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Not on Fire, but Burning

Page 15

by Greg Hrbek


  And yet. It is possible, too, for a world to change very little, to be stuck in one place, or caught in a kind of loop, so that even the magicicada, a creature which disappears from the face of the Earth for so long a time, may reappear to find conditions not much different from those left behind. To find the same war still being fought. Even after so long a wait … For this world has become stuck. Caught in a loop. As it was in the time of our progenitors, so it still is. So it may continue to be, even in the time of our progeny. Unless the cycle is somehow broken. Unless the course of a given pathway can be altered by a person gifted with an awareness of other pathways. Listen now. When we tell you that among the countless thousands of reality-structures comprising the parallel planes of ∞, there is one in which orderings of random chance and free will are such that this war without end never began. Can you sense that reality? Where the ones you’ve lost are still with you and the ones you stand to lose will always be safe. Listen. To the sound we make. If you listen now, if you let the sound in—don’t fight it off, don’t shut it out—you will hear what we have been saying all along. You will hear her name. Skyler, Skyler, Skyler.

  •

  Into his dream comes the gunshot. Even as his sister is turning, moving to cover his body with her own, Dorian is awake and alone, in his real bed—and there are five more shots in rapid succession, glass breaking, the sound of a car engine revving, and when he gets to the window that faces the road and the Banfelder house, headlights are swerving weirdly through the dark, coming towards him though not casting light in his direction, tricking his brain into thinking that time can move both forward and backward. But no. Only the car is going backward. Driving in reverse onto his lawn, heading right for the tree under the window, and as the rear end strikes the trunk, the alarm goes off, three deafening horn blasts followed by a whooping siren. And someone else is coming. Across the road. On foot. Visible in the glow of the headlights. Dorian ducks out of sight. As if in fear of a mad assassin who will shoot anything that moves. Then a voice:

  “Mitch! Kathryn!”

  His father, from somewhere below: “Will?”

  “Hold on!”

  One more cycle of horn and siren, in the course of which Dorian’s bedroom door swings open. Cliff. In mid-howl, the siren is squelched.

  From the lawn: “It’s me, Will Banfelder. Goddammit, Mitch.”

  “Was that you?”

  “Just me. They did have something. A pressure cooker, I think. The police are coming. Are the boys awake?”

  “Dorian?” Mitch says.

  “Yeah.”

  “Cliff?”

  “Present,” Cliff says.

  Will (with a tremor in his voice): “Boys, don’t come down here.”

  “Is he dead,” Kathryn asks.

  “Yeah.” A pause. “Yeah, he is.”

  “Who is he.”

  “Not Arab. A DT, for sure …”

  And then their neighbor, who has just deposited a dead body and a car on their lawn, runs back across the road. To make sure his adopted son is safe. Saying he’ll be right back, as if to promise that the mess will be cleaned up. Cliff says he’s going down there. Dorian does not move. Doesn’t even look. He just sits on the floor under the window, feeling: I am in trouble. I am in deep and troubled waters. Okay, someone else threw the first punch, and someone else set the wheels of revenge in motion. But why me at the center? This can’t be a coincidence. Some dark desire has drawn death in my direction. I must want these things to happen. Deep inside, I want the trouble to get deeper still.

  Residents of Poospatuck Circle, and Members of the Community Lifebook Page: You know from Kathryn Wakefield’s post (2 minutes ago via mobile) that the Wakefield family is safe. It is a post that does nothing to mitigate your collective fears and curiosities about what is happening where you live. The time is two in the morning. Are people supposed to go back to bed under these conditions? Step out onto your porches, your decks. Depending on your view, you may be able to see that a car has crashed backward into a tree, or that the ambulance which came screaming into the subdivision is now just parked in the road, no longer in any kind of a hurry. Most of you, however, can’t see anything but the colored flashes from a police cruiser. What are you supposed to do? Make coffee and sit around until sunup, wondering and worrying? Get dressed. Go out into the darkness. At the foot of every driveway is a light. A lantern on a pole or a simple cylinder jutting not far out of the ground. Everyone, go to this place. Stand in the light and see a neighbor standing nearby in another oasis of light. Call out: What’s going on? You saw the post? Yeah, but. There were four shots. I think I heard six. You think it’s related? To what. Last night. The cross, you mean. I think it must be. Two nights in a row. (Move closer to each other. Drift into the road.) It’s all related. The fight was the first thing, then the cross, now this. I wouldn’t call it a fight exactly. What do you mean. I’d call it assault with a specific intent to commit battery. Banfelder has really opened a can of worms here. I know. I mean, this isn’t just his problem now, there’s a dead guy on someone else’s lawn. Look, another post. From who? Moses Nkondo. Says there’s two dead, DTs, and they had a pressure cooker bomb… So there you have it. Two right-wing haters trying to first-degree-murder your neighbor with an IED ran into a little more resistance than they bargained for. Or maybe the way you see it is: Two self-appointed guardians of the American way, making a statement about what will and will not be tolerated, have been gunned down in cold blood by a man whose loyalties are none too clear. The interpretations are irrelevant. The fact of the matter is: A conflict is under way—and escalating. Right and wrong. Don’t waste time on that debate. Just everyone pull together and do something before violence gains the foothold of an invasive species and spreads faster than you can fight it off.

  At the time of the six gunshots, he had been in the study on the ground floor. Writing with pen and paper. As he has been doing every night for five nights now. Mitchell Wakefield is becoming something he never was before: nocturnal. Around nine o’clock, when the cicadas stop chorusing, is when the voice starts speaking. A sentence comes into his head; and once he has written it down, the space after the period or the question mark is immediately filled by another sentence, and the next space by another sentence, the pen moving as constantly as the needle of a polygraph. Tonight, the pen had done something different. Stopped mid-sentence. Frozen in the white space between two horizontal lines. Confused, Mitch removed the canalphones from his ears. He had been listening to ocean waves and the interrupting noise seemed to have come from somewhere on the shoreline. Maybe he hadn’t really heard it. Then—again—another explosion, followed an instant later by a sound like a micrometeoroid smashing through a roof window … Now Mitch is standing on his lawn, in the strobing lights of two police cruisers, a few yards away from a dead person. Man in a car, windshield scattered in pieces on the hood and on the dashboard and also (even this next detail he can see from beyond the yellow tape marking the borders of the crime scene) on the shirt and in the hair of the dead man, who is still upright in the driver’s seat, one forearm draped over the steering wheel as if cruising the main drag of some bygone town, shirt sopped with blood and a gash across one cheek, a furrow so deep you can see bone shining through the skin.

  “Mr. Wakefield.”

  Beside him: one of the neighbors. Whose first name Mitch can never remember. Deepak or Deepesh. Doesn’t know the wife’s name either. But both of them are surgeons. One operates on brains, the other hearts.

  “Doctor, this is …”

  “Very disturbing, I agree. But not surprising. Where Muslims go, violence follows.”

  Mitch looks at him, a face flicking in and out of sight with the rotation of the lightbar beacons, skin shaded now red, now blue.

  “I don’t say this in a prejudicial way.”

  “No, I know.”

  Looking at the car, the doctor says: “It’s obvious who this man is. So, what is he doing here? Have any suc
h people ever come to our street before? No. They’re only here because that boy is here.”

  “That boy.”

  “Mr. Wakefield, let us face the facts. The boy was brought here. And then his Arab friends came and they assaulted your son …”

  Dorian catches some of this. He has been standing a ways off, near the thicket of trees surrounding the gazebo, as if guiltlessness is a function of distance. He takes a step closer now, as his father says:

  “Doctor, we’ve put that incident behind us.”

  “Obviously not.”

  “I’m not sure what you mean,” Mitch says. “This? I don’t see the connection.”

  “Mr. Wakefield. You don’t know us well, me and my wife. But you know what we are. You know I’m a brain surgeon. You may not know that my wife’s patrilineage is Brahmin, but you know she is Indian-American. You know we’re Hindu. But the man in that car, he does not know and he doesn’t care. Indian, Persian, Pakistani, Iraqi. It’s all the same to him. Now, this man is dead. One less ethnocidal maniac. So, one might think our neighbor has improved the state of things. But in fact he has made things much worse. Because this man has confederates who will soon be very angry. Let us not delude ourselves. The question is not if they will come back. The question is when. And when they do, we will all be in danger. My wife and I for obvious reasons. But all of us by simple association, by reason of our inaction. We cannot sit by and do nothing.”

  “What can we do?”

  “Press charges. Press charges against the boy for assaulting your son.”

  “We can’t do that,” Mitch says.

  “Why not.”

  (Dorian doesn’t want them to notice him, but he takes another step: closer to his father and the yellow tape, the car and the dead man, because some words of the conversation are still unclear.)

  “What if we did.”

  “If you did,” the doctor says, “then maybe we could stop this violence before it gets worse. Before more of us get drawn into it.”

  “And what about the boy. He ends up where.”

  “Where he belongs.”

  “He’s just a boy,” Mitch says. “Same age as Dorian.”

  “Mr. Wakefield, I’ve operated on children younger than your son. I’ve saved the lives of children. But a doctor also knows about hard choices. Think of 8-11. Should every victim have been helped and saved? Of course. But in certain eventualities—”

  Ringtone.

  At which sound the doctor will turn and see you. Stand your ground for a moment. Look your father in the eye. Then remove the phone from your pocket. UNKNOWN CALLER. Take a few steps toward the trees. As you answer, a voice will say:

  “Dorian.”

  Ask: “Who is this?”

  “Who am I. Who the fuck do you think I am? What did I tell you. Tomorrow a gun. Well, it’s tomorrow, my friend.”

  End the call.

  Turn around. Your father in conversation now with a police officer. But your neighbor still looking at you while the lights of the cruisers flash like nerve impulses carrying messages between neurons …

  •

  The next day is Friday. The old guy can’t take him to jummah because he has to be at the police station with a lawyer present answering questions about the night’s bloodshed. So Karim gets to “hang out” for the day and go to prayers with Omar Mahfouz. At nine on the dot: the doorbell. Mrs. Mahfouz. Who appears none too pleased with the situation. The old guy asks her to come in for some sweet tea. She declines. Karim gets in the car and they drive for a good five minutes in total silence before she says: “I’m glad you’re safe, Karim. But what was done last night is not God’s way.” And so on. Karim sits in the passenger seat, pretending to listen, nodding from time to time. Knowing perfectly well that God has more ways than one. The house they arrive at is larger than the one he is living in. With an in-ground swimming pool and an in-ground basketball hoop with a glass backboard. Inside, downstairs, there is a room dedicated exclusively to a giant wall-mounted television: which is where Karim finds Omar, controller in hand, on a couch that seems to be digesting him slowly and alive.

  “Hey,” Karim says.

  The other boy, over and over again, is pulling a sort of trigger. On the screen, not people, but vaguely human beings with gray skin and unseeing eyes, are being shot repeatedly; and though their flesh is tearing off in clods on impact and blood is spraying everywhere, they don’t appear to be dying.

  “What are you doing?” Karim asks.

  “Dumb question.”

  “What are those things?”

  “What things.”

  (Pointing to the television.) “That you’re fighting.”

  “Are you kidding?” Omar says.

  Only when the action freezes and GAME OVER appears on the screen does the other boy look at him.

  “You want to play?”

  “No.”

  “Suit yourself,” he says, and starts it again, while Karim stands there and finally sits on the couch. Speechless for the duration of another massacre. When it’s done, Omar, like a follower of timeless rules of hospitality, again offers his guest the controller. Karim ignores him. Gets up and leaves the room. Mounts the stairs of the strange house and enters the kitchen, which is wide-open and silver, and still. He opens the refrigerator. What he wants is a soda; and like a wish granted, there it is. He sits by the pool and drinks it and thinks about taking out his coin and practicing his meditation, but he doesn’t want Omar to come out here and find him in a trance state. So he takes out his phone instead and checks Lifebook. There’s a post from the girl, Khaleela (two hours ago, in Washington, D.C.: standing beside a giant statue of a guy in a chair, a president whose name Karim can’t remember). Forty-three people like it and he adds himself to the list though he doesn’t actually like the picture. He links to her page. She has more than a thousand friends. He goes to his own page. Nine. One of whom is the boy downstairs. What kind of friend is he? It doesn’t matter, because with the coin Karim can go there any time; and even when the time is over, he can go there in his mind again tomorrow and be with her in his mind. Which is good. It is. And yet. I don’t want to pretend. I want to go to Paradise for real. And for always.

  “Hey.”

  Turning. And Omar, from the door of the kitchen, saying: “Dude, time to hasten to the remembrance of Allah.” As if prayers and God are a joke.

  When they get there, a recording of the azan is playing over the parking lot. Karim and Omar go through the men’s entrance. Mrs. Mahfouz falls in behind a couple of grandmothers in long shapeless robes. The hall is on the second floor. They climb the stairs together and remove their shoes together. But as soon as Omar puts his loafers on the shelf, he leaves Karim there, on one knee, untying his laces. When he finally walks in, the musalla is half-full: maybe a hundred men and boys doing their rak’ahs. Karim takes a rug from the pile. Omar off to the left. Beside him: one of the other boys who was at the pool party. Don’t. Don’t make a fool of yourself. Go to the middle of the room. By yourself. Say your prayers. (To one side of you, a guy in a Yankees jersey; to the other, an older man in a dishdasha.) Bow, kneel, touch your forehead to the rug—and after the second cycle of prayer, waiting now for the arrival of the imam and the start of the service, survey the hall: Omar and the other one whispering and joking; the mothers and girls and the littlest children roped off in the back. Maybe two hundred people now. Not just Arabs, but lighter-skinned Middle Easterners and dark-skinned Blacks. Even a white man. Whom you can’t help but stare at and be suspicious of.

  Watch him lower his head to the floor. As he does so, the person just in front of him and to his right will come into view:

  A boy.

  The resemblance in profile so strong you would swear … Then he turns, to his left and back, where you are—and you squinting in disbelief. But it is. It’s Yassim, making a face that seems to say: Oh, there you are.

  •

  Dorian down arrows until he is back at 2:09 a.m. UNKNOWN
CALLER. And there is the number. An area code unrecognized. Why talk to him? Not because he wants to. Only because he has to. Because what if his neighbor, the doctor, is right? Last night, a couple of strangers killed: men enlisted in a kind of army, soldiers fighting a war, ready and willing (or so one might assume) to die for what they understand to be their country. But what if someone innocent were to die tonight, and I never even tried to stop it? He walks outside, out the sliding door and onto the deck, where there are some Adirondack chairs and a gas grill and a bug zapper, non-functional, hanging from the eave of the roof like a memorial to generations of executed insects. And over the cul-de-sac: a crescent moon, a waning crescent. Horns pointing to the right. An Islamic moon.

  “Who is this,” he says.

  “Um. It’s Dorian Wakefield.”

  “I can see that.”

  “Is this—” (Don’t call him by name: address him personally and you only make borders less secure.) “Is this the man from that organization?”

  He laughs.

  “You called me,” Dorian says.

  “I called you?”

  “This morning.”

  “I don’t recall the conversation. I probably made a hundred calls this morning. I’m very busy. Some haji-lover killed a friend of mine last night—”

  “Wait.”

  After a period of silence—a time long enough for the siren of an ambulance to reach Dorian’s ears and fade away—the man says: “I’m waiting.”

  “I guess you were right,” Dorian says.

  “Was I.”

  “Look. I have to talk to you …”

  “Really. Well, you didn’t want to talk to me this morning. It’s coming back to me now. You’re the kid with the black eye. I called you and you hung up on me. This isn’t a good time. Your neighborhood has gone flashpoint. There are more than a hundred comments now.”

 

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