31 Hours

by Masha Hamilton

  Outside the tall red-brick building of stacked apartments, the wind ignored his high-technology parka and went right for the bone. This was serious cold. In most towns, the streets would be bare on such a day, but no one who lived in New York City could afford to take time off and stay cozy inside, and nothing deterred the endless tourists in their frenzied, thoughtless race from museum to restaurant to theater. So the streets were still full enough, though each face was etched with a matching grimace and each body charged forward as if lingering could kill.

  Jonas headed toward the tip of Manhattan, where the East River mates with the Hudson. His ungloved fingers quickly began to sting from the cold, but he only had to walk two and a half blocks before he found a deli, windows slightly steamed. Three bells hanging from a rope clanged as he shoved open the door. The deli, squeezed into a railroad-car-sized space, carried a thick scent of coffee. Beyond a display crammed with single-serving bags of chips, Jonas saw meat spinning on a kebab over a grill. The man behind the counter wore a white apron with an oil stain on his left chest, near his heart. He nodded once at Jonas, the only customer.

  “Hey,” Jonas said.

  The man watched him, impassive.

  “A gyro,” Jonas said. “Lamb. Extra white sauce and extra hot sauce.”

  “You got it, bud.”

  The man reached for the pita bread, and Jonas noticed he had dark, fur-like hair on his arms, almost matted to his skin. This guy would have a tough time doing what Jonas had just done, shaving much of his body; it would probably take him hours, and even then, he almost certainly had hair in places that he couldn’t reach, places Jonas didn’t want to consider.

  “Carrotsonionstomatoes?” the man asked, as if they were one word.

  Jonas nodded. “The works.”

  It occurred to Jonas that maybe Masoud had chosen him simply because he didn’t have a mass of body hair, so no one would have to help him shave. He smiled at that thought. On the other hand, as much as Jonas wanted to believe his passion and intellectual clarity were what had singled him out, he knew the deciding factor was probably that he came from privilege. At least relative privilege, American-style. A home, a laptop, an iPod, plenty of food, clothes, education. And this, his comparative wealth, would increase the public impact of his deed. Its marketability, if you will. It gave his actions greater meaning. Masoud had explained this, and Jonas believed him. He understood that if people saw someone like him—like them—moved to carry out such a mission, to make such a sacrifice, then they would have to ask themselves why. They would have to question their assumptions because Jonas would not be so easy to dismiss. And the act of questioning would force people to realize how America’s powerful triteness undermined not only the country but the world itself. The climax was coming. Jonas had been aware of this well before he’d met Masoud. For a long time, in fact, he’d found himself unable to ignore the flawed and increasingly frail pretend-wizard behind the curtain. Oz was a made-up place, and more and more of his countrymen were beginning to realize that. The momentum caused by his act—well, that was in the hands of something greater than Jonas, but he believed it could lead to a consequential awakening in America.

  His ability to spot the wizard behind the curtain had for years plunged Jonas into periodic depressions. How did everyone else manage their lives without being brought to a halt by the government’s lies, its narrow-mindedness, its violence against those who did not believe or adhere? Maybe he’d just been born with some gene—either one extra or one missing—that left him deformed for American life. Either way, the fact that he recognized the situation meant he had to do something. Something significant. The Gandhi alternative seemed grandiose and improbable in the current day. This was an age of sanctioned violence—air strikes, not hunger strikes. Deirdre had made that clear long before Jonas had met Masoud. And so, although Masoud had approached him, Jonas believed he had actually done the choosing. His personal search had led him to precisely this moment.

  “Here you go, bud,” the man said, handing over a sandwich wrapped in foil. Jonas didn’t want to eat while walking the icy streets—difficult to manage and clearly a poor choice for his last New York gyro. Though this was not a sit-in deli, a table with one folding chair stood in the far corner.

  “You mind?” Jonas asked, motioning toward the chair with his head. The man shrugged, and Jonas sat.

  As he peeled back the foil from the stuffed pita, Jonas decided to bring a Buddhist approach to eating the gyro; he wanted to be fully present and taste each bite. He thought about Buddhist monks in Tibet who ate very little but chewed so slowly that a twelve-bite meal could take an hour. He’d learned this particular detail from a former monk he’d met in the comparative religion class at SAWU—the same place he’d initially met Masoud. Harold was a surprise—a middle-aged guy in jeans and a T-shirt with a hole in the right sleeve and a slogan reading, “Bud, King of Beers,” who’d spent a year and a half as a novice monk, living in a monastery near Lhasa in a room the size of a walk-in closet, trying to make sense of things. That was the way he’d expressed it, without elaboration: “Trying to make sense of things.” Then he’d decided to shove it in and come back home, where he’d ended up in a class with Jonas and they’d begun talking food.

  “New Yorkers wolf down breakfast and lunch and only slow down for dinner half the time. There, living with the monks, I consciously tasted every bite.” Harold scratched his head thoughtfully. “Made me appreciate the mouthful, sure. Problem was, I was also slowly starving.” Jonas and Harold enjoyably split hairs, then, over the various ways of starving. Jonas said too much food could also lead to starvation, and Harold said, “Listen, you goddamn idealist, a man can’t even recognize the metaphorical unless he’s got a belly full enough,” and their argument continued, good-naturedly and off-and-on, for a couple weeks.

  Now Jonas grinned, thinking about telling Masoud, the pious Muslim who’d completed the hajj in Mecca, that he’d spent his last day trying to eat Buddhist-style. On second thought, Masoud would probably appreciate that—Masoud was not an extremist as Jonas had once thought of them—except that he was extremely well-educated. He’d studied topics that swept from the earth to the sky and had easy access to facts that seemed obscure to Jonas. In one of their early discussions, Masoud casually mentioned that Socrates was the Western world’s first recorded martyr, ordered to die for insisting that all men and women possessed souls of their own and thus were obliged to question authority and discover truth for themselves. “The martyr is the offspring of a community at war with itself,” Masoud said. “The martyr helps the right side win. And so beyond his death, he continues to live in two realms, Paradise and Earth.”

  Masoud was often open-minded as well; in fact, the main difference between Masoud and, say, Jonas’s dad was that Masoud, having lost his older brother, had thought through the meaning and purpose of his life, and that consciousness guided his actions, whereas Jonas’s dad’s life, like most people’s, had been shaped by chance and longing and failure. To the outside world, Masoud might look like a struggling grad student and Jonas’s father like a thriving art dealer, but looks deceived.

  The pita felt warm against Jonas’s lips. He hesitated long enough to consciously absorb the heat and then bit down. Delicious—it was moist and spicy, and he imagined he could distinguish the individual flavors: tomatoes, and onions, and green peppers. And the lamb, the sacrificial lamb. He ate slowly, savoring each bite, feeling the carrots crunch and the tender lamb give way under his teeth, and after a few bites he tried to catch the eye of the man in the apron, wanting to nod his appreciation, but the man had lost interest in him; he was standing at the other end of the deli, gazing out the window at the street. Just then the bell hanging from the door rang again and two young women walked in, one wearing a black coat and the other a red jacket and mittens. The red-jacket woman had black hair, pale skin, and saucy full lips.

  The man behind the counter grew suddenly more attentive. “Yes, ladi
es?”

  “I’ll take a hot pastrami on rye,” the black coat said. “And a cup of coffee, to go.”

  “And you, miss?”

  “Oh, I guess . . .” The red-jacket woman hesitated, reading the menu from a board above the man’s head. “Swiss on a roll?”

  “Sure thing,” the man said.

  “So anyway,” the red-jacket woman turned to her friend, clearly picking up midconversation, “it was disgusting. He pressed himself up against me and—” She hesitated, glancing toward Jonas, then apparently decided to disregard him. “I could feel his dick against my back.”

  “Oh, God,” the other woman said. “What did you do?”

  “I waited a second until I was sure I wasn’t imagining it, and then I said in a loud voice, ‘Get the fuck away from me.’ And he said, ‘What are you talking about, lady? The subway is crowded. I can’t get away from you.’ He started talking to the other passengers: ‘What is this lady, crazy? Doesn’t she know this is rush hour?’ God, he was an asshole.” The woman looked at Jonas again and scowled while her friend murmured sympathetically. Jonas averted his gaze to his lap. After a moment, the woman resumed talking. “I said, ‘Don’t fuck with me; you’re fuckin’ feeling me up.’ ”

  Jonas felt his cheeks flush with a sudden rush of fury. He felt incensed with the man who had harassed this woman on the subway, certainly. But he was also angry with the woman in the red jacket for expressing herself so crudely in a deli so tiny that he was forced to hear every word. He glanced over at the man making the sandwiches, and this time the man returned his gaze, winked, and nodded toward the women with a leering smile. The moment reeked of vulgarity—precisely the trait that was undermining this country and had to change.

  We never destroyed a population that had not a term decreed and assigned beforehand. Neither can a people anticipate its Term, nor delay it. Sura 15: 4–5.

  Jonas’s appetite had vanished. He left the last piece of his gyro on the table and paused near the women, waiting until they looked at him before pushing his way out the door. I want you to remember me, he thought. Remember when you see me on TV.

  The street seemed a bit warmer, whether because of the sandwich in his stomach or because of his anger. He felt suddenly aimless. These were the hours in between. Nearly all the time and for a long time now—for the last ten or twelve weeks of study, at least, and certainly during the final intensive training with Masoud—he’d had no chance to feel aimless. In fact, as the weeks had passed, he’d grown increasingly focused. He’d felt remarkably clear-headed since converting to Islam, a simple ceremony carried out in a small mosque with Masoud present several days before Jonas left for Pakistan. The conversion involved stating his intention in a ritual way and then washing to symbolically rinse away his previous life. Jonas recognized that he converted primarily out of a sense of brotherhood with Masoud, who’d lost his own birth-brother. But he did love certain things about Islam—the physical act of praying, for instance, bowing together, rising, a human wave of committed energy, an act of beauty on both the micro-and the macroscale. He liked the discipline of Islam’s daily routine, and its intimacy, that there were few human intercessors between him and Allah. He very much liked that Islam offered him a path to finally make a difference, and how it seemed to anticipate his doubts, his crisis of confidence, and be ready with answers. When it came to religion, he was happy to pick and choose parts of each he encountered.

  Over the last weeks, Jonas and Masoud had discussed religion and philosophy for hours each day. Masoud repeatedly described the Ka’ba in Mecca, always dense with prayer, and together they pondered what Mohammed’s life must have been like there and what the world might be in ten years. They talked politics, too, and discussed the death of Masoud’s brother Ifraan, and the vast numbers of others killed by American bombs and rockets. Masoud explained qisas, the Islamic law that requires equality in punishment, much like the biblical mandate to take an eye for an eye. Sometimes Masoud woke Jonas at 2 or 3 in the morning to offer more instruction, and Jonas wasn’t sure whether Masoud’s goal was for him to think more or to become so sleep-deprived that he stopped thinking. In between all this, Jonas read aloud an English translation of the Qur’an, focusing especially on six suras: Baqara, Al Imran, Anfal, Tawba, Rahman, and Asr. A phrase raced through Jonas’s mind now: And some people say, “We believe in Allah and the Last Day.” Yet they are not believers. They seek to deceive Allah and the believers, while in fact they deceive not but their own souls. Sura 2: 9–10.

  Masoud talked a lot about self-deception and the falseness of what was generally considered reality. And souls—Jonas’s soul, primarily. It turned out that talking religion endlessly was not unlike smoking weed; intense, heady, exacting, and finally exhausting. The process had strengthened Jonas’s convictions. Perhaps he’d even become addicted to it in some way because now, given the final hours to be alone and settle his own mind, he felt—like a physical pressure at the base of his throat—the sharp desire for another looping dialogue with Masoud.

  He began heading uptown. Bringing awareness to each precious step, he noticed how his arms and legs moved in effortless symmetry, as if in time to a nursery rhyme. One began to run through his head: London Bridge is falling down, falling down, falling . . . Maybe he would walk until all the anger drained away and he wearied, and then he would take the subway back downtown toward the studio apartment. Or hop a taxi if he felt like it. When Masoud took Jonas’s wallet, he gave Jonas fifty bucks, like an allowance, which Jonas had in his back pocket now. At this point, why save money? Masoud had called it his emergency fund, but the irony of that almost made Jonas laugh, even at the time. The only real emergency was the one Jonas would trigger, and then miss.

  He saw a woman ahead of him pausing in front of a store, the only person he’d seen hesitating on the street this morning. She was digging in a big leather purse, and when she lifted her head, he stopped short. It was his mother. God, what horrible, clumsy timing; what would he say? He felt a mounting panic.

  But only for a second did she look like his mother, and then she glanced down the street, meeting his eyes, and she looked nothing like his mother, who was more fine-boned and favored flowing, rainbow-colored clothes, and besides, had reddish hair these days.

  Jake and Carol. Carol and Jake. When they were young, Jonas’s parents must have been something. They must have thought the very linking of their names was a prayer. They were, he imagined, so juicy once. He envisioned his mom, the bohemian potter busy at her wheel, his father, the struggling painter before the canvas, the two of them breaking from work to meet in a collision of limbs and laughter.

  Jonas had a vague childhood memory of some late-night giggling between them. He remembered the curve of his mother’s arm embracing both father and son. He remembered sitting at the wooden table with his father, eating slices of his mother’s whole-grain bread and listening to her sing while she showered in the bathroom off the kitchen. Jake and Carol. Hippies trying to grow up in their own way.

  But most of that had faded by the time he was five or six. What he remembered then was the mood in his house transitioning from steamy to sterile, which was a loss but manageable, and then to nasty, which was not. In the black period, Jonas’s Sunday mornings were punctuated by the sound of yelling and the scent of bacon, which his mother said his father cooked because she hated the smell, which may have been true, since two or three strips invariably ended up in the trashcan, uneaten. After several months, the yelling gave away to a silence that vibrated, that seemed to him briefly hopeful before it was replaced by sentences that began, “Well, your father believes . . .” or “Your mother thinks . . .” Differences Jonas hadn’t even known about, seemingly significant but in ways he couldn’t understand, emerged in discussions that each of them had with him alone. His mother, it turned out, loved to read, while his father gravitated toward theater. His father longed to see Venice, and his mother wanted to return to Paris. His mother was a committed athe
ist, his father the son of Hasidic Jews. Who had known all this mattered?

  Not long afterward, his father vanished from their Upper West Side apartment in one last spasm of yelling, and by the time Jonas was ten, his father owned a gallery on Lexington Avenue, with large paintings that seemed to have been thrown on the ivory walls in haste. The haphazard charm of the gallery soon attracted a throng of unconventional young art-lovers. The paintings were not by his father, as Jonas thought when he first saw them, but by artists his father represented in his new incarnation. “Up-and-coming” was the phrase his father used. His father said he did not want to paint anymore, and though both son and ex-wife understood this to be a lie, it was not discussed.

  The artists whose works hung in his father’s gallery were of various ages and backgrounds, but the paintings themselves held an eerie similarity. In fact, from the beginning, walking around the gallery, Jonas could boil down his father’s taste in art quite simply: whatever the frame held must have curvy lines and lots of red. Which Jonas’s mother noticed, too, and somehow interpreted as a sign of materialistic misogyny, a phrase Jonas didn’t even understand but which caused his father to explode: “Ridiculous!” and led to their last and most virulent argument. “You say idealism like it’s a swear word now,” Jonas remembered his mother shouting. After that, they stopped speaking altogether.

  During this period, the boy Jonas began to get it. You can be anything you want to be, his parents told him, but they lied. Truth was, an enormous breach existed between one’s ambitions and one’s reality. “Sellout” was a term he was still too young to know, but he began to get the general idea. His mother continued to throw pots and teach pottery classes, but it took the help of child support to keep them in their rent-controlled two-bedroom. His father occasionally showed up in society photographs, holding a glass of champagne, and his gallery remained trendy. Jonas had the sense that one was successful and the other not, but he regularly changed his mind about which parent fell into which category.