by Teddy Wayne
Mr. Schrub and his sons said hello to each other. Jeromy ordered French toast from Andre and Wilson ordered steak with eggs. “Bloody and runny, please,” he said.
“I was thinking of taking a hike around the Audubon Center today. Who’s up for it?” Mr. Schrub asked. I waited for his sons to answer, but when they didn’t, I said I was.
“Good,” he said. “Guys? It’s a beautiful day.”
His sons were reading the newspaper now. Wilson had the National section and Jeromy had the Sports section. “I’d love to, Dad, if I could find the time,” Wilson said, and he smiled very slightly to himself while he continued reading.
“Me, too,” said Jeromy. “I’ve been getting literally raped at school.”
“Jeromy,” Mrs. Schrub said. “First of all, getting ‘literally raped’ would mean you’re actually getting raped. Second, it’s not the most polite language.”
“Sorry,” he said. “Figuratively speaking, I’ve been getting sexually harassed.”
“Then it’ll literally just be me and Karim,” Mr. Schrub said. “Or is it ‘Karim and I’?” he asked his wife, and pinched her waist. The proper grammar was in fact “Karim and I,” and in addition to “me and Karim” being incorrect, it is considered impolite to state “me and [other person]” instead of “[other person] and me,” but I remained quiet.
Irma provided me with hiking clothing and sneakers, and after I changed Mr. Schrub and I went outside to the driveway, where a dark green sport utility vehicle was already parked. Mr. Schrub drove and I sat next to him, and because we were so high off the ground in the car, it felt as if he were the pilot of a plane and I were his copilot.
The Audubon Center had multiple walking trails, and we took one that Mr. Schrub said was his preferred route. Of course I had been in Central Park many times, but there you are always seeing people and it doesn’t feel like you are truly solitary in nature. We saw very few others, and the only sounds I heard were birds and the wind on the leaves colored like fire and the branches breaking under our feet. Mr. Schrub didn’t talk frequently except to identify the names of the trees I didn’t know, such as American sycamore, and plants with original names, such as honey-bells and eastern skunk cabbage.
We arrived at an open field, and Mr. Schrub handed me a pair of binoculars he had brought. “This is one of the best sites in the country to spot hawks,” he said as he looked through his own pair. He pointed to a tree a few hundred meters away. “Look! That’s a red-shouldered. They’re rare, now.” He exhaled loudly and said, “Moronic hunters.”
It took me longer to find it, because I wasn’t acclimated to searching for birds in trees. The hawk had red and brown horizontal stripes over its chest and shoulder and black and white on its wings and tail. Mr. Schrub told me facts about the bird, e.g., it locates prey from a tree branch, then dives quickly and retrieves its target and eats it on the branch again, and facts about hawks in general, e.g., their eyes are eight times more powerful than a human’s. “Gorgeous creature, isn’t he? You have to be a robot if that doesn’t bowl you over,” he said.
Maybe this was why Mr. Schrub gave his company the logo of a hawk, which was something I had always wondered and had never read about.
Then the hawk flew off its branch and zoomed down to the field. I couldn’t track it with the binoculars because it was too fast, so I observed with my eyes. It plummeted to the ground and fluctuated its wings but without flying. “Use the binoculars again, and look at its talons,” Mr. Schrub told me.
The hawk’s talons contained a gray object. “What is that?” I asked.
“Lunch,” Mr. Schrub said. “And dinner. Squirrel.”
The hawk made noises that sounded like “kee yar,” and Mr. Schrub joked that it was trying to call my country’s name.
Through my binoculars I saw the hawk rip into the squirrel’s body with its claws and beak. “Watch him go. It’ll devour the whole thing right now,” Mr. Schrub said.
I turned my eyes to Mr. Schrub, who was smiling as he watched. I reviewed through the binoculars. The hawk was now eating the squirrel, whose fur was bloody. I shifted the binoculars slightly to the left so it would appear I was still observing it, but instead I focused on an area of grass.
“He’s hardly going to be able to fly after this,” said Mr. Schrub. “See how engorged his chest is?”
I said yes. After five minutes, Mr. Schrub said we should go back into the trail and watch more birds. They weren’t hawks, and none of them hunted animals, so I was able to magnify them.
As Mr. Schrub watched a downy woodpecker through his binoculars, he said, “I could never seem to get Jeromy or Wilson too interested in birding.”
“It can be difficult to make someone else interested in what you are interested in,” I said. “They have to have some initial interest independent of you.”
“Maybe so,” he said, and he put down the binoculars. “But you’d like to think a father and his sons would have some intersection. As far as I can tell, the only thing that drives them is having a good time.”
“If you drew a Venn diagram of my interests and my father’s interests, the intersection would also be minimal,” I said.
“Well, you don’t choose your parents. And, despite your best efforts, you don’t really choose your kids, either.” The woodpecker began contacting the tree with his beak. “Take a closer look,” he said, and he put his arm around my shoulders as I used the binoculars. I was glad the binoculars covered my face and Mr. Schrub was focused on the woodpecker, because my smile was possibly the broadest it has ever been.
When we returned to the house Mr. Schrub said he had to do some work in his study. Sounds ejected from the living room, where his sons were playing a video game and yelling. “I’m afraid that doesn’t sound too enticing?” he asked.
I said, “No, I would like to try to get to know them more.”
He looked pleased. “Thanks, Karim,” he said.
Although I’m a skilled computer worker and have optimal hand-eye coordination from racquetball, I’m poor at video games, as we were never allowed to have them, and the solitary way to become adept at any system is by practice. In addition, certain personality types excel at video games, and mine isn’t one of them.
It was a shooting game, and the television was bisected so Jeromy and Wilson could each see out of the eyes of his own character as they hunted each other. “My hunger for human flesh is insatiable,” Wilson said as his character ran through a dark tunnel. “My thirst for blood, unquenchable.”
“Bring it on, fat boy,” Jeromy said. “How were the birds, Karim?”
“It was educational and interesting,” I said. “I have not been in a true forest before, and I have never seen a hawk in person.”
“He does love those fucking hawks,” Wilson said, and I observed his eyes rapidly shift to Jeromy’s side of the television and then return.
“Yeah,” Jeromy said, and his face and voice looked and sounded like he was going to cry. “More than he loves his own family.”
Wilson crashed Jeromy with his elbow, and they both laughed. “Come on, play, you ADD-riddled piece of shit,” he said.
Wilson soon shot Jeromy and his character exploded and fell and blood leaked out of his body. “Defeated,” Wilson said. “Conquered, subjugated, dominated, enslaved, made my bitch.”
“You cheat. You always look at my guy’s POV.”
“I’m trying to understand your point of view better—to empathize with you,” Wilson said. “Karim, you want to try?”
I said yes. “I’ll coach him,” Jeromy said. “Let’s beat this arrogant spoiled brat.”
Jeromy instructed me on how to operate the controller, and soon I became efficient. Wilson’s character and my character were both in the same maze, and because it was a newly created maze, Wilson didn’t have a special advantage over me in finding weapons and power bonuses. In fact, because my spatial intelligence is robust, I quickly deciphered where these things were in the maze,
and I could tell he was having difficulty because he was cursing to himself.
Then I saw Wilson’s character far ahead with his back to me, but because I knew he cheated and would rotate if he saw that I was observing him on my side of the television, I rotated my character 180 degrees and ran in reverse so that Wilson didn’t know I was near him.
Then, when I knew I was very close to him, I turned around again, and Wilson’s character’s back was directly in my targeting cross. Jeromy contacted my shoulder lightly with his hand to signal me to shoot.
But I didn’t.
Wilson’s character quickly rotated and shot me. My side of the television turned red like closed eyelids after looking at the sun.
“You had him,” Jeromy said.
“No one ever has me, ha ha ha,” Wilson said, and he put Jeromy’s head inside his angled arm and depressed his fist over the top of his head.
“I am sorry,” I said as I looked at the red half of the monitor and Jeromy pushed Wilson off and called him a motherfucker. “I will go upstairs now and allow you two to play.” They said good-bye to me and restarted the game.
I resumed The Grapes of Wrath, which I enjoyed for two reasons: (1) It taught me about U.S. history during the Great Depression through a stimulating story (e.g., there was no minimum wage in the time period of the novel, which causes problems for the workers on the free market), and (2) I liked partnering with the main character, Tom Joad. He attempts to provide for his family and has strong values, and he has an intriguing way of speaking to boot.
Then Irma knocked quietly on my door and told me dinner was ready. In fact it wasn’t dinner yet, but Andre carried a tray with a bottle of wine and crackers and several cheeses into the living room. Wilson and Jeromy wore higher-quality clothing now, and I felt foolish in my hiking clothing, but it was too late to change.
When Andre deposited the tray on a small table, Wilson reached for the knife and cut multiple large cubes of cheese for his plate and ate ASAP without crackers. Jeromy ate more slowly and with crackers.
“Save some room for dinner, boys,” Mrs. Schrub said.
Mr. Schrub watched them mutely and looked as if he were truly watching something in his brain. “Maybe we’ll have the ’94 Burgundy tonight,” he finally said.
“We had that last night,” Mrs. Schrub said.
“We had the ’93.”
“Dear,” she said as she put her hand on his leg, “I think you may be having a senior moment.”
“Do you want me to go down and bring up the inventory?”
Mrs. Schrub smiled and petted his head. “I don’t think that’s necessary.”
“You think I’m wrong, don’t you?” Mr. Schrub said. “That’s it, I’m getting it.”
“Derek!” she said. “Do you always have to be right?”
I remembered also that it was the ’93 and that he was right, and I also dislike it when someone thinks my memory has a glitch, so I said, “I think I can prove that Mr. Schrub is correct.”
Everyone looked at me. “I use a voice recorder to learn English.” I showed it to them. “If you give me a few minutes, I will locate the part when Mr. Schrub asked for the wine.”
They all observed me as I set the voice recorder on rewind and listened at different points on low volume so only I could hear. It was high pressure with everyone watching me, but I felt confident that I remembered. Then I put it on the table and played it for everyone to hear Mr. Schrub’s voice: “Andre, would you bring up the ’93 Burgundy?”
“Much appreciated, Karim,” Mr. Schrub said, and he picked up the voice recorder and inspected it before returning it to the table. He turned to his wife. “Do you have anything you would like to add?”
“I think it’s very admirable that Karim is so industrious about improving his English.” She kissed Mr. Schrub on the cheek. “We could all learn from his example of trying to better himself.”
Mr. Schrub looked at his sons. “Indeed,” he said.
I turned my face away from them all, especially Wilson and Jeromy, but a corner of my mouth curved up despite my attempts at restriction.
Then Andre told us dinner was ready, and Mrs. Schrub said they had a special treat for me. The dinner table had two lines of silver trays like expensive buttons on a coat, and when Andre opened them I saw kebabs, hummus and baba ghanoush, tabouleh, a lentil salad, and other Middle Eastern dishes.
It reminded me of when Rebecca invited me to see Three Kings. However, I was a guest, and once I saw it I did desire authentic Middle Eastern food, and I briefly felt my eyes hydrate like they did in the car with Barron, so I thanked them and quickly estimated the cost of all the food to reroute my thoughts.
The food was delicious. During the meal Wilson and Jeromy ate mostly the meat and didn’t try the lentil salad or the baba ghanoush. Mrs. Schrub asked them questions about their progress at Princeton. I didn’t ask anything, even though I wanted to know what a cream of the cream U.S. university was like, e.g., how the research facilities were and what class of visiting lecturers they host and if they could access the professors easily. That last subject is the area I especially wish I had in Doha.
Mr. Schrub asked about infrastructural development in Qatar, and I talked as intelligently as possible without appearing to be boastful, as I deciphered that Jeromy and Wilson weren’t interested and Mrs. Schrub was interested only to be polite.
As we finished the main course, Wilson and Jeromy argued over the last kebab. Jeromy said he had “called dibs” on it first, and Wilson said he had. When Jeromy pulled the kebab away from his brother, he crashed his elbow into mine, and it made me spill my spoon of cucumber soup. It landed on my shirt, which was my second eating accident with the Schrubs, although this time it wasn’t my fault and it stained my own material.
Mr. Schrub yelled at his sons for fighting, and when Jeromy saw my shirt, he said, “Shit, I’m sorry, man.” Wilson didn’t say anything.
Mrs. Schrub directed me to the nearest restroom to clean my shirt. “Actually, that one’s having plumbing trouble. You can use the one in Derek’s office.”
I left the dining room and walked down a long hallway to Mr. Schrub’s office and rotated the brass handle. I stepped onto a thick red carpet. In front of me was a dark wooden desk, and behind it a spacious window displayed a yard and the forest, and the walls contained bookshelves with hundreds of books. It looked simultaneously like an ideal and intimidating place to work.
I cleaned my shirt in the office’s restroom, and when I exited I noticed the trash bin next to the desk had a paper shredder on top of it and fully contained shredded paper. This was in some ways how Mr. Schrub presented himself to me: He gave indications of who he was but he shredded the data so I could not fully decipher him. There was much more about him that I was curious to learn, but I could not gain access. He said that this weekend would enable us to get to know each other more, but nearly all he had talked about so far was birds, and he worked nonstop. I had observed his relationships with his family, but I still did not know what he was truly like.
And I considered that I am most truly like myself when I am working and in my office, and this was where Mr. Schrub was so frequently, and without 100% thinking through my actions, I took out my voice recorder and went to a bookshelf near the door and deposited it on a shelf at my height behind a thick book titled Democracy Through Prosperity.
I let my hand go. The voice recorder was hidden, and it would now record the hidden Mr. Schrub.
I exited the office and returned to the dining room. Without my voice recorder I felt naked, as I do when, e.g., I am away from computers for several days, but this was a different class of naked.
Only when I sat down did I consider what I had done. In addition to possibly being illegal, it was unethical. I had disobeyed Mr. Schrub’s trust, and if he found out, then I merited being fired and ejected to Qatar early. And it was not even intelligent: The only data it would record would be telephone conversations, which are not when p
eople are truly themselves. My foot started vibrating on the floor and I felt dizzy, parallel to when I had smoked marijuana. I couldn’t believe I had acted so foolishly.
I had to return to his office for the voice recorder, but I couldn’t go right away again, and it was too risky to enter his office if others were around. And of course I couldn’t leave it there, because if he found it later he would know it was mine. The solitary possible time would be that night when everyone was asleep.
Mrs. Schrub cleared her throat, and Jeromy apologized to me again for the accident, and this time Wilson apologized as well. He said something like, “Even though it was more Jeromy’s fault, since I called the kebab first.”
“Karim, can you settle this and check your recorder to see who called it?” Jeromy asked.
My stomach rotated. I waited to see if their parents would ask them to stop the fight, but they didn’t say anything. “Yeah, the tape won’t lie,” Wilson said.
I said, “I just put it away in my luggage upstairs and deleted today’s material. I did not want to make any of you uncomfortable about being recorded.”
They stopped discussing the accident, although I kept thinking about the voice recorder. It was like the window Raghid broke, although much worse: That truly was an accident that my friends didn’t take responsibility for, but this was a disloyal action that I didn’t take responsibility for, and in addition I further lied about it.
Wilson and Jeromy said they were going to a movie about a fighting organization after dinner. Mrs. Schrub said, “Why don’t you boys take Karim along?”
Wilson and Jeromy visually contacted. Jeromy was friendly, but Wilson was difficult for me to be near. Frequently that was the case here with sets of two people. I said, “Thank you, but I am taxed from the hike and prefer to stay home and read.”