by Mark Powell
“I know you move bombs, bomb parts.”
“Do you know what bombs do, Reed?”
“I’ve pretty much verified this is part of your operation.”
“Do you understand what bombs do?”
But what was a bomb against the times? What was a bomb against the broken teeth he found swept to the gutter after the police attacked an otherwise peaceful march? You had to draw forth the blood, coax it out, to remind people they were alive, to break the sound of dull knocking—for some reason he heard this in the voice of James Stone, histrionic and flexed—to shatter the sound of the hollow men, dancing.
What was a bomb against global oppression?
What was a bomb against his father?
The package came three days later, a square of eight or ten inches wrapped in brown paper and packing tape, addressed to a man in University Heights. It felt heavier than it should, and riding north on the 4 train he thought it a sort of ballast, something to anchor his world as surely as it blew apart someone else’s. He stared at the box from Thirty-Third Street to 125th where the train slowed to a crawl as it navigated past a baseball field and through the projects, a world of busted concrete stoops and yards crowded with lawn chairs on scabs of yellow grass. They were moving slowly enough so that on the buckled sidewalk he spotted a headless Barbie doll, a tricycle tipped onto one tasseled handlebar. Closer to the station, a man stood hosing down the sidewalk outside a Dunkin’ Donuts while a boy sold copies of the Militant, body leaned against a NEIGHBORHOOD WATCH sign.
Near Yankee Stadium, he began rereading Stone’s letter, eyes fixed until the train pulled into the Fordham Road station. The poor and oppressed. He knew the benighted poor, the favored children of God. The poor will always be with you. So said no less than Christ, and Reed told himself he believed it.
The train crept into light. He was doing this.
He was doing this, at least in part, because of his parents, because of the rich assholes back in Switzerland he couldn’t bring himself to call classmates. He was doing it because of those fuckers on the seventh floor. But mostly it was about him, about Reed, about being in the world and reclaiming it in a way most could never understand. This wasn’t about the poor and oppressed. It wasn’t about the 1 percent he had chanted against either. This was a private conversation. The rich, like the poor, just happened to be in the way. So fuck the rich. But just the same: fuck the poor and oppressed. They were mostly poor and oppressed for very good reasons. The point was to shatter something.
He left the subway and walked among the iron grilles and fire escapes and Duane Reade pharmacies, passed beneath the green-and-red awnings of twenty-four-hour bodegas, the windows full of yellowing oranges and dusty cans of Sprite. Around him well-dressed men and women were speed-walking to work, dodging delivery trucks while staring down at cell phones. In front of a synagogue an idling H.T. Hackney truck waited for two transvestites in silver wigs to clear the intersection. One of them clutched a knockoff Vuitton handbag and flipped him off. The other sucked a ring pop while the driver laid on his air horn.
He kept going.
Brownstones lined University Avenue. It was spring and crocuses were newly planted, bright in the sections of dirt separating stairs. He passed a man sweeping his steps, watched him move in and out of a parallelogram of heatless light. Trees lined the walk, lacing intricate shadows, the leaves veined and almost phosphorescent with green light, and when the breeze gathered he watched petals fall, delicate as sails. The leaves alone, their drifting grace, were reason enough for the bomb. Discount the violence, the disparity of wealth, the displaced homeless carrying papier-mâché golden calves and living in packing crates in Central Park. Don’t even consider the ornate indifference of his father. Throw it all to the side, forget every last bit of it.
Cupcakes in the spring sun, small dogs carried like handbags—that alone was reason enough. Disregard his father in his lavish Southern manse. Choose not to acknowledge the faithless pleading of his mother. Misremember the fascist police pepper-spraying the homeless. Rule out of bounds the greater Middle East, the drone strikes, the burning minarets, the million dead. Throw it all aside and right there, right there! standing on this quiet street with war no more than a rumor to be laughed at and still there was reason enough as if I even need a goddamn reason. Put the little brown-packaged square against the slaughter bench of history, against Goya, against Saturn Devouring His Children, against The Madhouse. Put the little square of paper and tape against the Holocaust, against the Middle Passage. It was laughable. He thought of Stone’s sudden conversion and laughed at that as well. It was a crime not to deliver it, even if he was sweating, his ribs ratcheted around his lungs so that breathing was a conscious undertaking.
He stopped at the broad stone steps of an elegant nineteenth-century brownstone and double-checked the address, needlessly.
Here he was. What now?
Leave the package with the doorman and go. Leave the package and—
Except he couldn’t. Its weight. All that impossible weight, that fierce density. As if what he held might form the earth, rather than blow it apart.
An elderly woman in pearls and a lacquered coif of dark hair came out the door, looked dismissively at Reed, passed on.
He had to do something.
But what to do?
Something of consequence, he thought, and it came to him what a fool he was, what a child. How right his father was, how right everyone was. Do you know what bombs do, Reed?
He stood on the sidewalk and held the box, sweating again, feeling the weight of the cardboard against his fingers, the glossy tape, feeling the sweat slide down the back of his neck.
He thought he might be dying, but realized what he felt was the toxicity he carried.
Not the box but his own soul.
His stomach forced him into the bodega, his sickness—tell yourself that, Reed, keep telling yourself that, brother, that it was sickness and not straight-up fear—past the wall cooler and beer and forgotten boxes of cereal—hep you, sir? hep you?—into the bathroom where he latched the wooden door and stood over the seatless toilet to take long, slow breaths. Still he couldn’t breathe, and realized it was because he was laughing, laughing so hard he thought he might break a rib, doubled over, face shiny with snot and tears. How ridiculous, how utterly fucking ridiculous it all was. A bomb! Seriously, a fucking bomb? He had been right to practice saying it because it was ludicrous. He was laughing now, tearing at the packing tape, laughing, someone knocking at the door, laughing, ripping open the box to find—what? A bomb? Maybe, no, wait . . . no, not a bomb: a small laughing Buddha, cross-legged and cast in bronze. As solid as Reed was foolish. A laughing Buddha! Laughing at him!
All the while someone was knocking at the door and he unlatched it, pulled it open on a little Asian man who might have been the Buddha himself. A little bodhisattva selling two Red Bulls for $3. A little happy monk with his scratch-off Lotto and heads of wilting romaine. Sir? Okay, sir? No mess. Go please, sorry, go. Reed walked past him, the torn box on the floor, the Buddha held before him like a lamp unto his feet and a light into his heart.
The gears of the machine? Was it a punch line?
Probably, probably everything was, because Reed couldn’t stop laughing, all the way home on the subway until folks had moved away from him and he was left alone in the car like a leper. Laughing, goddamnit, because it was a joke.
Okay, fine, then. A joke. I surrender. I give up. And that was exactly what he did.
Three weeks later, having said yes to his mother’s repeated offer, he was on a plane to Hartsfield–Jackson and there she was, his mother, just beyond security. Little lost puppy come home. No more takeout coffee. No more elevator girl. Just Reed, stumbling out of his twenty-month joke. The longest setup you could imagine. But the punch line worth every second, worth every laugh. Even if it was the sort of laughter that never quite went away.
So maybe start there, start with the laughter.
Start with the way he couldn’t get it out of his head.
Not that he didn’t try. Wasn’t everything he did an attempt to shake its echo? The way he took the MARTA to Midtown or to Decatur, the long solo walks into every corner of the city. The sports bars, the Coca-Cola, the Braves. There were black neighborhoods and white neighborhoods and poor neighborhoods where everyone was some indeterminate shade of sand. Rich neighborhoods—like the Druid Hills community where his parents lived with their travertine marble and Frontpoint security system. Poor neighborhoods with liquor stores and check-cashing outlets. The cookie-cutter suburbs that put him in mind of baking soda and guilty sex. Ethnic enclaves with souks and kebab shops and corner rugs spread on the pavement where men sold individual cigarettes out of the pack. Falafel joints. Roller rinks and corporate headquarters. It was mindless wandering and he disgusted himself, this was true. But whether he wanted to admit it or not he was an American, which meant he also loved himself. Above all, he pitied himself.
Mostly because nothing was different.
Atlanta was turning out like New York and it wasn’t supposed to turn out like New York. The Voice of goddamn Reason. It wasn’t supposed to happen like that ever again. The Goya prints and elevator girl. The way they had laughed at him.
What the hell do you know about bombs?
He felt his tongue push out against his teeth. It had started like this years ago, his inability to speak clearly the result of a nervous twitch. Conscious of the weight of his own tongue, feeling it in his mouth like a tiny whale, beached past hope. He would wake at night and feel it edged against his bottom teeth, trying to free itself, moving his incisors in the process. Mornings, he would study them in the mirror and find they had not moved. But he knew they had. He blamed his parents.
And then one day he wandered into a Muslim neighborhood in the corner of Kirkwood, a self-contained world of high-rises and satellite dishes, a cinder-block mosque with an actual minaret, and that day he felt something snap into place, he felt himself dissolve in a way he never had. What he liked was that they didn’t stare at him there, or stared but only for a moment, saw him, measured him, and averted their eyes. It was because they were afraid of him—these green-carded politically asylumed refugees shoved into concrete towers—afraid of this grown child of Western wealth. Possibly they hated him. But he liked to imagine that it was because they saw in him nothing unusual, nothing worth staring at.
Which made them different from every other person he had ever encountered, every other person who reacted to him with pity or condescension or, most damning, plans for his psychic salvation. Eventually he learned to disguise himself, to dress in thrift store jeans and municipal work shirts grease-stained as rags. He loved it. Everything was real here, the moldering oranges, the smell of the hookahs. Here was traffic and smog. The girls in their headscarves walking to bus stops. Bored teenagers in keffiyehs posturing on motor scooters. Even the sky seemed different, the deep blues and stringy cirrus of the posh downtown giving way to reefs of gray cloud, the remnants of torn posters, the fresh graffiti over walls whitewashed to efface yesterday’s graffiti.
The walks became his salvation.
He came early to watch the day brighten, the changing sun moving alley to alley like stage lights. Around the apartment buildings—massive, terraced monoliths, solemn as tombstones but for the blooms of satellite dishes and strings of laundry—stood aging shade trees pruned badly. Six A.M. and the streets already beginning to fill with domestic workers on their way to the homes of the wealthy. He would stop at a café, have a cup of tea, and just wait. There was a way the morning could touch binned fruit and he saw it for a moment from the corner of his eye, but then it was gone and there was no finding it and he’d probably just imagined it anyway. But he knew, too, that he hadn’t. He smelled body odor and washing powder and the scald of the bleach used to scrub the walk, a few scattered pools bright as coins. It was a seductive smell, clean, but violently so.
His mother never knew where he went, and he could see how desperately she needed answers. But how afraid she was too. It was evident that she loved him, but her devotion seemed not unlike the devotion offered a small dog, the way you might wash it in the sink or carry it in your handbag. Brag to your friends about its open-mouthed loyalty. But there he was something else, and soon enough he was a part of it.
By the time he joined the fight gym he had been wandering into the neighborhood for almost a year, wandering around the edge of the Masjid of Al-Islam, hearing the amplified wail of the muezzin call the faithful to prayer. The day he found the flier marked KRAV MAGA AT ALTKOMBAT ATLANTA with its fringe of pull-tabs was around the time it had occurred to him that maybe what his parents had most thoroughly deprived him of was any sense of inheritance. That inheritance could be, he thought, either Islam or Catholicism. But given his location he made a snap decision that it was the teachings of Allah they had denied him, and he was pissed off about it. Without ever really deciding, he decided he was a devout man, a follower of the Prophet, or was meant to be.
He imagined his grandfather emigrating to the States to avoid religious persecution—which wasn’t true.
He thought of childhood trips to a Baltimore mosque and how at home he had felt there, how serene—these never happened.
He remembered those rapturous days in Flatbush reading Malcolm X—which was true, the reading part. The rapture was bullshit, of course.
But he was inventing his past, not remembering it, and the invention was his, not his mother’s or his grandfather’s and surely not his father’s.
That evening he looked at the gym website and when he was finished he watched several YouTube videos on Islam. The next day he checked out an English translation of the Koran from the local library and walked to the gym: $110 a month for unlimited classes. No contract, but there was a code of conduct, the idea of which appealed to him. He paid it on the spot, signed everything they put in front of him, and knew both decisions—the gym, Islam—were gifts.
He was a new man, or would be soon enough.
So maybe, for the sake of brevity, start there.
Start at the fight gym.
*
AltKombat was east of downtown in a converted hangar on the edge of a commercial airstrip. Concrete floor. Roll-up door. A giant attic fan that pulled air and dust toward the vaulted ceiling. Nearby was a parachute manufacturer and a broker in precious metals. Inside were blue wrestling mats patched with duct tape, gymnastic rings, heavy bags. A carton of various shin, head, and elbow guards. The class was around twenty-five people of all ages. A few teenage girls. Lots of ex-military twenty-somethings with keloid scars and American flag tats, T-shirts that read WOD KILLA and EAT THE WEAK and WOUNDED WARRIOR PROJECT. A scattering of older folks, white-collar professionals looking to get their asses kicked in a more authentic way. There were also three or four young men about Reed’s age. But darker than Reed: dusky skin, midnight eyes. The instructor was a howling human bowling ball of neck, calves, and biceps. Six feet and maybe two-thirty. White hair flowing over his ears. A stone of Slavic extraction.
They started with warm-up drills—bear crawls, frog hops, burpees—and within seconds Reed was panting, fingers pressed into his sides as he gulped the thick air. There had been some fantasy about his level of fitness, all the walking he’d done, but it evaporated in seconds. Fifteen minutes in he was knocked to the floor by a focus mitt. He stood, wobbled, and just made it to the door before he puked.
Skinny fat, the instructor said and looked at him with what Reed could only interpret as disgust.
He drank from the fountain and a few minutes later was knocked down a second time.
But he got back up. That was the single right thing he did: he kept getting back up.
That night he lay in bed feeling as if he had been in a car wreck. His skin was prickled with mat burns, little heat rashes like shading on a map. But there was also the exhilaration of exhaustion. Packed away to the Collège Alp
in International Beau Soleil in Switzerland, where despite, or maybe because of, a room that looked out over the Rhone Valley he had felt a sort of foggy desolation that he could no more pierce there than he could later in Flatbush. But that was gone now, wrung out in the tremors he felt waving up and down his body.
It was only when he got up to go to the bathroom—he expected to piss blood but all he managed were a few drops of flax-colored urine, too dehydrated for much else—only then that he remembered the copy of the Koran in his bag. How strange that was, how much like a sign. That he needed succor, but also felt himself a warrior. He was aware of the cliché of the pissed off, disenfranchised nonwhite immigrant. But he was none of those. Or maybe he was all of those.
Either way, that night he started to read.
The next day he returned to both the gym and the library. He picked out the shortest book on Islam he could find and read half of it in a beanbag chair in the kids’ section. That was easy. The gym was harder. He was sore and tired, but managed to sleepwalk through the drills and sparring. Get knocked down and get back up, act like you don’t mind, act like it was what you came for.
After class, he took the MARTA home and in his room used the GPS on his phone to point the way to Mecca which stood somewhere just to the right of his desktop.
But he didn’t pray, not yet.
He did visit the mosque. The building sat across from an elementary school behind a wrought-iron fence and crowded by a parking lot of yellow buses. A few men slept on the vast open floor (only later would he realize he had visited during Ramadan), but no one saw him and he escaped unnoticed.
By the second week he felt better. His muscles ached less. His tiny contusions had blued. He went to four classes, Monday through Thursday, and on Saturday managed to jog seventeen minutes before slowing to a walk and he thought maybe that was the end of it, that he wouldn’t return.
But by Monday night he was ready for class. He went back to the library and picked up two more books, read some shit online about Palestine, and it occurred to him that maybe that was the cause he’d been after the whole time he was in New York. It occurred to him that of course it was. He looked at the photos from Gaza and the West Bank, felt moved by it, felt grateful to have a mission so clear-cut.