by Dima Alzayat
**
I have been moving now for five years. At times I stayed in places long enough to memorize where the shadows fell at dawn, to learn which birds sang in the trees. But eventually I left. For three months I dug foundations and mixed concrete in one place. For a full year I planted seedlings and watered the plants that grew from them. I learned to weave chairs from bamboo, to build protective barriers around turtle nests and runways so the hatchlings could find their way to the ocean without getting lost. In all this time, I have not gone home. On the phone my mother’s voice has grown colder, my father no longer asks when I will come back. Only my aunt Zaynab laughs at the sound of my voice.
When her third and final husband died, Zaynab refused to mourn. My grandmother, older and widowed by then, did not interfere. Even when Zaynab was seen laughing in public, wearing yellow and violet, her hair newly bleached and permed, my grandmother shook her open palms at those who spoke. ‘Enough,’ she said. ‘Words have a taste, just like food.’
A month before I had left I’d swallowed fistfuls of pills and at the hospital they pumped my stomach twice to get them out. I had taken them while in bed, had pulled the covers above my head and closed my eyes. Falling asleep I had seen a lionfish swimming among the corals, a koala perched on a eucalyptus tree. The air was clear, and I could breathe. I woke up in a hospital room filled with the smell of disinfectant and the sound of my parents’ screams. They yelled at doctors, at nurses, at me. ‘Please get better,’ they said. ‘Please make her better.’ As everyone else moved about the room in fevered frenzy, only my grandmother stood still, rubbing my feet with one hand and working her beads with the other. ‘Listen,’ she said. ‘Hundreds of female names in our language, but ours means triumph and nothing else.’
When she died two years ago I sat near a drying river thousands of miles from home and tried to imagine what she was like as a girl. I had seen only a single photo from before she was married; already by then her eyes were those of a woman, an island in rolling ocean. She had been married at fifteen, had borne seven children before she was twenty-four. With her hands she had sorted a lifetime of rice and lentils, had gutted fish and deboned chicken. She knew how to upholster furniture and help grapevine spread and climb, how to cover bruises and scars so no one could see them, how to measure the value of her life and still rise.
**
They sleep, and in shadowed lands unsheathe their swords and thrust them at who comes. False warriors swathed in robes try to crush them with their stones, stab them with their daggers. But the morning star appears, flushes the sky a milky pearl and lights their way. The blood they draw is soiled but feeds the land. Clusters of acacia trees sprout and grow at their feet, their flowers shade them as the day grows hot. Three cranes, with black-tipped wings and bright red crowns, circle above them, exalted monarchs of their skies.
When they wake it is in gardens, labyrinthine and immense. Thick walls of boxwood keep them from seeing in any direction and they are not tall enough to peer over the edges. Instead they call to one another through the plants, follow each other’s footsteps as they fade. Though the road is sinuous, eventually they find its end, a sheer cliff’s edge that beckons them to fall. They retreat, some quicker than others, some lingering near the tip, considering the weightlessness of their bodies if they fall, the weight of them if they stay.
It is only when the first one tilts over, seemingly stumbles into air, that more approach. One by one now they jump, some with eyes closed and legs pulled up toward thumping chests; others with arms spread and flapping, voices echoing as they go. Some dive, headfirst, arms at their sides, bodies like arrows. At different speeds they descend, some directly down like raindrops, others more slowly, in smooth, undulating motion as if across invisible hills.
What do they see? A gazelle nursing a lion, a camel running through a valley, its face unbridled, its back unfettered, the air damp, clear.
DISAPPEARANCE
The summer Etan Patz disappeared, New York was burning something fierce. ‘It’s hotter than a hooker in hell,’ my father would say after a day’s work, his collar slack and soiled, his scalp like wet sandpaper.
For three months our mothers kept us indoors, wouldn’t let us out no-way-no-how, convinced that the man who’d snatched Etan was prowling the neighborhood for more. I imagined a lunatic in a sorcerer’s cap stirring a pot of boys with a broom handle, bending over and pinching their thighs to feel for tenderness. Wondered what we’d smell like in that pot. Probably something awful, all that Kool-Aid and Play-Doh, gym socks and rusted pennies, pooled together like that.
‘Let me out, woman,’ I’d demand each morning and duck in time to miss my mother’s palm swinging toward the back of my head. I hated her in those moments, my larger-than-life warden, wide and rubbery like an inflatable raft sheathed in floral cloth. Why I had to be kept from the swimming pool, baseball games and sugar cones balancing scoops of rainbow sherbet, I didn’t understand. She never budged, not once. Stayed like that too, the rest of her life, unyielding as a nail in cement, until we buried her. Even then, at the very end, she’d still go on about ‘Poor Etan.’
Only thing that kept me from grabbing a bedsheet and parachuting out the window that summer was Tommy Palansky. He’d moved into the apartment beneath ours and his mother wasn’t letting him out either. We’d spend every morning running up and down the stairs of our four-story building, the light filtering in through window panes thick with dust and falling across us in streaks of gray. We’d gather Legos, rubber balls, wadded newspaper, candles melted down to their stubs, old slippers – anything we could filch undetected. Then we’d position ourselves on the steps on either side of the stairwell and build military posts out of broken-down cardboard boxes and plastic tubs and declare War with our ragtag arsenal. My brother Ralph would stand in the doorway and watch, drooling all over himself and saying nothing.
‘Ben, let Ralph play with you,’ my mother would holler from the living room where she sat peeling potatoes or snipping green beans into a colander, the record player behind her always screeching nothing but Fairuz.
‘All he does is drool, Ma,’ I’d yell back. I’d hold real still then, listening for the creak of wooden baseboards beneath her swollen feet. Sometimes she’d leave me be a little longer but eventually she’d come, her weight pressing down on linoleum and thudding across the cement of the stairwell. She’d pinch my ear between fingers, plump and damp, and pull me so close I could make out the short black prickles sprouting from her chin.
‘His whole life people gonna look to us to see how they oughta treat him,’ she’d say. But the kid really did drool everywhere, spit that mixed and mingled with all the other fluids he leaked. Sweat and snot and saliva on his face and neck, T-shirts, every Tonka truck and green army man we owned. The heat made it worse. He’d wake up dry enough and by lunchtime he was like a sponge left in a bucket of dirty water.
Rubbing my ear, I’d take his hand and lead him to my post, prop him up on the front line and hand him artillery to launch at Tommy. He was good at taking orders from me when he was in the mood for it, I had to give him that. Would strike Tommy on the shoulder with empty shampoo bottles and right on the head with wooden blocks.
‘That’s not fair, there’s two of you now,’ Tommy would groan.
‘Pipe down. He’s like half a damn person,’ I’d say. Then Tommy would get bored and start crawling on all fours, hooting and roaring and pounding his chest like a mad gorilla or some other wild beast. He’d circle Ralph like that, coming close enough to sniff him and then retracting in disgust. Guess I couldn’t blame him. The kid smelled like pickled eggs most days. Ralph never would react. He’d just stare right ahead and you couldn’t be certain if he was actually seeing Tommy or even looking at him. I can’t say I felt bad for my brother then the way my mother did. Didn’t see any sense in feeling bad for someone who didn’t seem to mind.
‘What do you think he thinks about?’ Tommy asked. I couldn’t guess wha
t went through Ralph’s mind any more than I could name what was broken in the first place. I was three when he was born and my mother would say I spent a couple of years just waiting for him to get up and play. I’d try giving him my newest Hot Wheel, my best Transformer, even tucked a pillowcase into the back of his collar so we could make like superheroes and fly. But he never had a want for any of that. Sure enough he got up and learned some words but his eyes, they just didn’t move like ours. It was like we were nothing more than stagehands to him and he was waiting for the show to start.
By noon the stairwell would get too hot to bear and we’d escape to the basement, where walls of exposed brick escaped the sun’s reach and remained cool to the touch. Except for a few empty trunks and a lone chair there was nothing much else in the space. Sometimes our mothers would let us carry down a couple of fans and we’d set them up near opposing walls and position Ralph in the center. Then we’d veer and tilt around him like jet planes, spreading our arms and letting the breeze make its way through our thin T-shirts, drying our underarms and sending shivers down our spines.
Spent, we’d collapse onto the floor and talk about our dwindling summer in captivity and the approaching start of another nine months spent in classrooms that smelled like mildew and vinegar. ‘Is he ever gonna go to school?’ Tommy asked once about Ralph. I didn’t answer. My father had wanted Ralph to go to school, even tried enrolling him in special classes for a few weeks the year before. Then some kid scratched him up pretty bad, pressed a pencil with a broken tip into the soft flesh of his wrist and dragged it up and down his forearm until the skin broke. All that afternoon Ralph said nothing about it. Sat through the rest of his classes and dinner, even watched some Tom and Jerry with me. It wasn’t until she undressed him for a bath that my mother saw the carved skin, the dried blood flaking off like red ash. That’s when she put her foot down and said No more. She got approval to home-school him then, but not before she clomped down the stairs and the three blocks to the school and made every official cower or cry.
Without fail our basement conversations would soon turn to Poor Etan. Whole afternoons we spent imagining what happened to him. Six years old, same as Ralph, and he goes missing the first time he walks alone to the bus stop. How’s that for luck? We imagined him holed in a basement like ours, tied up and invisible to the world. Sometimes we’d really get into it and invent entire scenarios. We imagined him stoned to death and buried alive. Burned in a fire as an offering to some cult god, his screams growing in pitch as the flames surged upward. We imagined him skinned and hanging in one of the meat shops in Chinatown, like a rabbit waiting to be fried or baked for dinner. I could always picture it so perfectly. His photo was on the news each night and on the cover of my father’s paper each morning. I knew his face better than I knew anyone else’s, maybe even my own. Hair blond and long like a girl’s. Eyes wide-set and blue. A smile that cut into his cheeks and spread past his lips, a smirk to maybe say it was all a joke, that at any moment he’d reappear.
Sometimes we’d bring down some twine and take turns tying each other to the chair and pretend that one of us was Etan and the other the kidnapper. Ralph’d just drool and watch. Our weapons of combat would transform into torture devices and we’d pretend to slit each other’s throats and ply fingers off one by one while yelling things like, ‘Gimme all your dough,’ and, ‘Where’s the cash stash, punk?’ We knew a kidnapper wasn’t gonna ask for money – but we couldn’t quite figure what it was he would ask for, what it would be he was after, so we carried on like that. My mother found us once, after I’d tied Tommy good and tight to the chair and was threatening to zap him from here to Jupiter with my plastic gun if he didn’t tell me where he’d hidden the goods. She nearly tore us to crumbs but my father, who was just getting home and in no mood for a fight, said, ‘Salwa, they’re like caged ferrets. You gotta let them have a tumble every now and again.’ Still, she told Tommy’s mother and made me carry the fan upstairs. But by the end of that week we were back down there and at it again.
When we were feeling really daring we’d creep down to the ground floor, a small open space that housed abandoned bicycles and the door to the outside. I’d drag Ralph along so he couldn’t tell on us and Tommy would twist the metal latch and pull the door, thick and hulking, and we would stick our heads out one by one into the humid air. Soon enough we began daring each other to step out onto the pavement, to walk to the corner where the Guatemalan man sold fresh fruit and cigarettes, and eventually, to sprint full speed around the entire block once if not twice. Even now, more than thirty years later, I can remember the way the warm air filled me as I ran, how it surged and swirled in my lungs. I must have passed the fruit stand then and taken a right, ran past Earl’s Drugs and Stuff and the video store, turned right again and rushed past Didi’s Donuts, the hotdog cart and the laundromat. That must have happened but I couldn’t tell you at the time what I was passing, the streets feeling new and foreign even though I’d walked them all the years of my life, had known nothing but their shapes and colors. Instead, I glimpsed the curves of lips and angles of noses, the arches of brows and lines of grimaces. A bald man with a diamond ear stud leaned on a shuttered shop, a suit in a fedora brushed my arm as he passed, another wearing nothing but shorts and sneakers bounced a basketball as he went. I ran fast enough so I didn’t look at any one of them directly, couldn’t tell you the colors of their eyes, but knew that they could look toward me, could see me if they wanted. As I rounded the final corner, I’d erupt into something of a frenzy, a current coursing through my veins, leaving me feeling at once fearless, like I could do anything, and relieved that I wouldn’t because someone was expecting me to return.
I can’t say exactly when it was that Ralph went missing. I just know it was the week before we started school and the sun was low enough to turn everything orange.
Tommy’s parents had gone to visit a relative in Queens and my mother had offered to watch him until after dinner. I never invited my school friends home in those days and a sleepover was unthinkable. The one time I did have someone over, this kid Joey, Ralph drooled all over the Chinese checkers Joey’d brought with him and during dinner, kept his mouth clamped tight while my mother tried to feed him steamed carrots and rice. By the end of the meal, his face was covered in orange pulp and Joey was staring at him like he was a zoo exhibit. The next day the entire class was talking about it.
Sure, Tommy wasn’t especially keen on Ralph always hanging around, but he knew Ralph, knew what being his brother meant and didn’t mean, what it said and didn’t say. When I found out Tommy would be eating with us, I begged my mother to cook something normal. It was 1979 and exotic-sounding dishes with names like South Sea Beef and Chicken Tahitian were all the rage – culinary experiments that ended with my father sweating just trying to keep them down and Ralph spitting half-chewed chunks onto his plate until she caved and made him a hotdog.
That night though, she’d agreed to Spaghetti Bolognese and the smell of crushed garlic and simmering tomato sauce wafted down to Tommy and me as we stood on the ground level of the building, bent over with hands on knees, panting. We’d already run around the block three times each while Ralph sat and played with his plastic trucks.
‘Come on, Ben. Just let him go once,’ Tommy said, still gasping for air.
‘Why?’
‘Because I’m bored just doing the same old thing.’
I shrugged. ‘We could play Legos.’
‘Oh, come on. He wants to go, don’t you, Ralph?’ Tommy looked to Ralph who had picked up a truck that was down to its last wheel, was flicking the wheel with his finger to make it spin.
‘It’s almost dinnertime,’ I said. ‘Anyway, he won’t do it.’
‘Sure he will, he’ll do anything you say if you’re the one to say it.’
Ralph glanced up to me just then and I remember searching for something in that look, for a twitch or a well-timed blink. Anything. But on it went, that endless gaping stare.<
br />
‘See?’ Tommy said. ‘He’s just waiting for you to say it.’
I stood there for what must have been no more than a minute but it felt like all of time was stretched before me, pulled like Silly Putty in all directions at once. My ears burned and I knew my face would follow. I remember wishing he would just say something, that he’d open his mouth and a ‘Yes’ or ‘No’ would make its way out of his garbled brain. I’d heard him speak before, knew he could. But the one time I needed him to, he couldn’t. Wouldn’t. Instead he sat silent and watching and I felt my insides grow hot, like someone had lit a match in my stomach and left it.
‘Fine,’ I said. ‘Ralph, run around the block one time.’ Tommy let out a small yelp and pulled open the heavy door. Ralph slowly rose and walked toward it, never breaking my gaze as he moved. I hoped then that he would just turn around and run up the stairs instead, decide to watch television or cling to my mother’s skirt as she cooked, anything. See, I’d say, I told you he wouldn’t do it.
But he did. He walked through the door and took the five steps down to the sidewalk, squinting his eyes to adjust to the light. And then I knew it was actually happening, that Ralph was gonna run around the block alone, be outside alone for the first time, and I just wanted it to be over. ‘Run fast, Ralph. Around the block, okay?’ I called. ‘Just fast and around the block.’ But he was no longer looking at me, had turned his eyes to sky and sidewalk.
He had just taken off toward the fruit stand, his arms stiff at his sides but his stride certain in its direction, when I heard my mother bellow my name from upstairs. Tommy shook his head, signaling me to ignore her. But again she called, louder this time and I knew she’d come barreling down those stairs, her legs thick and bowed like a charging bull’s, if I didn’t answer. I stood in the doorway and called to Ralph, but already he was at the corner and had escaped the reach of my voice. Again, my name left my mother’s lips and echoed in my ears. Tommy was now pushing me toward the stairs, knowing we’d both be punished something awful if we were found out.