Tabloid City

by Pete Hamill

  Carajo, how can I tell poor Raymundo? How do I say I lost my job? Wake him up? Take him out to the hall when he wakes up in the dark? So the kids don’t hear?

  No, he’ll be sick.

  I’m sick.

  Right now.

  My stomach is turning over.

  My heart beating.

  The N train pulls out. One more stop, and then a final stop on the local. The familiar stations of the R pass in a blur of black poles and flashing lights. Union Street. Fourth Avenue, Prospect Avenue, 25th Street. She sees the signs before she sees the stations, some trick in her head. The stations changing the way their luck is changing. But she knows from Mexico that you can’t trust in luck. You will not kneel before Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe and the next day win the lotería nacional. You will not be told you have cancer and then pray and pray and pray and find that you are clean again. You make your luck. You work for your luck. You work and work and work and work.

  Then at 36th Street, she rises to change to the R. The Chinese man gets up and yawns. The woman who looks Mexican grabs a pole and angles to the door. The angry-looking gringo stays there, his fingers laced, his knuckles white, staring at nothing. Consuelo thinks: Who can I go to? Who will help me find a job? Who can save us? The Diet Pepsi bottle rolls across the floor. Consuelo follows it with her eyes. Looks up. Sees a sign:

  SI VES ALGO,

  DI ALGO!

  If you see something, say something. The bilingual train stops. The doors open. Here is the R. She boards it, notices the usual people. Latinas and Chinese, a few gringos. Like most of them, she remains standing, until the train reaches 45th Street. She leaves the train and moves quickly along the platform to the revolving door that leads to the stairs and the street. The dented metal bars on the door need painting. She moves quickly with the other women, Chinese women, Mexican women, some Dominicans too, por seguro, some from Ecuador. Up the stairs. Into the rain.

  She sees the familiar signs. El Reencuentro restaurant. Mega Car Service. The Sprint Payment Service. The Tlaxcala Estila barbershop. They all start up the hill, the Chinese heading for distant Eighth Avenue, Consuelo and most of the other Latinas one long hilly block to La Quinta. This street is safe, with people here most of the time, even in the rain. You can see a police car every twenty minutes, maybe, just cruising along. Some other streets are not so safe. She reaches Fifth Avenue, and knows where everything is, even when the stores are closed and the metal shutters rolled down tight. Zapatería México. Tacos Matamoros. Cancún Fashion. The travel agency with a sign that says ENVíA DINERO A MEXICO AQUí. They haven’t sent money back home since little Timoteo was born. Now four years old. And the middle one, Marcela, is ten. The boy loves her. Always giggling when she tickles him. Following her everywhere in the house. What will happen to them?

  She turns right, heading south, hugging the wall to avoid the rain. Her bare hand clutches the key chain in her pocket. She sees the sign on the corner of her street: School Daze. Where everybody buys clothes for kids, the boys downstairs, the girls right inside the door. Beside it and on top of it, the apartment house called Roma rises five stories, the shades drawn in every apartment, no lights burning.

  Abruptly, from a shadowy doorway, a black man appears, his back against the door. She gasps, says Oh. He wears a thick black beard. His eyes are as surprised as hers must be. His skin is wet.

  –Don’t worry, he says. Just keep going.

  She moves out toward the avenue and hurries along, not too fast, so she won’t show fear. But she’s afraid. Where is the police car? Where is anybody? At the corner, in front of the Toda Moda shoe shop, she sees the lights of the Korean store a block away, burning as always through the night, and thinks she can run to its safety. They know her there. In the daytime, after school, her oldest son, Eduardo, works there, delivering orders, sweeping. The customers call him Eddie. The first American child. Fourteen now. Almost as tall as his father. And we were here only a year when he was born. Eddie is one reason Consuelo likes the Korean store. When she doesn’t have time to go to the cheaper store on 42nd Street down by Second Avenue, she buys serrano chilies there and nopales and tortillas.

  She turns and looks back.

  The black man is gone.

  She moves quickly into her street, stops before the shuttered unisex barber, looks for slow-moving car headlights, sees none, looks for the bearded black man, sees no one, and dashes across the wet street to her house. She jams the key into the downstairs gate. Turns it. Goes in, flicks the small lever that locks the door, and slams shut the iron bolt that Raymundo always leaves open for her. Goes through the second door, locks that behind her, stands there for a long moment, breathing hard. Home. Safe.

  She hangs her hat on a wallpeg, shakes her hair, unbuttons her jacket and pulls off her scarf and hangs them on a separate peg. Raymundo’s padded tan jacket is on the third peg. She slides off her wet shoes, and places them on the floor beneath the pegs. She walks in socks past the stairs into the kitchen. A coffee cup and saucer are in the sink, on top of dinner plates. That is part of their deal. She will do the dishes. Over the years, Raymundo had washed so many dishes, before becoming a cook, that he told her once his only wish was that he never wash another dish. She smiled and hugged him, and said, Okay. He said, No, no, it’s only a joke, un chiste, mi vida, but she said, No, I do the dishes from now on.

  She turns on the hot water, letting it run, squirting some liquid cleanser over the dishes. Four dishes, one each for Raymundo and Eddie, Marcela, and Timmie. The water warms her cold hands. She glances at the refrigerator, where photos of the kids are attached to the door with magnets. On the table is a copy of Diario de México, the new paper with all the terrible news from the old country.

  EJECUTAN

  A TRECE

  Thirteen more killed in the drug war. Usually along la frontera. This time in Mazatlán, to the south. It’s as if Raymundo is sending a message: We can’t ever go back to that country. Our lost country.

  She thinks: Oh, how will I tell him?

  She thinks: And what will we do?

  She tries to remember Mexico. To forget their two floors in this house, the kitchen and the room with the TV and the garden on the first floor, the bedrooms up one flight. To forget Sunset Park. Writing the rent checks. Addition and subtraction. Clothes for the boys. New shoes for Marcela. Instead, she pictures birds in the morning in the house in Cuernavaca. She is seventeen again, working up north in Cuernavaca, and sending money home every two weeks to Mama in Oaxaca. She sees the stone house in Cuernavaca, with light streaming into the rooms while she mops, and the pool blue and glassy and the birds singing. Señor Lewis said one time that birds were the first musicians. He was right. And on the second floor, Señor Lewis is in his studio, sipping coffee, painting in shorts and T-shirt. She sees the narrow bed against the studio wall. The bed where—

  Señor Lewis.

  Perhaps he can help.

  She has his address in New York, from fifteen years ago. She has never gone to see him. Not once. Not after—

  Señor Lewis.

  His kindness. His heart.

  She thinks: I don’t even know if he’s alive.

  I must try to find out.

  2:28 a.m. Malik Shahid, aka Malik Watson. Sunset Park, Brooklyn.

  Rain and rain and rain. Malik moves with caution, his kufi behind him in a sewer, his shoes soaked. Here nothing grows. Paradise is a garden, says al-Quran, but this is not Paradise. Here is only concrete and slate and asphalt, skeletons of trees, dead cars whose floppy airless tires caress stone curbs. He thinks: I am alone in rain and night. I hear the tearing sound of cars above me on the expressway but can’t see their lights. A few taxis, roof lights saying “Off Duty,” move south to their garages.

  Under his watery canvas jacket, Malik hugs the plastic bag from the Korean store, lowers his head, moves through black shadows. He needs to vanish. After tonight, after the holy mission of redemption, he must disappear. To make the final clea
nsing on Friday night. Holy night. With Glorious, or without her. With the child, when all is over. Yes. Above all, with the child. A boy, they told Glorious at the clinic. A son of Islam. Inshallah. Me and the boy. To the sacred places. Now he sees sleeping bodies under spread blankets, scrunched up against ugly girders that support the expressway. Shoe-covered feet jut from packing crates. Some mixture of rain and piss finds channels between fractured cobblestones. He sees garbage in black plastic bags, and a banana peel turned brown. A patrol car hurries by, dome light turning, and Malik flattens himself on the dark side of a girder. When the police car is gone, he gazes at the vacant side of the avenue, the one that carries traffic to Manhattan.

  And runs.

  In the rubbled street leading up the hill, there are three parked cars, each one alone, separate, two on one side, a solitary on Malik’s side. Just a few, as always. In summer, hornboys from New Jersey come here for twenty-dollar blow jobs from the filthy infidel women. Jizm in the throat, junk in the veins. On this night, the parked cars seem empty but Malik cannot be certain. He slides into the front yard of a condemned corner house, windows boarded up, and hunches behind the remains of a battered stoop. He peers at the dark parked cars, looking for steam on the windows, or a match lighting a cigarette. Nothing. The Lots are part of a vast project organized by some developer: housing for yuppies, or for NYU students to share, or for Jersey types who wanted a place to get laid before driving home; an office building too, and an Italian hotel where tourists could pay in euros. The sell: Wall Street just fifteen minutes away through the Battery Tunnel. It was all set to go, until Allah punished America, punished the crusaders, punished the Jews, punished the filthy infidel women with their polluted cunts and sucked-out tits. Allah gazed down upon them and broke their fucking economy, exposed their filth and usury and greed. The project stopped dead.

  Now all is gone except a few lonesome old-time tenements, somehow missed by the bulldozers, including the tenement used by Malik and Glorious. The whole area weeps now. It looks like a wet Baghdad. The one he sees in newspapers. On TV. That ruined city. Baghdad without the Muslim dead.

  He says out loud: Be there soon, Glorious. We got things to do. Hey: the rain is lighter now. All of a sudden. A message, for shit sure. Gotta go home. Gotta get dry. Gotta bundle these clothes. Gotta chop this beard. Gotta sleep. Can’t sleep, then hold the tits of Glorious, bursting with God’s milk. Oh. And enter her. As you have willed it, my beloved Allah. No papers from any authority. Just your will. You created women for us, didn’t you? Glorious doesn’t believe it, doesn’t believe anything, not Yahweh, not Jesus, not Buddha, not Allah. She’s not into it, she says. Won’t even wear a hijab out in the street, to cover her hair, to hide it from the lusting eyes of strangers. Why not? He didn’t ask her to wear a chador, covering her face, even her eyes. Just the hair. She says no. He keeps telling her that belief will come, that she will accept, will submit. Thinking: She’s a puppy, that’s all. One morning she’ll wake up and understand everything and accept Allah. But now she says something like What’s all this shit about submitting? Submitting to what? To who? And Malik always says: Submitting to Allah’s order, Allah’s rules. Told in al-Quran and the Hadith. And she says, You mean, submitting to you, right? And laughs.

  That’s the way she is. An example of jahiliyah. Ignorance of God. She knows as much as any puppy. She should be nasty but she isn’t. She’s got a good heart, Glorious, but she’s her mother’s daughter. The mother that named her. A filthy woman for sure, who lived with a Muslim, some asshole who pledged allegiance to Elijah Muhammad and his Lost-Found bullshit Nation street hustle. She left him because she loved junk more than the creed passed to us by the Prophet. Malik remembered talking about such traitors as heroinfidels. The mother went on the stroll, Glorious told Malik. Probably fucked a thousand guys, at least. Poor Glorious doesn’t even know who her father is. Some dude threw a load into her mother’s belly and moved on. Maybe even a white dude, ’cause Glorious is tan, not black.

  Later, after Glorious was born, some other dude threw the mother the virus. The usual shit started after that: moving around, shelters, different dudes moving in with the mother and trying to fuck Glorious, foster care, one school after another, until finally Allah put the mother out of her misery. Just last year. Around the time Malik met Glorious in Newark. Even now, Glorious wakes up calling for her mother. Imagine. Not Allah. Her filthy mother. Malik thinks: I never cry for mine.

  Then Malik starts to run through the Lots, staying low in the black emptiness, avoiding the open spaces, the deep gouges in the dirt, the sudden drops into basements where the houses are gone, one mound of rubble following another, one three-story house with only one roofless story left, an abandoned car without wheels or windows, a fuel drum on its side with charred wood from a dead fire spilling out. Up ahead: the tenement. No lights burning, even on the fourth floor, where Glorious is waiting. Nobody else lives in the tenement. The buried power line comes from the far side of the site, where an abandoned construction trailer awaits workers who went away when the money ran out and may never come back. Malik laid the power line himself. Stole it off a pole. Learned how to do all that when he worked a summer job upstate, near Canada. Malik and Jamal. He was into computers, Malik was a student, just starting at CUNY. But he was Jamal’s student too. A student of Islam. The true Islam. More and more they moved from the banalities of the mosque to the thinking of Sayyid Qutb. To Hassan al-Banna. To the true children of the Prophet. To the brotherhood. To jihad.

  Now he reaches the back side of the tenement. He faces the side wall, pale, jagged, broken into rectangles of old paint, the colors of rooms that are now gone, slowly washing away in the wind and weather. In the daytime, the walls are weird and beautiful: baby blue, bright red, one wall all black. The people who painted them are all gone now. Now Malik reminds himself: Be careful. He goes to the back door, facing the rubble where the yard used to be. He grips the big key for that door, a small one for the apartment on the top floor. He is jittery. You can never know if some crackheads made it into the building.

  Malik inserts the large key, pauses, leans gently on the door, listening, while wondering where Jamal is now. He is sure his old friend, his instructor, is still in the house he bought in the lower part of Park Slope. Bought with money he started making as a designer, after the friendship broke, after Jamal made the haj, with some help from his father, the X-ray guy. And came home a different man. Calling himself a lover of Islam, a hater of jihad. It must have been Jamal’s wife that changed him. Another American bitch. And her having a kid. Or maybe it’s a cover story, a way to exist here as if he were another dumb American nigger, working away, but keeping jihad in the most secret place in his mind. Malik wants to believe that. But he simply doesn’t know. He will have to find out. When this night of red rain ends.

  Now Malik inhales, turns the key, leans close, listens. Then exhales. No sound. He looks behind him across the Lots through the rain. Nobody. He slips inside.

  He hears faint groans and creaks from the black empty building above him. He has learned that such sounds are normal on nights of hard rain or stiff wind. Still, this night is different. He waits with the door shut behind him, letting his eyes adjust to the darkness. In a corner, a pile of discarded shovels resembles a small monument of iron tombstones. He closes his eyes and remembers the chant recited each night by him and Jamal and Atub. They took turns with the first name, then all three repeated it, heads bowed in submission, barefoot, kneeling on the floor of whatever place they were in.

  Khalid al-Mihdhar.

  Khalid al-Mihdhar.

  Majed Moqed.

  Majed Moqed.

  Nawaf al-Hazmi.

  Nawaf al-Hazmi.

  Salem al-Hazmi.

  Salem al-Hazmi.

  Hani Hanjour.

  Hani Hanjour.

  Satam al-Suqami.

  Satam al-Suqami.

  Waleed al-Shehri.

  Waleed al-Shehri.


  Wail al-Shehri.

  Wail al-Shehri.

  Abdulaziz al-Omari.

  Abdulaziz al-Omari.

  Marwan al-Shehhi.

  Marwan al-Shehhi.

  Fayez Banihammad.

  Fayez Banihammad.

  Ahmed al-Ghamdi.

  Ahmed al-Ghamdi.

  Hamza al-Ghamdi.

  Hamza al-Ghamdi.

  Mohand al-Shehri.

  Mohand al-Shehri.

  Mohamed Atta.

  Mohamed Atta…

  A prayer.

  Our prayer.

  A prayer for our martyrs.

  All waiting for us in Paradise.

  Allahu akbar!

  Now Malik can see, if only the large shapes of ceilings and walls, as he peers up the stairs to the first landing. He starts up. Somewhere up there, a door creaks open on rusting hinges. There is nobody visible, no sounds of breathing, no crackheads grunting, no pigs with badges from Homeland Security or the FBfuckingI. No New York cops. Like my father. Just the wind and the rain. On the landings, puddles are spreading from apartments without windows. The writhing unreadable graffiti on the walls hasn’t changed. On the second flight of stairs, the entire banister is gone, used for firewood in the iron barrels of the empty lots, and Malik hugs the walls. A damp rotting smell is everywhere in the vertical cave of the stairwell. Water leaks from another doorway without a door. He listens as if he were a cat. He hears the distant hum of the expressway. The beep of a horn. Silence, except for the rain. Thinking: I’m coming, baby. I got money, gorgeous. Like I promised. Tomorrow you see a doctor. Tomorrow you go to a warm place.