31 Hours

by Masha Hamilton

  Jonas was starting to forget already whatever it was he had said on camera. He knew he was exhausted. He shook his head to try to clear it. “Oh, well,” he said. “Is this the first time you’ve recorded one of these things in English? And will it be shown, all of it, just as I’ve said it?” Jonas heard the tinge of doubt in his own voice.

  Masoud put a hand on Jonas’s shoulder. “Your words are very important, especially following on your deeds.” He opened the door and brought the chair back into the apartment. “Now,” he said, “I will shave your head.”

  Jonas sat in the chair in the middle of the room. The cameraman sat on the bed. From his briefcase, Masoud removed scissors, shaving cream, and a professional-looking razor. Masoud stood in front of Jonas for a moment, looking directly into his eyes, and then he hovered over him, and all Jonas heard was the metal sound of the scissors doing their work. He glanced down and saw his long, curly locks falling to the floor and his stomach suddenly felt queasy so he tightened his lips against his teeth and closed his eyes.

  It took not more than five or six minutes, and then Masoud put down the scissors. It wasn’t Jonas’s imagination; his head felt lighter, his neck longer. He opened his eyes and saw that the cameraman had brought a pot full of water and placed it on the floor. Masoud sprayed shaving cream on Jonas’s head and began shaving in long, smooth lines, cleaning the razor in the pot of water after every three strokes. He worked silently, with concentration, and his hands felt sure, even nurturing, as they moved across Jonas’s scalp. When he finished, Masoud used a towel, also brought by the cameraman, to clean the remaining cream from behind Jonas’s ears. Masoud ran his finger over the side of Jonas’s head and then sprayed more cream and shaved one more time. Then he put the towel on Jonas’s head and massaged his scalp to dry it.

  Jonas reached up to feel his head. The skin was rubbery to the touch, like the bottom of a shoe. His scalp tingled. He wanted to go look in a mirror, but that might make him seem too concerned for this world. He would wait. The cameraman was already pulling on his coat, and he said something to Masoud, seeming impatient.

  “My brother, I leave you,” Masoud said.

  “We’re done?” Time. Jonas had a sense of time, then, like a snow-flake drifting steadily toward the ground. It was so cold today, this last full day of his last winter. It was too cold for snow, even.

  “Remember, you are taking the shortest path to heaven,” Masoud said. “Do not forget me when you have risen.”

  For just a moment, Jonas imagined himself a snowflake so light that a breeze could carry it, lifting it higher into the air so that it would rise, reversing the natural order of time, before descending again.

  In the moments it took for that thought to occur, Masoud and the cameraman were at the door. They’d almost closed it behind them when Jonas called Masoud’s name. Masoud poked his face back into the room.

  “Thank you,” Jonas said. “You showed me what I could do with all my . . . my disappointment. You showed me this path. I—I’ll miss you.”

  Masoud stared at him a moment and then smiled. “May Allah, glory be upon Him, be with you,” he said. “May He give you success so that you achieve Paradise.” He closed the door behind him.

  Jonas went to the bathroom mirror. Without his hair, he felt exposed. His scalp was whiter than he would have imagined. His eyes seemed larger, his eyebrows an aberration. He looked away from his bald head. His tiredness had by now sunk into his muscles. He hadn’t wanted to be alone again—he’d almost feared it, he realized now—but maybe Masoud was right to leave him. Two weeks ago he had felt ready, almost impatient; now he recognized he still needed mental and emotional preparation.

  If not for this—this bald head, this vest waiting in the closet—he might have had five decades of vital life ahead, even more. But, given life’s arbitrariness, he might have had only five months before dying in some silly, forgettable, meaningless way. Hit by a car as he biked to Central Park, for instance. Become a crime victim and end up on a police report: M/W/21, killed by GSW to torso. So the question became how to best meet the muscular, indestructible strength of death. On his terms, he thought. His own terms.

  Still, he longed to talk to Vic. Even though she’d moved on, he longed to hear her voice and let her hear his one more time. Everything felt so near now—events from the past and those in the future—that this desire settled in his throat, strong enough to cut off his breath. He locked the door and took his cell phone from under the pillow, and this time he didn’t hesitate. He pressed the speed dial that would connect him to Vic and put the phone to his ear. He heard nothing.

  He moved to the window. He had strong reception and plenty of battery power. He punched the number again and heard nothing. He tried the speed dial for his mother, and then for his father, and then, staving off desperation, he tried to call a couple of friends he hadn’t seen in months, and then he had to admit it: they had disengaged his phone. Anticipating this temptation, they’d somehow disabled his service. They trusted him, but only to a point. And after all, they’d been right.

  He took a deep breath.

  And it was fine. It was.

  He walked toward the corner where he’d been videotaped. Without premeditation, he drew back his bare foot and kicked the chipped mug. He kicked it so hard it banged against the wall. The force of the impact painfully jammed his toes, and he yelled. If Masoud could hear and the yell drew him back to this studio apartment, Jonas would say it had been an accident. But what had been the accident—the toppling of the mug, or all of it? The entire path that had found him chatting with Masoud about religion, then sleeping in a madrassa, then target-practicing in a rocky field in Pakistan, and now on a mission? He would leave that unspecified, if Masoud were to ask, and then he would see what happened, how Masoud responded.

  Or perhaps he would say, “If there is a way, let this cup—this chipped mug—pass from me.”

  But of course Masoud did not return. Masoud was already far away.

  Could the kicking of the mug be a prayer, too?

  Jonas fetched the first-aid cream from the bathroom, picked up his camera, and pulled the chair over by the window. He sat down and patted the thick cream gingerly on the top of his injured right foot. He took a snapshot of his foot, then cupped his shaven toes with one hand and curled them around his fingers, resting his shaven chin on his shaven knee. With his left hand, he rubbed a circle on the top of his head, as if comforting himself.

  Jonas had intended to carry the first-aid cream with him in the morning. He knew, although he did not want to consider it closely, that afterward individual parts were unlikely to be very large and that even identification might be difficult. He knew that. Nevertheless, standing in the pharmacy earlier today, he’d imagined that the first-aid cream would survive intact and serve as a kind of message demonstrating his innocence and good intentions.

  Look, he carried first-aid cream.

  Truthfully Jonas couldn’t even sort out his thinking about it now. He would probably leave the cream behind, he thought. He was already a different person from the one in the pharmacy.

  He looked out the window. A full moon. And he imagined Vic, surely in her apartment on this cold Sunday evening, not that far away, maybe looking out at the moon, too. He could go to her, he just could, and he could explain very briefly. Even if she no longer desired him, they were friends. She would help. Maybe they could manage to get to his parents, and they could all leave. Go to JKF or LaGuardia, catch a flight somewhere.

  He felt the tears pressing under his eyelids. He couldn’t do that. He wouldn’t get away with it, not now; it had gone too far. And even if he did reach Vic and back away from this plan, he would hate himself in a year, hate that he’d had a chance to do something worthwhile, something he believed in, something to match what Deirdre had done, and had been too cowardly to go through with it.

  He would write Vic, he decided. It would not be as satisfying as hearing her voice, but it would eliminate
the danger of emotion clouding reason, or revealing something he shouldn’t, or caving in altogether. He would write her as part of his final preparation, and he would photograph his hand holding a pen and moving across a page, and he would write them all—not only Vic but his parents, Deirdre, two or three of his teachers, maybe even the funny ex-monk Harold—and he would mail the letters in the morning on his way to the subway. Afterward the words would arrive along with the smudges he left on the pages and the scent of his tiny last apartment on the Avenue of the Finest, all of it carried on a breeze of its own.

  And, yes, that would surely be a prayer.

  NEW YORK: 8:38 P.M.

  MECCA: 4:38 A.M.

  Vic picked up her cell phone and stared at the screen for what had to be the twentieth time, checking to see if somehow she’d missed its ring. Odd that Jonas hadn’t called back yet. Of course, that probably wouldn’t have made her nervous if Jonas’s mother hadn’t come visiting with her own set of fears. What was there to worry about? Jonas wasn’t in trouble. More likely he’d simply met someone else. Vic had opened him up, primed him for love, and—even worse—sat around fantasizing about him, and then he’d met some girl on campus who could taste his sweet sensitivity and shy smile and long, lovely body, and they were together now, lying on her narrow bed in a tiny room, a candle flickering on the dresser, her textbooks scattered on a wooden desk carved with someone else’s initials, street noises floating through the window they’d cracked open to let some cool air bathe their sweaty skin. And Jonas, naked, was saying to her, this other woman, a close version of the things he’d said to Vic, and that Vic had foolishly hoped were intended for her alone.

  Jonas was not really like that, she told herself, and yet she knew men, by their nature, were different from women. This knowledge was part of what made her so cautious. Men had this whole thing about the chase, and then the opportunity, and no matter how much they loved one woman, no matter how great she was, given a chance with another, they’d feel it sinful to say no, if they even for a second considered refusing. They deemed it their right—their duty, maybe—and the physical always took precedence over the emotional. Men thought as long as they were having sex, they couldn’t be counted among the lonely, the aging, or the pathetic. Women knew otherwise.

  Vic did not consider her viewpoint extreme. She’d drawn her conclusions by watching her mother and her father. For months on end, the two of them would leave for work in the morning, laughing over something, and he’d be home on time for dinner, and they’d wash the dishes together and go out to movies. Then her father would start mentioning a particular female author or an editor, and then he’d stop mentioning her altogether—the giveaway—and work would begin to preoccupy him more than usual, and then he would come home late with a face made rosy by joy and guilt, and it was all so clear. Vic would have known what was happening even if she hadn’t caught him on the phone, or in his office the afternoon when she’d walked in unannounced, and even if he hadn’t finally moved out. He was a good man, her father. She admired him in many ways. She was even like him, partly. This was simply the way it went and the way it always would go between men and women. Time without end.

  Mara was still too young to have figured all this out, and certainly too young to have made peace with it. Thinking of this made Vic deeply indignant, for her mother, for herself, but mostly for Mara. Vic still remembered seeing her sister for the first time in the hospital—a miracle, she’d thought, as she’d inhaled the scent of newness that still clung to the infant, overpowering the antiseptic hospital smell. Their mother had gone back to work quickly, which had increased Vic’s sense of responsibility for this infant with prematurely wise eyes. She spent long hours rocking the baby. She grew as anxious as she imagined any mother would when Mara, at eight months, became sick with a wheezing cough. Every night until Mara got better, she crept into the baby’s room and slept on the floor, and nothing her parents said could dissuade her. When she was sixteen and desperate for independence, Mara was the one who kept her tied to family.

  One night about a week after their parakeet died, Mara came to Vic. “What does that mean, to die?”

  Where the hell, thought Vic, are Mom and Dad when you need them?

  “Will it happen to me?” Mara asked.

  Vic sighed. “It’s a long way off.”

  “Will I have to leave all of you behind?”

  “Hey, we’ll probably go first. Age-wise, it’s Dad, then Mom, then me. You’re last, angel.”

  “You’ll die?” Mara’s eyes were dry but very wide.

  “Oh, damn. Crawl into bed,” Vic said. “We’ll talk about it later.”

  Only they never did. Vic picked up the phone and called what she still considered, on some level, to be her home number. Mara answered on the second ring.

  “Angel, where are you?”

  “In bed.”

  “And where’s Mom?”

  “In her room. You want me to get her?”

  “No, I’m calling for you. I’m calling to make sure you’re almost asleep,” Vic said. “You’ve got school tomorrow.”

  “I know.”

  Her voice sounded odd. Strained. “You okay?” Vic asked.

  “I’m all right.” But she didn’t sound all right.

  “Are you sad, sweetheart?” Vic asked.

  “I’m okay,” Mara said. “I’m just—I don’t know, Vic. I turned out the lights, and I felt so scared I turned them back on again.”

  “What scared you?” Vic said.

  “It felt like air was blowing past my face. A hard, hot wind. I felt it even when I went under the covers.”

  “And now?”

  “Now it’s gone.”

  “Maybe a heating vent is aimed at your bed?”

  “No,” Mara said.

  “Okay, then maybe you should sleep with a light on. How about the one over your desk?”

  “Sure.” Mara’s voice sounded very quiet and far away.

  “I wish I were there right now.”

  “I wish so, too,” said Mara.

  Vic felt deeply guilty then. She hadn’t been paying enough attention to Mara. She hadn’t done enough to help her adjust to the new home situation. “I’m coming over tomorrow for dinner,” she said. “If I possibly can, that is. If Alex doesn’t make the rehearsal go on forever. Which I don’t think he will. He’s usually pretty mellow about our last night. So I’m coming over and we’ll make enchiladas, okay?” The line was quiet. “Okay, Mara?” Vic said.

  “Okay,” Mara said

  “Good-night, baby.”

  As soon as she was off, Vic called her father’s number. “Dad,” she said.

  “Vic. I’m so glad to hear from you.” The enthusiasm in his voice felt like hype. Either someone was in the room with him—which she didn’t want to know about—or he was ridiculously hopeful that a phone call from Vic meant his life without Mom was falling into place and that the change was being accepted by his family.

  “I’m worried about Mara,” she said.

  Her father didn’t respond immediately. “Go ahead,” he said after a moment.

  “She’s having bad dreams. She isn’t eating well. Mom is too upset to feed her. She’s under a lot of stress.”

  Her father sighed. “I’m sorry, Vic.”

  “Yeah, we’re both sorry,” Vic said. “But right now she needs a little more than that. Remember, she’s only eleven. You forget that because Mara is so—well, so Mara. I know she tests off the charts and even in first grade, she was like this baby adult, but this—this thing—it’s beyond her.” And you’re responsible for it, Vic wanted to say, but she stopped herself, adding instead, “I think you should go there—tomorrow morning. Have breakfast with her. Or something. Listen to her. Find out what’s going on for yourself.”

  Again the line fell silent for a beat. “You’re right,” her father said. “I’ll go. I’ll go before school. I’ll let your mom know tonight.”

  Vic felt gratified by the
response, but she was unwilling to sound too pleased. “It can’t just be a one-shot deal, either, Dad. You can dump Mom, but you can’t dump Mara.” Normally she wouldn’t talk like that to her dad, but she knew he wouldn’t say anything.

  “I’ve only been staying away out of respect to your mother, who needs her space right now.”

  “I’m unconvinced that it’s Mom who needs the space but—” Her father started to respond, so she just spoke over him, “but it’s not my business, and I don’t even really care. I just don’t want Mara feeling bad. Beyond that, I leave it to you and Mom. Beyond that, you can call me when the shooting’s over.”

  “All right, Vic,” her father said. “Okay. I respect that.”

  Vic hung up and lay back on the couch, flexing her feet. The emptiness of her apartment seemed large and forceful, so when she heard someone come into the building, she jumped to her feet and flung open her front door, thinking it might be Jonas.

  It was her upstairs neighbor. Jackie, who worked for the MTA, was undereducated but smart and saw the funny side of everything. She invariably had comic subway stories to tell. She had a daughter in middle school and another in high school, and every Thanksgiving, the oldest girl brought Vic a homemade loaf of the most moist, tasty pumpkin bread she’d ever had.

  “Hi, Vic, how you doing?” Jackie called.

  Vic leaned against the doorframe. “Long day?”

  “The longest. And I got to be back in at seven o’clock in the morning.”

  “Anything interesting happen today?” Vic asked, because she wasn’t ready to go back into her room and lose all direct human contact again.

  “Some man asked me how to get to the Sears Tower. Can you imagine? I said, ‘Take a plane to Chicago.’ ”

  “You’re making this up.”

  “And two teenaged boys were stopped trying to jump over the turnstile directly in front of three cops. Where were their heads?”