Not on Fire, but Burning

by Greg Hrbek

  “I want to.”

  “It’s not a matter of what you want. It’s not your choice—or mine. It’s God’s choice. God chooses his martyrs. Only God can bestow the honor of martyrdom. He alone bestows the honor or takes it away.”

  “Sheikh—”

  “I’m sorry, Karim. Enjoy your party. I’m sure the water in the pool is refreshing.”

  “Sheikh, wait.”

  “And one other thing. About your Lifebook account. I recommend a privacy setting. It won’t keep Satan away. But the Internet is full of lesser devils. Beware of them, Karim. Masalama. And good luck.”

  Back at the pool, in his absence, they are talking while Dorian and Plaxico listen silently on the periphery.

  “What a fuckin freak.”

  “Don’t say that,” Khaleela says.

  “Well, he is, isn’t he?”

  “And what do you think you’d be like?”

  “Yeah, that place,” Tarriq says.

  Omar says: “What about it?”

  “No phones allowed and it’s totally dark—I mean, what if you were never online.”

  “I’d be a fuckin freak.”

  “He’s trying to get used to things,” Khaleela says.

  “What’s the score?”

  Joey (looking at his phone): “Still one–zero.”

  “I can’t believe we’re missing this match.”

  “What match,” Plaxico asks.

  “Baghdad United, who else. You like Islamic League?”

  “Not really.”

  “Figures. But your friend likes to slide tackle.”

  “That wasn’t me,” Dorian says.

  “Who do you think he’s talking to anyway?”

  “Yeah, who would call him?”

  “Not his mom,” Tarriq says.

  “What?” Khaleela says.

  “What …”

  “Is that, like, supposed to be funny?”

  “No, I’m just saying.”

  “You three are assholes.”

  “Me?” Joey says.

  “All of you.”

  “I didn’t say anything.”

  “You don’t have to.”

  “Well—” (pointing to Dorian and Plaxico) “—what about them?”

  “What about them,” Khaleela says.

  “They’re not saying anything either.”

  “Yeah,” Omar agrees. “Say something.”

  “We hardly know him,” Plaxico says.

  “You two are real tolerant.”

  “I guess.”

  “I doubt it. But what you wouldn’t get anyway is that people like him are bad for us.”

  “I thought you were all Muslim,” Dorian says.

  “Yeah,” says Khaleela.

  “You mean, like, Sunni and Shia,” Plaxico says.

  “No, I don’t mean Sunni and Shia.”

  “Then what.”

  “Look, dude, they never should of let them out—it’ll just make it harder for the rest of us.”

  “Shut up,” Khaleela says. “He’s coming back.”

  “You shut up.”

  “Don’t say that to her,” Dorian says.

  “What if I do.”

  “He might do a slide tackle,” Tarriq says.

  Dorian (attempting to keep his voice steady): “I just told you—”

  “Yeah, yeah,” Omar says. “We know. It wasn’t you. It was some other Aryan. Sorry, you all look the same to us.”

  Karim walks into the kitchen where, set out on an arabesque tablecloth acquired by the old guy in the days of the third war, is the kind of thing he would’ve wished for back in the camp had he ever found a magic lamp occupied by a solicitous djinn. There are two giant serving dishes piled high with shaved lamb and chicken; a stockpile of pita bread; a bowl of hummus the size of a wash basin; and a pitcher of tea crammed full of ice cubes. But he can’t eat. He picks at the food while the others stuff their faces and chug the sweet minty tea. The old guy is looking at him, as he looked at him earlier when he walked in the door and found him sitting at the table crying. Don’t cry now. God, please don’t let me cry. The reason for tearfulness is: in his mind, he is still talking to the sheikh. Saying: No, don’t leave me here. Which are the very words his mind spoke and re-spoke to his mother and father in the days and months after the drone strike; not the first or second day and night, when he had wandered the streets of the camp in a state comparable to that of a computer after the crashing of its systems, but in the days and weeks beyond, when, having been identified as “displaced” (as if this hadn’t been his condition already), he was appended to a new household unit with a woman and a man whose presence only confirmed more fully the unbelievable absence of his real family, until at last—putting some food and a blanket in a backpack, and carrying his mother’s cracked eyeglasses in the pocket of his filthy blue jeans—he left like a runaway. He went to where the street grid of the old city ended. There was a last gasp of forsaken warehouses and factories; and alongside a sewer of a creek, a shantytown, like the settlement of some sad band of pioneers. Then farmland. Sterile and flat. Karim walked across it for hours. By midday, he could see the reservation fence. By sunset, he had reached it. Ten-foot electrified barrier of interwoven wire stretching like time in two directions and bending (as perhaps time bends) to form a closed loop all around him. He wrapped himself in the blanket—and while he slept, a surveillance drone must have heat-sensed him because he came shocked out of a dream in which his parents were not dead into a whirl of rotor dust and a darkness slashed by lines of green light that seemed to impale and hold him fast to the cold ground until a vehicle braked a few yards away: in all, four soldiers (not counting the helicopter pilot) armed with laser-sighted assault rifles to apprehend an eleven-year-old boy carrying a pair of broken eyeglasses. When one of the soldiers patted him down and found the glasses, Karim was afraid they’d be tossed away or ground into the dirt with a boot heel. But the man just handed them back. On the return trip, Karim held them in his trembling fingers, his mind saying, No, don’t leave me here, as if he had expected mother and father to appear on the other side of the fence and they had not come—as if beyond the fence is where they were: another world, but how do you get there from here?

  In approximately half an hour, when the sun is paused directly overhead as if balancing on a pinnacle of sky, the party will fail like a ceasefire. Only one of them can feel it coming. That one is not Will Banfelder, in whose opinion the whole affair is going off without a hitch. After noon prayer, he’ll break out the croquet mallets; he set the wickets up last night on the other side of the pool. It’s not Tarriq Malick, who hasn’t had such a wicked good shwarma since that restaurant in the capital closed after someone threw a concrete block through the front window and torched it. Not Zebedee (born Plaxico) Hightower, who is wondering what that phone call was all about and why Karim Hassan-Banfelder all of a sudden has the nervous shrinking look of a dog just kicked by its master. Not Dorian Wakefield, in whose head the voice of Khaleela Kingsley won’t stop echoing: I need mouth to mouth! And not Khaleela Kingsley, who is catching Dorian Wakefield stealing a glance at her over his shwarma. And finally not Omar Mahfouz. Who never did think that Dorian Wakefield was the slide-tackler from last summer but does intend after lunch to see how the little shit will react to further provocation. None of these know. Only Karim. He alone. Knows though not what. Perhaps when our hearts emit a pulse of commitment, then an echo of an action not yet taken and yet to be devised by the imagination can return to us. As Karim is feeling the echo, the phones of the faithful are awakened from sleep mode by their salat reminder applications. “Come to prayer,” the muezzins chant, one, then another, then another. “The time is here for the best of deeds.”

  Dorian knows about this from the Islam chapter in Social Studies. Five times a day. And that’s not counting weekly services at the mosque. Doesn’t know how they do it. His own family, when they first moved from California, had tried religion. They couldn’t even m
anage once on Sunday. Dorian can’t really remember, but the experiment and its failure has stayed with him—and the sight of the church sometimes gives him a guilty feeling, as when passing the home of a friend made and then forsaken. He can hear them now. By standing in the doorway of the bathroom. Their voices rising up the short staircase from the basement. Her voice in prayer. Sweet and serious. Check your breath. It smells like shwarma. On the sink lies a tube of Mentafresh. Squeeze some onto your finger. Suck it off, mix with saliva, swish, and spit.

  One o’clock or so.

  That hour of a summer day when anyone can start to feel a little crazy. Even in long lost times, before the planet’s dangerous warming, it was so; but with this dizzying heat and the noise of cicadas like schizophrenic voices in the head and a feeling in the heart that you are betraying your family and your god …

  The partygoers are in the yard. Karim holding in his hands something usable as a weapon. The game is called croquet. The other day, the old guy had taken him to play mini-golf and Karim used a metal stick to tap a little ball over fake grass in the direction of a tin cup. Now he is using a wooden hammer to hit a bigger ball over real grass through metal hoops. Games for spoiled and lazy apostates. How could I have imagined, even for a few short days, that maybe I could live like this? As he holds the mallet and watches the kid from across the street (the one set apart from the rest by white skin and light hair) clubbing his red-striped ball, Karim feels a correction in course. You can do it. You can do the thing you have been called to do. Though you must admit: What the sheikh said is not unwarranted. There have been moments when you’ve doubted your resolve— (Like the other evening, waiting your turn at the ninth hole of the mini-golf course at that place called Oasis Family Funplex, where the sails of a miniature windmill were turning and turning, and there was a baby secured in a sort of vest to its father’s chest as if the infant were a type of explosive, which made you ask: what if I was wearing the belt now, what if this was the appointed time and place)—

  “Nice shot, what’s your name again?”

  “Dorian.”

  “Oh, yeah. Aryan. Aryan, how come you’re not in soccer camp this summer?”

  “Don’t call me that.”

  “Because they suspended you is what I heard.”

  “I’m not that kid.”

  You would, Karim answers himself now, pull the cord. You will. Wherever, whenever. So prove it. Prove it to the sheikh.

  “Omar,” the girl is saying. “Just cut it out.”

  “Khaleela. Just shut your mouth.”

  “Hey—”

  “Forget it,” she says to the white kid; and she’s holding his arm, touching him—which, for some reason, makes Karim even angrier and more certain that the time has come, the sun at a tipping point, time for an action that will prove his willingness and his readiness for the greatest of actions. If only the sheikh could see. And then he realizes: The camera, the camera in your phone.

  “I told you before, don’t be rude to her.”

  “You told me.”

  “Now if you do it one more time, one more time, okay, and I’ll knock the towel off your fucking head.”

  “What?”

  “You heard me.”

  And while the other kid, the black one, is saying, “Okay, bro,” Karim is dropping his croquet mallet, not simply dropping it but throwing it sidewise over the grass. It’s a gesture everyone sees. So sudden and dramatic that all speech and thought comes to a momentary stop.

  What came next: I just stood there, not getting what he was walking at me for. To tell me something, was all I could guess—like he’d chosen me as the keeper for some secret. Even after he drew his arm back to hit me, it seemed I was still waiting to see what would happen. So he got me full in the stomach. While I suffocated, no one moved or spoke. Then my breath came back. Omar grabbed my shirt from behind. I swung a fist over my shoulder and caught him in the jaw before the other two got me by the arms and neck. Everyone shouting in Arabic and English. This time it came even more out of nowhere. Flash of blindness, then the pain across my face, like a baseball had taken a bad hop. Then blood. On my upper lip and into my mouth. I heard Karim saying: “Hold him down.” Which they did. They wrestled me to the ground and the next thing I saw was the kid standing over me with his phone, positioning the camera eye above my face, snapping a picture.

  7

  Mitch had found the photo. There were about five hundred in the folder. So it had taken him nearly an hour of looking. Then, there it was. The three of them, in the days before Dorian, on a beach. His son was right: a low angle. Unlikely, maybe impossible, that the camera had been been set down in the sand and programmed to work its own shutter. The people were too precisely framed and the horizon of ocean too true. Now that he could study it, Mitch noticed other things. First of all, on the left side of the image (to the left of Kathryn, in the distance, in the water) stood a rock arch. Instantly he knew it. Goat Rock. About a half hour’s drive from their old house, where the Russian River ends its southward course and fresh water commixes with salt, and where, in the springtime, on the plateaus of sand to either side of the estuary, harbor seals birth and nurse their pups.

  As he stared at the image on the computer screen (he was in his office, in the summer-deserted halls of the department, the building quiet as a church between services), Mitch tried to call to mind the friends who would join them in those days on such outings, and which member of that disbanded league would’ve conceived such a photo and lain prone in the sand to realize it. Fourteen, fifteen years ago. Perhaps the photographer had also pressed upon Kathryn the sunglasses with the tea-saucer-size lenses, an accessory she would never wear for any effect but comedy …

  He sent her the picture.

  Five minutes later, she replied: GUESS I REPRESSED THAT TRAUMATIC MEMORY OF FASHION—AND YOUR SON AND HEIR WAS A FAT LITTLE S.O.B.

  And Mitch wrote back: BUT DO YOU REMEMBER THAT DAY AT ALL? SEE GOAT ROCK IN THE BACKGROUND.

  And she replied: VISUAL EVIDENCE NOTWITHSTANDING, I’M PREPARED TO SWEAR UNDER OATH THAT I NEVER PUT ON ANY SUCH PAIR OF SUNGLASSES.

  He closed e-mail, closed the jpeg, thinking there was nothing to it—what could there be to it? And yet he didn’t send the file to his son. And the next day, when Dorian wrote Mitch wanting to know if he had found the photo, Mitchell lied and said he’d forgotten to look. As if he knew of a reason to keep it from him.

  •

  On Saturday, while his son is bleeding from his nose and possibly his mouth, Mitch—who all morning has been writing (which is to say: typing sentences, whole paragraphs, only to have them miscarry before completion and then he starts anew, like someone punished with an eternally futile labor)—opens the photo again. It has gotten into his head. Last night, he dreamed a kind of explanation for it. In the dream, Dorian was his eleven-year-old self, but his older brother was still two. They were all on the beach at Goat Rock and Dorian said: We have to take a picture before the radiation gets here … Now, looking at it again. Kathryn on the left with the sunglasses, Cliff in the middle, himself on the right. The ocean in the background and a rock sculpted by a thousand years of surf into the shape of a portal. Suddenly, his mind cognizes a detail that the nerve cells of his retina had sensed from the start: The sunglasses, a reflection in the lenses.

  He copies the photo to the college server and goes into the department office and starts up the PC with the twenty-three-inch monitor.

  Clicks on the file: The picture twice as large now.

  There.

  In the lens on the left. The one adumbrating his wife’s right eye—and most of her right cheek and a fraction of her forehead, too. Something there. An image. Though hard to tell what. He clicks on the magnification slider and moves it up halfway. His older son’s face fills the window. Then he moves the pointer onto the image and drags right—to his wife’s lips—and then down, until the sunglasses come into view. First the curving frame front. Then the lens. The reflection
in it. Close up like this, all you see is a grid of black and white squares, not dissimilar to an unsolved crossword puzzle. But zoom out a few degrees: and the pixels will come smashing together into a shape. A person. Isn’t that what it is? A child, isn’t it? Blurred by low resolution and warped by the bend of the mirroring surface. But yes. Prone in a brightness that can only be sand, holding something that must be a camera. Long hair lifting like smoke. On the shoulder, the dark line of a swimsuit strap. A girl.

  They have him pinned to the ground. Tarriq is kneeling on his right arm; Omar’s got the left one and also a fistful of Dorian’s hair. Pulling on the hair to tilt the face up so Karim can take another picture and thus the blood is running throatward and causing in Dorian a sensation of drowning. In his eyes the sun is a blinding bulb of unfathomable wattage—and though everyone is talking at once, he can’t seem to hear anything but the cicadas like a sound blasted without mercy through an array of loudspeakers. Through it all some part of him asking: Dude, where the fuck are you? Well, where else would Plaxico Hightower be—a boy with the reflexes of an emergency responder and the heart (even if he himself does not fully know it yet) of a pacifist—but sprinting over the lawn to enlist the aid of a peacekeeper? Sliding the door open while slamming his open hand on the glass. He can see through the kitchen to the living room and the baseball game on the flatscreen.

  “Mr. B!”

  Will is already on his feet, mind daymared with the vision of a kid floating face down in the water of the pool. Across the patio and almost to the steps when Zebedee calls: “No, back here!” He rounds the pool. Sees the children in the grass. Standing among the arches of the wickets and a litter of balls and mallets. One on the ground: not his son; his neighbor’s son. Blood on his face, but Will can see right away that this is nothing. An accident. Careless swing of a croquet mallet. Although when he gets closer, he is surprised by how much blood there is, on Dorian’s shirt as well as his face, and how black the substance is in the sunglare—and the poor kid also seems to have gotten it in the mouth.