by Greg Hrbek
And while some people, even now, even as Will Banfelder watches the old Saturn arc out of reach, are sealed in safe rooms or locked in underground shelters bracing for a violence that could recur and escalate at any moment, others, like Khaleela Kingsley (the girl from the pool party who, for nearly three weeks, has been a hope running silently in the background of the mind of Dorian Wakefield), are going on in defiance, or maybe denial, of hard data, so that even as Karim Hassad is being carried past the Wakefield house and is looking out the window of the car he is riding in to try and catch a glimpse of the boy he hit in the face and wishes he hadn’t (wishing rather, as he looks and doesn’t see him, for an entirely opposite history), Dorian is reading Khaleela’s post about a vigil she plans to attend at the park downtown at seven o’clock, and Dorian is clicking on the shared link (The Peace Now Project | Light Up The Darkness) as Karim, obeying the dispatcher’s instructions, is fastening his seatbelt and feeling the neighborhood, Poospatuck Circle, which was never his, slip away behind him in the same way that the internment camp, Dakota, a home that was never a home, slipped away beyond the windows of a different car; and he feels stupid for sadness felt about leaving such a place, which is the same stupid sadness about leaving the world, a place also not his and no more real a home.
“Mom …”
She is in bed again, already, at ten o’clock. Dorian, in the past, has seen her almost this bad. At the nadir of winter. But in summer, never. This is the mother associated with gray skies and icicles, whom he has agreed, after long negotiations with himself, to accept as an element of that certain term, with the condition that she will get softer and warmer like nature itself.
“Mom. Later today, there’s this thing in the park.”
“Mm.”
He stands there, remembering how last night he had heard her through the wall, not crying exactly, but breathing hard, winded by the shock of waking up from an overwhelming dream, and he had stood at the threshold of the room (same as now), knowing her to be alone—waiting there while she ignored him, enduring it until some force compelled him to move: not away but closer … And Kathryn not hearing what her son is saying now as she lies in the bed that he had climbed into and slept in the night before (“a thing in the park, a peace thing, it’ll be over by curfew”)—not hearing that; not sure at the moment where she is, not sure when, much less who is speaking to her or what is being said. She isn’t dreaming. Of that, at least, she feels certain. Earlier, seeing her daughter on the phone: that had been a dream. She couldn’t possibly have been seeing Skyler because this is a mass call event and not only is the volume of traffic overloading available channels, video calls have been access-class barred to give emergency responders priority on the network. So that wasn’t real. Okay. But what she can’t understand is: What is she doing in a bed, dreaming or not, when her daughter needs her? Maybe that’s what the voice is saying (get up, do something, before it all gets lost forever). She tries to move. Just the intent sets off a bizarre sensation under her skin as she remembers, all at once, that they put fire ants in her circulatory system, the veins and arteries of which are believed by the colony to be a series of tunnels. As long as she stays still, there can be coexistence. But if she moves, they will eat through her from the inside. Wanting to move but unable to, a form of torture no different from wanting to go back and there being no means of travel or locomotion in that direction—and yet she is in a wood now; aspen trees whose leaves in the sunlight and breeze are literally gold coins turning in the air; and the man seated cross-legged at the foot of one of the trees—a Siddhartha clothed in a T-shirt and ripped blue jeans, feet bare, long hair, a bandanna, a spliff the size of a cigar in one hand—is communicating something along the lines of: Let ∞ be represented by a Cartesian grid that extends without borders in all directions. A what? (Smiling, smoking): You weren’t very good at math, were you? No. A giant piece of graph paper. Oh. Now you draw a horizontal line: That’s the x-axis. Ring a bell? The y-axis is a vertical line intersecting the x-axis. The point of intersection of these two lines is called the origin and has coordinates (0, 0). That’s where you are: the present. Behind you on the x-axis is coordinate (0, −1). That’s where you were yesterday, last week, last year, depending on your unit of measurement. Ahead of you on the x-axis is coordinate (0, 1). That’s where you will be tomorrow, next week, next year. I can see it’s coming back to you. Can I try some of that? Good idea, because this is about to get tricky. Let me approach the difficulty via a question. If (0, 1) is where you will be tomorrow, what about (1, 1), the coordinate directly above (0, 1)? Kathryn (thinking, smoking): Where I wish I would be? A frisky answer, and not necessarily imprecise. It’s where you will also be, a point parallel to (0, 1) but also distinct from it, because back at, let’s say, (−26, 1), using years now as our unit of measurement, you did something different from what you did at (−26, 0). You mean my daughter. Correct. I dreamed about her last night. (Nodding): In the terms of this discussion, you remembered a coordinate on the grid: (−8, 1213) to be exact. Way up in the second quadrant. She was dying. (Smiling, gesturing for the joint): Death is nothing but something that happens at one set of coordinates while life is happening at another. You’re dead right now, Kate, in more than two hundred thousand present moments. Skyler is alive in four million, give or take ten thousand. Alive. Of course, alive. And at several present-time coordinates, you are all alive right now, all five of you, all of you living in California, you and Mitch and the boys still in that same house above the river valley, and Skyler in the city and San Francisco as safe and sound as when you knew it in your twenties (at x = −26) when you were faced with a decision containing within itself an energy powerful enough to shape entire systems of reality … (But none of this said in so much dialogue, not heard by her as words nor even imagined as speech, but come to be understood through sustained hallucination as new subjects can be learned by study: a mother and wife to all outward appearances sleeping off despair, but really a woman in a wood throughout whose blood ants made of fire are conducting a dark pilgrimage to her heart while her body temperature is climbing as surely as the surface temperature of the planet.)
•
He brakes on the hill above the green and looks down at the war memorial and the carousel and the people gathering.
Seven thirty. The sky bleeding out. The fountain in the pond going hush-hush-hush. Someone strumming a guitar. One of those songs he hates, about a hundred years old and overplayed as a hymn. Projected mental threat: I swear, if you start singing, I will throw that instrument in the water. Then, sure enough: “Imagine there’s no heaven …” Are you really going down there? You know who these people are, don’t you. They’re the freaks who stand on Broadway, on the corner by the post office, with their signs. And remember that one time, they were actually out in the middle of the intersection and there was a woman with a megaphone standing on a crate shouting that her son was dead, go look, read his name on the memorial in the park four blocks from here, he was drafted in the last lottery (and pretty soon you couldn’t even hear her because everyone was blasting their horns and yelling out their car windows or shouting stupid patriotic shit from the sidewalk). Usually, Dorian would’ve just pedaled past. But that time he stopped, because there were four boys out there in the street, teenagers a little older than his brother, and each of them was holding up a piece of paper, and one of them got the megaphone and said: “In case you didn’t know, they still send actual letters. The draft notice is the one and only form of communication left in America that you can delete by burning.” And that’s exactly what they did. One by one, each kid lit his on fire. And then the cops came up the street in helmets with the clubs and the hand-cuffs—and Dorian is thinking now, as he walks his bike down the hill toward the black wall of the memorial, the same thing he was thinking that day: that he will become one of those boys, he will get that letter in the mail and have to make a choice (go or don’t go; report as ordered or refuse to report), same on
e his brother will have to make a year from now and which they have never talked about as a family, as if silence can be a rampart against consequence. And that surprises you? What have they been doing for eight years now if not trying to make her never exist with silence— Shake it off: this voice, sectarian and oppugnant to the better angel of your nature, whose accusations (lying to you, hiding her from you) you have been repeating aloud for months and believing, as primitive peoples believe in fictitious explanations for phenomena beyond their understanding, when you knew all along (or at least know you should have known): that the truth, be it that of the stars in Heaven or a family on Earth, is infinitely more complicated …
“Dorian!”
He turns to see Khaleela running over the green with a glowstick in her hand, the sky above her faintly glowing and the fireflies sparking around her: a picture of her not to be forgotten and to cry over in future times.
“Dorian.” (Coming to a panting stop.) “Hi.”
“Hi.”
“Looking for me?”
He nods; sets his bike against a park bench; and when he turns, she angles the glowstick in his face.
“Bruises all gone.”
“Pretty much.”
“So it doesn’t hurt anymore,” she says.
“No”
“Come on, then”—and takes his hand, thinking to herself that life can tear apart at any moment. The Caliphate could nuke the whole eastern seaboard tomorrow. Are you going to leave things up to a boy? As if there’s time in this world for the slow confusions of nervous boys, the obviousness of whose attraction to you is rivaled only by the self-evidence of their total cluelessness about how to act on that attraction; while he, heart smacking around in his chest like a bee in a capture jar, knows somehow that the destination of this hurried hand-in-hand transit is the hedge at the foot of the hill—and Dorian knowing what will happen there, what he has to do, which he has never yet done though he has performed the action in imagination and also in dream (remembering suddenly a dream about her: disaster drill at school, basic medical in the fallout shelter, everything like normal except it wasn’t a mannequin, it was her; he slid a hand under her neck and pinched the bridge of her nose), and telling himself now, when you do it for real, you don’t breathe into her mouth—and what in one instant is a yearning-forward shall become in the next the foretelling of a happening willed into existence by the dreaming of it, which is: his hand on the nape of her neck and her palm against his cheek and the two of them kissing at (0, 0) and at myriad other parallel points and sending a spike of love, like an electrical signal neurotransmitted, across the infinity of the grid.
15
As we were trying to figure out how to say goodbye, it happened again. The tone. Khaleela had my phone in her hand because she was putting her number in my book and then the tone was sounding on every phone in the park. And not just the phones. The municipal system was going off, too. Sirens starting up and echoing and multiplying into the sound of a flock of screaming robot birds while a text-to-speech voice, female and ageless, coming from the sky like the voice of a mythological goddess, said: “Attention. This is the Capital Region Emergency Warning System—”
“Khaleela!”
It was her father. She waved the glowstick with one hand and grabbed me by the shirt with the other.
“My bike,” I said.
“We’ll drive you. Come on. What if it’s airborne.”
She took my hand and we ran across the green, past the carousel, the horses motionless and wide-eyed in the dark, while the voice advised without feeling: “The following bulletin may affect your area …” Then I was falling into the backseat of her car and there were her parents in the front.
“Who’s this,” her father said.
“Dorian.”
Her mother (pushing the start button): “Seat belts. Where do you live?”
“Poospatuck Circle.”
“What?”
I told her it was a tribe. “A tribe of what,” Khaleela said. “Poopsatuck,” her mother was saying to the GPS. “Poopsatuck Circle.” Which the GPS of course didn’t recognize. “Point me,” her mother said to me, and I pointed and said, “Poospatuck,” and explained that they were a tribe of Native Americans. Her mother started driving and her father looked back at me with disapproval as he switched on the radio. No one spoke the rest of the way. The only words in the car were the clear commands of the GPS and the vague imperatives of the man on the radio concerning the need to stay informed and follow the instructions of state and federal officials so we could protect ourselves, our families, and our community against an incident of bioterrorism about which no further details were currently known. “Go point-five miles on Washington … There has been a serious incident.”
Where they are now is not where they were the last time when he cut the dog’s throat and he and Yassim, after being measured for the belts, put on make-believe ones filled with twenty-pounds of sand and practiced walking, stopping, and pulling an imaginary cord. That was a farm in the country; this is an apartment on the top floor of a three-story walk-up in the capital, through the window of which (smudged pane of glass, metal screen in the pattern of a Cartesian grid, and small black flies trapped in the interstice) can be seen, down on the street, a smoke shop with a window display of water pipes, and, above and beyond the nearby rooftops, the summits of the pale monoliths of Agency Buildings 1, 2, and 3 …
The first thing they did upon arriving in the capital a little before noon was get food from a drive-thru (cheeseburgers, fries, shakes), which they consumed in the backseat of the car on their way to view the target: a hospital named after an infidel saint. They did not go into the hospital, nor even get out of the car; but sat in the car and looked at the entrance to the emergency room, which, sometime between nine and ten o’clock that night, depending, said the dispatcher, upon how soon symptoms present in the general public, you are to walk through. Inside, you will be in a large room filled with people, perhaps several hundred of them. It will be loud and chaotic. Do not look into the faces of any of them. As we practiced, you will walk to the center of the room, cry Subhan’Allah as loud as your voice can go, and pull the cord. That is the hour in which you will meet God …
Then: single room with single window, table, television, a few carpet remnants where Karim and Yassim and the man knelt and said the afternoon prayer—in the midst of which the food Karim had eaten not two hours before, apparently not accepted by his stomach for digestion, hit the floodgate of his bowels with a sudden and merciless pressure. As he performed the actions of salat—bending at the waist, bowing, and saying Subhan’Allah—he tried to hold himself closed, clenching the muscles with all his might and eyeing the bathroom: only a few feet away, but also scarcely distinct from the main room itself and with no type of ventilation. You cannot walk away from prayers to take a shit. But what if one is physically incapable of prostrating, of kneeling and pressing one’s forehead to the carpet, without losing everything one is trying so desperately to keep in? Just a few more minutes, five at the most. But his control slipping with every passing second (that garbage he had eaten, wolfed down as if not having had a meal in days; like a drug while being chewed and swallowed, but afterward, almost immediately upon finishing, how queasy he had felt and full of regret)—every second an eternity and not even at the first prostration and thinking if you shit your pants right now and going already for the door, not knowing what in the world he had been thinking waiting so long, unbuckling his belt while angling his backside and going into a squat and begging his body to hang on for just one more fraction of a moment, not caring now about smell or sound, only that he get his pants down, but the body refusing to grant the self even that much latitude, so that what the body refuses to harbor, instead of being contained by clothing, explodes onto clothing and hands and toilet and floor …
And now, five hours later: he stands at the window with Yassim, looking down at the smoke shop.
“Wish we could
do it one more time,” Yassim says.
“What.”
“Dream …”
And then a knock on the door and the uncle who is no uncle peers through the glassed hole of the door, then unbolts the door and opens it—and a second man comes in, carrying a duffel bag.
Sun going down.
Almost time to pray again. Last time to ever pray in this world. Two, three hours left now (depending on how soon symptoms present). In the duffel: the belts. Not your decision. None of it by your own will. Not willed by you any more than what happened in that bathroom earlier in the day: a thing your body does and cannot be stopped from doing. For it has been written. Written that you would shit your pants from fear seven to eight hours before the achievement of your goal, shit all over your clothes and yourself and the floor of this ugly apartment the way that dog shat on the dusty ground of the barn as you bent over his bleeding body with the knife and held the edge to his neck, he looking into your eyes with his, seeming to know what was coming and seeming to desire it, and yet terribly frightened of it, too. But you must not think that those slain in the cause of Allah are dead. They are alive and well provided for by their Lord (Sura 3, verse 169). But what if you, after cutting the dog’s throat, instead of relinquishing the knife, had thrust it suddenly into the belly of the man now laying the belts out on the table and had stabbed the point of it into him with all your strength, picked up the gun he would have dropped and, holding it with two hands, pulled the trigger as he had pulled it against the dog whose throat you had already cut. What if you had done that. But more important, Karim: Why didn’t you?
And Mitch wishing he had not given in and let Dorian go (which he only did because his son confided in him that there was a girl involved and father-son sympathy won out over vigilance), because now he’s not sure where his son is, and, with the stress on the wireless networks, may not be sure of his whereabouts for some time if, as Mitch hopes, Dorian is sheltering in somewhere near the park rather than riding his bike in the open, in air through which something lethal could possibly be drifting right now …