by Greg Hrbek
Mr. B says: “Whazzup, boyz?”
“Hey.”
“Someone I’d like you to meet. This is Karim. Karim, this is Dean, Plaxico—I mean, Zebedee—Keenan, and Dorian.”
“What does that mean?” Keenan asks.
“It’s called an introduction, pal.”
“No, that.” He points to the rear of the Argo Electric. The bumper sticker says: WHERE THE HECK IS WALL DRUG.
“Wall Drug,” Dean says. “Must be a hash bar.”
“Good guess. But no. It’s a tourist trap in the Dakota Territory.”
“Dakota,” Dorian says.
“Which is where we just came from.”
Dorian looks at the kid and speaks to him directly: “That’s where you live …”
“Sort of,” Karim says.
“Used to live,” Mr. B specifies.
“Used to.”
“Where does he live now?” Keenan asks.
“You’re lookin at it. Thirteen Poospatuck Circle. Christ, it’s hot out here. And these bugs, it’s a like a goddamn Bible plague.”
“I don’t get it,” Keenan says.
“Don’t get what.”
“Thirteen is your house.”
“Correctamundo,” says Mr. B. “Thirteen is my house. It’s now also Karim’s house. That’s why I called you guys over. Introduce you. Let you know there’s gonna be a new kid in the hood.”
“For how long?” Keenan says.
“Indefinitely, son.”
All at once, everything freezes like streaming video when there’s a dearth of bandwidth at the point of reception.
Finally, Dorian says: “You’re from the camps.”
“No,” the kid says.
“Where, then.”
“I’m from the Jamestown Colony.”
“What Karim means,” Mr. B says, “is that before his family was interned, they lived in Jamestown.”
“And where’s his family now?” Dean asks.
“They’re deceased.”
While Keenan answers his ringing phone and wanders off, talking and glancing back as if someone might be sneaking up on him with a lead pipe, Dorian thinks (flash of cicadas dead on corkboard): I’m sorry about your family. It sucks and I can relate. Can even imagine, What if I was you. Reverse everything. This is an empathy exercise I learned at school: Imagine I’m the orphan and some old guy in a turban adopts me and makes me meet a bunch of camel-fucker kids who clearly hate my guts, of whom you are one. I’d be looking at you, wanting to stomp your goddamn brains into the ground. And like you wouldn’t be wondering what the hell your old neighbor is thinking, bringing someone like me into your sandbox. Indefinitely. Because let me tell you about this street. There’s Black, White, Vietnamese, Indian from India, Catholic, Unitarian, African Methodist, Jewish, Hindu, Free Will Baptist, and Agnostic. Notice what’s missing? Over on Mohegan and Onondaga, there are some of you, and there’s exactly one day out of the year they come over here, and that’s Halloween … Such is the path of his thoughts as the pow-wow awkwardly breaks up. Pretty phased, Mr. B is saying. Long-ass drive. Et cetera. Keenan still standing a good thirty feet away, with zero intention of rejoining the group. “See you around,” Plaxico says. But the new kid already has his back turned. In some kind of pain, judging from the weird twist in his spine. Maybe holding a shit since Ohio, Dorian thinks as he walks down the driveway. By the road, The Negro, in his white shirt and pants, red vest, and red-and-white cap, is bent forward (he doesn’t look so comfortable either), one hand pocketed, the other thrust forth for a reason long forgotten. Slap him five. The summer of your eleventh year is in motion.
4
They can’t understand where the idea could have come from. A sister. Eighteen years old at the time the bomb exploded, or the meteor hit, or whatever happened happened. Kathryn and Mitch have spent hundreds of hours, literally hundreds in the past six months, trying to figure out a source. A story he read, a movie. They started seeing a psychologist (the two of them with Dorian, then Dorian alone, then all four of them), a man who talked in private with Kathryn and Mitch about paracosms. Imaginary worlds created in childhood. The doctor made the phenomenon sound harmless, even propitious. A phase of intellectually gifted children. But at the worst point, in the icebound days of January, with their son shouting at them almost daily, accusing them of familial conspiracy (some of the episodes so irrational and paranoid, they thought with terror of schizophrenia), Mitch had said: “We need to be completely honest and consider every possibility.”
“I know.”
“Well, think. According to Dorian’s story, she would’ve been born in, what … ’09. So, ’09. The summer of ’09.”
“What about it.”
“Don’t act stupid, Kate. Please. This is too serious.”
“I know what you’re talking about,” she said, making a great effort to keep her voice steady. “But I can’t imagine why you’d bring it up.”
“Look—”
“Now of all times. Like we don’t have enough going on here.”
“There could be a connection.”
“Like this isn’t crazy enough without throwing that in.”
“I’m not throwing it in.”
“I mean, what are you thinking?”
“I’m thinking it’s the same year. ’09. And that’s weird, Kate. It’s a very weird coincidence. What I’m thinking is, the whole fantasy could be coming out of that. If you’d had the baby—”
“Just stop it,” she said.
And he did stop. And hasn’t mentioned it since, though Kathryn has thought about it plenty. The conversation comes back to her in these sorts of moments: alone in the car, backed up on the Northway while the sun capsizes in a sea of tropospheric aerosols, another day ending with the colors of holocaust. What happened in ’09 was, she was with Griffin and then she was also with Mitch. When she got pregnant, the question of whose could only have been answered in one way—and what would be the point of having such a test if not to choose one man or the other based on its results. One fate or the other. Maybe some people can make a decision that way, but not me. Is the future all mine to shape? What am I going to do, award myself to one of them like a prize? I can’t start a life that way. Thus went her reasoning all those years ago, twenty-six years ago now, when what she did was, she let it go, all by herself. Didn’t tell either one of them. Believing there was purity in this. Knowing, not much later, that abortion had been a way to protect herself against what she’d thought of as total loss. What if you lose both of them and the baby. In the end, she had told Mitch (and can see even now the way he had squinted his eyes, as if trying to see through a swirling fog), but the truth is, by then, what was this admission but itself a kind of test. If you love me.
Exit 8.
She calls home and leaves a message saying she’ll be late (what’s new) and is anyone working on dinner.
She turns on public radio.
The news is: There are elected officials out there, governors and senators, saying that their provinces and colonies, in defiance of the recent court ruling, will close their borders to all former internees. Turn it off. Can’t take it. These poor people. How many different ways must you prove your hate for them. She wonders what Dorian is thinking about all this. End of the camps; the renaturalizations. Should have talked to him weeks ago. It’s your own fault he’s back-sliding. Of course the news is setting him off. He sees these people as criminals. They’re set free and, abracadabra, this bizarre projection of his reappears. This symbol. There’s nothing mysterious about it at all. You studied psychology in college. It’s not complicated. He sees her in dreams and she is nothing but fear given form in a dream. Stop thinking about what your husband said that time. Which he only said for his own selfish reasons. A weird coincidence, yeah. But Dorian cannot know anything about that. Still. If you’d had the baby, it might have been a girl. She would’ve been conceived in ’09. Would’ve been eighteen when he was three. And she could have been in
the city when it happened—and when you step into this current of imagination, you lose your balance, emotion passes between you and rationality like a moon between planet and sun. Shadow over your heart. There’s something feasible here. If you had done one thing different.
•
One of the first things the old guy does is get him a smartphone; and once Karim has it, he starts thinking about what Abdul-Aziz instructed him to do. Call the number. Not immediately calling the number does not mean he’s not going to call the number. Karim will do as he was told by the sheikh (which is the rightful thing to do in the eyes of God, and which he wants to do), he just can’t seem to bring himself to do it today. Tomorrow, he tells himself. Same thing he told himself yesterday after the old guy had taken him to the mall and bought the compact device in its red metallic casing, giving Karim the power to access the Internet, take pictures still and moving, download and play games, and make unlimited audio and video calls. He had never used one of these before. In the camp, they were contraband. Somehow, though, the sheikh possessed one; and once, after dark, Karim had held it in his hands, Hazem and Yassim on either side of him, and the boys watched the glowing screen, blinking like moths winging at a flame. “Don’t be afraid,” said Abdul-Aziz, as the boy in the video was prepared by men in dark hoods, as plastified explosives and tubes filled with nails and steel balls were taped to his skin and bones. But fuck were they afraid, all three of them terror-filled, expecting that at any moment, by design or accident, the boy might burst on the screen before their eyes into a cloud of blood, flesh, bone, and guts. Which he did not. Though he did no less suddenly burst into tears; and when a voice asked him why he was crying, he sobbed, “Because I am so happy. I am going to see my mother in the highest gardens of heaven …”
June 22.
Only three days past Dakota. But the camp and his friends, the lean-to they’d built out of scrounged cardboard, sheet metal, and particle board: all just disappeared. And now this house. Soft carpeting, gentle gusts of cool air, staircase leading to a second floor and a room all for him (with a futon whose plush makes him feel like he’s remembering something from before the encoding of memories), and in the back yard, get this, a pool, a real swimming pool filled with clean water and covered by a transparent dome. He can’t swim. But the depth is only four feet from end to end. He can lunge around, make some attempts at the rudimentary strokes, and float on a giant yellow smiley face with holes for eyes. You put your ass in one of the holes and let your head rest on the big happy mouth, and eventually Satan will ask a question of you: Is it possible you’ve already laid down your life—a painless passage, as the sheikh promised—and this is Paradise?
It could be ten minutes, could be a century later that he hears a muezzin chanting the azan.
“Allahu Akbar …”
“Allahu Akbar …”
The voice is not coming from a minaret, not from a loudspeaker (as it did at the camp); it’s coming from the smartphone. Karim paddles over to the ladder and pulls himself off the float. He drapes a towel over his shoulders. Picks up the phone. “Come to prayer … Come to prayer …” He exits the dome. A few steps on soft grass, a few more across flat stones that burn the soles of his feet. Sliding glass door. Stepping inside is a dream-change. You are now in a subzero dimension: molecules of chlorinated water freeze into crystals on your skin. Across the room, there’s a magic machine. Push one button, you get jewels of ice; push another, a cascade of perfectly tasteless water. Karim drinks until his brain aches. As he puts the glass down, the old guy says from the doorway:
“Time for salat?”
“Mm.”
“Good, good. You look good today. You feel good?”
“Pretty good,” Karim says.
“Good.”
“God is greatest,” chants the muezzin.
“I was thinking,” the old guy says. “Around sunset, how about some mini-golf.”
“Some what?”
The old guy joins two fists and makes a funny knocking motion. “You don’t know? It’s a game.”
“Oh …”
Down in the basement, the old guy has made a place for him to pray. Persian rug. On the wall, a framed picture of the Grand Mosque. Karim stands on the rug and faces Mecca. As he recites the first sura, he raises up his hands. Folds his hands on his chest. Bows. Sits. Kneels. Lowers forehead. Touches forehead to rug. Asks for protection from the torture of hellfire. When he’s done, he picks up his phone.
Tomorrow.
Tomorrow, you will call the number.
•
Dorian thinks of the dream he had a few nights ago. About the Arabian palace with the mural of Mount Rushmore. Now that Dorian has met the kid, it has an unnerving relevance. Hanging out alone in his room, he thinks: I had that dream, and then a couple days later a haji from Dakota appears. But a mural made of corn. That’s just random. When he types DAKOTA CORN into the search engine, he isn’t really expecting anything to come up. But he gets pages and pages of images. Of a building. He clicks on the first one … In the dream, he never saw the palace from the outside, but this first picture is such a perfect match for what the outside would have been that he instantly feels this is the building he was in, in the dream. Some kind of weird mosque. Two minarets with pointed green tops like giant, perfectly sharpened crayons; and three curving domes, yellow and green with red pinnacles, like giant heavenward-pointing boobs with flags coming out of the nipples. The highest flying flag is the Stars and Stripes. Above the entrance, letters spell: AMERICA’S DESTINATIONS. Then white columns support a bigger fancier sign: MITCHELL CORN PALACE. The exterior walls are all muraled—and, there, to one side of the doors is the same mural from the dream. The heads of Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln, and Edmonds. Mount Rushmore. Made of ears of multicolored corn.
Via videocall, he explains it all to Plaxico, who has his tablet at such an angle that Dorian can only see one quarter of his face as he plays PGA Tour on his dad’s old console: software so prehistoric you can practically hear, while you’re teeing off, archaeopteryxes screeching in the computer-generated trees.
“What do you call that,” Dorian says.
“What.”
“When a dream comes true, what’s that called.”
“A dream come true.”
He ends the call and walks out of his bedroom, down the hall, downstairs, out of the house, into the meltdown of afternoon sun and the crashing sound waves of the seventeen-year cicadas, over his family’s uncut dandelion-filled grass and onto the neighboring lawn (closely cropped and weedless), to the sliding glass door under the deck through which he can see his best friend holding a remote like a Neanderthal boy with a bone weapon. As Plaxico drives a stupendous tee shot over a virtual fjord, Dorian sits in the chair that looks like the amputated hand of a storybook giant.
“Is it déjà vu?”
“That’s something else,” Plaxico says. “That’s when something happens and you know it happened in another life.”
The brown-skinned, khaki-trousered, polo-shirted avatar waits patiently on the fairway while Plaxico disappears into the utility room and reappears with two chilled cans of Tahitian Treat.
“Saw the kid last night,” he says.
“Where.”
“Funplex.”
Dorian pops the tab on the soda and gives him a look.
“Sorry, it was Family Night.”
“I am family.”
“You’re like family,” Plaxico says. “If we start a Like Family Night, you’re there.”
“Whatever.”
“Anyway, I saw the kid. First time in his life playing mini-golf, he finished two over par with a hole-in-one.”
“So, buy him a green blazer.”
“Precog.”
“What’d you say?”
“That’s what it’s called. When you dream of the future, you’re a precog. But you didn’t see the future.”
“Yes, I did.”
“You didn’t see the kid. Yo
u didn’t dream a kid was coming.”
“I saw the mural.”
“So?”
Dorian isn’t sure how to explain it. Plaxico picks up his tablet and after a few seconds of surfing says: “Any plans Saturday?”
“Not really.”
“Just got a invite. To a pool party.”
He reports the news in a tone of dramatic offhandedness that sets Dorian’s mind in motion. Must be from a girl. Maybe Hanna Hyashi or Isabel Ambrose. More and more, he is thinking in these terms, in terms of girls and what might happen with them: for almost a year now, a feeling in him—or the desire for a feeling—like when a thunderstorm foments in the summer atmosphere day after day, and you know the rain is coming though it seems it never will, until finally, maybe at this very party (I need cooler cargo trunks, he starts thinking, and, I swear, if my mother makes me wear a sun-protective shirt) … But none of these mental projections are relevant, because when Plaxico passes him the tablet, Dorian sees that the e-vite—the maw of a great white shark rising out of a kiddie pool—isn’t from Hanna or Emily or any other girl. It’s from Karim Hassad-Banfelder.
•
All four boys receive this invitation. For the coming Saturday at eleven o’clock. When Dean opens the message, he is getting stoned on real shit from Indochina with a sixth-grader who goes by the nickname Landru. Dean clicks on the link and he thinks it’s funny (the shark that can’t possibly fit in the space it is depicted as being in, suggesting a disregard for physical laws, or maybe a change therein, some dimensional passageway at the bottom of the kiddie pool, a wormhole to oceanic depths), but he deletes the e-mail without giving a moment’s consideration to the question of attendance as the hands of Landru proffer a water bong the size of a shoulder grenade launcher … When Keenan opens it, he is in the in-law apartment where his grandmother aged gracefully until cortical dementia infected her mind like spyware. Now she lives in a community for the memory-impaired while her grandson uses her old quarters as a love shack where he and Amber Kakizaki, a thirteen-year-old girl met on a hike for kids with nature deficit disorder, have tortuous outercourse under the grandfather clock that plays Westminster Chimes every half hour. He clicks on the link and doesn’t think there’s anything funny about a shark in a kiddie pool (though he does see the potential for humor if one were to add some towelhead kids jumping out of the pool with their eyeballs bugging out of their faces). Far from amused, the thought of being in a swimming pool with one of them, the idea of immersion half-naked in the same water, makes his guts squirm and burn with a furious nausea … And Dorian and Plaxico are together when they open it, in the basement of the Hightower home, drinking carbonated fruit punch while on the flatscreen television the facsimile of a long-dead golf pro waits to take his second shot on fourteen. Dorian is not so much angry as afraid—and when he says, “Like we’re gonna play Marco Polo with Jig-Abdul of Arabia,” Zebedee can see through the show of rancor to the fear inside, which he guesses isn’t so different from the fear we all harbor. Still. In this best friend (better known than his own brother), it’s something else, too. It’s like Dorian is afraid of himself, of the one thing in life you can know in full: more afraid of himself than of any uncertainty or unknowable. It seems to Zebedee that his friend might start crying, and he’s trying to think about what to say, even as his own mind is distracted by a series of deep links that range through language and history: Jig-Abdul. Jigaboo. The lawn jockey you call The Negro. Your great uncle dragged by rope, by truck, over a dusty southern road to the field with the hanging tree: He to whose name you have changed your name.