Not on Fire, but Burning

by Greg Hrbek

  “Karim, what—”

  “Nothing.”

  “Damn. Damnit, son.” Then, in Arabic: “I’m sorry.” He sits at the table. “I shouldn’t have left you alone like that.”

  “Jaddi …”

  “Go ahead,” he says. “Let it out.” (Leaning forward, old hands clasping and unclasping but not daring to touch your hands, which are also on the table, closed around the phone.) “I’m here,” the old guy says. (Not understanding at all.) “I’m here,” he says. “Damn, I’m sorry, son. I won’t do that again. I mean, not until—” (not understanding, not understanding at all) “—not until you’re ready …”

  •

  Keenan gave Mr. B some bullshit about a family crisis: Grandma fractured her femur in a loony bin for the memory-impaired. Dean’s excuse was some Calypso Fest at the Civic Center. Come eleven o’clock, it was just me and Plaxico in our cargo trunks and sun-protective shirts and flip-flops heading up the curve of the cul-de-sac. To the party. If you could call it a party: three kids, one of whom was literally an enemy combatant, and a retired mercenary. Then a car rolled by us. Two kids in the back. It slowed down at The Negro, which is when I saw that another car was already parked in the driveway, and there was a woman in a head scarf standing by the open driver’s door and a kid was walking from that car to the house. Dressed just like us. Dressed for swimming.

  “What is this,” I said.

  “I dunno.”

  “Other kids. And they’re hajis.”

  “Yep,” Plaxico said.

  “Who are they? From Crescent?”

  “Crescent, I bet.”

  Which was a private school in an old crumbling mansion near the abandoned racetrack. We had Muslim kids at our school. But if they could afford it, Muslims sent their kids to Crescent.

  “Forget it,” I said.

  My best friend had a look on his face like maybe he agreed. We just stood there for a few seconds while our sunscreen scattered and absorbed ultraviolet radiation. Hottest day of summer so far. Meanwhile, Mr. Nkondo was coming down his driveway with a garden hose. Washing dead cicadas off the blacktop. Now he closed down the nozzle and I could feel the water wanting to get out.

  “Zeb, Dorian. Yo.”

  “Hi, Mr. N.”

  He removed his kente hat, ran his wet hand through his wooly hair, and looked at the scene playing out next door. The lady in the head scarf talking to the driver of the car that had passed us; the kids. All of them definitely Arabic.

  “Lemme guess. You two are going to a funeral on a beach.”

  “Pool party,” Plaxico said.

  Mr. N put the hat back on. “You know those kids?”

  We shook our heads.

  “Well,” Plaxico said. “We know Karim.”

  “Not really,” I said.

  “We met him the other day.”

  “Me, too,” Mr. N said. “I met him the other day. Can’t say it was love at first sight. The kid’s kind of, I don’t know.”

  “Yeah,” I said.

  “So you got that feeling, too,” he said. “Well, let’s not rush to judgment. He’s been through a lot.”

  “Do you think it was a drone?” Plaxico asked.

  “What.”

  “That killed his family.”

  Mr. N raised the leaking hose to his lips. “You mean, do I think our government has been in the business of killing its own citizens … I— Well, I need some proof before I buy into that story.”

  “Me, too,” I said.

  “Whatever happened, it left him all alone. I was talking to Ry—Ryder’s in Damascus now—and he said, over there, kids who lose everything, they wind up blowing themselves into a million pieces.”

  “How can kids do that.”

  “I don’t know, Zeb. So maybe it’s all good. Help a kid, save some innocent lives. Maybe that’s how we get out of this mess. A few lives at a time.”

  As we walked off, I was thinking about how Mr. N had been an orphan, too. From Nigeria. An American couple adopted him when he was a baby. Growing up, he had been Hendrix Woodworth. Later, he took back his African name. Went to college, got married, had a kid of his own.

  Made me wonder.

  What if no one had ever helped Mr. N.

  As Moses Nkondo opens the nozzle of the garden hose (the water has been surging there like blood behind a clot and now released atomizes against the blacktop, alchemizing into a rainbow-flecked spray), he watches the two boys walk toward the neighboring house. They have, he has noticed, a curious habit of touching the lawn jockey statue every time they go near it. The statue has been there at the foot of that driveway for as long as he can remember. A representation undebatably offensive. The big red lips and the skin not so much black as blackfaced. But one school year, Ryder did a report and discovered that the statues had been used to guide escaped slaves to freedom; and ever since then, he has felt a fondness for the thing, not because of its history, but because of the association with his son, who when he wrote that report was as small and bewildered as the boys seen now through this veil of water … He washes the insect death, the exoskeletons and winged bodies, to the foot of the driveway and into the road. Doing this with one hand while manipulating the screen of his smartphone with the other. Checking the countdown timer that tracks the balance of his son’s tour of duty. Six months, five days, thirteen hours, twelve minutes, forty-one seconds, forty, thirty-nine …

  As he slaps The Negro five, Dorian says to Plaxico: “I still say forget it.” The sentence is necessary to him, as a bridge is necessary to someone making a crossing. I still say forget it. Meaning that he gets Mr. N’s viewpoint—but the viewpoint, sensible though it may be, does not change the facts on the ground. The invitation didn’t say anything about other kids; it was therefore extended under false pretenses and accepted based on incomplete information. He is not refusing to go, but he wants it to be sayable later that he went into the whole thing having expressed, out loud and in the hearing of another, a doubt alike to non-consent. On the driveway stand the two adults, the mother in the head scarf and the father from the second car, who stop their talking as the boys approach. The mother, in a tone of pleasant surprise, says good morning. The father, who in sunglasses and Hawaiian shirt looks to Dorian like an Arab general on vacation, gives them a wordless look with implications difficult to divine, as if he has information about them which they don’t yet have themselves. An impression shared by both boys, who as a rule move through the world knowing just enough to formulate questions. The answers, it would seem, are always just out of reach. Like: Out in those camps—what’s been happening out there? Is it true, what some people say, about drones? Or: That photo from the other night, of my family before I was born. Someone took that picture. Someone is just outside the image. Not there yet there.

  Is it her?

  Dorian hadn’t thought this at first. When he first saw the picture, sitting in the darkened den with his father, he had merely thought: California. My brother is two or three. But the image, the angle of its recording had positioned his mind’s eye, making him feel he was lying in the sand before his parents and brother, which made him think: the person with the camera was lying in the sand. Then, as the photo faded, he thought suddenly of her (if his brother was two, she would’ve been eight), and thought also of the other thing he’d noticed: the sunglasses on his mother’s face. The lenses were gigantic: two giant convex surfaces in which the reflection of the person in the sand, the person with the camera, might be visible. If he were to zoom the picture to two-fifty, maybe three hundred percent and look into the lenses … So Dorian had asked his father for a copy of the photo, and all the following day not receiving one finally wrote him an e-mail, What about the pic, to which the reply, What pic. Oh, that pic. I haven’t had time to look for that. Which is totally bogus because your father has nothing but time, does nothing all day but type on a computer after which he will spend the dinner hour moping because he hasn’t achieved anything worth shit all day. He k
nows why you want it. Just because your father is anti-social and self-centered doesn’t mean he’s not attuned to the action around him. On the contrary. He’s a writer. He sees plots everywhere. So why would he give you the photo. When he can remember perfectly well that she is the one who took it. He himself has probably thought about the sunglasses. Has maybe even done what he knows you would do if he gave you the picture; and has seen that you are right, that in the dark lenses (perhaps in one more clearly than the other) it is discernible: the reflection of a girl, eight or nine years old, lying in the sand with a camera.

  “The boyz from the hood!”

  “Hi, Mr. B.”

  “Marhaban, marhaban,” he says. “That’s ‘welcome’ in Arabic.”

  At the far end of the patio their neighbor is wearing a cook apron that says GRILL MASTER—THE MAN, THE MYTH, THE LEGEND. The other kids are buds. Hanging close, elbows rubbing. Karim standing off a little, against the house, in a scalene triangle of shade. (Two of us, Dorian thinks, and four of them.) Then the sliding door opens and a girl steps out: a black girl never before seen by Dorian. She has apparently been in the bathroom checking her phone and applying lip gloss because there’s a phone in her hand and her lips have got the luster of hard candy.

  “Oh,” she says. “Who’s this?”

  Karim (sort of clearing his throat): “They live here.”

  “I’m Zeb,” Plaxico says.

  “Dorian.”

  “The boyz from the hood,” Mr. B reiterates.

  “I’m Khaleela.”

  “Cool name,” Plaxico says. “Is it African?”

  When she shakes her head, her shoulder-length braids swing with the slow grace of trapezes: “Khaleela was the wife of the prophet.”

  “You mean,” Dorian says, “like a prophet from the Bible.”

  “Um, no. The Koran.”

  Once introductions are completed (the boys of Arab descent are named Omar, Tarriq, and Joey), the kids head for the swimming pool while the adoptive father withdraws to the kitchen in his cook apron and readies a banquet of snacks and meats. Under the transparent dome, which covers the entirety of the twenty-foot-long oval pool like a ballistic missile shield, the children do cannonballs, trying to splash the dome and scare cicadas off the outer surface. They have a semblance of a conversation (“How many bugs up there?” “Two hundred, five hundred”) while in the kitchen, the old soldier is impaling chunks of lamb and chicken on metal skewers. From this distance, the scene under the dome is one of fun and friendly relations—and the orphan boy, though perhaps on the outskirts, is not outside of it all. It’s the girl who won’t let him separate or isolate. Showing him something on her phone. Volleying a hot pink beach ball. The girl is like a butterfly, alighting on each male faction in a flight pattern that seems both random and carefully planned … She gets on the giant yellow smiley face and floats in the center of everything, sunglassed, head back, counting the insects aloud. “86, 87, 88.” The kid named Omar submerges, approaches sea-monstrous from below, and capsizes her. She surfaces, choking and spitting, shaking water from her braids, blinking her huge bright eyes; and cries, “I need mouth to mouth!” When she catches the boy looking at her—the white-skinned one, the only white one, who has a cool cowlick at the front of his hairline—she rolls her eyes and puffs her cheeks out like a blowfish. The boy ducks under the water. Holds his breath and opens his eyes. He can see her legs and feet; toes touching the bottom of the pool, just barely, lifting, touching again; and even under the water, he can hear the cicadas chorusing in the trees above and all around them. Dampened by water, the noise sounds like something other than itself. What is it? Then it comes to him. That tone played on the radio. That cold musical note meaning the next emergency can come at any moment.

  I swam underwater to the ladder and climbed out. Plaxico was sitting on a lounge chair, drinking a soda and tapping his feet to that song that goes: Seasons don’t fear the reaper, nor do the wind the sun or the rain … I was going to say, Let’s bail. (Because all these Muslims kept looking at me like they knew I was the one, the kid from the public school who’d come to their mosque and written that thing in the boys’ bathroom, got suspended, got forced to take a class about hate speech, and then dragged back to the scene of the crime to apologize and paint over the words.) But before I could say anything, the girl was coming with her phone. Her skin wet like with dew. Saying: “Omar, take a picture of us.” Then she squeezed between me and Plaxico. Our bare legs were touching, the thighs and calves and even our feet a little, and all of her felt wet and warm.

  “Take a couple shots.”

  “Okay,” Omar said. “But you, what’s your name again?”

  “Dorian.”

  “Maybe get the booger off your nose.”

  As soon as I reached up, he pushed the shutter button—and there wasn’t any booger there in the first place. He took another with a shit-eating grin on his face, then handed Khaleela the phone. I watched her delete the first picture; and while she was posting the second one, Omar said to me:

  “I know you from somewhere. You go to Sacred Heart?”

  “No.”

  “You all go to Crescent?” Plaxico asked.

  Omar nodded. Khaleela said no, she went to Dorothy Nolan. Plaxico told them where we went.

  “You just look familiar,” Omar said. “Do I?”

  “Not really.”

  “I know. You were in The Wizard of Oz.”

  “Huh?”

  “The play. In the park last year. You were the mayor. Of the Munchkins.”

  “No,” I said.

  Then he called out to one of the other kids and went off in Arabic. The other one looked at me like I was suddenly in focus and nodded, and Omar took a step closer to me and said: “You do soccer last summer at East Side Rec?”

  “Yeah.”

  “That’s it. I knew I knew you from somewhere. Soccer. You were always doing those slide tackles—”

  “Karim,” Khaleela said. “Your phone.”

  He picked it up and squinted at the screen. The ringtone was set to OLD TELEPHONE, so it was going off in his hands like an alarm clock from the Great Depression, and Omar was saying, “The green, dude, touch the green”—but I think the kid knew what to do, even if he had never gotten a call before. The way he was holding the phone and staring, he didn’t look confused. He looked scared.

  Back at the internment camp, just for fun, Karim and Hazem and Yassim would sometimes communicate on the two-way radios even if they were all in the same room or walking beside each other on the street. So when a phone started ringing under the dome and the girl, who was holding her own phone, said, “Karim, your phone” (and Karim realized that his phone, left on a towel colored like an American flag, was the one ringing), he thought for a moment that it must be her calling him. Then he picked up the device and saw the screen. And everything around him—the pool and its pristine water; the face on the inflatable raft smiling idiotically at heaven; the suburban children in their swim-clothes—all these things seemed to disappear, as if they’d only been aspects of a mirage; while the face on the screen, with its thorny beard and eyes glowing red from camera-flash, was the one and only thing that was undeniably real. The name above the photo, the name was wrong, not the one they called him by in Dakota. But the photo. No doubt about it: It was him.

  “Touch the green, dude.”

  Karim moves away from the invited guests. Toward the steps that lead to the ground. The ringing. Like a command shouted again and again. Answer me, answer me. It is impossible to disobey.

  Touch the green.

  Whereupon the picture on the screen will change to a different picture of the same person, this one moving and speaking:

  “Abdelkarim Hassad. May peace be upon you.”

  “Sheikh, I—”

  “Karim, greet me properly.”

  “Na’am. Aasif. And peace upon you, as well as God’s mercy and blessings.”

  “Now, then. Tell me. Are yo
u enjoying the party.”

  “The what?”

  “Those are your new friends I hear in the background? You’re very gregarious, Karim. Also disloyal.”

  “Sheikh, I didn’t—”

  “Scarcely a week and you’ve already forgotten us.”

  “I haven’t.”

  “Forgotten your true friendships, the family they murdered, your people, and even God Himself. Or did you simply forget the ten numbers I made quite sure you memorized before leaving?”

  “No,” he answers. “I didn’t forget anything.”

  “No?”

  “No, I didn’t.”

  “Then you have purposely ignored my instructions. Instead of being a warrior for God, you want to make friends on the Internet. You would rather fraternize with infidels in a swimming pool.”

  “Sheikh, only two are infidels.”

  “Oh, is that all?”

  “Yes, but—”

  “Why didn’t you say so? Only two. Only one-third of the total number. Why not make it an even half?”

  “I will call today.”

  “It’s too late for that, Karim.”

  The boy has walked a good ten meters away from the pool—into the shade of a hundred-year tree where the insects cry and wail like people mourning the wrongful deaths of loved ones. The boy says: “What do you mean, too late?”

  “I mean that your commitment is uncertain and there can be no uncertainty.”

  “I’m—I’m not uncertain.”

  “Listen to yourself, Karim. It’s a shame. Your parents and your sister, they have been counting on you for the justice no one else can do. I’m sure your mother is greatly pained. That you would rather stay with worthless strangers than be with her and earn her the greatest rewards of Paradise.”