by Greg Hrbek
“About what?”
“The post. I sent you the link, Dorian. I come out there, I blog about you. Last night, a guy loses his life and you can’t be bothered to open your mail.”
“It’s not that.”
Silence again. Then the man says, in a changed tone: “No, it’s not, is it. It’s not that you don’t care. It’s the exact opposite. Let me guess. You want me to exercise the better part of valor.”
“I don’t know.”
“Do you know what the better part of valor is?”
“No.”
“Discretion,” he says. “That’s what a famous coward once said. Is that what you’d like me to do?”
The boy looks at the moon. Not far from the lower horn: a planet. A pearl of light. And hears himself delivering an address about his neighborhood. The Nkondos’ son, Ryder. Fighting in Persia. The Ganeshwarans. Hindu, not Muslim. And William Banfelder. Had served in Gulf War III …
“And what about you,” the man says.
“Me.”
“Yeah, what are you?”
Not sure what he means. Last year’s genealogy project had revealed a backstory of embarrassing blandness. Anglo-Saxon. Last name derived from a place in England. (Meaning, literally: Watch over an open pasture.) But maybe the actual question is not what were you born as, but what will you be.
“Are you there,” the man asks.
“Yeah.”
“Tell you what. No action in your neighborhood tonight.”
“Really.”
“Mm. If you come to a meeting tomorrow. Of the local chapter. I’d like to expose you to a few ideas …”
And under the crescent moon with its subscript of star, Dorian types the information onto his notepad, not even thinking to not agree to the man’s terms—a meeting, just a meeting, yes, all right, agreed—full not only of relief, but a sense of accomplishment as well; not to mention of optimism that this process of negotiation can be continued, and the whole situation defused gradually, and no one else hurt, and no one ever to know with whom he had to consort to make things right.
12
Time is a constant across all pathways. Though there may, and almost certainly will, at corresponding geographies, be differing weather patterns (violent thunderstorms on one path, a placid blue sky on another), all dates and hours will be synchronized to the millisecond. So, when Dorian Wakefield, at 2:33 a.m. EST on 2 July 2038 in B39 – R61, is asleep in the Province of New York, he is also asleep at 11:33 p.m. PST on 1 July 2038 in R5 – B94 in the State of California. In R5 – B94, his family never left California. On that path, his sister is alive, because on that path nothing ever came hurtling out of the skies over San Francisco. On R5 – B94, the city is undestroyed and Skyler Wakefield is alive; and at 11:33 p.m. PST on 1 July 2038, she is on a beach on the northwest edge of the city, at the strait that links ocean and bay—not far from the bridge whose main cables plunge and rise to the pinnacles of twin towers and whose suspension ropes uphold a roadway that has joined the city to the headlands for more than a hundred years—and she is worrying about her brother …
She is with friends on the beach. Fellow students from the art institute. They have been drinking wine around a bonfire and passing around a ceramic pipe packed with some very exquisite sativa from an indie farm up north. The flames are so bright that, from her vantage on the landward side of the fire, there seems to be, to the west (where the ocean should be), nothing but a blackness, as if everything, all the real world, might have winked out of existence, or never existed at all, and maybe they, Skyler and her friends and the man she is in love with, are floating in some allegorical space, like characters in a parable, whose situation is meant to instruct us and show us a way.
They are all in their mid to late twenties and studying to be artists. Skyler is twenty-six and learning to be a fictionist, a path her father had tried to stop her from going down, avouching that a future of cooking and ironing would be preferable to the humiliations of the writing life. But she hadn’t listened, and she knows that her father is secretly glad of it. She gets up and walks away from the fire, the sand cold on her bare feet. Her brother is eleven. Not a little boy anymore, but still, when he answers, she uses the nickname they have called him by ever since she can remember …
“Dodo?”
“Skyler. What. What time is it?”
“I woke you.”
“What are you doing,” he asks. “Where are you?”
“Baker Beach.”
She turns the eye of her phone (and the image of his face) toward the bridge, though she supposes the video won’t show much more than the vapor lamps of the roadway like a trail of stars in the dark.
“What’s wrong,” he asks.
“Nothing.”
“It’s after midnight …”
“Is it?”
She sits on the sand with the image of him, grainy and monochromatic. Watches him wipe the last of the sleep from his eyes.
“Weird,” he says.
“What.”
“This dream I was just having. All these people in our yard. But it wasn’t our house. Some other house.”
“Yeah?”
“There was a car and … a guy dead in a car. I can’t remember now.”
“Just a dream,” she says.
“Yeah.”
“Anyways, I was going to ask you the same thing.”
“What.”
“If anything’s wrong. I just, I got this—” (sort of sensation, some part of her is thinking, as of standing with you at a precipice, a dizzy anxiety that some force will pull you over regardless of how firm my hold on you might be)— “This sort of, I don’t know,” she continues. “That you’re in some kind of trouble.”
He shuts his eyes.
“Are you?”
“Sky,” he says. “You know what I said to Mom the other day?”
“No, what.”
I said, “ ‘You know what, Mom? You’re worse than Skyler.’ ”
“Mm.”
“I’m serious. It’s like …”
“What’s it like.”
“I don’t know,” he says. “But I’m not in trouble. It’s summer vacation. I’m playing soccer, I’m doing my summer reading list. I’m trying to get a good night’s sleep cause I’ve got a game tomorrow.”
(and some part of her thinking: Something not right, though I can’t say what it is. A feeling I keep getting. {{examples}} That nightmare I have in which the bridge is gone. I’m babysitting a boy who is Dorian but also isn’t. {{where}} I’m in a house I was in once, up on the hill in Presidio Heights, and I can see everything from up there: the bridge, the headlands, the bay, the ocean. Something happens. {{clarify}} I don’t know. An act of war, an act of God. The bridge is gone {{dead link}} and the Marina District is burning. It wasn’t a bomb, but then it is and I know I should be sheltering in but I’m not, because my brother is in very bad shape because he was looking when it happened and he was watching through a window: his face is bloody and his eyes are sightless. So I carry him on my back until we find a hospital—and that’s where I lose him. No choice but to leave him there, but how can I leave him? {{disambiguation needed}} Leaving him. In other words: leaving home, going to college, moving to the city—when he was so attached to me, dependent on me. {{retracted}} That was nine years ago, nine years. The dream is not about that. It’s not an expression of guilt or fear or maternal instinct. It’s not telling me how I feel deep down; it isn’t telling me that I’m ready to have children or that I’m not. What it’s telling me is that something is wrong—something bigger than myself, of which I am (we are) only a small part. {{elucidate}} I can’t. Except to tell you that the feeling seems to come from over there. {{specify}} The bridge. Whenever I’m near the bridge—like now—and much more so when I’m crossing it …)
“Dodo,” she says. Are you there?
His image is frozen.
“Dorian, can you hear me?”
Low bandwidth. The call h
as dropped. He looks less alive than archived. Grainy, grayscaled, and motionless. As you must look to him. Why does that scare you? He is in his bed at home, breathing, as you are on this beach, breathing. And the bridge is there. It was never not there.
•
In the morning, Dorian wakes with a start and checks the community Lifebook page. A night without violence. As promised. Peace for a night. Now—how to keep it? Go to the meeting and then what. What will they ask of you next? Slippery slope. One step down and you’ll start sliding. Don’t even go near the edge. But if I don’t … He gets on his bike and goes to a place he thinks of as his alone: a wetland area on the east side of town, where a creek flows over rocks and into an expanse of reeds and cattails. The multi-use trail ends, suddenly, at the interstate: the creek disappears into a dark culvert ablast with the thunder of traffic headed toward Albany or New France. Before that, you can enter the water and wade to where the tall plants protect you like ramparts. He shouldn’t go. He should go to the police instead and tell them what he knows. But as he sits there in that place of contemplation—atop a rock amidst the blades of the reeds and the strange brown spikes of the cattails—it seems to Dorian that to tell what he knows will not solve a problem so much as create a new one, a worse one. He can set this right on his own. Without anyone else getting hurt. And with no one ever knowing he had a connection to any of it. As he stares over the marsh into the heights of the deciduous trees, he will come to feel sure of this—and he will suddenly see, perched on a branch like a specimen from the state museum, an American eagle, which all at once, with a shrug of wings, will come to life and fly away, silent as a drone.
At first he couldn’t believe it. But in the days since encountering Yassim at the mosque, Karim has come to feel that what is actually hard to believe is that there is nothing unbelievable about the appearance of his friend. Hadn’t the imam said in his sermon, two weeks ago, that some of us become lost on false paths, but if we pray well and honestly, Allah will guide us onto the path of our true and best destiny—which will lead us finally and unerringly to the gardens of Paradise? I became lost, Karim thinks to himself. I became lost and I didn’t even know I was, but God has sent Yassim …
After the service last Friday, the two had slipped out of the prayer hall together. On the playground, surrounded by squealing children and beyond the hearing of the mothers standing in the shade of the main building, Karim smiled and fought the impulse to embrace his old friend, for if he did, he was sure to cry.
“Yassim,” he said. “I thought—”
“What.”
“Nothing.”
“You mean you thought I was …” He pantomimed an explosion by a sudden unfurling of his fists …
“I guess.”
“I am, dude. I’m a ghost come to haunt your ass from Paradise. Shit, man. Can you believe this?”
“What.”
“All of it. These fuckin mozlems.”
Karim looked around and saw: little boys with neat haircuts, little girls wearing shiny shoes, mothers in fancy hijabs texting on smartphones. Nice families, each with a car in the parking lot and a home to return to.
“The sheikh wasn’t kidding,” Yassim said. “They’re all infidels.”
“But Yassim …”
“Mm.”
“What are you doing here?”
Yassim smiled and put a hand on Karim’s shoulder. There was nothing sarcastic about this action; no joke. His old friend guided him a few feet away from the play-structures, away from the mothers and the children. Under a line of trees, a few boulders were left over from when the land had been excavated. On one of these rocks, in the shade, Yassim produced a smartphone, touched the screen, and handed it to Karim. A video started up. A boy, robed like a little scholar in a short-sleeved dishdasha, a kufi on his head, looking directly at the recording device, said: “Peace be upon you, my brothers.” The voice. That’s what made Karim realize that the boy on the screen was someone he knew. Realization in the form of a denial (not him, ears too big), even as he understood that the ears had been hidden before under hair that had since been cut, and that the boy on the screen really was Hazem—the very boy with whom Karim and Yassim, for half a year, had slept on a twin-size mattress under a lean-to made of scrounged sheet metal and particle board; the same boy who had been joined with them in dependency upon a drug that bore the three to a place far away from where they truly were; the one among them who had always been a true believer, never doubting what the sheikh told them (that, for example, if you lay your life down in the path of God, you will feel nothing when your body explodes). And yet, now—on a playground in the Colonies, a world away from Dakota—Karim still felt a weird doubt. Peace be upon you, my brothers. A thing Hazem would never say. And yet it was him. Was him wearing a suicide vest and standing in front of the flag of the Caliphate, saying: “Every one of you who feels you have no future now but the future of a dog. I thought that was my future. But I have found a new one.” It’s him, Karim thought. Him and not him. And what a strange notion came to Karim next. That this was Hazem’s very self trapped within the screen of the phone, like a djinn in a lamp …
“So, he’s dead,” Karim said. “He’s a shahid.”
Yassim nodded.
In a tone falling somewhere between reverence and incredulity, Karim said: “He really did it.”
“Just like we will.”
“We?”
“It’s a joint operation now,” Yassim said, as a child skinned her knee and broke into tears. “That’s why I’m here.”
The Algonquin: A very big and very old building on Broadway. A four-storied castle of red brick with arches and columns and balconies, made during that gilded age when the town had lured people with its healing waters and horses. Once a hotel, now rental apartments. As he locks his bike to an iron rack near the entrance, Dorian realizes that he never has looked at the building closely. There seems to be something false about its grandeur. He walks up to the door. No video intercom, just a silver frame with black buttons and a speaker. No name next to 30½. He presses the button. No answer. But an interval during which he thinks: You’ve come to them, you’re asking them to let you in …
Through the speaker: “Yeah.”
Dorian’s voice sticks in his throat.
“Hello?”
“Yes, he says. I don’t know if this is the place, but—”
The buzzer cuts him off. He hears the lock of the inner door click. Then he is in. He goes down the dimly lit hallway, past an elevator, and enters a space his mind links to an illustration from his fifth-grade history book: The theater where Abraham Lincoln was shot. What was once a lobby looks now like an empty stage. Two wide staircases sweep up to a second-floor balcony, then a third-floor balcony … Up the stairs. Every door is red with gold numbers. On the third floor, different hallways lead to the ends and corners of the building. He goes down one of them and, not finding 30½, returns to the center and tries the next one, and like a mouse in a maze turns around again. Smell of snuffed-out greens and cleaning agents, and sounds from behind closed doors of videogame warfare and doom metal. Finally, he finds it. Knocks. Door opened by a girl with stretched earlobes. He has seen her before: one of the baristas at Café Pravda. She says, “Dorian, right? God, look what they did to you.” Touching him. Laying her hands on his face, one palm against each cheek. (For a second, he thinks she might kiss him on the mouth.) “C’mon,” she says, and leads him into a room with big arched windows, uncurtained. Not a place where anyone lives. It’s set up like an office. Several desks. A printer on one of them; a scanner on another. Bare white walls. He sees a kitchen and smells coffee. Then he sees the second room, where a voice is coming from. Something about the minutes from the last meeting. Corrections, additions. Eight men at a table, each with a palmtop or a tablet, including Jon-David, from whom he gets a look of acknowledgement, at which a kind of relief moves through Dorian, the kind he feels whenever he starts anything new (a team, a camp,
a club) and sees among the new faces someone with whom he shares a background of friendship.
“Who’s this.”
“Poospatuck Incident,” Jon-David says. “It’s on the agenda.” (Turning to Dorian.) “Here, I saved you a seat.”
“What’s your name?”
“Dorian.”
As the man types it, Jon-David lays a hand on Dorian’s back and whispers: “Congratulations. You’re officially present.”
•
She wakes up on the couch and recalls having woken up several times already. Each time glimpsing the television, but seeing only vaguely what it was showing her, and not really hearing what was being said. On the table between herself and the television: an ashtray and the small ceramic pipe she bought in a head shop in Haight-Ashbury long ago (before the bridge fell, before Dorian) and a small plastic zip bag with a few buds of the stuff they’d had the other night in the park; all this beside a wine glass and a bottle of red, half empty. One of the times she’d awakened, she had become cognizant first of the television and then of Dorian, who was sitting on the couch beside her, looking into her eyes and touching her shoulder, prodding her gently, saying:
“Mom, Mom.”
And Kathryn had responded with something like: “Hm? What. Dorian. Are we all right?”
“Here,” he had said.
What he wanted to do was help her up. But she was alert enough to not want him to think she couldn’t do it on her own …
And so finally he had left her there, with the TV still on, thinking that’s how you end up when you don’t carefully consider every choice in life, one thing leads to another and you find yourself middle-aged and stoned and asleep in front of a neoliberal news program at nine o’clock at night. Why is she the one I want to talk to? Because, if she were sober, she’d drag it out of you. What’s the matter, she would say. Where were you tonight? She would take you by the shirt sleeve, grip your arm and make it hurt, making you believe there are things a mother is powerful enough to disallow. And my father. Won’t pressure you at all. Because deep down, he doesn’t want to know. If he stays ignorant, he won’t have to act. He can stay in his own world of stories.