He laughs. “You are persistent, Naeem. This I haven’t seen before.”
I feel a hard, angry heat, not sure whether to be pleased or upset.
“Something goes wrong, you give up.”
“Not anymore.”
“No,” he admits. “Not so much.” He sucks on one of the crab legs and tosses the shell down onto a plate. I think about how few times I see us like this, relaxing.
“What about a day off, Abba?” I ask. “At the beach? We haven’t gone to Rockaway in ages.”
We used to pack up a cooler and take a bus down Woodhaven Boulevard. It was a long ride, but we didn’t care. Once there, Amma rolled up the bottoms of her pants, the little waves washing against her calves. Abba walked the length of the sand. The wind seemed to rub his face young. We felt it then: ocean, horizon, stretching in every direction possible.
“Rockaway!” Zahir calls out. “Yes!”
Abba’s eyes gleam in the dark as he considers. “Your mother and I. We have so much work.” But I can hear his voice softening. “Let us see.”
—
The change, it’s ringing deep around me. A deep, brassy sound. A shine of approval. I hear and see it on the streets now. Naeem, who gave his parents so much trouble once, now turned obedient son. I am more than they can see. Even with the fasting I’ve never felt so light. I am a nighthawk, winging from neighborhood to neighborhood, snatching up secrets, keeping them safe.
I take the train to Thirtieth Avenue, zigzagging past the houses with their tiny front gardens and flourishing pots of sunflowers. It’s easy by the Bengali areas. Not much to pick up on. Mostly the old guys who hang outside after prayers—the younger ones have cabs to drive, jobs to get to. No story there. I go over to Little Egypt in Astoria, hookah lounges behind dimmed glass. After a while I realize they’re all talking Arabic and French—what good am I listening to them? Stupid police. As if we’re all the same.
Still I walk and walk, just because I like it, hopping on and off at different stops, following the branching spine of subways. My legs are tired. I come home and sleep harder than I ever have. The work suits me. Being paid to wander. Now, that’s a good deal.
The only problem is there’s nothing to report. Nothing.
Friday night in Kensington I hang by a little triangle park near the shops. The mothers lug their bulging shopping bags, exhausted from fasting and now getting ready to cook, their younger kids licking Mr. Softee ice cream. The men sit and chat. Gossip lingers in the evening air: who’s got a bad back, who reneged on a loan and is in trouble. Whose daughter is getting married to a boy they don’t like. They give me that smile-frown of an elder. And then they gather themselves and walk slowly back to the masjid, kurtas fluttering like pennants in the evening’s ruddy light.
Nothing here, I text Taylor.
Join the study group.
Roger that.
When I meet up with Taylor, he slips me a wad: five hundred dollars. That’s the most I’ve gotten so far, though I feel a little dip of disappointment. “I thought you said a thousand….”
Sanchez grins. “You haven’t gotten us much. Thought you were in the know. In on the community.”
I puff out my chest. “I am.”
“Show us the money and we give you more money.” He rubs his fingers together, kisses the tips.
Angry, I stuff what they gave me into my pocket. No way I’m going to let this Sanchez guy cut me down. He’s trying to drive a wedge between me and Taylor. Make it seem like I’m not worth much.
As if reading my mind, Taylor smiles.
“It’s only been a few weeks, man. Keep at it.”
—
Back home, I peel off the bills, save fifty for me, and give the rest to Abba. His eyes go wide. Amma lets out a small cry. “Buy the stock you need,” I say.
“What should we get?” Abba asks Amma.
“Stationery,” I answer.
They both turn to me, surprised.
“That’s what you need. Envelopes. Paper. Post-its. Good pens. Not that junk you have. There isn’t a Staples nearby. Everybody hates going there anyway. And school stuff. You know how it is. Some science project and you don’t have colored paper. They just want to pick it up on their way home.”
“Maybe we can get some new displays!” Amma suggests, excited.
Abba shakes his head. “This money you gave us. That won’t be enough.”
She takes the bills from him, tucks them into her pocket. “You wait.”
The next day, Amma goes right to the Bangladeshi bank and sees about securing a small line of credit for new stock. It’s as if the part of her mind that was always worrying about me has freed up. Later my parents sit at the dinette table, heads together, flipping through an office supplies catalog. Carefully, they fold down pages, circle what they want. This goes on all night; I can hear them whispering on the other side of the thin wall, scheming.
“No, no,” Amma says. “We need investment. Copier machine. I’ve heard the lease is not so expensive.”
“Maybe,” Abba assents. I’ve never heard them this way: talking, planning, as if there really is a future here.
—
By the end of the week, I’m in such a good mood I meet Zahir at his bus stop. He comes bounding off the steps, nylon bag hiked over his shoulder, surprised. His face brightens. These days, with all my work, dashing here and there, it’s rare I pick him up.
“You wanna come with me?” I ask.
“Yes, yes!” Then he pauses. “But where?”
“For an ice cream.”
He nods vigorously. Sometimes I feel such a pang, seeing Zahir. He’s not like me. Or at least, not like what I was at his age. He’s pure and frisky-bright. I worry what will happen when he goes to middle school. They’ll eat him whole, the tough kids. I started talking to Abba and Amma about paying for tutoring for him so he can test into the magnet schools. But either they’re afraid to let him out of the neighborhood or there just isn’t enough money for extra help.
We sit at the ice cream parlor, the old-fashioned vinyl booths behind us, stools spinning beneath our legs. My stomach’s scraped dry, but I just watch him spoon up his hot-fudge sundae. It pleases me, to give him this much.
“So I got something for you.”
“What?”
“Can’t say. Unless you promise me something.”
His face wrinkles into a puzzled expression. He looks like a little gnome, crescent-shaped indents around his eyes from his swim goggles. Out of my backpack, I slide a book I found. Middle-School Math.
“But I’m not in middle school,” he says, disappointed.
“I know. But you should get started.”
I see his thin shoulders slump. This is definitely not what he had in mind.
“Here’s the thing,” I explain. “You promise to do two pages of this every night and I’ll give you this.”
I pull from my pack a huge stack of Marvel comics. Twenty of them, to be exact. The New Avengers. I bought them in a zine store I found one day, deep in Brooklyn. Zahir gives such a whoop, legs kicking out from under him, I’m sure he’s going to fall off the stool.
“All of these are mine?” He’s so excited, his voice is squeaky-high.
“All of them,” I say quietly. “If you do your math, Zahir.”
“You bet!”
“Our secret, okay? That way you can surprise Amma and Abba. Get yourself ahead in school.”
He nods vigorously. When we stroll back to the store, I let him carry all the comic books, and he stops every few feet to look at them. His eyes shine with disbelief. Suddenly, he turns, flings his arms around my waist, and buries his head in my stomach. “Thank you, Naeem,” he whispers.
“Anything new?”
“Not much.”
“I noticed.”
My stomach hurts. For the first time, instead of a quick meeting where they hand me a few bills, Taylor and Sanchez and me are meeting in the open. Totally not procedure. They’ve drive
n me to some neighborhood in a part of Queens I don’t know, which has me on edge. It’s like I’ve been brought into the station house all over again. Or hauled up before Mrs. D or one of my old teachers for a missed assignment. I haven’t delivered.
“Though you look good.”
“Thanks.”
“Filled out. Confident. What’re you eating these days?”
“Not a whole lot.” I scratch at my jaw, which is itchy from the new beard growth. “I’m fasting.”
His eyebrows rise. “You’re really into this. Playing the role.”
“It’s not a role,” I say, annoyed.
I notice Taylor has on sunglasses and a jacket, even though it’s warm out. Sanchez trudges behind. We pass houses with aluminum siding, tight up next to each other. One’s got four mailboxes, a thick rope of cables snaking up the side of the house, four satellite dishes tilted on the roof. I know these places—where the Dominican or the Chinese busboys live on mattresses, sometimes taking shifts. They keep their money in nylon pouches tight against their bodies. Abba once lived like that, when he first came here. To this day he always sleeps in a few minutes after my stepmother rises, says he wants to know what it feels to stretch his toes in his own bed.
Taylor stops in front of an arbor dripping with plump bunches of glistening grapes. He plucks one and pops it in his mouth. “Want one?” he asks.
I hesitate.
“Sorry. I forgot.”
Just a grape, I tell myself. I take it, and the juice squirts tart into my mouth; the seeds crunch. I almost want to cry out with pleasure. Then I’m flooded with shame. Who am I? A guy who’s faking he’s devout? Or is this me?
“Not bad, huh? My grandmother used to have grapes out back at our house,” he says.
“Where was that?”
“Bellerose. Right by Alley Pond Park.” He grabs another grape. “She had a fig tree too. Brought it all the way from Italy, crazy lady. Every fall she’d cover it with burlap. I swear she treated it like another baby.”
“So your family is from Italy?” I ask. “How’d you get a name like Taylor?”
He shrugs. “Believe it or not, my grandfather was a tailor. Sort of. He cut patterns for a company. My parents thought Taylor sounded right. Gave the old man his due. He died before I was born. But the old lady, she lived in a bedroom off the kitchen. My whole life.”
“But you don’t—you don’t look Italian,” I protest.
He smiles. “They’re from the north, that’s all. Blond.”
“There’re all kinds,” Sanchez laughs, from behind.
All kinds, I think, rolling the phrase in my mind. I’ve always pegged Taylor as some all-American Fordham guy. But it’s as if I can see his house, a wedge of brick and Tudor, the little bedroom, even the arbor draped in purple grapes out back. Grand Central Parkway humming past like a river. His family is from somewhere else too.
But what’s going on here? The three of us, walking out in the open, sunlight on our heads, talking about growing up in Bellerose. We’re not supposed to be seen together. That much I know.
“So,” he says. “Nothing turn up?”
“I told you. It’s just prayers. Gossip.”
“You have a problem with this work?” Sanchez asks. “ ’Cause we’re kinda wonderin’. We paid you.”
“Not much.”
“You didn’t give us much.” He adds, “We’re not paying you to make friends. Find someone to invite to your wedding.”
“Very funny.”
I wish Sanchez weren’t on my back, breathing fire. The guy is intense. Like he’s going to break into a street fight any second. If I could just be alone with Taylor. Sometimes I can feel a connection, invisible, hard to catch, between us. It’s all in his shoulders and his walk, the way he cups his keys, cuts me a smile. It was there that first evening, with him and Sanchez. He’s signaling me a way out. So different from Abba, who wants me to duck my head as he does, fold myself and pray. Stay unseen. No trouble. Heart still as a hibernating animal.
Taylor turns to me. There’s a crease of worry in his brow. “Seriously, Naeem. You have questions?”
I pause, then working up my nerve, ask, “Do you ever feel weird about doing this? Snitching on people you might know?”
His jaw tenses. “The thing about being a cop is you’re a skeptic. Even about your best friend, your neighbor.”
“That’s hard.”
“Is it? No one ever tells the whole truth, Naeem.”
I give a little shiver. Is he talking about me?
“Even you,” he says, as if reading my mind.
He clicks open the car and we all get in, me in the front with Taylor. Pulling out an iPad, he swipes the screen and then hands it to me. “You ever see one of these?”
It’s a recruiting video. The screen is black. Then soft voices, lapping water, strands of soothing music. A call to prayer stirs some deep and old place inside me. Soft focus on a guy about my age sitting cross-legged on the ground, a semiautomatic set casually on his knees. I see his mouth moving around familiar words. The words are all good: God. Truth. Purpose.
But I can see a cruel glow beneath his skin.
It’s his eyes. Like stars that have gone dead.
“That’s some messed-up stuff,” Sanchez says, low.
I nod. My mouth is coated dry, as it always is this time of day, from the fasting. The forbidden tang of grape on my tongue.
“You know how many hits this video got before we took it down?”
I shake my head. A queasiness washes up behind my ribs. “What do you want me to do?”
“It’s the offshoots we’re keeping an eye on.”
“Conversations on the side,” Sanchez puts in.
“Lone wolves.”
“There’s some activity?” I ask.
He shakes his head. “You know we can’t tell you that. It’s bad enough we talk to you this much.”
“These guys are for real,” Sanchez puts in. “No joke. This is war. We need foot soldiers who got discipline. ’Cause sometimes, with you, I’m not feeling it.”
I don’t say anything.
“No free rides here,” Sanchez says. “Haul in some better intel. Good tips mean money. You gotta work for this, baby.”
“You got it?” Taylor asks.
I stare out the window, watch an old Chinese woman sweep her pavement, back and forth, sending up little puffs of gray dirt. So that’s what this is all about. It’s about protecting people like my family, my neighbors, just trying to make it, to keep our hold here. All of us pressed up against each other, working so hard: the remittances wired to family back home, the weekly calls on the phone card, the nylon bags stuffed with clothes and hair dryers and lotions, zippers bursting, dragged across the floor at JFK airport.
They are the tattoo on my heart; they are my electric circuits, lighting up my veins. They are my Gotham. I can feel every one of us, squeezed into the little stores and houses, aluminum siding falling off. Every one of us yearning. You can feel that rush to the subway every morning, the sky pink and brand-new, the trains sucking their doors open and closed, scooping us in. We snake and move toward the city. It trembles through every one of us, the ambition, the striving, the want. And I must save them.
“Got it,” I breathe.
Maybe I needed that. A pep talk. Realignment. Remembering those sick dudes on the video. Nausea at the back of my throat. School too: I got a C on my last essay for Professor Emily. Is there a thesis statement here? she wrote. And what about punctuation? Time to double down. Focus. A few more weeks, another payment, and I can register for math in the fall. When I show up at Taslima’s office the day after my meeting with Taylor and Sanchez, she tells me, “I’ve decided to promote you.”
“Me?” I drop my canvas bag in the corner and start twisting open a bottle of juice. It’s murderous hot out there, and the bus was fifteen minutes late. I notice Ishrat is also in the office today, sitting at the corner of the desk stapling stacks of co
lored paper.
“Don’t look so shocked,” Taslima remarks. “Ishrat is impressed with you. Go figure.”
“Maybe it’s my hair,” I joke.
“Yeah. Right.” She reaches over and affectionately rubs my scalp. “What hair these days? Seriously. We’re supposed to run some youth leadership programs with the mosque this summer. Ishrat thinks you can connect with the kids. You can be a liaison. She’s your female equivalent.”
“Hardly,” Ishrat laughs. She presses the heel of her hand on the stapler and it makes a loud chewing noise.
I feel a little heat under my skin. Ishrat’s exactly the sort of girl I usually avoid, the type who would tease me and my friends from across the cafeteria table, but then if you gave it back to her, she’d back away, shy. But here we’re shoulder to shoulder, getting bruises on our palms from too much stapling. Too close.
Most of the kids who come streaming through the doors don’t seem to know where to go—they look like cows in a pen, aimlessly bumping into each other, shoving chips in their mouths. I know Taslima and Ishrat have been showing up at every youth and student group and high school and mosque, pulling the kids in. Ishrat is busy making little baskets for the older kids who are fasting, or at least trying it out. She’s festooned them with ribbons and small prayer cards and tucked in snacks inside tissue.
A slender girl steps into the room and looks around uncertainly. She’s thin, looks about fifteen, and is skittish, as if she’s not sure she wants to be here. “Hey, Noor!” Ishrat does a big arm-rolling motion. “You came!”
The girl gives a shaky nod.
Up close I can see Noor is a funny mix: tight jeans with zippers at the ankles, a peach-colored scarf that matches her nails, which are tipped in shiny decals. A fluorescent string knapsack hangs from her thin shoulders, saggy with books. She keeps her arms pressed across her chest.
“It’ll be fun! You’ll see. We’ve got activities and group talk and guest speakers.” She thrusts out a marker. “You want to write good wishes on the cards?”
Poor Ishrat—she reminds me of my stepmother, with her round face, working so earnestly at everything. I want to reach out, wipe off the sweat that’s showing on her upper lip, and say Don’t try so hard.
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