31 Hours

by Masha Hamilton

  Jonas thought, then, of the dialogue group he’d once attended: New Yorkers gathered to share near-death experiences. A friend had invited him, a man in one of his meditation classes. The group met in an apartment on the Upper East Side, maybe seventy people crowded into two rooms, and everyone, it turned out, wanted to talk. The experiences, recited one after the other, were remarkably similar and by now wildly familiar: the sensation of floating above one’s body, moving down a tunnel toward light, being bathed in bliss, experiencing a panoramic life review. Perhaps by now, Jonas thought, everyone had heard of these sensations so often that they were programmed to remember those stories as their own.

  A scientist who’d had his own near-death moments when he’d fallen down a mountainside in the Italian Alps was among those gathered, and someone in the group asked him if there might be a physical explanation for the shared near-death phenomena. Jonas leaned forward in his seat as the man spoke, using expressions like “neuro-physiological factors” and “stimulation of the temporal lobe.” He talked of the possibility that certain chemicals bounced off a part of the brain and activated neurons, creating the commonly reported near-death sensations. The scientist finished by saying that research remained inconclusive, but he personally thought it most likely that love and light were simply typical elements encountered on the path between what he called, genially and neutrally, “here and there.”

  Here and there. Love and light. Jonas tried to sedate himself with those thoughts. He lay back on the red bedspread and encouraged his shoulders to unclench. He tried to drain his mind of nostalgia. He tried to imagine himself as light and love, sacred, devoted, exploding.

  NEW YORK: 6:46 A.M.

  MECCA: 2:46 P.M.

  Jake awoke to the sound of Carol’s calm, steady voice seeping from the kitchen, where she was speaking on the telephone. It filled him with optimism: they would find Jonas today; they would resolve this; it would, in the end, be understood as a typical parenting trial. Carol had closed the door to the living room, so it was a muted version of her words and intonations that slipped through the crack between the door and the wall, falling into his ears. Hearing that, waking up in her presence—well, more or less in her presence—and feeling more secure about Jonas, he found himself swallowed by a wave of nostalgia and longing.

  Sometimes Jake still felt himself to be a teenager in his cravings. He wasn’t proud of this; he simply observed it. He still had the teenager’s desire to dive headlong into a rush of reckless intimacy that would, each time, surprise him with its inventions and awe him by its intensity. He loved the vibrations that radiated from his center out to his fingertips, and he loved the sense that something was being revealed to him, another curtain pulled back for this boy from Ohio who as a child had been so loved, yes, and so sheltered.

  But he was changing. Here he was, after all, fifty-two. So, finally. He could almost hear Carol, laughter floating beneath her words. You’re growing up, old man.

  Yes, okay, I see my own mortality now. I can start to see the arc of my own life. But, old man? I still want romance at the edge of a lake, or with candles lit late when it feels like no one else in the world is awake.

  What he wanted was probably impossible: freshness and imagination and exhilaration, but now he wanted it coupled with reliability and serenity. If any of his relationships had the possibility of embodying it, it was the one with Carol, except, of course, that relationship had long gone cold. Until now.

  The kitchen, he realized, had fallen silent. She was off the telephone. So he rose, ran his fingers through his hair, and pushed open the door that separated them. She sat at the kitchen table, her head in her hands. A pen and paper lay next to her; she’d been doodling. She’d always doodled when she was worried. Even now, he remembered those kinds of details about Carol.

  He squeezed her shoulder once, not wanting to overstep the boundary that she’d built between them, that he knew he’d caused her to build. “It’s going to be okay. You want a cup of coffee?” he asked. She didn’t answer, so he went to the cabinet and opened the door that held the can of coffee.

  “Jake.”

  He turned to her. She’d raised her head now. “Everything,” she said. Her hands were both lying palm-down on the table, fingers spread. “Everything gets lost so easily.” Her eyes were wide and very silent. Her body, too, was completely motionless, but the muscles in her arms looked strained, as though keeping them immobile required enormous effort.

  “What?”

  “And there’s too much to understand. The world’s too big, and the Internet makes it seem like we’re connected, but we aren’t really. We can’t possibly understand.”

  “Carol,” he said, “what are you talking about?”

  “I have something to tell you. Last night, before you got here, I called the police.”

  Jake felt a rush of irritation that surprised him with its force. Must be he still had an ingrained suspicion of cops, stemming from nothing more than his pot-smoking days. The days when cops, even those his age, had seemed like the staid, corrupt establishment. Carol responded to the objections written on his face before he could speak.

  “I had to,” she said. “I’m scared, Jake, and I couldn’t hold myself back any longer. I told them it might be premature. They put me on with this detective, very nice, who sounded soothing and said to call him again if Jonas didn’t show up in twenty-four hours.”

  Jake nodded. “Our original plan anyway.” He poured a potful of water into the coffeemaker.

  “But after you told me about the airline ticket, I called back again.”

  “Last night?”

  She nodded. “The detective wasn’t there anymore. So I told the officer who answered about Jonas and Pakistan, and I gave him the detective’s name, and they put me on hold for five minutes and then they patched me through to the guy’s cell phone or his home or something, and I told him.”

  Jake turned to the counter and scooped some coffee grains into a filter, aware of his sense of optimism draining away, trying to resist its loss. “We still need to give it today, Carol,” he said.

  “He just called back,” Carol said.

  Jake flipped on the coffeemaker. He sat down across from Carol.

  “It turns out the man’s name . . .”

  “What man?”

  “Jonas’s friend from the class. His name is Masoud . . .” She glanced at a paper resting under her elbow. “Masoud al-Zufak. Or close enough. Anyway, the name means something to them. The detective didn’t say, exactly, but they’re interested in the guy; that much is clear.”

  “Hell, they’re interested in anyone with an Arab-sounding name,” Jake said. “That doesn’t convict him of anything.”

  “The detective listed these characteristics . . .” She trailed off.

  “Characteristics?”

  “Profile, he said, of a homegrown terrorist.”

  “What? They are already accusing this guy Masoud—”

  “Not Masoud, Jake,” she said. “Jonas.”

  “What?”

  “Or at least, people who get talked into things, which is what he thinks Jonas is. He was describing the personality type. Often naive, he said. From a liberal background.”

  “Oh, yeah. It’s so fucking dangerous to be liberal.”

  “Just listen. Seeking to fill a void. Distressed or angry about something they believe to be unjust.”

  “What the hell are you getting at?”

  “The detective is getting a warrant, Jake. He wanted to let me know. He’s going to search Jonas’s apartment. This morning.”

  “Jesus. This isn’t making sense.”

  “I know. I know, it’s like a foreign language, but—you remember that Christmas Eve, years ago, when I was robbed?”

  He remembered. It had been after midnight, and she’d headed home from a friend’s apartment. They had so little money in those days, certainly not enough for a taxi, and yet it didn’t matter. They were two bohemians, living t
heir way. She took the bus and walked down the dark street to their apartment. She was jumped. Two guys and a girl. They wanted cash, and she didn’t have any. She was saved by a neighbor who’d just returned from a party and came rushing out his front door when he heard her scream. He shouted, and the muggers ran. The neighbor walked her home. And when she arrived and told Jake, he felt his own knees weaken.

  “My God, I could have lost you,” he’d said, pulling her into his arms.

  It was as if all the moments he’d unconsciously avoided thinking about were flooding him, an abundance of memories, one leading to another and another.

  “Yes, I remember,” he said now.

  “The cops were barely attentive,” she said, her words indicating that she wasn’t remembering the same moments Jake did. “Another mugging. Big deal. That was their attitude.”

  “Times are different,” Jake said, doubting himself that the cliché applied when it came to the police.

  “They’ve jumped all over this, Jake. They aren’t treating it like some case of a mom overreacting. They want a list of Jonas’s friends. They want to question you. This morning. They asked to come here. Something’s happening.”

  Jake got up. He poured them both cups of coffee, adding a splash of milk to hers. Then he hit his fist on the counter, surprised by his own ferocity. “Goddamn it, Carol. Jonas is not a fucking terrorist. And I don’t want to talk to anyone who thinks he is.”

  “They’re on their way.”

  “I thought we were going to go back to his apartment to look for clues. Try to locate friends we didn’t know about.”

  “They’re doing that.”

  “What if,” he said, and let those two words sit there for a moment. “What if my girlfriend theory is right or Jonas has just been busy or even if he’s in the throes of some late-adolescent rebellion and doesn’t want to talk with us?”

  “I know.” She took a sip of her coffee. “It’s so hard to know your kids at this age. He’ll be so pissed at me if this is all getting out of hand.” She reached out and touched his arm. “Let it be getting out of hand. But that detective’s response,” she pulled back, “it scares me more than anything else.”

  Jake, too, felt long tendrils of fear in his stomach, like a foot of thick rope being pulled from his throat through his chest and stomach, down toward his feet. He sat down across from her and took a deep breath. “If you’re right, and something is very wrong, do we want to trust the cops to handle it? I don’t know, Carol. This is our son. Shouldn’t we talk to his friends? Shouldn’t we call this center where he took the class and see if we can find out anything more instead of sitting here answering questions while cops write down stuff we already know?”

  “Oh, Jake.” Carol pressed her hand against her mouth as if holding back words for a moment, then made a fist. “I don’t know what to do.” Her eyes became slightly glazed. “He’s the best of both of us. He learns while he sleeps; we used to tell him that, remember? And he’s passionate and moral and there’s this quiet streak that runs through him and that always calmed me. If he thinks he’s doing the right thing, nothing can stop him. But he also gets depressed. He feels like something’s missing, like the world is immoral and only he sees it.” Carol met Jake’s eyes. “All I know is I keep getting the feeling Jonas is in trouble. He’s in trouble and we need to reach him, and we need all the help we can get.”

  Jake stared into his cup and then drank the last of the coffee in it. “Okay,” he said, and he rose from the table and squeezed her shoulder. “Okay, I’ll talk to the goddamn cops.”

  “Good,” she said as they heard the buzzer. “Because here they are.”

  NEW YORK: 7:07 A.M.

  MECCA: 3:07 P.M.

  Mara overslept. She overslept badly, and she knew it the moment she awoke. She didn’t stop to decipher what finally made her stir, whether external clatter like a car alarm or some shudder from within. She just jumped out of bed with her eyes barely open, kicked over the bell she’d set on the floor the night before, glanced at the clock to confirm her fears, tugged on a pair of pants, tucked in her nightshirt, and pulled a sweatshirt over her head. She slipped on her boots without socks, grabbed her coat, stuck the chosen rocks in her pocket, started out of the room, remembered the MetroCard on the floor, and returned to get it. She rushed past her mother’s door—closed, as usual.

  Outside the apartment, Aaron was slumped down on the floor, leaning against the wall, his head resting on his backpack. He wore his coat, unzipped. As she stepped into the hallway, he opened his eyes and began to rise.

  “I’m so sorry,” Mara whispered because she didn’t want to wake her mom, and then she closed the door as quietly as she could, turning the handle first. “Let’s go.”

  She led the way to the elevator, and Aaron followed. He followed as she walked out the building, down the street, and around the corner to the subway station. Before she reached the stairs, she slowed and turned to talk to Aaron, but she weighed too little to anchor herself and felt herself being gently carried forward through the narrowing of foot traffic at the subway entrance, her toes grazing the ground, making contact and then losing it the way they might if she were bobbing in a swimming pool. She moved in this fashion until she reached the foot of the stairs, and then she managed to expel herself from the pre-rush-hour flow of work-bound commuters and press her back against the wall. There she waited. Aaron saw her and steered himself in her direction. She took his hand. They held hands until they got to the turnstile, and then they separated to slide their cards separately through the machine.

  “This way,” Aaron said, heading toward the downtown B-train, and then he cocked his head and said, “One’s coming,” so they rushed down the stairs and arrived just in time to get on the B, the recorded admonition, “Stand clear of the closing doors,” ringing out behind them. Standing room only. They found a place in the corner.

  “Were you waiting there since six?” Mara asked as the subway screeched to a start.

  Aaron nodded.

  “You didn’t think I’d changed my mind?”

  Aaron looked surprised. “No. I thought you’d overslept.”

  “And you are still okay with this?”

  He nodded again.

  A woman was smiling at them. A man sitting next to her rose and spoke to Mara. “Would you like my seat?”

  Mara shook her head, but Aaron said, “Sit,” and the man added, “Please,” so Mara did. She scooted over so Aaron could squeeze in next to her. They didn’t talk for a few stops. It was still early, and everyone in the car was quiet. A few people read magazines or listened to music on earphones. No one spoke. Then Aaron leaned close to Mara. “Is your dad still going to be there?” he asked quietly. “For sure?”

  This was the question that Mara had been refusing to consider. Her father’s office hours had never been absolute. Sometimes, in the past, he’d left the house at 7 o’clock in the morning, sometimes he’d stayed home until 2 or 3 in the afternoon, editing in the apartment and then going to the office. But she didn’t want to share her uncertainty with Aaron. She needed his confidence in her.

  “He’ll be there,” she said. “I’ll call as soon as we’re in the neighborhood.”

  The subway emerged aboveground to carry them over the Manhattan Bridge. Aaron stood to look out the window, and Mara joined him. She’d never taken the B this far before. Out the window, she saw graffiti scrawled on the roof of Chinatown buildings, tags in spray paint like “Cake87” and “Skidman.” Also, a boat trail like a ribbon on the Hudson River, and the silver skyline of Manhattan, looking shiny and fresh. It seemed much prettier from a distance than it did up close, and she wondered briefly if that might be how it was with everything.

  They changed at the Pacific/Atlantic stop. Mara stayed close to Aaron as they went down one set of stairs and up another to catch the next train. The number 4 was less crowded. A panhandler started at one end—she could hear him giving his spiel: “If you ain’t got it, I unde
rstand, ’cause I ain’t got it. But if you can spare . . .” He shuffled through the car. He paused in front of Mara, a look on his face that was puzzled and pained at once. She thought he must be waiting for her to give him some money, so she dug in her coat pocket, searching a little helplessly for change, but he just shook his head, said, “God bless, child,” and, after a moment, walked on.

  They got off at Utica, the train’s last stop. Aboveground, it felt colder than Manhattan to Mara, though that seemed unlikely. At the corner, a stall selling homemade Caribbean-style chicken was already doing business. Next door, a beauty-salon window was decorated with three pictures of black women, each with different hairstyles, that looked like they had been torn from magazines and taped up from the inside. The streets were busy, but Mara did not see any children. Some passersby eyed Mara and Aaron with open curiosity. Mara felt conspicuous, and, looking at Aaron, she could see he did, too.

  Aaron reached into his pocket, pulling out a map that he’d printed out from the computer. “This way,” he said. They walked two blocks in one direction and three in another. At the corner, he pointed to the street sign.

  “St. Johns and Kingston,” she said, grinning at him. “What time is it?”

  Aaron wore a wrist-watch, something else that set him apart from Mara’s other classmates. “A little after eight.”

  She wanted to get out of the wind to call her father. “C’mon.” She took Aaron’s hand and pulled him into a small deli.

  The man behind the counter was selling a pack of cigarettes to a customer, but he paused as they entered. “You kids need some help?”