31 Hours

by Masha Hamilton

  In some way, Sonny thought, the subway was his church. A holy, sanctified place of worship. There wasn’t a single preacher; the homily was delivered by a mix of voices, the gospel sung beneath the sermon. And now the congregation was beginning to gather before these three musicians, four or five folks pausing, not too many ’cause most were rushing to day jobs, matters of the flesh, as it were, but it was fine—wherever two or more of us be gathered in His name—and even those hurrying by would on occasion throw a smile over their shoulders or pause long enough to reach into a pocket and drop a couple of coins into the hat. Remembering, for a second, Thine Amazing Grace.

  Even as the three were drumming, gospel lyrics began wandering through Sonny’s head, as though the drumming had unhinged the words from their songs and was mixing them together as randomly as subway commuters themselves are mixed—“Strongest trials, my heavenly spirit. Loudly sings saved a wretch like me. How sweet the infinite sake of the Lord, they fade and decay.”

  It occurred to Sonny that if this could be considered his church, then he might say he’d turned out to be just as devout as his momma always was. Which would have surprised her some. He’d explain his way of thinking to Ruby next time he saw her. She’d at least get a laugh out of the idea, and maybe she’d even understand what he meant, somehow.

  The musicians flew into a final frenzy as they finished up their first piece, and then Sonny knew it was time to go back to work, no more lazying, even for church. But before he could move on his way, an odd and eerie sensation hit him. A sudden breath of silence seemed to fall over the subway. It was a hush more still than snowfall but not as peaceful. More like the overpowering silence of those moments of staring at the doctor right before he tells you the bad news you already guessed. It’s spread. You’re not going to make it.

  That kind of quiet was impossible here; Sonny knew that. The subway was a place of endless trains pulling in, people calling, “Wait,” humming to themselves, yelling at each other, one activity rolling loudly into the next all the way through the morning’s wee hours and back out the other end. Despite that, it seemed to Sonny that the silence not only existed but grew like a mushroom in humidity, even as a teenage boy dropped coins into the musicians’ hat and a gray-haired woman in a fur-collared jacket stopped and bent over to cough, and a thin man with a day’s growth of beard rolled in a delivery of newspapers for the underground stand, and an officer near the turnstile stood whistling as he twirled his stick. Sonny saw it all and knew there should be sound but heard nothing, no coins, no cough, no whistling. He felt afraid, like maybe his personal time had arrived, he was in the midst of a stroke or some such. But then he smelled that rank scent that often signaled bad luck coming. A second later, the ceiling began to glitter as though with reflected sunlight, though from where, Sonny couldn’t imagine. Sonny doubted anyone else saw it.

  Cautionary signs, strong, no denying. He closed his eyes and strained, but he couldn’t focus in on the subject of the warning. Still, he had to do something. Though he’d stayed quiet in the past—why risk being picked up as drunk or crazy?—this felt too big. He approached the officer, unable to hear his own footfalls as he walked.

  “Officer,” he said, “I have hold of a very bad feeling.”

  “You all right, old man?” The officer moved his face closer to Sonny’s. “You need some help?”

  Sonny didn’t like the “old man” reference, but he felt pleased that when the officer spoke, he could hear the words. Everything else was still silent. “I feel something bad wants to happen, and I hope you keepin’ a close eye on everything,” Sonny said.

  The cop stared at him for a moment and then leaned forward, almost menacing. “What are you talking about?” he asked.

  “Police put up signs everywhere,” Sonny said. “They say, if you see something, say something.”

  “Yeah? So what did you see?”

  “Not like that,” Sonny said. “Just a feeling that won’t be leaving me alone. Something not right.”

  “A feeling.” The cop eyed Sonny closely, his eyes dense with suspicion.

  “Dangerous today, officer,” Sonny said. “I only stopping to tell you to do your job well today because something not right.” He felt enormously frustrated that he couldn’t be clearer.

  Despite that, as soon as he finished speaking, normal noise filled the gap caused by the oppressive silence. As suddenly as it had started, it ended, and Sonny could hear the musicians begin another song, and the conversation of two businessmen who half-ran by, one wearing a tall Russian-style hat, the other saying, “What he’s got to learn is . . .” What a relief. Sonny took it as a sign that approaching the officer had been the right choice. He’d done what he could do, and it would help somehow. So he nodded. “Moving on, now,” he said. “You’ll be taking care of it. You’ll be taking care of it.” And he began to walk down the stairs to the subway platform.

  When he glanced behind one more time, he saw that the cop was already talking on his walkie-talkie, Sonny’s tip already being heeded. Something would be done, and he would have been part of it, even if nobody ever knew his name. Another thing to mention to Ruby next time. Already he felt his spirits lift as he took the last couple of steps down the stairs. He boarded a D-train that seemed to hesitate on the tracks, not in a rush despite the rush hour, dawdling as though waiting for him.

  NEW YORK: 8:24 A.M.

  MECCA: 4:24 P.M.

  Vic decided to walk. Clouds scored the sky, and the iciness in the air refused to be ignored. But she didn’t feel like taking a taxi. She didn’t want anything comforting; she wanted everything raw and true. Walking briskly, she could probably make it in about twenty minutes. She hoped not to pull any muscles, not today, but she needed to hurry. If he was there in his apartment, where he was, damnit, supposed to be—a minor miracle, please, and in return she’d do something to atone for the way she’d doubted him—then she might even make it to rehearsal on time. If he didn’t answer the door, she knew where he hid an extra key, taped to the floor under the mat at his front door. She’d go inside, look around. See what he’d left behind.

  Though she’d finally really begun to believe that Jonas was missing, she couldn’t imagine what that meant exactly. Before leaving her apartment, she went online and typed “missing people” into a search engine. Looking for something almost unnameable: what to do next, how to respond. She clicked on the first website listed, a kind of bulletin board for those searching for loved ones. A twenty-four-year-old girl with hazel eyes, identifying feature a heart-and-moon tattoo on her upper right arm, last seen two years ago in Salt Lake City. A blue-eyed nineteen-year-old boy, vanished from Washington, D.C., almost three years ago. His mother’s note: “Luke, if you can, please please just phone and let me know you are okay.” A thirty-three-year-old New Orleans man with salt-and-pepper hair, last known to have been planning to attend a church service in Philadelphia, where he had been visiting. His wife was organizing a nationwide “March for the Missing.” An entire march. Vic had no idea so many average-looking people had slipped into the ether. She also hadn’t yet discovered the ways they might slip back home again. Because some of the stories must end well, surely.

  A cold breeze slapped Vic’s face. Another of those days when it felt like it would always be winter; she might as well throw away her summer dresses because she would never need them again. Jonas, she suddenly realized, was a child of summer, tall, lanky, blond like a wheat stalk. In the winter, as the city shuttered itself in, it was harder for the heart to keep beating, and especially the heart of a summer being. She would tell Jonas that. She would tell him that what he felt in winter, whatever sorrows or anguish, by spring would be gone.

  To her right, a tall building was enshrouded in black—mourning garb, she thought, though she knew it was put in place only to protect the facade until the weather improved enough to allow work to resume. She had to be at the theater, no matter what, by about 11 A.M.; the police were coming there to questio
n her. The police were coming; how unlikely that sounded in her own mind. They said it would be brief, but it still required that she offer some explanation to Alex and the rest. And later she needed to see Mara because she owed Mara an apology. And of course this was the last rehearsal day. All these pressing demands just as time felt insistently frozen. Just as it seemed to take forty minutes to put on her coat and mittens and half an hour to walk a measly block. She couldn’t remember anymore if she’d seen Jonas’s mother yesterday or the day before. The past had become unattractively stuck, like the plastic bags caught in the barren branches in the trees that lined the street. The future: impenetrable. All Vic knew was that she needed to find Jonas so history could start again.

  NEW YORK: 8:34 A.M.

  MECCA: 4:34 P.M.

  Carol abruptly rose from the couch and saw four sets of eyes shift in her direction: Jake, meeting her glance, turning away, and the three detectives, each with trained, unrevealing gazes, two of them hovering over some kind of high-powered telephone, the third at the window.

  “Bathroom,” she said, an apologetic explanation, and then slipped from the room.

  Locking the door behind her, she sank to the floor. Dear God. How had this happened? Where had she gotten off track? She’d always thought of herself as so attentive. Except for those few months when she’d lost herself in her own Lorenzo-filled life and—be honest—considered Jonas only in passing; could that brief period be to blame?

  She took a deep breath. Everything was fine; maybe everything was fine. Maybe next week Jonas would forgive her craziness and they would laugh together. This is the way mother-love works, she’d explain to him. There’s no controlling it, and there’s nothing like it, not the way a cleric loves his God or a soldier his country or a man his wife. This baby emerges, and that’s it—you’re sucked into a maelstrom so profound you never get out, and so you worry, you overreact sometimes, all you want is to protect your baby. Even if he’s shaving now. Maybe she’d suggest they take a trip together, just the two of them. Jonas liked to camp, and it had been a while since Carol had slept in a tent. Or they could fly to the Caribbean. A beach somewhere.

  What she couldn’t dismiss, though, was not just the way her jaw felt: rock-like, as if talking would be difficult, smiling an impossibility. It was also how Jake was beginning to look. Afraid, his cheeks blotchy. How could she quiet her own panic when he looked like that?

  She felt dizzy, too. She rested her forehead on the heels of both hands. Maybe if she and Jake, together, concentrated very hard. Maybe Jonas would feel that energy and show up, or call, or send a text message. She never prayed—maybe once or twice as a kid, “Now I lay me down to sleep,” but not as an adult. But she knelt on the bathroom tile and gripped the white porcelain of the sink. “Oh, my God, please,” she said. “Please please please.”

  Jonas. He taught her humility, the way a child does, and how to love godlike, selflessly. And there was more to learn. She wasn’t finished yet.

  She heard footsteps outside the door. “Ma’am? You okay?” One of the detectives.

  “Out—” Her voice broke. She took a couple of short breaths, trying to steady herself. “Out in a minute,” she said.

  “Okay, ma’am.” But the steps did not retreat.

  Was this really her life?

  She reached to pull a towel off the rack, folded it twice, put it on the floor as padding, and began touching her head repeatedly to the floor. Prostrating herself. “Jonas,” she whispered, as though calling to him. “Please, please come home. Come home now. My God. Please, Jonas, my God, please. Please.”

  She rose abruptly, then, before the words could turn into a wail of a hundred letters that she feared, once begun, would last a hundred days, a hundred years. She hung up the towel, flushed the toilet, ran water in the sink mindlessly. All the while, the word “please” repeated in a loop in her mind, vibrating through her body from her head to her weak knees to the soles of her feet, a never-ending prayer.

  NEW YORK: 8:37 A.M.

  MECCA: 4:37 P.M.

  “The son will march forth without

  permission of the father, the wife without permission

  of the husband, the debtor

  without permission of the creditor.”

  A line Jonas had memorized from The Virtues of the Jihad, written in the 1990s by a fervent Pakistani. An injunction to be buried with the dust of your struggle still clinging to your coat. He’d read the pamphlet in the training camp. There’d also been several lectures about “the Obligation,” and he and Masoud had discussed the concept. He found himself thinking of it again now as rush hour hit New York City. Whispering to himself like a mantra, the words at once necessary and almost meaningless. The obligation to look carefully, to admit to yourself what you saw, and then—no matter how difficult—to act accordingly. Shore up what needed supporting; change what was false or shallow or dangerously unkind.

  He pulled on the clean jeans. The stiff fabric slid up his slick legs. Though he needed to move quickly, still he paused for a second to put his fingers at his hips, to feel the solidness of the bones there, to acknowledge for a moment the beauty of his own human frame. Then he fastened the top button of the jeans. Still bare-chested, he stepped to the window to look out. Cold but clear. He would not see the season’s first snowfall, but while that thought would have created anguish within him a few hours ago, now he noted it simply as an observation.

  His ideas, in fact, as well as his emotions, seemed disconnected from him in some essential way. As if he were paddling a canoe and coming upon notions as randomly as rocks in the lake, steering around them so as not to be grounded. Rowing on.

  “Insofar as the fire does not enter our home,

  we feel we are safe. We pretend, even,

  not to feel the heat of the flames

  that burn the homes of our neighbors.”

  Another line from the same pamphlet.

  He ran his hands over the smoothness of his chest. He went to the coat closet, which he’d shut tight and left closed after Masoud had left. Now he opened it, reached for the vest, pulled it out on its hanger. He studied the vest a moment, resting his hand on the explosives that would soon nestle against his belly, as if he were bestowing blessings.

  Very carefully, he slipped it over his head, onto his sleek body, tugging it down gently in the front so it covered his belly button, reaching to do the same in the back. It fit perfectly.

  He hoped matters would not heal seamlessly. He wanted, after all this, nothing short of the collapse of Rome. His mother, and his father, and Vic, and his own memory deserved that much. The world deserved that much. Things had to change. If they didn’t change this time, there would simply be more bloodletting. Next year, or a decade from now. It wouldn’t stop until it stopped.

  He paddled on past that rock, allowing his thoughts to flow freely again. He went to the bathroom and stood in front of the mirror. He verified that his expression held serenity. That was the look that he wanted for the photograph he took of himself reflected in the mirror. Bald, tranquil, with vest. A prayer.

  He reached for the shirt Masoud had left him, a white, sack-like, Egyptian-style shirt. No embroidery, no embellishment. He raised his arms above his head and slipped it on. On top of that would go his coat, nothing more, though usually on a day like this one, he would wear a sweater as well. Maybe a down vest, too. Jonas ran to cold. Without those layers, he might be cold, at first, today.

  He pulled from his backpack a knitted ski cap, orange. The kind of orange meant to alert hunters to your presence in the woods during deer season. So you don’t get shot by accident. It was a new cap, as new as he was now. He’d bought it especially for today. He put it in front of the door, standing up next to the two letters. Organizing the items he wanted to bring as if he were afraid he’d forget them. The orange round and the white rectangular. He snapped a photograph.

  He knelt, carefully, on the prayer mat. He wanted to allow his mind a free moment b
efore he headed out the door, because once he headed out the door, he would have to park the canoe, rein in his wandering thoughts, remain focused. He closed his eyes, softened his shoulders, relaxed into the dense blackness of the space between his brain and his shuttered lids. His breathing, he realized, had turned shallow, probably been shallow for hours now. He tried to inhale into his belly, but his belly resisted all unnecessary movement. He would have to accept that. His eyes closed, he pictured his father. Jake was kneeling on the floor in front of Jonas, but not Jonas as he was today; Jonas as a small boy. Jonas the boy lay in bed. Jake rested his hand gently on Jonas’s stomach. “My sweet, my precious child,” Jake said, and it was so vivid that Jonas was sure he actually heard those words said aloud, in the apartment on the Avenue of the Finest. He could not, though, remember his father ever saying that to him in real life. Jake’s tone held a quality of inconsolability. Jonas the boy in the bed sat up and hugged Jake. “I love you,” Jonas said aloud to his father, to the image of his father. He realized, then, that he hadn’t written a letter to his father, and he wondered if he should remedy that, but he felt beyond writing now. Mohammed’s father, Abdullah, died six months before the prophet was born. And what had happened to Jesus’s earthly father, Joseph? He effectively vanished, as Jonas’s father had. Within these absences, the sons forgave. The sons rose to greatness. “I love you,” Jonas said aloud again.