“But there isn’t any salt in this water,” I said.
“Just pretend,” he said.
After his ritual, we ate egg-and-tomato sandwiches under the sun. “Why don’t we take a trip to see the real ocean?” my mother asked.
“With what money?” my father said. “It’s my birthday, and I am very happy being here at the lake with these delicious sandwiches.”
Night had fallen on the drive home from the lake. “We are from somewhere else,” my father said.
“We used to be from somewhere else. Now we are from here. This hellhole,” my mother said.
“You and I, your mother, Ahlam, we are from up there,” my father continued. “We come from the stunning stars. We were just born in the wrong place. We were meant to live on another planet. The people who come to the desert are those who know this, deep inside of them, we are from up there. From far, far away.”
“No one knows how to listen in this family,” my mother said. “Don’t learn that from your father. Ariel, why aren’t you saying anything? You’ve spoken three words this entire trip.”
“Do you really believe in curses?” I said.
“Of course I do. I was born inside a curse,” my father said. “Don’t you know the story of the Bedouins in the desert who used to dig and dig for water? All they wanted to find in the dirt was water. All they needed was water, but sometimes they found a black liquid instead. And they knew if it was black, not blue, that God had cursed them. That they were being punished. They would wail and scream and plead to not find it ever again. Every time they saw black instead of blue. Well, suddenly the West needed that black liquid. And some of those Bedouins became rich from the very same thing they used to believe was a curse. But oil is still a curse. Would there be war at all if it weren’t for oil? How many millions have died for that black liquid curse?”
Sitting in the backseat, gazing out at the few stars in the dark, I thought of all of the nights in New York I’d come close to death, all the nights I pushed it too hard, of the booze and drugs I had consumed to escape my losses, realizing that if I had succeeded, my ghost would yearn to return to the one place I’d tried to flee, the desert, being driven by my parents, fighting in the front seats, being driven through the dark toward home.
I awoke in the middle of the night in my childhood bed, and there were tears on my pillow. I had been crying in my sleep. I had been dreaming of my mother at the Sea of Galilee. Rather than one large semicircular lake, it spread out like a true ocean, with bounded bays and smaller tributaries sprawling up into the land. We dove into one such islet of water, its water grey but clear. Once submerged, we saw that there were women, naked, floating beneath its surface, their hair perfectly intact, women dead since Jesus came.
Laura was there. Her hair was purple. I was consumed with love for her. Her scar was gone, her chest smooth and blank. I swam toward her, but my mother urged me up toward the surface. We had to find my father, she said. We swam and swam and then once again had to go below the surface because dusk had descended and the bombings had begun, so we stayed beneath with the other women, but I could no longer find Laura.
“We need soap,” my mother said.
My mother walks toward us. The guards remain on the sidewalk, ready for us. This day has already happened; this day will not end. My father is muttering beneath his breath.
“Tell me the story I told you when you were a child, Ahlam. The Sufi one about the butterflies . . . I forget how it goes. Tell me while we wait.”
“Yusef,” my mother says.
“You joined us,” he says.
“There are three butterflies that dance around a flame. The first butterfly comes close to the flame and says, ‘I know all about love. It is beautiful, unforgettable.’ The second butterfly wants to get even closer than the first, so it does. But it singes its wings. So it withdraws. Terrified, the butterfly says, ‘I know that love only burns.’ But the third butterfly doesn’t say anything at all. The third butterfly simply throws itself into the flames and is consumed.”
The rain has arrived. My mother and I hold my father’s hands. I take the leaves of the creosote and put them to my father’s nostrils. “Now that’s the smell of heaven,” he says.
Somewhere a television is on. Somewhere there is talk of the beheadings, of the air strikes, of the new epidemics replacing the old, of another massacre. The earth spins further from help. Beyond us the heart monitors go on, the fluorescent lights buzz, the commentators shout, the casino leaves fall into the desert, sirens blare. But all we hear is the rain.
I returned to New York at dawn on a red-eye. I longed for Laura. I had to tell her we would survive. That I forgave her everything. We would survive even ourselves, as long as we were together.
I took a right into our lot. The moon was full over the canal. I galloped through the alley and past the boulder. The sky was blue and satiny, and the city just beyond was softened in it. New York was always so beautiful in the very crux of parting with it. It was finally spring, and the winter that year seemed to never end.
There was music wafting out from the loft, classical music. I thought Laura was playing. I turned the key. Ofelia was squawking loudly, batting against her cage. I saw Laura. The sheath of the piano was open as if just used. A song was on the record player. “Kol Nidre.”
“Laura,” I said. I walked to the window. I sat on the bed beside her. She was wearing a charcoal-grey dress. Her mascara had dried on her cheeks. There was residue of powder on a book. An empty bottle of wine. The Oxys emptied. A syringe on the floor. “Laura,” I whispered. I lay down beside her. The train lights moved above us, refracting off the window. Through my sudden tears, the train lights smeared like shooting stars. Lying before the rippling blue window, below the slurred lights of the world above, it was as if we were underwater. “Laura, you’re cold,” I said.
vii
October
The Jewish New Year fell late this year. It was a day of rain. I did not go to work. I woke up from dreams of snow pouring down, thick and white, breaches of sky laced with stars, purple nebula, the world cooing slow as song, and looked into the grey out the window, and not sick, decided to stay. I called my father and said I was coming home.
On that day of rain, I watched it fall on the city, the buildings shrunk by the clouds. It was prettier that way. Laura’s things, my things, had all commingled in a chaos that sprawled the entire loft. Laura’s clothing and the broken instruments remained on their bellies. I had no idea what was mine in it any longer. Dylan would return any day, I knew. I had bought all the time I could.
I walked in circles about the apartment, tiptoeing over brooms and coins and bobby pins that once held Laura’s hair until my chest began to ache as it had intermittently in the months since she passed. I saw a doctor who told me there was nothing wrong with my heart, that it was likely sympathetic grief pains. I went out to the truck and climbed into that bed for the first time since she died and wondered at how loud the rain fell on the tent. Beneath the pillow was something hard. Laura’s journal.
Slowly we make our way through the reservation back to the sidewalk. A wheelchair awaits my father. The crowd that has gathered is smiling. As if this were some sort of homecoming. As if we really had taken off. But they are smiling because they have won.
“I won’t get in that,” he says.
“We just need to make sure your fever has gone down,” the doctor says.
We walk slowly through the halls, my father slightly leaning into my mother and me. “No pain, no pain, no pain,” he says over and over again. “When we leave, if I have to fill something out like ‘country of birth’ . . . I will say I do not know where I am from. I have no birth certificate. I was born walking. That is what I will say, Rachel. My country disappeared when I was born.”
After Laura died, she appeared in my dreams every night. The dreams were variations
on the same theme. In them, we were sitting by the canal at Dylan’s. Or we were sitting on the reservation in Arizona. And I’d say to her, “Laura, you are dead. How did you get here?”
And she’d say, “No, I’m not. I’m not dead. You made a mistake. How could you believe that I was dead? I never died.” Only once in any of those dreams did we embrace. She hugged me violently, lay on top of me, and put her head to my chest to hear my heart. I pushed her off, fearing mine would stop in her arms. In most of the dreams, there were no hugs. We remained talking, fighting gently or viciously for what seemed like hours, but it was only minutes or perhaps a second, because it was only a dream. Then I got up to go somewhere. I had to get something, though I didn’t know what, and when I did, I looked up at the sky, and it was as if it was coming apart at the seams and the spectacular reaches of deep space, the nebula, the indigo star clusters, they were all coming in, coming closer. And when I went back to find her, to tell her to come and look, to tell her I’d found heaven, she was gone.
In Laura’s journal, I found nothing I had not already seen. I saw Danielle’s photo again and realized how little they looked alike. That it was only the shape of their eyes that bore any resemblance at all. The fact I had thought otherwise for so long seemed like the cruelest trick of Dylan’s. That the both of us needed so much to feel we were special, singular, that our being there was intended, that neither of us, in our own ways, was just another dispensable girl.
Tucked into the journal’s flap, I found Laura’s birth certificate and social security card. Born in February, in Arizona, to the name Sonora Gavin.
I felt her in the truck with me suddenly, as if my reading her name had conjured her back. I knew she was there considering me, saying my name in a language I’d never understand. My shoulders and my forehead were pressed down upon as if by a huge weight, the weight of the dead. There was no escape. I leaped out and, hearing my own footsteps echoed back to me, began to run, as if I were being chased by real feet.
There was a new wine store. It had appeared from nowhere in the last month. The other liquor store we’d frequented all those years, the one with the bulletproof glass as its casing, had shut down. This store was dimly lit, spare. There were bowls of orchids. Sophisticated elevator music played. It might have been a spa. There were pairings written on a board in chalk, not pairings for food but for moods.
The girl at the register complimented my bracelet ensemble. I hadn’t spoken to a living person in two days. I let her give me suggestions. I let her talk at me. “This one is dry and bold and very complex,” she said. “A great year too.” I imagined the wine staining my lips.
On the way home, on the bridge of the canal, three young Orthodox boys approached me. “Are you Jewish?” they asked.
“In a way,” I said.
“Well, that counts. Have you listened to the shofar today?” the youngest said. I shook my head. “Would you like to?”
“I guess,” I said.
“You have to repeat this prayer after me. Do you speak Hebrew?”
“No.”
“You just have to repeat after me. Can you do that?” he asked.
I set the wine between my feet. I tossed my cigarette, and we read. Then he drew up his instrument. The sound echoed the wet in the street. People stopped and stared. There was the canal at our side. The city in the distance. The sea elsewhere, the smell of it suddenly close. Here was the trumpet Laura told me to listen for.
“The sounds of the shofar emulate the sound of a cry, every variation of sobbing,” he said once finished.
“That’s what the shofar is supposed to be?”
“Yes,” the youngest said. “And the last, did you hear how it cuts like a gasp, like a pant? It’s the last sobs of a desperate man hoping for another year. Shana Tova.”
“And to you,” I said.
We parted and once over the canal, the drawbridge alarm sounded. The horn of a boat announced its arrival in New York. For a moment the past returned, the canal was a bustling place, a portal scrawled with industry, a place where no one could ever be alone. Once home, I opened the wine and poured it into two separate glasses. One I drank, and one I left full just beside me. And to you.
“I’m fine,” my father says. “I cured myself by walking.”
The doctor excuses us out of the room, and my mother and I sit again in the waiting room.
“If they let him go, where should we eat dinner?” I ask.
“I can’t think about food,” my mother says.
“Galileo?”
“It’s been gone for years. It closed before you left,” she says. “Don’t you remember?”
“What happened to that waiter? Tomás?”
My mother shakes her head. “God knows.”
I dreaded the coming autumn. I dreaded the snow that would fall when it was finished. The doctor who told me there was nothing wrong with my heart, told me I should exercise, and so I walked in circles about the neighborhood as I once did, passing the woman who mooned and screamed at passersby, the woman long gone or dead, and now passing crowds of people my own age coming to the new flea market that had opened, emerging with furs and antiques and old books and artisanal ice cream.
There were nights the pain in my chest became so bad I thought it would be easier to give in and let go. There were nights I could not catch a breath. I meditated on my childhood, vague and distant before high school, where Laura still flickered only on the edge of things.
I thought of my father, in the washes with a stepladder to pick his olives, on his tiptoes to reach the healthiest branches. “Take what’s whole, what looks the most alive,” he’d said. Once home he poured the olives into vats and filled them with water, vinegar, salt. The olives marinated for a month, sometimes two. They were always bitter, my father’s olives. We always said they were the best olives we’d ever tasted.
I remembered the nights we all drove out past the city lights and parked the car with our telescope. We found the craters on the moon. We spotted Mars. “Look up when you are scared. Always look up,” my father said. “We’ve named the night after ourselves. Ahlam, dreams are daughters of the night. Dreams travel to the land of the dead and come back again.”
I thought of my mother braiding my hair before dance recitals, placing each strand carefully in a bun. Helping me apply the rouge and the lipstick, and the feel of her hands, assuring me everything was going to be okay. I thought of the hot chocolate she brewed for me every single morning I ever slept at home.
I thought of Tomás on the patio at Galileo, hearing the cars swish beneath us. Tomás drew star maps on the paper tablecloths. The first night we ate there, he drew a picture of the galaxy and pointed to where we were, far from the center. “We live in a nowhere suburb in a pretty mediocre galaxy,” he explained. “I don’t think I’m from this galaxy at all. I believe I came from the Andromeda galaxy, not so far, but far enough. Maybe that’s why I’m an outcast.” He drew the spiral of Andromeda close to the Milky Way, almost touching. Then he pointed to Andromeda in the night sky above us.
“Maybe that’s where I’m from too,” my father said. We could still see the stars.
But the walking in circles never quieted anything, and one morning I realized the only thing left for me was to run hard and fast. My heart aching, sleepless, just past dawn, the light still blue and red and cold, I set off and over the bridge of the canal and over the bridge into the city and back until the sweat and tears burned my eyes, until there was no difference between them, until my heart beat so hard against my chest, I knew I was alive, still alive, undeniably alive. My limbs, my knees, my lungs all hurt, and yet I could go on, I knew, if I had to. I would go on.
When I reached the corner, the father at the watermelon stand called to me. “Why don’t you sit down for a second? Have some melon? It’ll cool you down.”
“Thank you,” I said.
<
br /> “I’ve been waiting to have a chat with you,” he said. “All these years . . . but now that you’re all alone.”
“Dylan will be back soon,” I said.
“I’m sorry about your pretty friend,” he said. “Laura, was it?”
“I’m Ahlam,” I said and shook his hand. I hadn’t said my birth name in years. “Yes, Laura.”
“I’m Daniel,” he said. “I lost a lot of my friends in the war. But running was my therapy. I’d run to Central Park, I’d run all the way to Harlem, if you can believe that. I was a very handsome man. Now, you see, it’s hard for me to get to that tree. I fell through a subway grate years ago. I was near gone for this world. But now if I walk to the tree and back, it’s enough. It’s a miracle. If only they’d get me my money.”
“How long have you been waiting for it?” I said. “The money?”
“Oh, years. This city . . .” He sighed. “But it will come. I’ll be sure of that. For now, I can get to the tree and get back. And the doctors told me I’d never walk again. You can do anything in this life, I tell you. All of life is alchemy. You own the magic of your path.”
The rain finishes. The doctor greets us. “Unbelievable, the fever is gone,” he says. My mother begins to cry. “He can go after we get through some paperwork. But I want him to return for a psych eval.” We nod. We say we understand. The nurse rolls my father out of the room in a wheelchair. My father winks dramatically, as if all of this, the entire night, had been one great joke.
Only toward the end did Laura and I discover Greenwood Cemetery. We were always in search of the desert: empty beaches, Greenwood, Gowanus. When we climbed the highest hill, she said, “This is the highest point in Brooklyn. We’d have to come here if there was a flood.”
I still see us sitting there, hiding from the tourists and the cars, our lives, the bars, feigning to be invisible, a land quiet as the desert, looking out over the rivers that close in on New York, the Statue of Liberty lonely in her centuries-old thrust into the clouds. We are there when suddenly the water begins to rise without warning, and the bridges crumble beyond us and the great city and all those gone from our desert are floating there, a great gathering beneath the waves.
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