by Ayad Akhtar
3 Urdu for “Holy Messenger”—commonly used to refer to Muhammad.
4 By the time Malala was awarded the Nobel, in 2014, the conspiracy paranoia in my parents’ home country had started to show symptoms of widespread social psychosis—that is, wide-scale diminishment of any sense of reality, the rise of mass delusions impairing functional operation of the social body and state—with talk of Malala staging her own shooting for a visa to America, or being the Hungarian child of Christian missionaries or an agent working for the CIA, opinions espoused by more people in my family and in the country at large (and by those with a greater level of education) than you would ever believe possible.
5 In the name of God, most good, most merciful.
6 Another common Muslim invocation, meaning: “As God has willed it.”
Scranton Memoirs
IV.
God’s Country
A Blown Gasket
A decade ago, while driving back to Harlem from upstate New York—where I’d spent the weekend with my parents at the Finger Lakes resort they visited every few years, an excursion memorable not only because it was then my father announced I’d been conceived on the resort’s second floor, in a room on the “lake” side (he couldn’t remember any longer exactly which one), but also because it was the last time I would see my mother before she was diagnosed with the recurrence of the cancer that would eventually take her life—it was while driving back along I-81 that my Saab 900’s exhaust started sending out white smoke, or so a Pennsylvania state trooper would inform me once he’d pulled me over to ask if my engine had overheated. That was when I first noticed that the needle of the car’s temperature gauge was pointing in the wrong direction. We popped open the hood to take a look inside, and foul-smelling steam nearly singed our faces. He laughed as he pulled out a handkerchief and wiped his cheeks and forehead; I wiped mine on my sleeve. The trooper’s earlier approach to the car had put me at ease—his slow, deliberate movements; his measured, cheery tone intended, I’d thought, to announce he was just there to help—and his reaction now only reinforced the message.
He was bone-white, his features boyish, though there was something ancient about his vaulted cheekbones and the Tartar slant to his eyes. Polish or Serbian, I thought, though the last name on his tag betrayed no obvious ethnic origin: MATTHEW. As we stepped away from the car, he pointed ahead at an exit. We weren’t far from Clarks Summit, he said, where there was a garage. He suspected that was where AAA would take me, though he had to admit he’d only ever heard bad things about the service there. “I know a garage in Scranton where I always go. It’s a little farther, but they’ll come get you with their own truck. I know the owner. They do great work. I’d be happy to call him for you.”
It was a bright, mild day in late October. The surrounding hills were ablaze with autumn color. As Trooper Matthew and I waited for the tow truck, his cruiser between us and the traffic’s noisy ebb and flow, he turned to me and asked—entirely benignly, I thought—where my name was from. I knew from experience that an honest answer to this not infrequent question could raise suspicions where there might otherwise have been none, my well-intentioned interlocutors suddenly beclouded by some reflexive evocation of terror. In the trying months after 9/11—when the simple act of mounting the city bus and paying my fare had become a provocation, met with fearful, watching glares—I’d settled on a prophylactic strategy: “India,” I would say. It was a lie. The name wasn’t Indian. But I knew the question usually masked a curiosity about my origins, and as you already know, my parents were born in what was then India. This answer had the obvious advantage of connoting not the referents of terror, murder, and rage that most associated with Pakistan but rather the bright colors and spicy tastes of delightful dishes like tikka masala, gyrating flash mobs in Bollywood movies, and yoga pants. To complicate all this further, my name is actually Egyptian, and depending on the political moment—in the wake of attacks like those on tourists at Luxor and Sharm el Sheikh, or two years later, during the misleading months of the so-called Arab Spring—mentioning Egypt can become a prompt to more questions, each riddled with a particular pitfall that often leads to the very sort of mistrust I am ever keen to avoid in the first place. If all this sounds somewhat paranoid, I am happy for you. Clearly you have not been beset by daily worries of being perceived—and therefore treated—as a foe of the republic rather than a member of it.
Standing alongside Officer Matthew, surrounded by the painted hills, grateful for his charitable interest in my vehicle’s proper repair, disarmed by gratitude, I opted for the complicated truth. “The name is Egyptian,” I said.
“Really?”
“My parents aren’t from Egypt, but when my father first came to this country, he had an Egyptian friend who had my name. He’d never heard it before and really liked it. So when I was born, he used it for me. Funny thing is, he doesn’t say it right. Or at least not how he heard it said by his friend…”
“How are you supposed to say it?”
I joked my way through the various pronunciations of my name—the original Arabic, which sounded nothing like how my parents said it and which was different still from the way my kindergarten teacher had coined the American pronunciation, which had stuck ever since.
“So why couldn’t your parents say it right?”
“They don’t speak Arabic.”
“They’re not Arabs?”
“Well, no, they’re from Pakistan, so—actually, they were born in India. But that’s a long story.”
“And you all moved here from Pakistan when you were in kindergarten?”
“I was born here.”
He paused for a moment, picking lint off the stiff felt dome of his wide-brimmed trooper hat. From somewhere upwind of us, the sweet smell of burning apple wood was pouring into the air. “So where were you born?” he asked, suddenly tentative.
It was clear I’d made a mistake.
“Wisconsin,” I said. It was another lie. Though I spent almost the entirety of my childhood and adolescence in Wisconsin, I was born on Staten Island. “Wisconsin,” though, felt like a stronger move in this negotiation around the impression forming inside him.
“Never been,” he said. “I just read this book, The Looming Tower. You heard of it?”
“It won the Pulitzer last year, didn’t it?”
“It’s pretty incredible.”
“I know the writer. Lawrence Wright. Great guy.”
I’d recently met Lawrence—or Larry, as he’d introduced himself—at a reading of a play he’d written about the Italian journalist Oriana Fallaci. We’d spoken afterward, an encounter I doubt he would recall and during which I would wonder if, in fact, his sympathies with Fallaci’s troubling views on Islam were deeper than he was letting on in the play he’d written. In short, I was misrepresenting both my affection for—and proximity to—this famous writer in an obvious attempt to signal status and amiability, to get Trooper Matthew off whatever suspicions I worried he was now harboring.
He continued: “You know, I never knew that the guy who ran the whole crew of hijackers was from Egypt. For some reason, I thought they were all from Iraq. I thought that’s why we went to Iraq. See, but the truth is, none of them was Iraqi. Not a one. They were mostly from Saudi. And Atta, Mohammed Atta, the guy in charge, he was from Egypt. Cairo, actually.” So quickly had we arrived, via my father’s best friend, on the subject of Atta. “My grandfather was stationed in Cairo during the world war. We had a picture of him in front of the pyramids. I used to dream about visiting when I grew up, standing there where Grandpa did. I had no idea the kind of hate they’ve got for us.” I bit my lip—literally—and nodded, hoping my silence would appear respectful. “I gotta say, for guys who’re pure evil,” Trooper Matthew added, “the book almost made me understand them. Don’t get me wrong. It’s not like I felt for them or anything like that. I mean, they’re monsters. But…you know, when you see what happens in their countries, and how messed up everythin
g is for them, how hard it is for folks who live there, well, you start to get how they’re seeing the world. You can understand how they start thinking Disneyland’s really the problem with everything.”
“Disneyland?”
“Yeah. Atta. He hated Disneyland. Thought America was turning the world into a theme park.” Moments earlier, I hadn’t known better than to speak; now I was certain silence was necessary. He was fishing, his tone no longer declarative but slipping—at the ends of phrases—into the ostensible friendliness of the interrogative. “I mean, you can almost understand a guy like that. You know what I mean?”
“You think? I don’t know.”
“I do. I really do.” He paused again and glanced at me—I thought—with a look that drew out more distinctly the tapering almond shape of his eyes. “D’you know that when he returned his rental car on September ninth, he called the rental agency to tell them the oil light was on? Can you believe that? He didn’t care about the three thousand people they killed, but he cared about the next person driving the car. You believe that? I wouldn’t if I saw it in a movie.”
“The book sounds amazing,” I said after a short pause.
“Right,” he said distantly. “I should probably get on the horn. Make sure those guys are on their way.” The hat found his head again as he walked back to the driver’s side to make his call.
He was still on the phone—running a check on me, I assumed—when the flatbed truck from Marek Auto Repair pulled up. The tow driver was a short, stocky man in denim overalls whose face was covered with blistering acne. He huddled over the engine to inspect. “Yep,” he said. “Busted head gasket.”
“You guys can fix that, right?”
“Shouldn’t be a problem.”
I looked over at the cruiser, where Trooper Matthew’s face was lowered, phone still to his ear.
The tow driver backed up the truck and lowered the flatbed. Once the cables were attached, the truck’s squealing winch pulled my car up into place. It wasn’t until the car was mounted and level—and until we’d gotten into the cab and were readying to go—that Trooper Matthew finally emerged and made his way to the tow truck’s driver’s-side window. He and the driver spoke about someone they both knew; I could tell he was ignoring me. I looked forward and did the same. As their conversation came to an end, the trooper put his hand on the door frame and leaned in:
“Staten Island, right?”
It took me a moment to realize he was addressing me. “What’s that?”
“Staten Island, that’s where you were born, not Wisconsin. Isn’t that right?” He was staring at me now, his blank look less a provocation than an acknowledgment of betrayal—whether his or mine, I couldn’t tell. What to say? How to explain that I’d been worried he had the wrong idea about me and I lied to let him know I was not the enemy he worried I might be? Was there really no way to convey this simple truth through the thicket of mistrust that had so quickly grown between us? If there was I didn’t see it. So I lied again.
“Oh, no. That’s wrong. It’s a long story.”
My response didn’t seem to surprise him: “You know you can always get that taken care of. All you have to do is take your birth certificate in.”
“Was never a problem for me before, sir. But thank you.”
I heard my combative tone; I hadn’t intended it. He looked away, his tongue lodged against the inside of his cheek, fighting—I thought—the urge to allow, even encourage, an escalation. “Okay,” he said finally, patting the door frame with his palm. “Hope everything works out with the car. Have a good day.”
* * *
It was a Sunday. Though the tow service was running, the repair shop was closed. The driver told me someone would look at it in the morning and call with an estimate. If it was just the gasket, it would be fixed by Monday afternoon—assuming, of course, I hadn’t driven the car for very long with a blown gasket. “Because if not, and if you’ve been letting the fuel mix in with the coolant or the oil for any length of time”—he paused and studied me, as if trying to divine whether I was the sort of person who might do a thing that stupid—“well, in that case, all bets’d be off.”
The shop was in North Scranton, too far from the downtown hotel where the tow driver suggested I might want to get a room. I called a taxi. The route into the center of town took me through an outlying region of industrial lots, empty warehouses, acres of bare fenced-in asphalt; past curbs crumbling into the streets and roadside grass left to grow to knee height. The roads themselves were worn, pitted with holes, the fading yellow lanes and crosswalks barely insinuated by the disappearing paint. Signs of municipal neglect were everywhere, and an unusually abundant profusion of utility poles and sagging black lines defined all manner of helter-skelter perspectives through which to see the widespread disrepair. We drove past a series of impossibly long buildings, three tall stories of brick covered with rows and rows of broken windows. The cabbie noticed my interest and explained what I was looking at was once the great Scranton Lace Company. He was an older man with a pear-shaped face, thick along the bottom. He wore a faded cabbie cap, and the name on the taxi tag affixed to the back of his headrest read: MARK. “See, we didn’t live too far from here when I was growing up,” he said, sliding open the plastic window on the barrier between us so he could be heard better. “There was lots of Italians in these parts, on the other side of the river we just passed.”
“You’re Italian?”
“My grandparents all came over from the old country.” He slowed and pointed at a street to our right: “When I was a kid, we’d ride our bikes over this way. You’d hit this road, and it was so busy back then. Like its own city over here. Three shifts going in and out every day ’cept Sunday. Hundred times as much traffic as there is now. That factory was running twenty-four hours, six days a week, making tablecloths, curtains, napkins, anything with lace. They had a bowling alley in there, if you can believe it.”
“Really?”
“Oh, yeah. Sure. My uncle Jimmy had a girl he was seeing who worked there. One time she snuck me and my cousin in, and we went bowling! Four lanes, if you can believe it! I remember those long looms, the rollers turning. Ladies spinning, twisting yarn, their fingers moving on those machines like they were playing the piano. They didn’t just make lace there. In the war, they made parachutes, tarps for the troops. That was before my time. I don’t know how many people they had working in there. Must have been ten thousand. I mean, look how big it is. In the morning, they’d pour out into the bars along this way here.” He was pointing at a row of boarded-up two-story buildings on his left. “One shift’s drinking Jameson, the new one’s finishing their eggs and bacon on their way in to start the day. Hard to imagine it, with everything looking so dead around here now. But trust me, it wasn’t always like this, if you can believe it.”
“How long ago was this?”
“You know—sixties, seventies.”
With what was left of Scranton Lace behind us, we turned onto a road lined with businesses—a deli, a copy shop, a storefront fitness center—still solvent, though perhaps not by much. “Don’t get me wrong. It’s not like it was all some walk in the park back then. You know, being Italian in these parts wasn’t easy. Wasn’t easy anywhere, but especially not here. Germans, Scotch-Irish—they hated us. Called us cockroaches. When you think about it, weird thing is we were here before a lot of them even showed up. Working the mills, mines, but see, we didn’t know how to get ahead. It wasn’t our system. Unions, city councils, whatnot. All we knew about getting our needs taken care of was Cosa Nostra. For some folks, that was enough.”
“Mafia strong around here?”
“Not anymore. But when I was growing up? For sure.”
We turned again and drove past columned multistory homes from the early part of the last century. They were falling apart. “A made guy. That was a thing to want to be. With stacks of cash like stones in their pockets. I mean, I knew my share of them, ’cause my dad helped
run the literary society over on Prospect.”
“Literary society?”
“Dante Literary Society. It was a social club. I mean, it’s still over there, but it’s pretty dead now, like everything else around here. They started it in the Depression to help teach folks from the old country how to speak English, though by the time I was a kid it was mostly about teaching kids like us Italian. That and ballroom dancing, if you can believe it. Made guys hung out there pretty regularly. There was a room in back where they, you know—played cards.” His eyes—meeting mine in the rearview mirror—narrowed with a knowing smile. “Don’t get me wrong; I thought about it. I had a moment when I thought that might be the life for me—nice suits, pretty girls. But it didn’t take me long to figure out I wasn’t cut out for that.”
As we entered the downtown, further neglected splendors from the nineteenth century dotted the blocks, old Greek or Romanesque revival mansions, intermittent reminders of an era of great wealth long passed, crowded by the thoughtless array of the town’s newer construction, the ad hoc styles and worn facades adorned with signs advertising empty space for rent. Mark pointed out the sturdy, unostentatious granite blocks and arches of the university; the dappled, rough-cut stone of the county courthouse; the creamy limestone of a building he called “the Electric.” For a moment, here, in the center of town, against a garish late-afternoon sky that could have been colored by Hockney—heaps of silver-pink cloudy fluff against a cornflower blue—Scranton suddenly felt every bit the painted backdrop for the modern sitcom The Office, which was my only previous association with it.