by Greg Hrbek
“Jesus H.”
“We didn’t start it.”
“Start what,” he says, kneeling down. “Dorian, you all right?”
“I dunno.”
“Bonk in the nose. Jesus, though. I hope it’s not a posterior bleed.”
“Sir …”
It’s the girl speaking: she looks terrified.
“He hit him.”
“Hit?”
She points to Karim. A few feet away. For some reason, phone in hand.
Zebedee says: “It’s true, Mr. B.”
“We didn’t start it.”
“Start what, goddamn it.”
Dorian sits up, touching the teeth in his mouth; all are firmly rooted. He spits into the grass. Blood still draining from his nostrils. He stands and starts walking. Behind him, he can hear them arguing: “He used a racial slur … They used one first.” On the front lawn he is safely out of sight. A sob and then the tears come. Swallows. Clot of blood down the throat and a nauseated shudder. He leans over. A few feet ahead, The Negro hunched and proffering his open palm. Approaching from behind, his best friend. Saying: “Bro, lemme help.” But Dorian doesn’t want help. Needs help, but doesn’t want it. And won’t accept it. So walks off at a rate of speed and with a bearing of body that says don’t fuck with me—and, to punctuate the message, gives the lawn jockey statue a vicious karate kick to the head.
You never hit anyone before this. Not in the face. One time in the camp, you punched Hazem in the stomach; and when your friend crumpled to his knees, you kicked him, kicked him hard in the arm and the ribcage in a furious panic because he had used up—all by himself, in violation of the pact made by the three of you—the last of the opium. But you have never hit anyone in the face. Until now. And you wouldn’t have thought, had you ever given thought to the idea, that hurting someone else could cause so much pain to your own self: your right hand feels cracked and sprained. You never made another person bleed until today—and because you hit him (at least once, maybe more) after the blood had started, some of the boy’s blood is on your hand, smeared and starting to dry.
“Go to your room.”
The man who wants to be your father says this in Arabic. In a tone of anger being used for the first time. Go. Do as he says and don’t waste time. Because soon he will come and demand an explanation for your behavior, at which time he may take away the phone. So what you must do quickly is send the pictures to the sheikh. Run. Across the lawn. You didn’t think this far ahead. You have never sent a photo. But you will find that you, like all children of your time, are instinctively inclined toward basic technological operations. When you reach the room, close the door. In the photo album are three pictures. The first is no good. The boy had moved and the camera captured only grass and a clump of yellow dandelions. But the second one is clear. A bloody face fills the frame and the blood looks very dark on the white skin. Tap this image with your fingertip. Symbols will appear at the bottom of the screen. The leftmost one (an arrow in a square) makes a kind of sense. Touch it. Yes: a menu of commands. Choose the one on top. The picture is now a message. But a message with no destination. You don’t know what to type—and for a moment you think there is no way to know. But notice. Another symbol: red circle with a plus sign. Touch it and the number of the phone he called from will be revealed to you. Touching that number will cause it to be pasted into the address line. Just one last thing to do now. But before you tap the green button, touch the subject line. You will see the letters of the alphabet in random order. Search through and press one at a time until you have spelled out: I DID THIS.
As soon as I kicked the statue over, I felt guilty about it. I actually stopped and looked back. Plaxico was fixing it. For some reason that made me feel worse. But I kept walking. Where Poospatuck intersected with Onondaga, there was a culvert, a big concrete pipe underlying the road. When we were little, we’d pretend we were caving or traveling through a wormhole to another universe. I had outgrown those games, but it was still a good place to disappear into. I crawled in a ways. Dipped my hands into the trickle of water and dabbed at my face. Fat lip, one eye swollen nearly shut. The kid had gone completely ape shit on me—and I had done nothing, said nothing to him. I sat there listening to the water falling from the culvert into a little stream that went through the woods and I started thinking of my grandma’s house in the Oregon Territory. Because I guess that’s where I wished I could be. In that house that wasn’t much more than a cabin on the shore of a lake, so far away from everything and so alone in the mountains. I was always the first one awake there. Before the sunrise, I would go down to the dock and look into the fog and sometimes a loon would call out from the heart of the lake, and something about that haunted sound made the world I had come from—the real one with all of its problems—seem like a dream …
When I opened the sliding glass door of Keenan’s in-law apartment, I found him on the carpet with his girlfriend, Amber Kakizaki, both of them fully clothed but attached to each other like mating insects.
“Got any ice,” I said.
Amber saw me and started going, “Oh, Oh.” Keenan said nothing. Just walked calmly into the kitchen while I sat on the couch. The apartment, even after several months, still had the smell of his grandmother: baby powder and prune juice.
“You talk to Plaxico?” I said.
“Yep.”
He handed me the freezer pack and I held it to my face. Again, he walked off. Returned with a tin of breath mints and said: “Have a synthetic opiate.”
I shook my head.
“Look. Don’t be such a pussy. Your goddamn nose is broken, you’re blind in one eye, and have you looked at your shirt?”
“You could be nicer,” Amber said.
“I agree,” I said.
“Nicer. That’ll work. Let’s everybody be a little bit nicer. The real point is, what are we going to do about this.”
Do, I thought.
“There’s four of them, right? Jig-Abdul from across the street and the other three go to Crescent.”
“What are you talking about?”
“I’m talking about what are we going to do, Dorian. I mean, Arabs come into your neighborhood and beat the crap out of you. Now what do you do.”
Silence.
Then the grandfather clock played Westminster Chimes.
Then I said: “I gotta pee.”
In my friend’s grandmother’s bathroom mirror, I finally saw my face. Pocked purple, smeared with blood. I ran the water and cupped my hands. Once I’d cleaned up, I could see the damage wasn’t so bad. Four times he’d hit me, maybe only three. And he was not a strong kid, not a big kid. Now, what do you do?
Around three o’clock, Mitch gets a text from his younger son. Wants to know if he can spend the night at Keenan’s house. Mitch does not like the kid. Likes his parents less. And Kathryn likes all of them even less than Mitch. The kid, as he understands it, has been allowed to move from his bedroom into the in-law apartment recently vacated by his grandmother. The scenario would be funny if it wasn’t so poorly supervised. He imagines … what? Chill out, man. They’re only eleven years old. And even if eleven is the new thirteen. So they’re playing video games and smoking some greens maybe. And maybe some girls arrive at some point and they pair up and turn off the lights and make out. Like you did at their age if you correct for inflation. He tells him all right.
As he sets the phone down, Mitch sees the time. He has been at this computer, manipulating the picture in PhotoWizard, for nearly three hours. At one point, he had heard footsteps in the hall outside (and felt, as they faded, a needless relief, as if he were about some business both secret and forbidden). Now, without warning, a key is being inserted into the lock and the door is opening.
“Oh, Professor Wakefield!”
“It’s okay.”
Of the three books in her hand, library books the size of stone tablets, one has fallen to the floor. Mitch moves to pick up the book, then takes the others from her a
nd sets them down on the faux-wood countertop. He recognizes her. A student assistant. The reason he didn’t hear her coming: bare feet (toenails painted black).
“I just came to do some copying,” she says.
“All yours.”
He bends over the computer and closes the file. Logs off. There are eight printouts of the photo spread over the desk.
“You’re a photographer, too?”
“Me? No.”
“Looks like a photo. Or is it a painting?”
(Glancing at her while completing the shut down.) “What’s your name again?”
“Chloe Bennett.”
He nods, then holds out one of the printouts: “Chloe, what does this look like to you?”
“Hmm … Man Ray?”
“What? No,” Mitch says. “I mean, does it look like something. Can you tell what it is?”
After quite a long time, she says: “A quasar.”
“A quasar.”
“I took Astronomy last semester.”
“Can you see a girl? See. This is the head, the body …”
She squints and tilts the paper. Finally says: “Oh. Oh, yeah.”
“Do you?”
“No, I do. It’s like she’s floating in a fog. That’s very trippy, Professor.”
“Yeah, it is.”
“Is it your daughter?”
He looks at her. First in the eyes. Then, when she looks away, not of his own free will, at her chest. Then away, at her hands holding the photo; and sees on one wrist, a pale pink scar. Says: “No. No, it’s not. I don’t have a daughter.”
The party’s over. Guests gone home. The girl, Khaleela, had been the last. Will had sat with her on the front steps in silence, in the hot shade with glasses of iced tea, water condensing on the glasses and gathering into beads that tracked down the outsides and clung to the round bases, then let go, falling to the concrete step. When her father came, Will explained to him (as he had to each parent in turn) what had happened. That he had been wrong. Had rushed the boy into something he wasn’t ready for. “It’s my fault. I should’ve known better.” And this parent—a tall man, arms crossed at a strong chest—did not regard Will Banfelder (as the others had) with accusatory agreement, but said in a voice whose low pitch seemed augmented by a subwoofer in the throat:
“Don’t be so hard on yourself, it was just a fistfight.”
As the car backed away, the girl waved from the rear window, a gesture of regret and sympathy beyond her years.
Now here he stands. All around him, the goddamn bugs. Whose chorusing is like a kind of laughter. Inside the house, the boy, his son (think son, keep using the word) is waiting. To be questioned, lectured, punished. Just a fistfight. Will wonders if maybe the man is right. Don’t be too hard on yourself. Or him. No one’s dead, after all. Just a bloody nose. But it somehow seems unlikely that the Wakefields are going to be interested in anyone else’s idea of what constitutes actual violence. Don’t fool yourself. A harm has been done here, a harm. This behavior cannot be in any way sanctioned. And yet it’s your fault, not his. You rushed him. You should’ve known.
So goes the thinking of Will Banfelder—not in circles so much as by random turns, as if his mind is blindly navigating a maze—as he returns to the house, opens the glass door to the kitchen and confronts not only the remains of lunch (the dirty plates and utensils, the leftover meat and hummus, a housefly crawling on the waste), but also the specter of dessert: the seven bowls he had set out on the counter. The old man stands there, trying to decide what to do first. Finally goes to the freezer. Scoops ice cream, pours on some fudge sauce, and tops it off with Kool Wip. At the table, with a plastic spoon, he eats it all. Then climbs the stairs, approaches his son’s door, and knocks.
•
Clifford Wakefield has never been close with his younger brother. He can still remember when his parents announced the news of a coming baby. (He was six years old and just starting first grade.) First a shock of undoing, as if the fabric of space was tearing along a seam; and then, for months afterward, a sense that the established circumstances of life were not so much changing as being confused with a set of circumstances that were alien and invasive. It wasn’t that he couldn’t imagine a brother or sister. His mind was not denying the possibility of a mother having a baby. But this mother. This mother who was his mother. He tried to understand the situation in terms of something his grandfather had used as a soldier in Vietnam, a keepsake he had allowed Cliff to play with at his house in the Oregon Territory—a circular object with a glass cover and a silver needle under the glass, a magnetized needle that, in obedience to physical laws, only ever pointed in one direction: true north. Now, if the needle were to point east and only east. Well, that was impossible. But what if it did … They were right, of course, his parents, when they told him he’d get used to the baby. But the next summer when they visited that house on the lake, Cliff, now seven, saw the compass laid out in the same place as always, on a shelf beside an old aneroid barometer (the hand of which seemed never to be pointing left or right, not to the forecast of RAIN or FAIR scripted on the face, but always straight up, to the word CHANGE)—and he picked up the compass and, turning his body in different directions, watched the needle being realigned by the powers of the planet, thinking that, just as the needle of this compass cannot point east, there cannot be a baby, cannot be a brother.
He has been thinking about all of this lately, thinking of it in the light of what his schizo brother has been saying about a sister, and sensing a creepy parallel—and just last night, he had a dream that really scared him, which both answered the question of Dorian’s strange behavior in recent months and explained the equally strange conviction from his own sixth and seventh years, as follows:
He was walking in a forest and encountered a man sitting under a tree clothed in a T-shirt and ripped blue jeans (feet bare). The man had long hair and a bandanna wrapped around his head. Also, the man was smoking an old-fashioned blunt. He didn’t look especially intellectual. But not only was he wicked smart, he was telepathic, because before Cliff had said a single word, the man said something along the lines of: Let ∞ be a set of universes, U’s, of distinct but parallel paths (A1 – Z100), each of which is a set of events, E’s, on ordered pairs
But the dream was about to break up.
The man was not talking anymore. In fact, he wasn’t a man anymore, although he still looked like one. He was a cicada. He opened his mouth and out it came, emotionless and unrequiring of breath: the scream of an insect.
•
In the light of day, Cliff has been unable to remember exactly what the man said. The ideas, so logical during sleep, now have a quality of total nonsense. What is staying with him very clearly is the scream at the end. Before that, there’d been a lot of weird mathematical jargon. Something about alternate dimensions and his little brother being not craz
y. Well, you never said crazy in the first place; all you said was, there’s a need here for medication and the kid better start taking some before he does something more egregious than defacing a bathroom— (Phone ringing.) Speak of the devil. It’s four o’clock. First sign of him since he left for the party. Is it possible he’s still hanging with the mozlem?
“Lemme guess.”
“Cliff—”
“You’re getting a tattoo that says: 72 VIRGINS.”
“Something happened,” he says—and judging from the tone of his voice, not something good. Better lay off and be supportive.
“All right, calm the fuck down. What’d you do this time?”
“I didn’t.”
“Okay, okay.”
“First of all, there were three of them there.”
“Three of who where.”
“At the party. Kids from Crescent.”
“You mean Muslims.”
He doesn’t answer; and when Cliff tells him to turn on his video feed and there’s still no reply, the silence strikes him as eerie. In these days, the mind is poised always on a kind of ledge above fearful assumptions. You see a backpack on a bench or you hear a siren in the offing and your mind curls around an inner trigger. Perhaps he is unable to turn on the video. Because someone is forbidding it. Allowing a voice call, but no more. But, of all people to call, why me—Then suddenly there he is: Black eye and a fat lip, one cheek streaked with a line of blood, as if painted for war.
Cliff (trying not to laugh now): “So what’d you like crash your bike?”
“No.”
“Well what.”
He touches his lip and winces. Then says again that there were three. While they held him down, the other just whaled on him.
“You got in a fight,” Cliff says. “With Muslims.”
“They started it.”
“Jesus Christ, Dorian. Mom is going to execute your ass.”
“Is she home?”
“No,” he says. Then goes downstairs. Because someone is ringing the doorbell. He walks with the phone in his hand and his brother’s face on the screen; and when he gets to the door and peers through the fish-eye peephole (while Dorian is going on about how he never said anything to the kid, not a word the whole time, and the kid just went ape shit on him), whom should Cliff see standing there on the front step but the very same assailant. Son of suspected terrorists. The new kid on the block.