by Greg Hrbek
Two days before the man arrived to take him away from the camp, six months after his mother and father and sister had been killed when a government drone launched two air-to-surface missiles into his block in the Sunni half of what had once been Mitchell, South Dakota, Karim got high for the last time with Hazem and Yassim in the ruins of the old abandoned palace on North Main. Carefully, he stabbed a needle into the last pea-size ball of opium they’d bought at the souk.
“Faster, Karim.”
“Chill out.”
“You chill out, mozlem.”
He picks up the disposable lighter. Flicks the striking wheel. Holds it a couple of inches below the drug.
The palace is made of corn. Well, not made of it exactly. But covered, outside and in, with multicolored ears of corn. It used to be a tourist attraction. The city would change the corn on the outside every year, make different patterns and patriotic pictures. That was before the government moved the people of Mitchell and built an electrified fence and put people like Karim inside it. By now, the corn has all been pecked away by birds or shot out with bullets. Not much left but bare cobs turned brownish-green. But the letters above the main entrance—MITCHELL CORN PALACE—have not completely faded; and the domes and minarets, painted green and yellow, still reach toward the sky over the plains, giving the building the look of a mosque from the old country.
The drug has grown soft.
Yassim holds the pipe and Karim smears the flower-sweet goo on the curved sides of the bowl. The boys pass the pipe, heating the drug until they can draw it into their mouths as smoke; once the process has been repeated until there’s nothing left but a gray ghost of resin, Karim says:
“Thazzit.”
“It.”
“Opeem,” he says. “Thizshithole. I cant bleeve izallover.”
“Cant bleeve it.”
“Cant bleeve it.”
“I wish,” Yassim says, “youka come withuss.”
“Me too.”
“Leeme seet.”
“Kikt,” Karim says, and hands the pipe to Hazem. Then, tearfully: “I wanna come widjuguys.”
Hazem says: “You are cominwidjuss. Juzza matturahtime.”
The three orphans lie back on the cool tile floor; and as each one feels his soul levitating just above his physical self, he thinks of the sheikh, Abdul-Aziz, who has said to them, “You may be going your separate ways now, my sons, but very soon you will be together in the highest gardens of heaven. It is just a matter of time.” Each boy contemplating the same thing in his state of flotation: That for which he is destined. Paradise. And wondering. Will Paradise feel as good as this? But thinking also of what must come first. Is it true what the sheikh says? That if we lay our life down in the path of God, we will feel nothing when our body explodes. Can dying be so easy? But even if it’s hard, even if dying hurts very much. To feel like this after. Forever. Matter of time to feel like this foreverafter. To float above the physical world and dream. To be with your family again … Karim reaches into the pocket of his short pants. Touches the eyeglasses. The lenses are gone—the ovals of curved glass which helped her see clearly have cracked and broken into tiny pieces (scattered now, who knows where)—and one of the temple arms has broken off. But what remains, the shape of the plastic frame, helps Karim remember his mother’s face.
Hold it before your eyes. Remember her eyes. Then fold down the temple arm and return it to your pocket. The only memento.
Two days later, dressed in new donated clothes given him by the nuns (a pair of corduroys worn smooth at the knees; a collared shirt, bright red, with an alligator stitched onto the left breast; a pair of tennis sneakers), he sits in a bus painted the blue of a bruise and rides out of the camp and onto a road so straight it might have been drawn on the plains with a ruler. The window of his seat is pushed up. A breeze comes through. On the horizon, he can see a rainstorm: a dark cataract of water plunging from a thunderhead as massive as an intergalactic mothership. The camp, that divided city, is already out of sight. And Hazem and Yassim. Won’t ever see them again in this world. Next week, they leave for the Michigan Territory. A shelter for Muslim-American youth where they can surely score Dream and probably play soccer all the live-long day while you, in some heathen suburb, are getting the agonies and the shit kicked out of you. Karim shuts his eyes and rests his left temple against the window sash. The wind goes right up his nose; it’s like drowning. Like that time a couple years back when they were playing war and he was the terrorist and they tipped him back on a board and poured water into his breathing passages. One of his friend’s mothers found out about that episode and told the other parents and he and his crew got the tongue-lashing of a lifetime. You think torture is a game and so on. Well, yeah. They did, actually. Though looking back now, Karim can sort of see their point. When you’re seven, eight, you make plastic explosives from Play-Doh and fill up matchboxes with rusty nails and tape it all onto a belt and it’s a fucking breeze to kill yourself. Then, one day, you’re eleven, twelve, and you’re a part of something real, more important than childhood, and more important than yourself.
•
“Him?”
“Yes,” the nun says. “The boy in the red shirt.”
“Jesus Christ Christian …”
They are standing at a window looking out on a fenced, razor-wired area, like the exercise yard of a prison. His adopted son has just walked off a bus. A kid at least ten pounds underweight. Whose flesh looks mildewed. Who’s hugging himself around the midriff as if to keep his guts from spilling out.
“I thought you knew,” the nun asks.
“Yeah, but.”
“But he’s just a boy, I know. Come, I’ll introduce you.”
Out of the building and across the dirt lot. When they get close, the kid sees them and forces himself to stand straighter.
Will has had a lengthy inner debate about conduct in this moment. It’s about the kid, not you. Empathy. Big picture. Imagine you’re three years old and you and your family get packed onto a cattle car and shipped off to a slum with no exit; eight years later, you’re the only one left, and some old white guy comes out of nowhere and expects you to call him father. Be cool and take it slow.
The nun says, “Hello, Karim.”
“Hi, Sister.”
“Karim, this is Mr. Banfelder.”
The kid looks up at Will with eyes big and tear-filled. Not crying, exactly. It’s a symptom of withdrawal.
Will kneels down in front of him and says: “You’re a Dream addict.”
“Yessir.”
“How’d you get the stuff.”
He shrugs and hugs himself harder.
Will reaches into the breast pocket of his coat and takes out a pack of greens. He shakes one out and hands it to the kid, then produces a disposable lighter, and the nun says:
“Mr. Banfelder …”
“Sister, I’ve seen this before. I knew a guy once, back when I served, who got into this shit. Said he never coulda kicked if it wasn’t for grass.”
He lights the cigarette.
The kid sucks and exhales. Shivers. Wipes his eyes.
“How long?”
“Five months, I guess.”
Will nods and lets the kid take a few more drags. “Feel any better?”
“A little.”
“Mr. Banfelder, I don’t think—”
“Opinion noted, Sister. But Karim is my responsibility now. Legal guardianship and all that jazz.”
The nun gives a kind of smile. Then she says her goodbye to the kid, a hug and a kiss on the cheek; then she shakes Will’s hand and is off to her next good deed. Which leaves the two of them.
“You called me ‘sir,’ ” Will says.
“Yessir.”
“Don’t do that.”
“Okay,” says Karim. “So, what then?”
“You know Arabic?”
He nods.
“How about ‘jaddi.’ ”
The kid looks at him and wipes
his eyes again. “You speak Arabic?”
“Na’am.”
“Jaddi,” the kid says. “Like, grandfather.”
“That make sense?”
“Sure.”
“Okay, then. Jaddi it is. Finish the smoke and let’s go. It’s an hour to Sioux City. We’ll get you some vitamins and a milkshake.”
•
The trip to New York is hell. Although Karim has been through this before (several times since he started using), every other time he’s had the agonies he lay still on the mattress in the half-light of the lean-to—Hazem and Yassim with him, all of them on the twin mattress like a litter of whining dogs—until withdrawal had become a state of suspended animation. You sort of forget you’re alive. But this time. The world racing past the window at impossible speed, the glare of the sun, the heat of the sun and the chill of the air conditioning, the stink of a cattle farm. (How can something possibly smell worse than that open sewer by the lean-tos?) But the speed is the worst part. Even when he closes his eyes, he can’t rid himself of the sense that nothing outside the window is staying still. Somewhere on the first day, they get pulled over by soldiers in desert camo—and even though the old guy has got stamped papers, they search the car. They pull up the false floor of the trunk and take out the spare tire. Then they make Karim remove all his clothes right there by the side of the highway. Though he is finally stationary, the motion of the car won’t leave his head and he pukes up the milkshake from Sioux City. That night, they stay in a motel with two beds, where Karim, curled fetally in the clean sheets, feels like he’s adrift on a lifeboat. He drifts off and has a dream in which the camp hospital is heaven. His mother, wearing the jilbab she died in, looks as though she has waded waist-deep into a river of blood. Yet her eyes are open, and she’s squinting—and saying: Karim, is that you? Where have you been, habibi? You have my eyeglasses. He wakes up and it takes him a long space to understand where he is. Not heaven, not yet. Not the lean-to. Then he hears the old guy in the other bed, making a sound in his sleep like a flooded car engine. After this, he can’t sleep. Feels like there’s something inside him, clawing at the dead shell of his self, trying to split him apart and get out. Perhaps this is your soul. He lies awake, thinking of the sheikh. Dark beard with twisting hairs, a beard of thorns.
3
By the next day, the insects have changed once again. The eyes are still red but the body has gone from white to black; the veins on the wings from pale yellow to brown. And the males have found their voices. The world is full of the noise: a dizzy trilling that gets trapped like a greenhouse gas below the dome of the sky and echoes as endlessly as surf in the helixes of a conch shell. Dorian and his friends are outdoors, playing a kind of game. Each boy has captured a fully matured cicada and pinned it, alive, to one of the four corners of a cork board. Each of them has a magnifying glass from a science kit and is using it to concentrate the energy of the sun into a single point on his insect. Whoever’s catches fire first wins. But the whole thing is a bust: All that happens is, they burn a smoking hole through the poor things. The lack of a dramatic conflagration leaves an emptiness where there might have been a thrill; and other feelings, annoyance and pity, for example, claim the hollow space. The dizzy echoing noise, the chorusing, which comes not from screaming mouths but from vibrating abdominal membranes, seems to get louder.
“Whose bright fuckin idea was this?”
“Keenan.”
“Brilliant, dude.”
“We did prove something,” Dean points out. “They’re not flammable.”
“Idiot,” Keenan says.
“What.”
“It’s just not enough heat is all. Phase two, we need a medicine dropper. Everybody gets two drops of lighter fluid …”
This is when the car comes up the curve of the road. Mr. Banfelder’s Argo Electric, which has not been sighted for a week. He sees the boys and gives two friendly taps on the horn. There’s someone in the backseat.
A kid.
They all see him. And the window is down, so they see him pretty well. They see shaggy black hair squalling in the slipstream. Skin that isn’t black or white, but an unmistakable in-between brown.
“It’s a haji,” Keenan says.
“Jeezuss.”
“Am I right?”
“You’re right,” Dean says.
“Zeb?”
“I didn’t really see him.”
“Dorian?”
But Dorian doesn’t answer. He watches the car follow the curve of the cul-de-sac and pull into the driveway of the house with maroon shutters and the old lawn jockey statuette on the grass. Car stops. Passengers disembark. It’s a kid, all right. A boy. Judging from his size relative to that of the car: eleven, twelve years old. He’s looking up at the air, at the trees. (That sound.) Then he crouches down and picks something off the blacktop of the driveway. Holds it in front of his eyes. (What the fuck is this?) … As a finger whistle whipcracks across the subdivision.
“He wants us.”
“Us?”
“To go over there,” Dean says.
Dorian sets his magnifying glass down on the corkboard where the four insects lay impaled and scorched, and starts walking toward the Banfelder house. One at a time, his friends fall in behind him.
Will has been anxious about this moment ever since committing to the adoption. He knows these boys well. He’s known them for years. The Wakefield boy in particular. All good kids. Except for the one who dressed up like a Jew from the Holocaust last Halloween. Actually shaved his head. Keenan. But other than him, they are as good as you can expect. Still, is it too much to ask of them? To befriend a Muslim. No, not that. Just accept him. Understand him and let him be.
“Karim.”
The kid doesn’t respond or move. He’s in a crouch, holding a cicada by the wing, though not looking at the insect. Watching the posse approach. Four kids: three white, one black. Will says, in Arabic:
“Stand up, Karim. And give a proper greeting.”
For the first time, Will has spoken to him in what you could call a fatherly tone of voice. And the kid obeys. Though first he looks up—with eyes to make an old man think of a past that won’t let go. (Like a time we were at one of the old palaces, where we weren’t supposed to be, but in the early days everyone was: We’d ride into these fallen citadels in our up-armored sport-utility vehicles, firing in the air like Yosemite Sam and any towelhead who didn’t put his hairy face in the dirt wasn’t alive for evening prayers, which is how it went on this one day in Samara or Babylon or Tikrit, who can remember anymore, all incidents and settings seem interchangeable now, but wherever it was, there was a haji in a dishdasha with a camel; and even when the team leader, an ex-Marine named Brainard, walked directly toward them with the sawed-off Winchester 1887 he’d brought from Toad Suck, Arkansas, herder and animal just stood there, staring us down. It was not surprising when Brainard put the muzzle of the shotgun to the patella of the camel’s left foreleg. Shot. All at once, the lower half of the leg was dangling from a bloody cord of muscle and fur. The guy came next. Same place. In the kneecap. Brainard ejected the spent shells and started toward the palace; and as usual, because the suffering didn’t seem to unduly concern anyone else on the team, you were the one to clean up the mess and put each thing out of its misery. The man didn’t bother you so much, the way he swore and spat at you. But the animal. Which had stood for a few moments on three legs before collapsing suddenly onto the road. Kneeling beside it, you thought: Odd animal. The hump and the two-toed hoof. As you knelt beside it, the head on the long neck craned strangely. Eyes searching, for what?) Back then, what Will Banfelder did was: He stroked the smooth fur of the head, once, twice, then pressed a gun to the top of the skull. What he does now is: Puts an arm around his new son’s shoulders (think son, use the word in your mind), and says, “It’s all right. You’re going to like them.”
The boys have a superstition with the lawn jockey. Every time they cross to the Banfelder
property, they slap him five. He’s one of the old ones with skin painted the color of a charcoal briquette and big red lips. The Negro, they call him. To slap The Negro five is cool. To not do so is to dis The Negro. Dorian walks right by the statue and Plaxico says: “Bro, you dissed The Negro.” He doesn’t give a shit. His mind is otherwise engaged by the idea of walking right up to this kid and clocking him without saying a word. The feeling is terrible. He knows nothing about him yet. Nonetheless, Dorian’s body is cramping with anger. Hating … not him exactly, but the idea of him, or the idea of people like him—and though he has been taught to not believe in the sameness of all such persons, a logic as inborn as the structure of his DNA connects each and every one of them …