t metallic, but white and plastic. In the moonlight, it didn’t shine at all, though it had a luster about it, hinting that it could be—and was maybe waiting to be—resuscitated.
If anyone had seen him smashing the window with the two-by-four he retrieved from the alley, breaking the panes and the wooden frame, lining the glass-chipped lower ledge with flattened cardboard boxes, and crawling into the store, they would have reasonably branded him a burglar. If they had seen him rifling through the lap drawer of Adad’s desk, searching feverishly for clues to his father’s identity, finding there only one thing, perhaps, of any significance, extending halfway out of the pages of a faded Superman comic book, an envelope addressed, in a decidedly feminine hand, to ADAD TOTAH at 1199 N. RAMPART STREET, NEW ORLEANS. 70116 U.S.A. with a return address on the back that he couldn’t decipher, except for ALEPPO, SURIYE, shoving the envelope into his right front pants pocket, they would have thought him a scavenger or a thief.
And if they had witnessed him exiting the alley with Adad’s Apple iBook G4 tucked under his arm, sloppily wrapped between pages of the August 29, 2005, Times-Picayune he found on the desk—the “Ground Zero” hurricane headline facing out and the laptop power cord trailing behind him like the cat’s tail his furtive efforts had earned him—they would have labeled him a belated looter.
But Ramadan felt he had just performed a rescue, or taken possession of something that belonged to him. As he hurried home, the moon, which had aided him tonight, seemed to absolve him, too, its paleness casting him in the most innocent of lights. Trotting along, he played the childhood game of attempting to catch up to his shadow, to dissolve into it, and, finally, to be made whole. He couldn’t do it, of course, but about halfway home, he vowed never to stop trying.
Slinking inside, he made it all the way down the hall to his bedroom, but as he pushed the door open, its century-old hinges creaked the news of his return.
“Ramadan!” He couldn’t tell from her voice, which was phlegmy but firm, if she had just awakened or not. It was sharp with accusation, though, stiffening his pose.
“What you up to out there, boy?”
“Nothing. I’m just going in my room. You all right?”
“Oh, I’m fine. I just had a bad dream, that’s all. It was all about how you went out without me knowing about it and how then you almost made it back in without getting caught—and then that’s when I woke up.”
“Oh,” he said, not budging. She was almost done—but not quite.
“Next time I have a dream like that, somebody else around here gonna think they having a nightmare. Now good night.”
“Good night.”
He stepped into his bedroom and closed the treacherous door behind him. Sliding the laptop from the folds of old newspaper, he laid it on the bed. As he was whisking the paper out of the way, he remembered the letter, and removed it from his pocket, tossing it carelessly on the bed next to the computer. Then he plugged the power cord into an electrical outlet behind the bedside table. When he stood back up, he heard a faint hum and saw a green dot of light blink near where the cord was attached to the laptop.
“Ah!” he said softly.
There was no computer of any kind in the entire house, either on Mama Joon’s or Clarissa’s side of the double, so even though he knew what the laptop was, he had no idea how to operate one. First, he tried to pry it open at one of its corners, like a book. When that didn’t work, he tugged at its seams. After jerking for a whi
le, he tossed it back on the bed. Part of him wanted to smash it on the floor in frustration. How could the series of difficult, even criminal, actions he had performed to acquire the laptop be easier than just opening the thing?
He closed his eyes and took a deep breath. His head drooped, and he realized how exhausted he was from the long day of skulking around: climbing Mama Joon like a tree and seeing her bleed; sneaking out in the middle of the night; smashing the store window, breaking in, breaking laws. He crawled into bed and rolled over onto his side; his head hit the pillow, and his body relaxed. Then he reached down for the laptop and slid it near his face. When he gave it one last admiring look before falling asleep, he was staring directly at a silver sliver embedded in the white plastic casing: the latch. He pressed it with his thumb, and the lid began to rise. Owing to either the Macintosh propensity for the magical or his drowsiness, it was unclear to him whether the lid continued to lift on its own, forcing his hand to levitate, or if he was aiding the process. With heavy-lidded wonder, he sat up on one elbow and perused the white keyboard of alphabet and symbols, all neatly arranged but not in an order that made sense to his linear, preschool, ABC mind. He slid his fingers over the row of numbers, counting along. Then he rubbed the large trackpad; still nothing. The darkness of the screen reflected the restive state his body was craving, and only a few moments passed before he, too, was asleep, recharging his own battery.
Hours went by as the sleeping Ramadan lay next to the sleeping iBook. At some point, as he relived the day in his dreams, his hand slid down the monitor, and his fingers rubbed the upper edge of the keyboard. When his index finger nestled into a circular indentation—the inconspicuous “on” button—the laptop awoke with the Mac’s signature opening chord, the auditory approximation of dawn. In his unconscious state, he heard a lullaby, a call to retreat into a deeper sleep. So as the Apple logo appeared in its homage to nourishment, knowledge, and original sin, he moved toward innocence and inner inquiry, asking the same question that had consumed him for months—“Where is my father?”
As sometimes happens while one is not listening, indeed while one snores, the world posits answers. As he slept, the computer was solving the riddle of his life, for a background picture filled the screen with a panoramic aerial view of a great distant city—a postcard photograph of Mustafa’s hometown. A breathtaking evening shot of the old Citadel, the man-made flat-topped hill that looked exactly like the fortress it was intended to be, with the ancient Syrian city glittering in every direction. Any casual admirer of the landmarks and wonders of the Middle East would have recognized it immediately, rendering the title in the lower right corner unnecessary: “The Love of Aleppo.”
But, only moments later—awakened by the light—Ramadan found the words informative. Especially the last one.
“A-lepp-o!” he sounded it out.
Then, feeling a distinct twinge of recognition, he began scrounging around in his bedsheets in search of the envelope he’d taken from the desk drawer at the store. When he didn’t immediately find it, he stood up and started flapping the bedspread so wildly he almost knocked the laptop off the bed. He was nudging it back to a safer spot when, out of the corner of his eye, he saw the letter at the foot of the bed, wedged between the mattress and the footboard. The back of the envelope was facing him, and he saw what had made him start scrambling for it. There it was, the same word—the same place—on the computer screen: Aleppo.
Opening the envelope, he took out the letter, which was written in a script that was to him inscrutable. A faded old photograph of a man and woman fell out, and he picked it up and studied it. The couple’s emotions required no translation: they were in love. Who were they? Friends of his father’s? Relatives? Something in the man’s face looked very familiar. Just what, he couldn’t quite say. What he could say, looking back at the envelope and the screen, was this: Aleppo.
This time when he said the word, it roller-coastered its way through the tunnel of his mouth, from the back of his throat, to the tip of his tongue, to the propulsive final pop of his lips. Aleppo! And he said it again and again and again . . .
* * *
BY THE TIME Ramadan was seven, he understood that there was a storied country in the Middle East called Syria and that one of its most important cities was called Aleppo. By the age of nine, he would know the map of the entire region better than he knew the map of the United States. Because the contents of the computer were password-protected, he was never able to search it beyond the background screensaver photograph of Aleppo. It was as if this powerful machine’s sole computational purpose was to orient the compass of his heart. He secreted it away in the back of his closet (with the letter sealed between its keyboard and screen) under an old quilt. At first, every few days, he would take the laptop out and boot it up—just to stare at “The Love of Aleppo.”
Over time, weeks would pass, then months, then years, before he would pull the computer out again to remind himself of how intensely he had once felt about going someplace he would probably never visit and of how passionately he had once felt about finding someone who, so the passage of time would begin to suggest, he would never know. A resignation befell him, a dormancy of desire.
Then, in early 2011, not long before he turned eleven, when he began to see news reports about the political upheaval in Syria and about its subsequent escalation to war, he made a special trip to St. Augustine Church and lit a candle for the return of peace to the place where, he imagined, his father had lived as a boy, and where, perhaps, he lived now as a man. And, like that candle, his old yearning began to flicker. As with the uprising, something within him, too, began to rise. When he watched the people marching and chanting through the Syrian streets on television and the internet, they reminded him of himself and the tantrums he used to throw. “The Arab Spring,” they called it. Even though his days of rage were long gone, his inner Arab—these were his people—channeled their passion. Not politically, of course, as he had no idea what they wanted specifically. But personally, privately, he understood. He still wanted, as he could see they did, something else, something more. Deep down, he knew he had a real problem with the powers that be.
8
Ramadan and Mama Joon Get Passports to the Other Side of the World
Ramadan sat with Mama Joon in a rear pew in St. Louis Cathedral at nine o’clock mass, and he was about to take a selfie with the latest gift from his ever-doting grandmother: a brand-new iPhone. She’d told him it was a birthday present, though he wouldn’t turn twelve for another two months. Just as she was now a weekly churchgoer, she had also kept the vow she made while watching Cassandra kiss the cell phone that heralded the return of their boys. She and Ramadan were still staying at the motel in Houston when she bought their first phones. He had sat on the edge of his bed pressing the keys on the little Motorola flip phone. “Mama Joon, why you got me this?”
“Because God can’t bother with being the only one who knows where your lil narrow behind is at any given minute,” she had said. “He must get sick and tired of people always begging Him to find other people for them. Lost children. Wayward husbands. Suckers who owe them money. I’m exhausted for Him.”
Fiddling with his phone, Ramadan had slapped her with an out-of-the-mouths-of-babes “You do seem kinda tired.”
A grandmother’s child, he had already mastered the tone of sympathetic old soul. She had cut her eyes at him, her face tight from the insult at first, before surrendering to comic admiration.
“Anyway,” she said, “maybe that’s why God gave us these things. Maybe every cell phone is a miracle.”
That flip phone hadn’t felt miraculous. Within a couple of days, he had broken it in two. Did miracles do that? Come unhinged? But this iPhone was different. Like the treasured bit of contraband stashed in his closet—the Aleppo-revealing iBook—it was branded with the Apple logo, so in his mind it was anointed by association.
The priest was delivering his homily, and he kept saying “curi
osity.” His voice conveyed a sense of otherworldliness, as if he had acquired, from years of proximity, the sonic moodiness of an organ. But Ramadan was too distracted with his phone to process the sermon. Looking down at it now in selfie mode, he saw his face mirroring up at him. He smiled as his contentment doubled, knowing the feeling of his grin and the pleasure of seeing it reflecting back to him. Then he scrunched his face, stuck out his tongue, pursed his lips, and crossed his eyes until he couldn’t really see himself at all—all in avoidance of looking at the same old him. If you didn’t know any better, you would think he was no different from any other beige American boy who came from tawny American parents, and for whom Providence had reserved a brown American life. The faint streaks of blue in his amber-colored eyes and the dense merengue of dark curls that refused to grow beyond the three inches piled on his head hinted at atypical infusions but not at the specifics of his roots. And certainly not at any extraordinary destiny, which was essentially what he was trying to impose upon his face, upon himself.
The priest was saying:
“A little girl, I tell you . . . a little girl from Kansas—where else, of course . . . a Dorothy called Clara—she is the one who named it: Curiosity! So when the rover Curiosity lands this summer on that famous planet, more famous perhaps than our own Earth, when you think about it, a hundred million miles away . . . all right, not that far, but millions of miles . . . it may as well be a hundred million . . . we will all know why that little girl understood the majesty of ‘curiosity.’ And why we must all reach for the moon, the Mars within, for there resides the soul. The soul is what makes each of us worth exploring. The soul is what makes each of us extraterrestrial. Not merely of the Earth, but beyond it. Above it. The soul is what makes each of us a star!”
Ramadan Ramsey Page 13