by Greg Hrbek
•
He hardly slept last night. Between the grandfather clock and the pain in his face every time he rolled over. Now it’s early afternoon. Since the conversation in the kitchen, Dorian has been in his bedroom, in a sort of self-exile. At some point, he pulled down the translucent solar window shades; and now, lying on the bed—not in darkness, but in the kind of shadow that can only form when light is obscured but not extinguished by an occluding object—he is unable to keep his eyes open. He is asleep for two minutes and thirteen seconds when the landline rings: a mechanical trill. The waves of sound cause his eardrum to vibrate, but his brain is not processing the resultant electrical impulses. Which is to say: He doesn’t hear … In the living room, Kathryn takes the receiver from the base. F. MAHFOUZ. She doesn’t recognize the name, but the number is local.
“Hello.”
“Yes, hello. Is this Ms. Wakefield?”
“It is.”
“My name is Fawzia Mahfouz. I am calling to apologize for what happened yesterday. To your son.”
After a calculated pause, Kathryn says: “You’re one of the mothers.”
“Of Omar.”
“Omar.”
“His behavior,” the woman says, “is inexcusable.” And as she goes on to explain that she is the leader of the youth group at Masjid al-Islam in the capital, and that what her son and the other boys did is completely contrary to the mission of the group, which is to promote not fisticuffs between children of different backgrounds, but rather understanding, Kathryn is experiencing a feverish flush of humiliation. In this woman’s place of worship is where Dorian wrote those words.
“Ms. Mahfouz.”
“Yes.”
“My son is Dorian Wakefield. Is that a familiar name?”
“It is, yes.”
(Silence) … While in the house above the bay, overlooking the water and the bridge, Noah is saying: Mesopotamia with a hotel, five hundred. Dorian turns away from the window to the boy, whose facial features are enough like his own to give the sense, as he speaks, that he is speaking to himself. I’ll pay the rent, he says, if you promise to not look out the window. With two fingers, Noah makes a peace sign. Then Dorian feels a realization: The money is in the other room. The one where his sister writes. Wait here, he says. Then he goes into the other room. From there, the scene outside is more frightening because the window is much larger. Skyler is at the table. Watching the spaceship: a silver disc of unbelievable diameter and circumference that appears to be spinning on a central axis as it hovers above the two towers of the bridge. In the last dream, he made a mistake. He waited too long and then it happened. Now he can feel a vibration in his mind meaning: Say her name. To say it is to slow the spinning of everything, from the planets in their solar orbits to the thoughts in the vortex of your mind.
Skyler …
She turns to him, and looks at him, her eyes saying: I know you, even in worlds where we never met.
Now he notices the computer on the table; and on the screen, the photo of his parents and his brother on the beach, which he understands to be composed not of pixels but of all the words she has been writing. The picture is the story. In the sky above the bridge, the spaceship is turning again, faster and faster. Before it happens … His thought only complete when she completes it. By laying her fingers on the laptop. Pressing a key. Holding it down while pressing a second. Operation invoked. As a new window appears, she says: I’m saving it to the cloud.
9
While that digital photograph from Path M50 – M50 was becoming a consequent in pathways including, but not limited to, B39 – R61, Kathryn Wakefield and Fawzia Mahfouz were speaking of forgiveness and reconciliation, teachable moments, and a lesson their children would carry into the future. After the conversation, Kathryn opens her Lifebook page. To find the friend request—and an image of the woman to whom she has just spoken: a smile showing white teeth; eyes like black pearls. Later that same afternoon, Dorian gets an e-mail that reads (in part): YOURE NOT A ARYAN OR YOU WOULDNT HAVE EVEN COME … I WAS A MAJOR DICK … SINCERELY OMAR MAHFOUZ.
With these words echoing in his mind, he goes to the garage and takes out the lawn mower. Inserts the battery, turns the key, starts pushing. The drone of the engine cannot drown out the chorusing of the insects, which are not only in the trees, but in the grass. Nothing to do but go over them. The dream seems so fresh, almost like a wet painting. He thinks of it and something—not color, but a kind of pigment—is left on his mind. The spaceship, for instance; the blur of its spinning hull. He had read, just a few days ago, on some web portal, that theories of alien responsibility, which have always occupied a middle ground between the explicable and the supernatural, are becoming more prevalent—that nearly one in five Americans now believes that 8-11 was an act of “extraterrestrial terrorism.” Pushing the mower forward, stopping at the property line, reversing direction, Dorian thinks: What if. If that’s what really happened, then what about the internment camps and the drone strikes (if there ever were any)? Suddenly, the mower stalls out. The battery is dead. Has he really been turning these thoughts over in his brain for a whole hour? He carries the bag of clippings into the woods by the gazebo. Mixed in with the grass: the body parts of cicadas, some cleanly severed, others mucked with what belongs inside. Then he sees one moving. Alive and whole. Drawn like the others into the updraft of the whirling blade, but miraculously spared the violence of it.
So the sheikh was correct. Of course correct. As everything he has ever said to you and your friends was true. How could it be otherwise? How could a messenger of the Almighty speak anything but the truth? And yet you. You listened to another voice. Chose to listen to a voice that said: Why call the number today? What’s the rush? What is one more day in the scheme of eternity? Heaven isn’t going anywhere, is it? How clever that voice was. To not issue commands. Only to pose questions. And not even in words, but in the form of hot food, a soft bed, a cool pool of water … Well, what is so wrong with food and a bed and water? Wouldn’t your mother and father want you to have these things? Didn’t they speak, often, of how the internment would end some day, some day soon—and you would all return together to a life in the real world? (He is holding the eyeglasses.) And it did end, and here you are. Without us, I know (the voice his mother’s now), without me, I know, but yesterday you had friends—friends, habibi—and even that boy so unlike you, with skin unlike yours and a history so different. Even he. I understand why you hurt him. And, of course, of course, I want to be with you, also. But think. Think, Karim—
“Allahu Akbar …”
“Allahu Akbar …”
It’s the muezzin calling him to sunset prayer. He turns the sound off, sets the eyeglasses on the desk.
Downstairs, the TV is tuned to a baseball game. The old guy on the couch. Asleep. The sportscaster saying: “After one inning in Houston, Yankees 8, Colt .45s nothing.” Karim can see, through the bay window that looks over the front lawn and the road, that the boy is in his yard again, pushing the mower. He watches him steer the machine, moving it across the grass in straight parallel lines. The job almost finished. Perhaps a dozen more crossings from one end to the other. Karim watches him cross once, twice. Then, very suddenly, thinks to himself: I am going to whisper now. If the old guy wakes up, I go down and pray maghrib; if he stays asleep, I go across the road.
“Jaddi.”
Not a muscle in the sun-browned face so much as twitches. As Karim steps onto the patio and eases shut the sliding glass door, he can just hear the words: “Top of the second, heart of the Yankee order coming up …”
Time of a summer evening when the world is being downsampled toward grayscale. The air cooling, a change that seems to be caused less by the setting of the sun than by the fading of color; and the legions of cicadas falling silent, as if color was the thing driving them mad and making them scream. His mother told him to think: words not from beyond the grave, but from a current of mother-talk that moves like constant water thro
ugh the mind, carving out ideas and shaping beliefs. Unsure at first what she meant, beyond a caution to think twice, think carefully before taking actions that can’t be taken back. But now, turning the corner of the house, Karim Hassad is thinking (insofar as acting is a form of thought), that perhaps one must know not only what to do, but also when to undo actions that can be undone. He walks down the slight grade of the driveway, the nerves in the soles of his feet sensing that the asphalt is still warm … Dorian doesn’t see him coming. His eyes are fixed on the last line drawn in the grass by the lawnmower, which is getting harder to discern as the light slips away. Then all of a sudden the kid is standing there, like something pasted from another window into a destination image. He startles and lets go of the bail bar. The engine dies, the wheels stop turning; and there they are, facing one another in the gloaming.
“Sorry,” Karim says. “I mean, for scaring you.”
“You didn’t scare me.”
“Oh.”
“Anyway, it’s too dark now,” Dorian says. “I was gonna stop anyway.”
“You’re almost done.”
“I know that.”
“So you should just finish,” Karim says.
“Did you ever cut a lawn?”
“No.”
“Well, it’s too dark now to see the line.”
“What line.”
“That’s the point,” Dorian says. “If you can’t see it, it’s too dark.” Karim looks up at the sky.
“Anyway—”
“No, wait,” Karim says, pulling something out of his pocket. “You want a green?”
“Here?”
“Yeah, why not.”
“What,” Dorian says, “does he just let you smoke?”
“Sort of.”
“Whenever you want.”
“Two a day,” Karim says. “Until the agonies stop.”
“The what?”
Returning the box to his pocket, he says: “I used to smoke Dream.”
“Dream,” Dorian says. “Like, opium.”
The kid nods.
Dorian has heard the rumors. Not only that opium was used in the camps, but that government agencies—in league with traffickers allied with anti-Islamist rebels in the Caliphate—actually helped to introduce the drug and to keep it coming through the fences, thereby reducing the people within to a state of perpetual semi-consciousness. A conspiracy theory. Same as the drones. Same as the allegation (so outlandish, it made the notion of aliens from another galaxy seem credible) that 8-11 had been planned in Washington and carried out by a secret command of the Defense Department. Dorian has never believed such things. But speaking of things hard to believe: Here he is, standing on his front lawn in the gathering dark of a midsummer night, having a reasonable conversation with a Muslim who jacked him the day before during a game of croquet.
“I guess you’re pissed,” Karim says.
“I dunno.”
“I hit this friend of mine one time. I thought he was the thing I was mad at, but I realized later …” (Silence.) “Have you ever?”
“Hit a friend?”
“Hit anyone.”
“Not really. No.”
Again, Karim looks up, as if waiting for something to appear in the sky, a star maybe, and says: “I have some issues that require professional help. That’s what the old guy says. I call him jaddi, which means grandfather, but … I don’t know what I should call him. Anyway, if it wasn’t for the issues— I mean, what he thinks is, if I talk to someone, I won’t do anything like that again.”
“You mean therapy,” Dorian says.
He nods.
As each waits for the other to say the next thing, both realize that the cicadas, too, are silent.
Karim says: “They finally shut the fuck up.”
“I know.”
And as if to underscore the cessation of the din: here and there, the mute flash of a firefly.
“Well, I better …”
“Yeah,” Karim says. “But one more thing. You know that girl from yesterday? She wants to friend you but she doesn’t know your last name.”
“Oh.”
“She’s one of my friends, so if I friended you …” (Voice trailing off.) “Or I could just tell her.”
Now, in the space between them, the pale green strobe of a firefly. Each flash like a dot in a line of demarcation disappearing even as it’s drawn. Dorian says: “Whatever, sure …” A few moments later, Karim is walking slowly (almost thinking, home) over the freshly cut grass, making the walk slow because he knows the boy is watching. Then he hears the mower being maneuvered, the turning of the wheels on the axles. As the garage door goes down, Karim stops. Waits. Watching the space around himself—standing at the heart of a neighborhood dark and somnolent—until a firefly appears, like a mote of magic dust. He reaches out with both hands cupped, and misses.
•
Work. As methodical as the cutting of stones, laborious as the plowing of a field. This is what writing is—or at least, what it always has been for you. But that night, for the first time in almost twenty years, something mystical happens. You wake up in the smallest of hours—and a character is speaking to you. It’s the girl from the photo. Not addressing you (not calling you by name), nor pronouncing words in a literal sense (that would be impossible, wouldn’t it, since the voice—if it can rightly be called a voice—is located in the abstract space of the mind). No, not a voice speaking words. More accurately, a flow of encoded data. Dimensionless. In fact, in this received form, meaningless. Without you, the voice cannot make sense. Get out of bed. Notice, without in any way factoring the information, that the time is 1:57. For all you care, the time might be Δt = 2Tc + 4Ta. In the bathroom, fill cupped hands with cool water and raise to your face. Be as quiet as possible. Don’t wake up your wife. If you do, her voice, a real one, will speak over the wordless one speaking to you, then you also will have to speak. Downstairs, do not power up the computer. What you want is paper—a notebook, wirebound and ruled at intervals of seven millimeters—and a pen, black pigment ink, with a very fine tip. And don’t stay in the room. Where you want to be is out in the night. Exit through the door your sons use when they don’t want to be heard coming in after curfew. On your way across the lawn (still scented from the recent cutting), look up into the sky; and before you reach the small outbuilding under the trees, you will see a planet, set like a precious stone in the zodiac. In the gazebo, switch on the lamp. Place yourself in the rounded spot of light. Open the notebook. Uncap the pen. So this is inspiration. So there really are goddesses to help us and holy spirits to speak through us and divine winds to bring us visions … Of a ghostly shape. Could be a quasar, but could just as plausibly be a girl. Now observe the bigger picture. The girl is a reflection in a tinted lens. The lens is attached to a pair of sunglasses being worn by a woman. This woman is the mother of the girl in the reflection. Beside her, two other people lie prone on the sand. A very young boy and a man. The boy is her son; the man her husband. Now watch as the picture is set in motion. Seven years will pass. And another child, a second boy, will join them unexpectedly—at the very edge of the woman’s potential for such a thing. The daughter (a teenager, beautiful and brooding) has been slipping away from the family, growing distant, moving towards nothing, just moving away. The baby will bring her back. When he is in the womb, the girl puts her fingertips against the mother’s transforming belly, and, with her lips close to the smooth taut membrane of skin, speaks to him about things they will do together; at the birth, not only does she want to be present, she wishes to cut the cord—and after the boy is out, covered in blood and fluid and vernix, does so with the shaking hands of someone performing the first of countless important acts of responsibility; and in the early days, in the night when he can’t sleep, she spells her parents, holds him and walks throughout the house whispering to him with gentle patience—or, better, if the night air isn’t too cold, carries him outside, where a pale green moonglow or the sparkle of
the galaxy works a quieting magic. The parents think of it as devotion. Their new-age friends call it astroharmony, a clear-cut case of Pisces and Pisces. But to the girl, turning fifteen, then sixteen (as her brother learns to crawl, speak, walk), the emotional reality is more complicated. At the beginning, she fears he’ll die in his crib—and she checks obsessively to be sure he’s sleeping on his back. Later, it’s the stairs: what if her other brother, a careless seven-year-old, forgets to secure the safety gate. Yet these kinds of worries, about accidents preventable through vigilance, are nothing compared to the darker visions of dangers we can’t control. She can see now (the baby has shown her) that to be in the world is to be in danger; and to move through the world is to be in a constantly shifting relationship with tragedy: we avoid it by a wide margin, or we narrowly escape it, or we feel it suddenly upon us, a thing too big and fast-moving to be outrun. The boy is two. They give the crib away and he starts sleeping in a single bed; and gets into the habit of waking in the middle of the night and migrating into his sister’s room. According to the parents: not a good idea. What happens in a few months when you leave? Granted, you’re not going far, just into the city—but the point is, you won’t be here anymore, and he’s becoming more and more dependent on you. The conversation brings tears to her eyes. A couple of years ago, she was wishing away the rest of high school, dreaming of a faraway college in the New England Colonies. Now the idea of moving just two hours away is more than she can bear. In this fragile state of mind, she says foolishly: You should’ve had him sooner. (They try not to laugh.) You think it’s funny. No, but— I’m going to miss everything. Honey, we didn’t intend to have him at all. Well, you should’ve messed up sooner … And so on, until Mitchell Wakefield has filled ten, twenty, almost thirty notebook pages with words that are neither memory nor fiction, nor a writer’s elementary commixing of the two, but something other and more (though he can’t imagine what), until around four o’clock the pen slows down, and he can’t think of what should come next. Because the voice is gone, like a spirit that has ceased, suddenly and without explanation, to participate any further in a séance; and the moment he realizes he is no longer writing is like the moment when you wake up and realize you’re no longer dreaming.