Messenger from Mystery

by Deno Trakas

  “No, you’re a freakin hero, and this lass is an angel of mercy.” He took a deep drag.

  Nadia exhaled and said, “No, I am chicken shit. Or I am scared shitless. What is right? Do I have shit or not?”

  Hitch sputtered, blew out a burst of smoke, giggled, handed me the joint, tried to contain his laughter but couldn’t—it rolled out, a rising, falling scale of laughter that he obviously couldn’t control and that infected Nadia and me too.

  We were incomprehensibly silly for a while, but then Hitch said, “Why are you laughing, mate? You lost all your stuff? And your hand is cooked medium-well.”

  I held it up—Nadia had re-dressed it after the shower—and she blew on it. “It’s not bad. Could’ve been worse.”

  “Yeah, that’s my motto.”

  “I sorry, Jay. It is my fault,” she said. “My fault Saad attack us, my fault you burn hand, my fault you almost die, my fault you lose everything.” She started to cry.

  I hugged her and said, “It’s Saad’s fault, nobody else’s. I hope they catch him and throw his ass in jail.”

  “Yes, me too. But you lose everything, Jay.”

  “It wasn’t that much. I’ll get by. I can go home and get some stuff from my mom’s house, and some of my dad’s old clothes if she hasn’t given them to Goodwill.” I was pretty sure she had.

  Hitchmough said, “But it’s not just about losing your stuff, mate—they tried to freakin kill you. Don’t you need to reconsider some things, like your life?”

  “Yeah, maybe, that still hasn’t registered.”

  “I will help,” Nadia said. “Stay with me. Save the money for the rent to buy the clothes and what else you need, and I buy gun and alarm.”

  “Thanks, Nadia. I might take you up on that ’til I find another place.”

  Hitch said, “If he doesn’t, I will.” And with that half-serious offer, the conversation changed and gave us the closure we needed. We all went to bed, a couple of hours before dawn.

  The fire investigator concluded that I was right—someone had thrown a bottle filled with gasoline and a lighted rag through my window. The police went to pick up Saad for questioning but couldn’t find him. The next day they tracked down his roommate, staying with another friend, hauled him in, and got the story that Saad had left the country. Airline records confirmed that he had flown out of Columbia and headed for Tehran, with stops in Atlanta and London, in the last twenty-four hours. He had obviously planned the sequence—he was almost as clever as he was hateful. I wondered if his rage was personal, all about me and Nadia, but I didn’t think so . . . so where would he go next, and who would be his target? Would he join the militants in Tehran, or find another jihad? Or come back to the States and finish this one? I had no idea, but at least he was out of the country for now, and if he came back, he’d be, as Jenkins said, on the radar.

  CHAPTER 10

  I borrowed $100 from Nadia and bought some clothes and other necessities, and her apartment had everything else I needed, including a new security system. I felt relieved and smug: the fire hadn’t defeated me, Saad hadn’t defeated me, I was resilient and capable of living on a thin margin. But every time I walked into Nadia’s apartment, its comfort mocked me: I wasn’t tough or resilient, I wasn’t living on a margin—I was living on her.

  I’d lost Jenkins’ card, but I called the CIA in Virginia, talked my way to his secretary, and left my new address and number. But he didn’t call back, and there was no sign of progress in the hostage crisis—the Iranians were, as expected, pissed, defiant, and contemptuous of our rescue plan, whereas the administration was focused on dealing with the widespread criticism of its failure. And then there was Ted Kennedy, still fighting with his heavy guns in the primaries. The majority of my students didn’t care—the hostage crisis was vaguely “over there,” and here they were comfortable and politically indifferent. If asked, most would say they were Republicans like their parents. I’d learned in my political science classes that the South had been a Democratic stronghold since before the Civil War, but the Republicans had used the issue of race to flip it beginning with Barry Goldwater in 1964—he won the deep South but lost everywhere else. But Nixon’s “Southern Strategy,” a euphemism for racism in my book, helped him win in 1968 and again four years later. Carter, a Southern Democrat, managed to reverse the trend in ’76, mainly because of the public backlash to Nixon’s Watergate scandal, but now it looked like the Republicans were going to win the South again. I stuck to my rule of not discussing politics in class mainly because such discussions depressed me.

  The school year ended mercifully at the beginning of May, but so did my modest paychecks. Nadia was going home for the summer at the insistence of her parents, whom she hadn’t seen in a year, and I felt alternately depressed and relieved. Depressed because I would miss her in a million ways, relieved because living with her and having her in my life a million ways had gotten a little crowded.

  She asked me to go with her—she’d buy the tickets and I’d have no expenses in Kuwait—but I said no, I had to find a job to make and save some money, and I had to study. My comprehensive exams were looming—I showed her the long list of books I intended to read, covering all of American lit and Nineteenth Century British, and she just shook her head. She was afraid she’d lose me—what if I met another girl? I said I didn’t want or need another girl; did she want another boy? She smiled, looked up, put a finger to her cheek and said, hmmm.

  She called almost every day for the first week, but her father soon put a stop to that, so we resorted to a disjointed exchange of time-delayed chatty letters.

  I got a job at the Peddler Steak House in Five Points and settled into a routine of studying four to five hours a day, waiting tables, and waiting for a call that seemed less and less likely as the weeks passed. Graduate school, or gradual school as some of us called it in honor of our peers who were in their fifth, sixth, or seventh year, tended to kill our passion for literature because of the pressures of the semester. But summer allowed me to slow the pace, to read for several hours a day for pleasure—I could even tolerate the Puritans—and I remembered why I’d switched from political science to English.

  I liked my job too—for a guy who’d grown up working in his dad’s diner, the work was easy, and the social life was new and different. Richard and Emily invited me over for spaghetti, and I reciprocated, made pastitsio following a recipe my mom got from one of my dad’s sisters, but I spent most of my non-work-non-study time with the other restaurant staff—at a bar, a bowling alley, a late movie, or Shoneys for pancakes. I caught a crush on Delaine, one of our USC student hostesses, in part because she was pretty and looked a little like Azi: she was about Azi’s height but seemed taller because she was thinner, with long arms and legs that were elegant if sometimes clumsy; her thick shoulder-length hair was dark brown but with blondish highlights; her eyes, mineral blue, were the main difference. She sparkled with optimism and confidence but not vanity or snobbishness so most people, even other women, liked her. We flirted in a fake antagonistic way—I belittled her addiction to Tab and her devotion to Pat Benatar, while she ridiculed my addiction to fig bars and my “oh so intellectual” tendency to quote literature. We laughed a lot. One night we had a serious conversation at a bar about politics, and I told her about Azi and Nadia. She surprised me by being well informed on the hostage crisis and fascinated by my connections to it. I thought she wanted me to ask her out, and I wanted to, but I never did. I felt guilty anyway. I didn’t agonize over it, but I did decide that I needed to move out of Nadia’s apartment, not specifically because of Delaine and not because I felt bad for staying at Nadia’s while she was gone—I took care of it and she had to pay the rent anyway. But I didn’t want to continue my lazy dependency on Nadia when she came home. And if Azi ever did come back. . . .

  Our Columbia summer steamed ahead sluggishly because the days were oppressively long, hot, and humid. Beginning in June, a heat wave smothered the Midwest, South, and
Southeast, with days and days of record-setting temperatures, in the 90s by mid-morning, over 100 by mid-afternoon. We thanked God for air-conditioning—those who didn’t have it suffered, 10,000 deaths attributed to the heat during the summer. But we had to pay more for energy as the price of oil spiked, in large part due to the decrease in production in Iran—evidently the mullahs and militants didn’t know how to run oil companies.

  The country went on nuclear alert because a computer showed that the Soviets had fired missiles at us—but it was a false alarm. The Olympics were held in Moscow, but we and 65 other countries boycotted because of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. Ted Turner launched CNN and we scoffed—what kind of crazy person wanted to be reminded twenty-four hours a day that the world was a mess? And the Shah died in Cairo, but although Sadegh had predicted that the death of the Shah would lead to the release of the hostages, nothing changed.

  In August I started looking for a room of my own, and around the time of the Democratic convention, when a tired and battered Jimmy Carter was nominated by his party, just before Nadia came home, I found a small apartment in Shandon above a shaded—that’s what sold me—garage behind the house of a former professor.

  When I picked up Nadia at the Columbia airport, she was bouncing, smiling her big white smile, wearing a sexy white dress with a slit up the side. We hugged for a long time, I was truly happy to see her, but even as I soaked up the familiar comfort of her sensual body, I was aware that my moving out would change our routines, and our routines defined us, and I wondered what that would mean. My routines were generally steady, predictable, and boring, but they’d been a little more flexible while Nadia was gone.

  Although Nadia and I hadn’t seen each other for over two months, we’d talked on the phone twice in the last week, so we didn’t have a lot of news to catch up on. As we were gathering her four pieces of luggage and driving in, she told me how she’d bragged about me to one of her girlfriends, how relieved she was to get out of her father’s domineering control and out of the desert heat (although, riding in my un-air-conditioned car, she remarked that Columbia in August, 98 in the shade, wasn’t much better).

  It seemed as good a time as any, so I told her I’d moved out.

  She jerked around in her seat to face me. “What?” I looked back at her and nodded, but before I could begin to explain, she whined, “Whyyyy, Jay?”

  “I just started feeling bad about living off you. It’s been great—I don’t know what I would’ve done without you after the fire—but it’s time for me to be on my own again.”

  She reached out and grabbed my right arm, pressed her nails into my skin. “You don’t like me now? You find other girl?”

  “No, that’s not it. I mean, there’s Azi of course.”

  “But no American girl?”

  “No.”

  “You still like me?”

  “Of course I do.”

  She smiled, but there was a fleck of doubt in her eyes. I thought she would keep talking, asking for assurances, but she didn’t, she just said, “Okay.” She let go of my arm and turned straight in her seat, took a Kleenex out of her purse and patted the sweat off her face.

  When I pulled into the apartment parking lot, Nadia jumped out and hurried in to go to the bathroom while I wrestled with the luggage, but a moment later she met me at the front door and said, “There is flood in bathroom, Jay. You see it?”

  I carried in two suitcases and went with her to take a look, and sure enough, the carpet was squishy, and moldy. “It must’ve happened in the last few days. I’m sorry.”

  “What we can do? I need to pee.”

  “Let’s go to the manager’s office—maybe you can go there.”

  “O-kay. Fast.”

  We hustled to the office, Nadia used the bathroom while I explained the situation, and the manager, an affable, middle-aged Yankee wearing red Bermuda shorts and a black USC golf shirt, followed us back to the apartment. He looked around quickly, stepped on the saturated carpet, said he’d have to call a plumber, and he might have to call someone else to clean the carpet, but he was sure he couldn’t get anything done before tomorrow—could she get by for a day or so? Nadia looked at me casually and asked, “I can stay with you tonight?”

  “Of course. I don’t have much furniture, but sure.”

  As the manager was leaving, I looked at my watch and she noticed.

  “Why you have ants in pants, Jay?”

  “I just have to be at work in forty-five minutes.”

  “Oh, o-kay, let’s go Joe. I take suitcase and follow you.”

  A couple of hours into my shift, Nadia came in, still wearing her sexy dress and her happiness, and Delaine put her in my area, at a two-top off to the side but within sight of the hostess stand. As soon as I noticed her, I went over, bowed and said, “Good evening, ma’am. May I get you something to drink while you look at the menu?”

  She smiled, settled into her chair, and played her part as the elegant young woman, forced to dine alone, who would appreciate and compensate the flattering attention of a dedicated male server. “Yes, thank you. I have glass of wine. What is good?”

  Business slowed, not enough so that I had time for long conversations, but I checked on Nadia often. During the last of those moments—I was recommending the mud pie—Delaine came over and just sort of stood beside me. I was expecting her to ask or tell me something, but she didn’t, so I caught on that she wanted to be introduced.

  “Delaine, this is my friend Nadia. Nadia, Delaine.” I tipped my head from one to the other.

  Delaine held out her hand, and Nadia, although she seemed flustered, shook it. “Jay tells me you’re from Kuwait,” Delaine said pleasantly.

  Nadia blushed and said, “Yes, okay.”

  “Nice to meet you.” Then Delaine turned to me and said, “We’re slowing down and you still have three tables—do you want me to give you any more?”

  “No, let me finish them and take off.”

  “Okay.” She winked, then swished away. She’d never winked at me like that, and it embarrassed me.

  I turned to Nadia, wondering if she’d seen it and if she’d seen it the way I saw it, and when she busied herself with her purse, obviously upset, I knew she had, but she wouldn’t confront me, not here, maybe not even at home. “Nadia, please—this isn’t what it seems.”

  She didn’t look at me or answer, she just dug into her purse.

  “Stay, let me get you some dessert and coffee.”

  “No, just check.”

  “I’ll take care of it.”

  She looked at me then, on the verge of tears, and said firmly, “No. I pay.” She slapped a twenty on the table and left.

  I was mad at Delaine but couldn’t argue with her at work, so I just finished up as quickly as I could and left. Nadia wasn’t at my apartment, nor was her suitcase, but there was a new thirteen-inch TV, with a bow, sitting on the kitchen counter. I drove over to her place, but the lights were off and her car wasn’t there. I figured she must have gone to a hotel for the night, and I drove around for an hour to see if I could find her, but finally I gave up and on a whim drove to Delaine’s instead. I knew where she lived because I’d taken her home from work a couple of times. I parked on the quiet road of her suburban neighborhood and observed her parents’ dark, two-story brick house whose trim needed painting and whose bushes needed trimming.

  I got out and walked around the house on a flagstone path between two rows of azaleas, and leaned against a pine tree in the far corner of the back yard. Soft light fluoresced from the kitchen window, marking a half circle of green grass, and one room upstairs glowed behind a drawn shade, but the rest of the world was dark, moonless and starless, and the air was humid and still. A figure passed behind the shade and I guessed it was Delaine. A mosquito bit my neck and motivated me, so I walked up to the house, picked up a pebble, and threw it at her window, then ducked into the shadows in case it was her parents’. Nothing. I did it again. And again. Finally,
she lifted the shade, and I stepped into the arc of light and waved for her to come down. She shook her head and pointed to the watch on her wrist. I motioned again and mouthed the word Please. She dropped the shade, and in a minute she was unlocking the back door, in her nightgown. But rather than open it and invite me in, she stood behind the screen door, arms crossed over her chest, and said “What is it, Jay?”

  “What was that about at the restaurant, that wink in front of Nadia?”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “You winked at me.”

  “So? We’ve been flirting all summer.”

  “But why then, in front of Nadia? It upset her.”

  “What did she say?”

  “She wasn’t home—I don’t know where she went.”

  “I’m sorry. But you make me crazy, Jay. You flirt with me, and I think you like me, but you won’t give me a chance.”

  “I like you a lot, Delaine, but I have these other women in my life.”

  “One’s in Iran, Jay. This is about me and Nadia.”

  She was wrong—Azi was part of the equation—but she was right too. “You don’t want a man who gathers women, lines them up, and then chooses his favorite.”

  “Yes I do. I want you to choose me.”

  She’d never said anything like that before, or committed herself in any way, and it moved me, and right then I wanted to choose her, to open her door and hug her, to feel her body through her thin nightgown. “I’m flattered—”

  “I don’t want you to be flattered. If you like me, ask me out.”

  “I want to—you’re pretty, sexy, intelligent, fun. But because of this weird triangle or quadrangle I’ve gotten myself into, I can’t. I can’t hurt Nadia.”