31 Hours

by Masha Hamilton

  “I kept thinking you’d call,” she said. “Was he there?”

  “No. Can I come in?”

  She waved her hand.

  Inside the door, he pulled off his coat and dropped it on a tan leather easy chair he’d never seen before. She had the same bookcase, but otherwise, everything was different, including the artwork on the wall. One was a photograph of a woman in a green dress flying an orange kite. Another was a terracotta-colored painting of a form that looked vaguely like Buddha. He walked into the kitchen and reached up into the cabinet where they used to keep the coffee cups. They were still there. He took down a cup he recognized, off-white with a lavender flower painted on the side.

  “Can I help you to something?” she said pointedly.

  “Well, if you still keep the tea over there,” he said, pointing to the narrow, built-in cabinet, “I can probably help myself.”

  “That may be more familiarity than I want.” She opened the cabinet he’d pointed to and pulled out three boxes—Earl Gray, green, and chamomile—for him to choose from. She set them on the kitchen table. He filled his cup with water and put it in the microwave. In the corner of the countertop, she still had the metal teapot they used to take with them when they went camping. She had stuck some dried flowers in it.

  She followed his gaze but didn’t comment on the teapot. “Okay, Jake. What did you find out?”

  “There was no answer on any of his phones or at the door,” he said. “I buzzed the landlord’s apartment, and there was no answer there, either. Finally I found someone in the damn building, a girl who is a personal trainer and knows Jonas, at least a little bit. We talked for a while until she was convinced I was okay and really Jonas’s dad, and then she told me the landlord was at his brother’s house on East 8th, helping fix up an apartment. She didn’t know exactly where, but she said the corner of 8th and 63rd, so I went there and rang a few bells, God, it was cold—”

  “Jake,” she said. “Jonas. This is about Jonas.”

  “Yeah. I found the guy, finally. He didn’t want to stop what he was doing to go let me into Jonas’s apartment, but he finally agreed to send his nephew with me and—” He broke off. This was where it would start to get tricky, he knew, so he took the cup out of the microwave and added a bag of green tea.

  “Go ahead,” Carol said.

  “Let’s go sit in the living room,” Jake said.

  “Does this really have to be orchestrated?” Carol asked, but she followed him into the living room. He noticed she took the chair across from the couch so there was no chance he could sit close enough to touch her.

  “So he let me in,” he said, sitting on the couch. “And the room was neat—very neat, actually, for Jonas. The bed was made and all the clothes were put away and the dishes clean. It looked like he’d gotten ready for company—or maybe just for a visit from you.” He smiled and took a sip of tea.

  “So it didn’t look like he’d been there?”

  “The room smelled kind of stale, so I think maybe he hadn’t been there in a couple days, but that’s only a guess.” He set down his tea and leaned back. “My best bet remains that he’s found himself a new girlfriend who lives in a nicer apartment than his.”

  “I want to call the police,” Carol said.

  “Wait a minute.” Jake held up one hand. “There’s a little more. I looked around some. I searched on his desk and found a few things. First of all, paperwork from NYU. He’s not enrolled this semester, Carol. I guess he was too late filling out some forms?”

  “What? What’s he been doing all day, then? And why did he lie to me?”

  “They said he could enroll next semester, so we’ll make sure he follows through. The part that bothered me, though, Carol,” and here he paused again, “is that neither of you told me he went to Pakistan.”

  Carol shook her head. “What are you talking about?”

  “I found a ticket stub for a flight to Pakistan.”

  “What?”

  Jake felt a tightening in his chest. He’d hoped that he’d simply been left out of the loop. The thought that Jonas had gone somewhere like Pakistan without mentioning it to either parent made him distinctly uneasy.

  “In early September,” he said. “Something like the second or the third.”

  “Pakistan?” she said. “He told me he was going on a yoga retreat in Vermont before school started. He even sent me an e-mail describing the weather and the food.”

  “I don’t know, Carol.” Jake shook his head. “E-mails can come from anywhere. There’s a used airline ticket on the corner of his desk that says Jonas Meitzner flew into Islamabad and then flew out three weeks later.

  Carol stood up. She walked around the room, rubbing her arms.

  “There is also a train ticket stub. The Abaseen Railcar, it said in English. Took Jonas to Peshawar.”

  “Peshawar?”

  “It’s near the border,” Jake said. “Maybe he was touring around?”

  Carol held her hand over her mouth for a moment, as though holding in a scream, and then took it away.

  “One more thing,” Jake said. “I left the tickets, but this I brought with me.” He stood up and reached for his jacket. He pulled a piece of printer paper from the inside pocket and handed it to her. She unfolded it as she sat on the edge of the couch.

  Jake stood over her shoulder, looking at the page that had Arabic writing in the lower left-hand corner and a sketch in the center that looked like steps leading to a box, with more boxes inside. “I don’t know what the drawing is supposed to show, but isn’t this Jonas’s handwriting?” he said, pointing to the words underneath. One line read, “Islamabad. Sadabaha bus stand.” The other line, underlined twice, read, “3rd car, 3rd door, 3rd stop.”

  “We’ve got to find him,” Carol said. She was starting to hyper-ventilate.

  “Look,” Jake said. “Let’s just slow down. Maybe he just didn’t mention this to us because he thought we would worry about him going to Islamabad, or Lahore, or Peshawar, whatever. And maybe we would have if we’d known. Maybe he just didn’t want to deal with the old folks on this one. So let’s go through what you do know, what he has told you. Maybe the girlfriend is Pakistani?”

  “I think he’s confused, Jake,” Carol said. “I think he’s in some kind of trouble.”

  “What about friends? Anybody from Pakistan? Or near Pakistan?”

  Carol leaned forward. “No, not Pakistan,” she said. “But let me think, let me think.” She put one hand on her forehead. “This is what I remember. Last spring he was taking some kind of comparative religion class at some organization on the Upper West Side. SAWU—the Society for the Advancement of World Understanding. I think that’s it. Something grandiose and all-encompassing like that. And he told me that in the class, he met this really interesting man. Mohammed, or Mahmoud, or, no, that’s not it exactly. He was impressed with the guy. I think he came from some upper-class Saudi family or something. Jonas said he was very clear and moral. This is part of this stage he’s been going through. You know, where he labels everything moral or immoral, even though he says that’s, I don’t know, simplistic.” She took a deep breath, biting her thumbnail, and then shook her head. “That’s it. He liked the guy, and then he never mentioned him again, and I don’t know anything else.”

  “Okay,” Jake said. “Good. So let’s look up this Society for the Advancement of whatever on the web, and in the morning we’ll call and see if they have a student list from last spring, and we’ll try to get in touch with this Mohammed.”

  “It’s not Mohammed,” Carol said. “And are you thinking we aren’t going to be able to get in touch with Jonas, then?”

  “Look, if Jonas went to Pakistan without telling us, maybe he’s—I don’t know, Carol—maybe he’s traveling somewhere else right now?”

  Carol groaned in frustration. “Goddamn it, Jake. If he just took off without saying anything . . .”

  “Carol, every parent in the history of parenthood has h
ad to deal with something like this, some kid who just flat failed to take into account the amount of worry he was going to cause his parents. We’ve been pretty damn lucky up until now. Maybe this is our turn. And remember, he’s not fifteen. He’s twenty-one. He’s solid. He’s reasonable. He’s responsible—”

  “Not too damn responsible,” she said.

  He sighed. “That’s our boy.”

  She gave a strange, weak laugh, and her shoulders seemed to loosen just a little. “I’ve been so worried, Jake, and I didn’t know what to do and—” She broke off, waved her hand. “This one’s . . .” she said. “I can’t do this one alone.”

  He took her shoulders and pulled her close, surprised that she allowed it.

  “You want me to stay tonight?” he said. “Sleep on the couch. Just be here, with you. And tomorrow we’ll start first thing; we’ll just work this until we track him down.”

  She sighed and reached to the back of her neck, beginning to rub. He wished he could do it for her, but he knew if he tried, she’d send him right to the door. “You know,” she said after a minute, and then she hesitated before going on. “You know, that might be nice, Jake.”

  He smiled. “You got an extra toothbrush?” he asked. “Or should I go to the corner to pick one up?”

  NEW YORK: 7:18 P.M.

  MECCA: 3:18 A.M.

  By the time he heard tapping at his door, Jonas was eating Saltines, carelessly letting the golden crumbs scatter on his chest as he reviewed what he’d already accomplished.

  Trim and file nails, toes and fingers both.

  Now only the narrowest moon-sliver of ivory rose above the pink core of his nails married to his flesh. He photographed his trimmed feet against the red chenille bedspread and unexpectedly realized he had attractive feet. He wasn’t sure he’d ever paid full attention to them before. He wondered what it might have been like to have been a foot model, if he—or his feet—would have had what it took. The right look. He wondered if such a job actually existed, where one simply had to show up and allow one’s feet to be photographed on golden beaches or dipping into pools of water or resting on rose-colored petals ripped from flowers. He imagined the photographs as part of advertisements for hotels or spas or airlines. He wondered if America had become so distorted that a foot model might be paid thousands for a day’s work while a middle school teacher took a second job driving taxis at night to feed his children. Then he decided not to muddy his thoughts with political analysis or even rants—he’d already done that, and he’d already made his decision. Instead he would simply appreciate his shapely feet. He wondered how he had gotten them. Not from his mother—he remembered unattractive bunions and a crooked third toe on the right foot. He couldn’t recall his father’s feet with any specificity.

  Shave hair around genitals.

  He’d been putting that off for as long as he could, initially justifying the delay by the need for fresh razors. Even after buying the extra razors, though, he’d waited. This, after all, would be different from shaving the rest of his body. Finally he forced himself into the bathroom, where he trimmed the hair close, used a washcloth to warm the skin, and then applied the shaving cream. He drew a deep breath before swiping carefully in the direction that his hair grew. It took four runs over the same vulnerable territory before a pale highway of flesh made its way through his second chakra of sensuality and pleasure. He kept going, feeling as if he were shaving off chapters of his life, traveling backward in time, out of reach of Vic, out of reach of adulthood, even. Back to some imagined boyhood when his view of the world was shaped solely by others. A burial: that was what it felt like. A farewell to Jonas the young man, to what he’d already experienced, and what he never would.

  Afterward, he took his cell phone from under his bed pillow, a longing to call Vic moving through his body. He cupped the phone in his hand as though holding it could stave off his desire. The phone was contraband. He wasn’t supposed to have it. He was permitted contact with no one in these remaining hours. He needed to purify and pray and concentrate, not be tempted by distractions from the very world he hoped to sanitize through his actions.

  Still, there was Vic. How could he but be distracted by her? It had been not quite three months since it had begun between them on Long Horn Lake, but the attraction had been building in him for two years, maybe more. In late August, as summer began to slip away and just a couple of weeks before he went to Pakistan, he and Vic went together to the Adirondacks. He was becoming immersed in Islam, but not so much that he would sacrifice his friendship with Vic. Still, he knew better than to mention to Masoud that they were going camping together. That would be haram, forbidden.

  Long Horn was framed by skyscraper pines and compact honey maples turning golden before their time, and they found a spot where they could tamp down the wispy grass, pitch a tent, and hear the water speak. They had a map; in the morning, they planned to hike a sevenmile trail up through the woods to a six-foot waterfall and a flat-topped rock that jutted from the earth, a type of rock locals called a glacial retort. They joked about its name and recalled, still laughing, glacial retorts they had given or received.

  They’d gone camping together before, over the years. Jonas, considering it as he packed for the trip, decided it was strange that they’d managed to share a tent six or eight times without a bit of sexual tension rearing its head. Then he admitted to himself that wasn’t quite true. He’d felt sexual tension, but he’d pushed it away, reminding himself that Vic was like a sister. Now, suddenly, his repressed desires bobbed to the surface. Close as he and Vic were after their years of friendship, he wanted more intimacy. She was smart and driven in all the right ways. And beautiful. And lithe. Though he vowed not to act upon his cravings, he credited Masoud for helping him identify the way Vic made him feel. Clarity in the spiritual sphere, it seemed, led to clarity in the earthly realm as well.

  Every time they camped, Vic awoke first in the morning and started right up, stoking the fire, making tea, calling to Jonas, “Up, up, you can sleep when you’re dead, boy.” Vic always had high energy, but the wilderness seemed to give her even more. On that late-August trip, however, a rain no one had forecast began in the night. In the morning, when she poked her head out of the tent, he said, half-asleep, “C’mon, Vic. It’s way too wet out there.”

  She flung herself back, clearly disappointed. “What are we going to do, then?” That question hung in the air for a moment, taunting them. Still wordless, they both reached out, as if into air, as if any contact would be a mistake, and then they touched one another, nothing more than a graze, and something was unleashed.

  It rained for four more precious hours. When it stopped, the sky turned a firm blue, its color absorbed by the lake, and the pine needles glistened. The place where they’d pitched the tent looked changed, magical.

  Afterward Jonas wondered if it had only been a particular mood that had seized Vic, trapped as she was in a tent during a storm. He worried the question for a few days and then he asked. Perhaps she regretted it? Perhaps it was too trivial to even regret? “God, Jonas,” she said. And she pressed her body close to his, as close as she could get, and leaned her head away, arching her back but still watching him, and then she took his head in her hands and pulled him toward her and he felt like part of a dance she was choreographing on the spot except that she shuddered slightly, involuntarily, and she said it again, only a little slower, a little softer. “God. Jonas.”

  By now, though, at least ten days had gone by since Vic had called, and he knew what that meant. He didn’t blame her. He was a pain. Moody and intense. Sometimes worry gave him stomachaches. Sometimes his thoughts raced so fast he could barely hang on to them.

  Sitting in the apartment on the Avenue of the Finest, Jonas wished for and imagined three or four different versions of a conversation he longed to have with her before tomorrow. He pictured himself saying, “Thank you, Vic. I love you, Vic. I love your laugh, and I love the way you touch your upper lip
with your tongue sometimes, and how you pull on your ear when you are thinking. I love the time we shared, even though you ended it. So thank you.” He’d never spoken like that to her before, with all walls knocked down, but he thought he would like to. If he called, he wondered whether she might laugh at his speech and say, “Please come spend one last night with me.” He would take that night, if he could. Then he thought about her show, which opened in a couple of days twenty-three blocks from where he now sat, and then he didn’t want to think about her anymore.

  Still holding the cell phone, he considered calling his mother. He’d been keeping his distance lately, both because Masoud kept him busy and because Masoud insisted Jonas curb ties with his “old life.” Jonas missed his mother’s laugh, the way she always smelled like earth from the pots she threw. His mother had rapid-fire intuitions when it came to Jonas, though. He suspected just the tone of his voice would worry her, and he didn’t want that. She’d probably trace the call and show up at the doorstep of this odd little apartment on the Avenue of the Finest—a thought that made him smile. Until fourth grade, he’d believed that after his mother dropped him off at school, she spent the hours lingering outside, occasionally peeking in the window, waiting for the dismissal bell.

  He supposed all kids had trouble imagining their parents’ lives unbound from their own. Jonas’s mother made it particularly hard because she was so centered on him. She made and sold ceramic dishes and mugs and threw those curvy pots of brilliant colors and irregularly shaped openings that were on occasion displayed in art shows. She was the artist, actually, while not a part of the art scene that included Jonas’s father. She did her pottery work at night, after Jonas slept, in a designated “mud room” off the kitchen. For years while he was in school, she held down a job keeping books for a chiropractor in his office four blocks from their home. She never much liked it, but the hours were flexible; she always had time for her son. After he moved out to start college, she quit. Still, Jonas’s room remained, neater than when he’d lived there but otherwise the same, as if waiting for his return. His mother, a lively, vivid woman still, clearly needed to rework the threads of her life and didn’t know how. Jonas suspected that desire for something new and fuller lay buried deep within her like an unborn seed. He felt convinced she wouldn’t pursue this desire until he was gone in a more definitive way. As painful as it would be for her, he predicted his absence would force her to renew her own life. The maturity of that thought cheered him in a self-congratulatory way.