Music for Love or War

by Martyn Burke

  Wearing what looked like a long gray shirt that went almost to his knees, their father leaned back on one of the heavy, dark-red pillows that were scattered around the room and watched Danny as he and Omar talked. Omar was reduced to nervous attempts to fill the silences that hung in the room, unlike Ahmed, who seemed content to act bored, waiting for it all to be over.

  Danny felt their father’s stare as if it were a beam of heat, the kind they had gotten as kids by holding a magnifying glass at a precise angle that caused a point of light to burn a hole in a piece of paper. Once he attempted to return the look but quickly turned back to Omar. There was something about the man that made both him and Omar feel the need to talk even when they didn’t want to.

  But what most got Danny’s attention were the doors in the apartment. They were all closed as if compartments of life differed from room to room and had to be kept apart at peril of contamination. From beyond the door behind Omar’s father, he could hear female voices, one of them being Ariana’s. While he was listening to Omar nervously telling his father how he and Danny went to the same school, he strained to hear what Ariana was saying. All he could make out were muffled words in a language he could not understand—words that ceased instantly when their father leaned back and rapped his knuckles on the door.

  Ariana appeared almost immediately. Danny started to make some kind of greeting, but it evaporated within him. She was instantly different, remote, and unapproachable, dressed in a long black robe, her head tightly encased in a silk shawl as she stooped before her father with a tray filled with glasses of Pepsi and 7UP. Danny was aware of that one wandering eye of Ahmed’s. It kept drifting back to focus on him, as if he was checking for reactions. Danny sat back on the big cushion and tried not to pay too much attention to Ariana. Her father reached for a glass without looking at her. She then turned to Danny, staring down at the floor while she held out the tray. He took a glass from it, murmured a thank you, and no longer cared if Ahmed was watching him. A woman, Ariana’s mother, Danny assumed, came from behind the same closed door with a tray of almonds and candy. She had a face that was unlined yet tired, with no makeup. She wore the same encasing clothing and never looked at him. She put the tray in the center of the room and hurried back into the void beyond the door. Neither Ariana nor her mother had spoken a word. To Danny, as he watched the back of Ariana’s shroud erased by the swinging door, they were like ghosts.

  “So. You save my son,” said Omar’s father in a heavily accented, raspy voice. “This is good.” It was the first full sentence he had directed at Danny. Everything else had been nods, word fragments, and those impaling stares. Danny wasn’t sure how to respond.

  “Omar is my friend,” he said, settling on something that sounded safe. But Omar’s father seemed first puzzled, then vaguely irritated. He looked over to Omar, who acted as if he hadn’t heard anything.

  “Friend.” His father said it as if he was weighing the options. Omar looked straight ahead. “Where do you pray?” his father asked, his face pointing to the floor, but his eyes blazing upward so he was almost looking through his eyebrows.

  It was the first time anyone had ever asked Danny such a question. He had no idea how to answer.

  “I sort of say thank you a lot.”

  “Thank you?”

  “Yeah. Like things are going good so I really should look on the bright side.”

  “Bright side? Bright side is a God?”

  Danny was completely confused. No one else he knew talked of God except at weddings or funerals. “I’m sorry sir, I don’t understand.” He saw Omar looking hard at the wall.

  “Omar pray five times a day.”

  Danny was even more uncertain. This talk of praying was not anything anyone he knew ever did—other than Say your prayers, the standard catch phrase they all used when something bad was about to happen, like when exam question papers were being handed out. No one Danny knew ever prayed. “Five times?” was all he could think of.

  “Every day.” Omar’s father turned to his son, who nodded quickly without looking at Danny.

  “Wow.”

  “Why this ‘wow’?”

  Danny felt sweat trickling down his back. All he wanted to do was get away from this stare that he was hoisted on—this strangely grinning but irritated look. Danny thought of the time his cat playfully pawed a trapped mouse back and forth before annihilating it. The stare was drilling holes in him. “I guess that’s a lot. Five times a day.”

  “How much do you pray?”

  “Um . . .” Danny shrugged. He didn’t know what else to do.

  “You do not. I know.” Omar’s father was almost smiling. “We know no one of you pray. Only us. Good for us. Bad for you.”

  That smile didn’t change—but suddenly it became different in Danny’s mind. And at the time he wasn’t sure what made it different. It was only later that he realized that it was the combative version of Ariana’s smile, showering you with mixed messages and irony beneath those arched and formidable eyebrows.

  “Have more candy,” said Omar’s father.

  • • •

  There’s a night that Danny remembers from that time, one of those nights he talks about up in the mountains when he’s trying to work through why it all happened the way it did. It’s the night Omar was blowing smoke on Bloor Street, practically pawing the ground like rutting season had begun and announcing he was going to get laid that night—“Just you watch.” All of which is probably why Danny keeps talking about some of those nights so much. Because there just ain’t any sane way to really think your way through them and come to an explanation that makes sense. At least not the way we normally think things make sense.

  They were standing there on the edge of High Park waiting for fat Freddie, who had a car. Freddie was the only one whose parents let him use their car on Friday nights, so automatically he became cool. In a kind of honorary way.

  “But your father said you—”

  “Fuck him,” said Omar.

  “Your old man’s a pretty tough guy. I thought you were worried about him finding out.”

  “He doesn’t know a goddamn thing about what I do,” said Omar, hoping his father wasn’t around to hear him. “He spends all his time away, back in Miram Shah and places like that. And Afghanistan. Shit holes. Mud. Everything’s mud. The streets, the walls, everything. Made of dried mud, camel shit, and god knows what else. And then he comes back and it’s nothing but pray-till-you’re-a-fucking-zombie, man. We’re like fucking prisoners. You can’t listen to music. And TV? Forget that. He saw me watching Friends, where Ross gets it on with Rachel, and he ripped the cord right out of the wall, yelling about living among prostitutes. It’s like a fucking monastery in there, I’m tellin’ you.”

  “Yeah. The other night?” said Danny. “When I was there? I thought he was going to make me pray before he let me out of there.” Omar nodded and said nothing.

  Later that night, Omar turned to Danny. “Do you like my sister?” The sucker punch of questions, coming from the blind side. Not asked with any ill will or menace. But somehow feeling like being asked to hold a grenade. Nothing scary about it unless you handled it wrong.

  “Your sister?” Said with the requisite yuck factor and a shrug. “She’s nice.”

  “Aw, c’mon, man. Nice? That’s it? Nice?”

  Stay away do not touch move on. Danny was seeing this—the two of them just talking—like it was an old video game with instructions flashing. Everything was lit up. “Yeah. She is.” Omar looked at him sideways and shook his head.

  “Hey. Back when you went through the ice, why didn’t you want me to hold your sister’s ankles so she could save you?”

  “I was different then.”

  “C’mon. You were drowning.”

  “Are you deaf? I’d just come over here then, okay? That was back when I was like my fucking brother, Ahmed.”

  “You’re deaf, you moron. You almost drowned because of that.”

 
“You like her, don’t you?”

  Topic change! Danny scrambled through his thoughts, wanting to get away from anything remotely connected to Ariana. “Fuck you, Omar. You always do this.” He knuckle-punched Omar on the back of the arm, and they jostled each other and laughed as horns honked on the street, and they ran for fat Freddie’s car, which for some reason had stopped in the passing lane.

  They jumped into the big SUV, yelling at Freddie that he was dumb for holding up two lanes of traffic.

  “Oh yeah?” said Freddie. “If I’m so dumb then how come I got us a Bonus Night?” Then he made the tires screech until the end of the block as Danny and Omar laughed and yelled at him to slow down.

  Bonus Nights were the main reason fat Freddie was so popular. It meant not only having one of his parents’ cars—it meant they got the whole house as well. Freddie lived in one of the big houses in the little hills on the other side of Grenadier Pond. At least once every month or two, Freddie’s parents flew to New York for the weekend, leaving him food in the refrigerator and a warning not to throw any parties while they were gone. Freddie had his bored Oh yeah right. Like I’m going to have a party or anything routine down to an art form.

  Omar lived for Bonus Nights. Four days after the first one, he announced that the mere fact Freddie hadn’t been slapped stupid meant that his father didn’t keep track of the condom stash in the sock drawer. Or the porn collection. In English class, Omar held up Saturday Night Beaver when Ms. Kershaw’s back was turned, grinning and dangling the DVD just beyond Freddie’s lunging grasps from the next row of desks.

  At Freddie’s place, Omar went right through the living room and into a little den as if he lived there, opening up a wood-paneled compartment that held two long rows of DVDs and videotapes. “Classics,” Omar announced, pulling out a handful. “Vintage porn. Behind the Green Door, Deep Throat—”

  “Jesus,” said Freddie. “I didn’t even know it was there . . .” His voice trailed off as he pulled out DVDs and stared at their covers. “Wow. Lookit those.”

  “How do you know so much about this stuff?” Danny asked.

  “Like you don’t? Time for your education, my man.” Omar slapped him on the back.

  And even now, Danny talks of how the Omar he pulled out of the ice was not the same Omar who gave him that slap on the back, the kind of hearty slap that frat boys strive to master, the kind men of power use to establish superiority, the kind Danny used to think only Americans could really pull off. The old Omar, the Omar who was his father’s son, would never have attempted it. But except inside their apartment when his father was home, there was no old Omar. There was only the new Omar, who had his hair cut to look like George Clooney’s, the Omar who had the gorgeous Bonnie Frangilatta threatening any other girl who stopped at his locker, the Omar who led paintball raids across the woods in High Park.

  The Omar who told Danny he could talk to him more like a brother than to Ahmed. Geeky, scary Ahmed, who prayed to Allah enough to deserve a new eye.

  On the next Bonus Night, Omar talked Freddie into inviting two of Bonnie’s girlfriends over to his house. Freddie was becoming obsessed with being found out by his parents, but he gave in when Omar told him that he’d gotten Bonnie to invite Sue Chapman, whose name Freddie called out whenever he watched porn. Freddie had always felt like a worm in Sue Chapman’s presence. In three school years, she’d never even looked at him before—and now she was actually coming over to his house! He watched Porn-ifornia, his favorite DVD, and imagined himself and Sue Chapman out there under the palm trees, fucking their brains out. He cleaned up his bedroom for the first time since summer, hid the Penthouses, and spent hours in the sauna for his sure-fire way to lose twenty-five pounds in three days. He just knew he’d be buff at the end of those three days.

  Danny had fantasized even more than Freddie—ever since the Monday before the first Bonus Night, when Omar had come to school with a grin. He hardly ever smiled unless someone made him laugh, but now it was as if he had a joyous secret he couldn’t wait to share. “He’s gone. My old man. Gone,” he said finally. “For maybe six m-m-months. First he goes to Tucson. Then Pakistan.”

  Danny decided that if Omar was free, then Ariana would be free too. Or freer.

  “No way,” she said when Danny told her of his plan. “Are you crazy?” She spun around, walking away into the pedestrians on Bloor Street. She turned back, irritated that he hadn’t moved, and came hurrying back, in flight.

  At least that’s the way Danny remembers it: with her hair being almost like shiny, black wings, falling and rising around her head, in a way that he keeps thinking of and tells me about sometimes, looking through the scope, when he doesn’t want to pull the trigger, when he only wants to go back and live in that moment.

  She said it all with those eyebrows arching to that crest above the outer edges of her eyes, the way they did whenever something about him either irritated or pleased her. “Are you crazy?”

  “You already asked me that.”

  “Well, you must be. How am I ever going to get out of our place on a Friday night, even if my father’s gone away?”

  “You already told me your friends got out.”

  “Yeah. They lied. About studying the Quran together.”

  “So?”

  She looked at him until her gaze faltered and she had to turn away.

  • • •

  About an hour or so into the next Bonus Night, every room in Freddie Trumbull’s house was being used. Downstairs, Freddie was being ordered around by Sue Chapman and her best girlfriend, Dorothy, who were drinking margaritas, listening to music, and phoning boys. Each time they dialed another number, they would yell for more pizza and Freddie would race in with slices of the extra-pepperoni he’d ordered using his father’s credit card and hoping that maybe this was when he could really talk to Sue. But after Sue announced that Jerry, the second-string running back on last year’s football team, was coming over, she quickly went into the guest bathroom, put two fingers down her throat, and threw up, missing the toilet by a considerable distance. Someone later told Freddie the bathroom mirror could probably have sold in some modern art auction.

  The upstairs rooms were technically not in use, at least not yet, but Omar had earlier announced while watching porn films that he was claiming them as the spoils of sexual war. But at nine o’clock he was still watching television with Bonnie Frangilatta, who was getting totally confused. She began worrying that maybe Omar didn’t find her attractive, even though she had worn the blouse that opened down to her bra and was rubbing her hands all over him and saying maybe it would be better if they went upstairs.

  From out past the door of the TV room came Sue Chapman’s moaning and cries of “Oh! Jerry! Yesss!”

  “Can you keep it down?” Omar yelled, and Bonnie Frangilatta told him he was so funny.

  Only Danny was not really a part of Bonus Night. He had showed up with the others, contributing to the tangle of bodies packed into Freddie’s parents’ SUV, had joined in the laughter and raw jokes once they got to the house, but then after a few minutes had quietly sifted out to the patio, where he checked his watch and then ran as fast as he could over to the far eastern edge of Grenadier Pond, and the little road on the side of the hill in High Park.

  Ariana was waiting for him, whispering from the shadows, barely visible as he ran up the hill. When Danny came close, he saw her trembling ever so slightly and in one simple, unplanned moment he put his arm around her. He had never reached out to touch her before, not even holding her hand, somehow deciphering and abiding by the rules that came with being who she was. But now those rules fell away for the instant it took her to reach out, and for him to put his other arm around her, pressing her against him, feeling the shivers that flowed down through her body in waves. “What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing,” she said, not looking up at him. “Nothing. I . . .” Her voice trailed off and then: “I don’t know how to . . .”

  “Shh.”
Uttered so softly she barely heard it.

  “Okay.” For a while they stood wrapped around one another, listening to faraway noises of the city and the waterfall sound of rushing traffic coming from the Gardiner Expressway beyond the edge of the urban forest, near Lake Ontario.

  Danny felt her breasts pressed against him and the sensation surprised him. He had thought of her as being beautiful but in a different way from anyone else he had ever known, and unlike all the other girls he had been with, her body had somehow not really been part of what he felt. It was shrouded by the rules—always the rules—that swaddled her in layers of clothing, even on warm days, and kept out thoughts of anything but how much he lived to see her.

  “I have to go soon.”

  “We just got here.”

  “I know, I know.”

  “Your father’s away.”

  “He’s never away.”

  “I don’t understand, of course he’s—”

  She put a finger to his lips. And then slowly removed it.

  • • •

  It was only later, when she sat up from his coat that he had laid across the ground behind the rows of spruce and cedar trees that he understood the fear she felt. It was a voice, calling from far away.

  “Ar-iana!” It came curling around the hills like some auditory tendril.

  “Ahmed,” she whispered, and he felt her go rigid. As they scrambled to their feet, he tried to calm her.

  “He’s not close.”

  “You don’t understand. He is. He always is.”