I’m so elated, my fingers auto-dial Ibrahim—the one friend who’d be amazed at all I’ve pulled off. We’d laugh long and hard. I can see him, lean face tipped over, pressing his fist to his mouth, laughing. Oh, man. That is sick! he’d say. No one hurt. Just a little spoof.
Then there’s a painful commotion stirring in my chest, raw, furious. This isn’t a joke. None of it is. I shove the phone back.
Ibrahim. The one person I can’t call.
—
It’s a dream, a black-and-white dream, the elevated train shadows slashing down, punctured light wheeling across the windshield in a crazy pattern. I can’t tell which part of me is in the dark, which is seen. But I like being here, in this cave of a car, next to Taylor, the upholstery smelling of old hamburgers and dangling air freshener, the creak of his leather jacket, though who knows why he’s wearing that in this heat. Even Sanchez in the back, breathing, listening. I’m changing, sliding out of one skin and into a new one, hard, bright, strong. I am metal, and I am what protects and sees. And I’m with someone who gets it. Who knows what I can do.
“This is good,” he says when I explain all the numbers I have, the volunteering. Then his words are drowned by the next train, rumbling overhead.
When the air goes still again, I ask, “These groups,” I say. “What if they’re not doing anything?”
“Then they have nothing to worry about.”
“But—”
“Look.” He swivels to face me, one hand draped on the wheel. “That’s the point. A lot of these organizations, they’re really innocent. Not doing anything bad at all. Great stuff, even. But they’re a target. You’d be surprised how easy it is for radicals to infiltrate. It’s like an infection. Just one, two, and the whole thing spreads.”
“But how do I know”—I pause—“who to choose?”
“That’s not your job,” he replies. His voice is abrupt, hard. I feel the shutting sound, a door, rattling inside me for a long time. It reminds me how Taylor is not just here, with me. There are offices and more offices, growing mazelike behind him. A regular matrix of power—and I’m nothing, just a little bug of information.
Now he turns to me. “You ready for more?”
My heart beats so hard, it’s in my throat. Every fiber in me strains. I don’t know why, but I want this more than anything. I want to be Taylor, seen and not seen. I want to shift like a lizard in the branches, iridescent, camouflage brown. Every one of my people, the shopkeepers, the old ladies, the hairdressers in the threading salons, they are mine and I am saving them. Somewhere deep inside me is a splinter of doubt, but then it’s pushed down, far.
“I—I guess so,” I stammer. Why can’t I just say yes? “Is there someone in particular I’m following?”
He flashes a cold look at me. “You never ask that, understand?”
I gulp. “Yeah.”
“You’ve got to stay on it. Get serious. We need you to head out to the mosques. Really blend.”
“I guess.”
I feel his eyes on me, scrutinizing. “If we can work with you, if you keep this up, we’re talking a regular salary.”
Dazed, I stare out the car window. Another train passes overhead, the pavement showered with confetti strips of light. “How much?”
“About a thousand a month.”
A thousand a month. All cash! Once Ibrahim showed me a check stub from when he worked at Chipotle. Twenty hours a week, lettuce threaded in his hair, and after taxes all he had was one hundred thirty-three dollars. That’s why you got to think big, he always said. Now I feel a burn of satisfaction. Yo, Ibrahim, I think, gently rapping my knuckles against the cool window glass. The bristles of my haircut, sharp angles of cheekbones. A slight crook of a smile. Look where I am, sucker.
“Hey. Pretty boy. Stop lookin’ at yourself.”
It’s Sanchez, prodding from the backseat. “Don’t think it’s so easy. You gotta work your butt off. We’ll be on you all the time.”
My mind’s whirring with calculations: three hours in the morning for class. That leaves the rest of the day except for picking up Zahir from the bus, when Amma’s busy. A few hours on the weekend at the store.
“You up for this?”
I feel as if my throat is going to explode. “Yes,” I whisper. “I can do that.”
FILE
Masjid Al-Rahman
Address: XXXXX, Brooklyn, NY
Telephone number: XXXXXXXXXX
• CI 1560 reports imam new to congregation. Trained in Saudi Arabia. Prior to affiliation with Masjid Al-Rahman in New York City, traveled to Houston and Pittsburgh. Asserts visiting relatives.
• Initial information and interviews with congregants indicate speakers sympathetic to Muslim conditions overseas invited to speak. No new speakers currently scheduled. No specific instances of retaliatory or hostile actions.
Plan of Action
• Continue pole camera surveillance.
• CI to attend prayer services and monitor imam.
• Continue car license review.
• Continue surveillance of cricket-watching café one block north where many of male congregants gather after prayer.
July blooms hot. Our air conditioner is broken. Ma wedges a fan into our window, but all it does is blow more warm, dirty air into our bedroom. Zahir is whimpering on his mattress, dressed only in boxer shorts, the sheets gummy around his bare legs. The heat gets to him too. Propped against his bed is his sky-blue drawstring backpack—he’s in a day camp, and his skin is edged with the tangy smell of chlorine.
I spend most nights doing computer work, keeping up with my Internet watching. I collapse into a universe of cyber identities, avatars, following strands of conversations. My eyes turn owlish, dark. That’s when I try to work on my essays for Professor Emily, as I call her. She may look like a barista, but she’s one tough teacher. My first essay she gave back slashed with red. An essay is not a text message, she wrote. You know better, Naeem. I don’t know what she means by that. She doesn’t know me. No one knows me these days. I don’t know myself.
I’ve changed: I’ve kept my hair trimmed, my beard shaped into the careful line of a neat goatee like the other devout guys do. I notice when I bound down Seventy-Third Street, the uncles and others, their eyes register differently. I don’t get the frown squatting down over their features. Or the blank look of not understanding. I’ve been slotted into a new place. Good boy. Parents’ boy. Working hard, all the time.
The first time I duck into a masjid, it’s tough. I feel my wrists shake as I kneel on the carpet. The prayer words slur in my mouth. What do I know? The imam raises his eyes at me, noticing how I keep fumbling to copy everyone else. They aren’t stupid. They know guys like me. Informants crawling all over.
Later, as the men gather in the foyer, slipping on shoes and sandals, I try striking up a conversation. Most turn their shoulders, push past me, head out into the white glare of the streets. I leave, discouraged. Nothing to show for my time.
But I go back the next day, and the next. I stay after a special event and help rinse the foil containers and sweep the floor. I play it low-key, steady.
“Where are you from?” the imam asks as I’m leaving. He’s young, with a scraggly reddish beard, green eyes almost like Ishrat’s. But the skin underneath looks drawn and lined, elephant-gray. As if he doesn’t sleep much.
“Brooklyn,” I lie.
“Your family name?”
“Hamid.”
“I haven’t seen you before.”
I cock a smile. “Never was too good about the praying stuff. Thought I’d give it a try.”
A slight twitching in his cheekbone. Playing it street means I’m a good catch. “Why now?”
I take a breath and then slowly spool out my story. “I was in a dark place,” I explain. Then I make my voice go low, hot with shame. “I did a lot of bad things.”
He embraces me, his breath scented with pistachio nuts. “Welcome.”
; —
Now I go to mosques all the time. As the summer draws down deep and furiously hot, I seek them out. They’re a chain of islands across the boroughs: Midwood, Ozone Park, Bay Ridge, Kensington. I follow them, one by one. The small, where you press on a gate, head grazing a brick doorway. The storefront masjids, where they hang strips of thick plastic in the winter, and where all the cabbies go before heading on their routes. The big one, with an imam booming into a microphone, so many men showing up that loudspeakers are fixed to the doors outside so the others can pray in the courtyard. I learn the worn-out shapes of shoes left in cubbies; the chemical smell of a dry cleaner seeping through the walls in one. I bend and fold, touch my forehead to a small rug. The men recite, their melodies twining pure over my head.
After, I sit. I make my features sad and sincere at once. I speak softly, about my black days, my impure thoughts. How I did drugs. Fell off the path. How found, how seen I feel now.
It takes time. First their eyes flit with suspicion. No one takes me up. They’ve been trained not to trust. Then a slow softening. Like Amma, flicking her wrist, slowly working the little balls of dough into supple paratas. I’m a boy, after all. A brother. A son. I have to stay with it.
An imam listens, gently gives me Quran passages to read and recite. Or a youth leader takes me aside. There’s a film in my head. My eyes do a sweep of the room. Note names, groups, speakers, countries people have visited, if it comes up. Whatever numbers I can get I load into my phone. Friend who I can on Facebook. Sneak-click pictures. Half the stuff I know Taylor doesn’t need, but he says it doesn’t matter. This is a kind of practice, as good as any devotion.
Ramadan, the month of sunup-to-sundown fasting, will soon be upon us. In the heat, the men will withdraw from their chairs on the pavement, find a cool, dark corner to lay their rug down, adjust it just so, to pray. By four, five o’clock, their eyes are glazed discs. Their heads wobble a little. Everyone listless, limp puddles of waiting. Their carved prayer beads sift through their fingers. Behind the counter I’ll hear Amma smacking her dry lips. Her fingers bounce ghostlike on the register. She’s faint, but she’ll never let on.
And then, just as dark blue darts into the summer sky, Amma will hurry to the back, where she’ll make a quick bowl of moori, swirling the bits of chopped green chilis in puffed rice. Then I’ll hear the snap of the microwave door, the pan sliding inside. Tendrils of spice and oily meat smell drift out. My own stomach rumbles in expectation, scraped dry; I’m gasping with hunger.
“You are fasting this year?” Abba asks me. His eyebrows, bushy, unkempt, are raised.
I grin. “Yeah, why not?”
This has been a sore subject between us forever. I never really fasted. Like everything I tried, I did it and didn’t do it. It was like my going to the mosque in the old days. Or my Saturday religious school, most of which passed through me. You have no staying power! Abba would complain.
“Hey, Abba,” I say. “What do you say we go on Friday to the big mosque?” This is where we used to go for the major holidays, even though it’s in another neighborhood.
He casts me a suspicious glance. “Why do you want to go there?”
I shrug. “For a change. It’s been a long time.”
He shakes his head, turns back to swabbing down the counter. Why does he use the same shredded gray rag? There’s an explosion detonating hard against my chest. The shabbiness of everything infuriates me. All that money I can make. More contacts, more work; I just have to keep going. That will wipe it all away, the shame of Amma squeezing every last drop of detergent from the bottle, or scraping the last of the mutton curry out of the microwave container. I hate that her grocery cart is broken and she drags it on the pavement with its dented wheel. I feel my dollar bills twinkle in my pocket. I will buy it all for them: the new TV, the shopping cart, as many comic books as Zahir wants. I will be like that guy blowing on his Starbucks coffee, nice scarf cowled around his neck. A car, so we can drive to Rockaway Beach and feel the briny wavelets slap against our ankles.
I calm down. I see Abba has joined the men who pray in the alleyway, right by the small masjid. He signals to me with his eyes. I chuck off my shoes, kneel down beside him. I can feel his heat and breathe his father-smell, pungent, angry, familiar.
Forgive me, I silently mouth as I bend too, my heart sore.
—
Later, as I’m turning the corner, I see Mrs. Khan, hands on her hips, talking to a cop. Mrs. Khan is always complaining about how hard it is, competing with the big places on the corner. She keeps a hawk eye on their prices, cuts her costs by hiring only one or two Mexicans and a girl who works the cash register.
A policeman is arguing with her about setting out her bags of garbage too soon. “I cannot help it. My husband, he is resting inside. Heart brings trouble. Heat. I have no helpers to put out.”
“Not now, ma’am. It’s blocking the pedestrians. You should know better.” He adds, “This isn’t news to you.”
“I know. But with Ramadan and husband not well—”
“Ma’am.” He rests his fingers on his thick belt. His voice has turned stern, impatient. “Don’t make me issue you a summons.”
I take a shaky step forward, stand next to Mrs. Khan. I make sure to let my hands hang by my pockets. “Don’t worry, Auntie. I’ll take care of it.”
She turns to me, grateful. She’s sweating something awful; there’s a furry mustache of sweat over her lip. “I didn’t see you there, Naeem.”
“What time should I come back?”
“Evening time. Six, seven o’clock.” She makes a helpless gesture. “Two boys called in sick today. And we got big shipment. Many boxes.”
I turn to the cop. For the first time, I don’t flinch. I stand, full on, shoulders spread in my shirt seams. My gaze meets his visored eyes. I’m one of you, I think. “I’ve got it, sir,” I say to him. “I’ll make sure it’s done right.”
—
By nighttime word has gotten back to my parents of the good I’ve done in the neighborhood. After Mrs. Khan I stopped off and helped one of the old guys fold up his table and put away his wares. For once I’m the kid with the golden heart, doing my duty. “You should have heard Mrs. Khan going on about you! ‘What a sweet boy, what a generous boy!’ ” Even my father, sunk in his La-Z-Boy chair, grunts with approval. “See, Abba,” I say. “I’m not a lost cause.”
“Lost cause,” he mutters, rattling his newspaper. But I can hear just a little pleasure in his voice.
The next evening, when we break the fast, it’s different between us. Amma has a surprise. “We are going to eat up there.”
“Where?” Zahir asks, puzzled.
She giggles, pushing back a moist strand of hair. “Just follow.”
Nights back in Dhaka we would sometimes go up to our rooftop. We’d duck under the strung laundry, sit on woven mats, listening to the rapid beep-beep of traffic that never stops. It’s the same tonight. The elevator is broken, so me and Abba and Zahir sneak up the stairs, warm bowls tucked against our stomachs. Amma is carrying the heaviest pot and refuses to let anyone help.
On the top floor Mrs. Persaud, the Guyanese lady, cracks open her door and scowls. She’s always complaining that we make too much noise or are stealing her mail, so we ignore her.
“Do you want to join?” Amma calls out. We’re supposed to always break the fast with company, so Amma is trying her best to include Mrs. Persaud. Before she shuts the door, I see just a quiver of a smile.
Then we’re scuffing across the tar roof. Just over the concrete edge we can see the slender spires of Manhattan. The Brooklyn-Queens Expressway rushes in the distance, constant as a river. Otherwise the streets lie quiet around us. We sit right there, on a cotton spread. First Amma pops open a plastic container and hands out dates. We each slide one into our parched mouths, bite into the sugary pulp, so sweet our teeth ache.
She pulls the top off her big pot and reveals what she’s cooked: crabs swimming in sau
ce—how did she find them? Amma always used to tell how when she was a little girl, the servant would return to her village and bring a whole bag of the black-and-pink-shelled creatures, spilling them onto newspaper on the kitchen floor. She had loved them, the sweet taste of the meat that comes only from Bengal waters, elbowing and fighting her sisters to see who could suck more flesh from the spiny legs. We do the same, me and Zahir, our mouths smeared. Abba looks on approvingly.
I can see Amma, the flyaway wisps at her temple when she leans over the counter, using the heel of her hands to smash garlic or scrape knobs of ginger on the bondi blade the way her mother’s servants did, on the floor. But here Amma does it all. Immigrating has a way of turning everything upside down: who’s on top, who’s on the bottom. The Aslam brothers thought to put their livery-car money together and bought a shop on a scruffy stretch of Hillside Avenue. Now you have to double- and triple-park to get inside. Who knew?
That’s what Ibrahim once showed me: how to tip the glass of possibility the other way. We were partners. Every day he had a new idea: Open our own club. Invent a new app.
Not anymore, I think sadly.
“You never talk about your class, Naeem,” Amma says, interrupting my thoughts.
“It’s going well,” I tell her.
“Well well or just well?”
I laugh. “Well well.” I add, “I like the teacher. She’s cool.”
“Naeem is on the computer all the time,” Zahir pipes in.
“Is that right?”
I start. “Um, yeah. Research for my class.” I glance over at my little brother. He lifts his face to me, eyes shining. My nerves go taut. Has he been watching me?
“So what do you say, Abba?” I ask, thinking about the three days of celebrating the end of Ramadan. “For Eid Ul-Fitr? Why don’t we go to the big mosque?”
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