by Kyell Gold
"You know their names?" Aziz's ears perked up.
"I met them a few months ago in the bookstore. They were looking for science fiction, so I gave them Dog Country and they came back to tell me they'd enjoyed it." He tilted his head, looking at Aziz. "They're nice. I can introduce you if you like."
"That's okay," Aziz said quickly.
Doug shook his head. "Have it your way."
"It's not..." The cheetah sighed. "Let's talk about something else."
"My friend." Doug reached across and rested a paw on Aziz's. The touch was familiar and friendly, not intimate, but Aziz couldn't help flicking his eyes over to the fox and dingo, who were also--no; they were holding paws in an intimate manner, the dingo's thumb rubbing over the fox's white fur. He snapped his eyes back to Doug as the squirrel went on. "The past is receding very quickly. The future encroaches on us everywhere."
Aziz chose to believe that Doug was starting a new conversation, not talking about his relationship with gay people still. "Have you signed your offer yet?"
Doug shook his head. "Waiting for the meeting. But I'll send it off right after that. Did you see the implicit threat?"
"Implicit threat?"
"The expiration date. After which they'll come after us."
Years earlier, when planning the Homeporium, Vorvarts had run into one obstinate homeowner, a pine marten who had been attached to her brownstone and refused to sell. They had sent inspectors around to find housing code violations, had hired lawyers to scrutinize her tax records, and had eventually harassed her--completely legally--into giving up her home for a third of what they'd originally offered. "Halifa worries about that too, but our records are in order. I don't believe they will go to those lengths if several of us hold out. Giverny said he expects they might increase their offer."
Giverny was the lawyer they and Doug had both used. "Or..."
"There is always that chance. Halifa and I will discuss it." Aziz exhaled. "There is the neighborhood, too. The mosque, the apartments down the street...if they take over here, how long before the rents rise and those people must leave?"
"And that'll be good for your business for a while longer."
Aziz inclined his head. "I hate to look at it that way, but it is business. I can't stop the neighborhood from changing."
Doug laughed and cut him off. "I'm sure Tanska will have something to say about that."
"I think we can survive here a little longer, even if they build around us." Aziz sipped his tea, thinking about the fiery Siberian tiger. "It would be nice if we'd been able to convince Polavic and Jenella not to sell."
"You think Halifa would want to stay if you could have a solid half-block?"
"No." Aziz rubbed the side of his muzzle. "But the situation would be different. She would understand that."
The squirrel leaned across the table, close to Aziz. His broad, pudgy shoulders strained at the thin yellow polo shirt. "And if Tanska agrees to sell...would you also?"
"There would be little point in staying then." The cheetah pressed his paws together. "But I still wouldn't know what I could do after selling."
"Besides run your other stores?"
Aziz had spent time at the other stores when setting them up, but now only traveled to them two or three times a year, while Halifa managed most of the finances. They were foreign nations to him, albeit ones that paid him monthly. "They run themselves."
"You'd have enough money to do almost anything you want." Doug looked up at the cheetah. "Travel, give up work, help people here or in your home country."
"That's the problem." Aziz rubbed his muzzle. "I'm not sure what I want. What are you going to do?"
"My son wants me to move out to Coronado with him. I would like to see a little more of the world. I could do both those things and more if I only had the time."
"And that makes it difficult."
Doug smiled. "May we all have such problems."
3
The Tape
After the meal, Aziz walked the three blocks to the Devos Musjid Al-Islam, a small brick building that looked like any other storefront, large window giving out onto the street with a green awning where two ground squirrels and an ibex sheltered from the evening heat, sharing a bowl of fresh dates likely from the grocery next door. They waved as he passed and asked about his day; he made small talk and accepted a date, the sweetness bursting in his mouth as he went inside.
Halifa preferred to pray at home. Aziz suspected that in recent years her sense of community had been broken. And even though he rarely lingered long after prayer, he did love the feeling of being surrounded by others at the night and morning prayers.
Brushing aside the privacy curtain, he entered the spacious prayer room and crossed to the males' side where he greeted a red fox, a pair of mice, and a pangolin who had been at the café. It was comforting simply to stand among them as they talked, leaning against one corkboard wall that held community announcements, waiting for the imam to lead them in prayer. And kneeling, prostrating himself as he spoke his prayer with a dozen others, he felt closer to his god, his fellows, his world.
Lately, that feeling hadn't lasted much beyond the prayer itself. Over the last six months, most of the post-prayer conversation in the mosque had been around the changing neighborhood. Thus far, the mosque was not in the sphere of Vorvarts, but that sphere was expanding. Rents had jumped, nearly doubled in the last five years, and people feared what a new development would bring. "They couldn't get us out by calling us terrorists," went the oft-repeated line, "so they're trying to drive us out with money."
Aziz knew that there was no sinister government conspiracy, merely capitalism and opportunity at work, and that all religions in Upper Devos were being affected more or less equally. Though he shared their worries about the neighborhood, he stood to profit from its development as the mosque's only business owner on Nassau Street, so he had politely excluded himself from those conversations. The problem was that that only left matters of faith, local sports, or his family as topics of conversation. That last had not been a good topic for three years, and Aziz did not follow sports, and these days the matters of faith all seemed tied into the fate of the Muslim community. So Aziz stayed a short time out of courtesy and then excused himself, walking out and down through the humid, dark evening back to his store.
Jennifer lived near Aziz and Halifa, so she often dropped by the store late at night and sometimes stayed to talk to Aziz when he came back to do the cash accounting. Tonight, though, she'd simply left the camera on the counter with a note saying that she had a date and had to leave, and she hoped this was the right camera.
It took him only twenty minutes to do the accounting, and like most evenings, the numbers lined up into orderly columns and matched the cash in the till to a degree that reassured him that the world was an orderly place. He liked the feel of cash in his paws, and even credit card receipts felt more solid than the numbers that appeared from his online storefront. Much as he preferred to look his customers in the eye, the online sales had kept his stores afloat when many other pawnshops had failed. The uneasiness of dealing with people he couldn't see was outweighed by the weekly income they brought in.
Once he'd finished, he picked up the camera. Heavier than he'd anticipated, even for as large as it was, nearly the size of his head. Probably about five years old. He opened it and looked at the unlabeled tape inside. Nothing there to show whose it was. He should probably play it so he could confirm that the tape was Ben's. It wasn't any more intrusive than anything else he'd done over twenty years of taking other people's possessions. He'd gotten nude pictures out of books where they'd been shoved and forgotten, old letters in pockets of briefcases, countless photos and video on cameras either forgotten or ignored. Sometimes he looked through them to see what kind of person had pawned their camera; often the original owner had passed on or moved out and the camera held a surprising array of images compared to the person who'd brought it in. Once Aziz had found photos
of white powder, needles, and piles of bank notes. That he'd reported to the police. The rest he kept to himself.
Jennifer hadn't brought any cables with the camera, but he had a few with other cameras, so he walked over to his shelf where seven blank television screens waited silently. Aziz plugged the cables into one of the TVs at his eye level and stepped back, holding the camera. Eyes fixed on the screen, he pressed Play.
For a moment the only sound was the whirr of the camera spinning the tape. Then static appeared on the TV, crackling, and an image burst onto the screen: golden-white sand and turquoise water and the froth of waves. A moment later a cougar in a tight swimsuit ran into the frame, laughing and waving. "Put the camera down!" he yelled. "Come on, let's swim!"
Muscles around his dense body spoke to youth or a good workout regimen or both, and the swimsuit was very tight indeed. Gerald moved with a weight and force that no cheetah in Aziz's experience did, but with a common feline suppleness. Aziz looked closer, only to see if he could identify this cougar as the one from the coffee shop. It was hard to tell when one was nearly naked and bursting with joy while the other had been clothed and devoid of any emotion, but the build was the same, at least. His wide, happy eyes glowed green through a brown filter: a soft hazel color. Aziz searched for another distinguishing mark and then leaned back, disgusted at his own invasive curiosity.
"In a minute," a louder voice called from off screen. The image wobbled, then steadied, and then a fox's black paw waved in front of the camera. "Looks good," he said. A moment later the fox himself, light red fur glowing in the sun, sprinted down the beach toward the waves, red tail streaming out behind him with its bright white tip overexposed. For a moment, Aziz thought the fox wasn't wearing any clothes, and then he turned and the bright red Speedo flashed into view.
In the short glimpse he had in the faraway picture, Aziz couldn't say for sure whether the happy fox on the beach was the same as the desperate fox who'd begged him to get the camera back. And the scene intrigued him. He and Halifa had gone to the beach, but only the local one here, back when their son Marquize was young. They'd let him ride some of the smaller rides on the boardwalk, had bought him a treat of fried dough and powdered sugar that had ended up all over his paws and muzzle, and had splashed around in the tame waves. Coming from an inland desert city, the ocean was a novelty, but one that made Aziz uneasy at first, both from the wide expanse of water and from the state of undress of the people enjoying it. Their son had loved it, and Halifa had enjoyed the cool water, so they went two or three times every summer until Marquize went away to boarding school. Aziz hadn't realized that he missed it until this moment.
That beach had been crowded with people; they'd had to arrive before nine in the morning to be sure of finding a spot. The beach in the video here was empty save for the fox and cougar. Was it a private beach? Hard to imagine they could afford to vacation on a private beach and then a few years later have to pawn the camera they'd used to record it. Not unusual, of course; people lost their jobs every day. Maybe the cougar had been military and something had happened to him.
"Come back!" the fox yelled down the beach, and the cougar hesitated, his feet already splashing in the waves, then ran back up. Sand stuck to his fur as he ran, and then he got close enough to sling an arm around the fox's shoulders and his sandy feet were out of the frame.
"What? I wanna swim."
The fox pointed to the camera, and now Aziz saw for certain that he was Benjamin. "Kiss me, husband," he said, and the weight he gave to that word made it sound as shiny and new as it must have been to them then.
It brought a sparkle to the cougar's eyes. He wrapped his paw around the fox's shoulder and bent down to kiss him, the two of them pressing closer and closer.
Aziz shut off the tape. Even as he replaced it in the camera, though, the image of the couple embracing stuck with him, and that caused his tail to twitch and his head to turn, ears perked, though there was nobody else in the shop and nobody could see in with the grating down over the front windows. Spying on others was a sin, but as the owner of a pawnshop, he had long ago made his peace with the brief glimpses of others' lives that passed through his paws every day. Early on, he had sometimes tried to discover more, and each time had reproved himself and added a du'a asking forgiveness to his prayers that evening.
Now that curiosity resurfaced. What was it that made this tape so important to Benjamin? Was it simply that this was a memory of a happier time?
Aziz and Halifa had once been that close, though they'd never taken such pure delight in each other's company. They had clung together out of shared past and emotional connection, out of having escaped the destitution of their home to make a better life for their son. In those days, they had been full of accomplishment, equal partners in their business and family. Halifa had delighted in the freedom she was afforded here, where perhaps real estate agents would give her a second look but would not speak over her to her husband or forbid her from signing documents. And Marquize had blossomed in the new world, making friends easily. If he'd resisted some of the duties of Islam, Aziz and Halifa hadn't had the heart to punish him too severely. Children rebelled against their parents and found their own paths, and those paths would lead them back. Or should. And always in the back of their minds was the cub who should have been Marquize's sister, stillborn, a message perhaps to remind them of how valuable Marquize himself was. And yet that permissiveness had led to...
Aziz forced his thoughts back to the dingo and arctic fox in the café, to the pair of wolves there. Their lives and stories seemed to open up to him, as though he'd been looking at a pane of glass edge-on and upon stepping to the side had noticed a design etched on it. But he couldn't yet see what that design was. If he could see it, would it help him understand his own life? Would it help him understand his son?
On his desk, sitting in a back corner, there was a small bottle of rosewater. Dust stuck to his fingers as he picked it up and turned it over, the delicate scent tickling his nostrils. Halifa used to like when he wore rosewater. He opened the bottle and the scent grew stronger; he turned it over into his paw pad and dabbed at the white fur below his chin, then stoppered the bottle and put it back.
4
Halifa
He walked home through the muggy evening and even opened his shirt to the air. A wolf in a skirt turned her--his?--nose as Aziz walked by, no doubt intrigued by the rose scent around the cheetah. An Anglic polecat named Maggie waved as he passed her, and he waved back. He might not know all the people specifically, but he knew many of them. And yet he hadn't seen Benjamin before, and Gerald only the one time that he could recall. Unless the cougar had been at the café and Aziz hadn't noticed him. That idea bothered him more than it should; he couldn't know everyone, could he?
Out of habit, he checked his shop as he walked by, but everything seemed to be in order. At the corner, Tanska was closing up the pastry store, and Aziz thought that talking about the Vorvarts offer with the tiger might distract him from thinking about the tape. So he waited five minutes, after which she saw him and raised a paw with two fingers: two minutes. He nodded and leaned against the glass, smiling hello to the polar bear couple who'd bought their first electric guitars from him years before and who still dropped off flyers for their performances whenever they had one.
The door to the store clicked open and Tanska came out, dressed in tight jeans and a halter top. She held out a napkin to Aziz. "It's good to see you," she said with a smile, and turned to lock the door.
"Thank you," he said, and unfolded the napkin to reveal a pair of flat biscuits. He brought them to his nose, sniffing the sweet, spicy ginger, and then rewrapped them. "I'll bring one to Halifa."
"I guess you got the letter today as well." Tanska slipped the keys into her pocket and looked across the street at the Homeporium. "Assholes."
"It's a lot of money."
"Don't tell me you're thinking about selling. I'll take those biscuits right back." She sw
iped a paw at him jokingly.
He sighed and shook his head. "But Halifa was willing to sell for two thirds of what they're offering. When she sees the letter..."
"We need to hold out, Zeez. As long as we can." She didn't have to look across the street again to remind him what was at stake.
The cheetah's tail lashed; he made an effort to still it. "I want to, believe me. I love the store, the street. But I don't think we will convince anyone else to stay."
The tiger rubbed her paws together. "You smell like rosewater."
"I know."
She stepped out onto the sidewalk, and Aziz fell in beside her. They lived in the same direction for at least two blocks. "I'm sorry. I see all this happening in front of me. I'm going to lose my store because everyone here is tired of fighting. They're going to give up, cash in, and that cancer," she swept her paw toward the blue glass as they left it behind, "will keep spreading."
"You aren't losing the store. What they offered us is enough to start up again somewhere else."
Tanska reached down around an oblivious raccoon couple to pick up a discarded can, and carried it to the recycling bin on the street corner. "You have other locations. It's easy for you. Easier," she amended. "Look at me. I have no husband, no children, nothing but the store. I'm forty-one. I'm too old to start over."
"I'm nearly forty-six," Aziz said lightly.
Tanska shook her head. "You have a wife. You have a--another store."
"I have memories here, friends like you."
The tiger's head lifted as they walked on and the Homeporium passed from view. "You don't think that keeping this is worth fighting for? You think those people know each other the way we do? They don't want a neighborhood; they want a mall. They want convenience and proximity to the city, not a community. You know how many of them have joined the neighborhood association since that went up?"