by Joshua Corin
“Who tipped them off?” she asked Jonesy. “What made them come here?”
“The task force? I’ve no idea. We could ask, as a matter of ascertaining the extent of their evidence against you, but they’re not obligated to share anything unless they arrest you. If there is anyone at all left in the federal government you haven’t pissed off, Groucho, now would be the time to call in that chip.”
There was someone…an ex-girlfriend who now worked at the State Department.
“No,” Xana said. “You’re all I’ve got.”
“Then let’s talk with them. Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe they’ll be friendly and open and helpful. You are, after all, only a suspect in an act of terrorism.”
“Two acts,” she added. “Don’t forget the suicide bombing in Dearborn.”
“Right. Yes.”
“There haven’t been any others, have there?”
Jonesy shook his head. “Not to the best of my knowledge. I know there were reports of increased police presence at mosques around the country. Maybe that deterred the attackers from causing any further harm. I’ll fetch the gendarmerie.”
“Hurry, would you, please? I need to get back to the hospital. Hayley is…she…”
“I will do my level best,” replied Jonesy, and he left.
And then Xana was once again alone in this windowless room. Cool air that smelled vaguely of milk poured in from a vent above her head. The walls were decorated with thousands of scratched initials, profane doodles, dried remnants of chewing gum, and a few discolored stains of indeterminate origin. Xana rested her palms on the desk, ran her fingertips over the years of misspelled insults and plaintive I-was-here’s carved into its pine skin. She did not—no, not at all—enjoy being on this side of the law.
In walked Jonesy with two dark-suited men. The IDs clipped to their breast pockets identified them as Rodrigo and Loyola. Homeland Security.
“We’re glad you’re ready to talk,” said Rodrigo.
Loyola set a small tape recorder on the desk. “There seems to be something wrong with the camera, so I’m going to use this, if that’s all right?”
Jonesy sat beside Xana and gave her a reassuring arm squeeze.
“Your hands are freezing,” she muttered.
“I have bad circulation,” he replied.
Rodrigo and Loyola settled across from them. They got the preliminaries out of the way, reminding Xana of her rights, confirming for the sake of the recording who each of them was, and so on.
Then Rodrigo tossed the first softball. “Where is the drone now?”
Xana shrugged. “I don’t know.”
“Where did you acquire the drone?”
“I didn’t.”
“When did you acquire the drone?”
Xana glanced over at Jonesy and then back at the two men. “I didn’t.”
“When you acquired the drone,” said Loyola, “did the seller also include the payload you used in today’s attack or did you acquire the payload from a second source?”
“Boys, I’m happy to talk. I am. But that’s dependent on you listening.”
“We did listen, ma’am. We listened while one of your colleagues identified you as the ringleader of today’s attack. We listened as he informed us that you used your position in the FBI to make contact with a merchant who specializes in black market weaponry. You say you’re happy to talk? We’re happy to listen. Give us the name of the merchant and the current location of the drone, and we might take the death penalty off the table.”
Chapter 23
Sara was dying.
She’d realized as much even before the pain in her abdomen had crescendoed and she’d vomited a few tablespoons of pink sludge on her bedsheets and the pain had not dissipated, not in the slightest, even after a nurse she didn’t recognize responded to her frantic pounding of the call button and increased the dosage of her intravenous painkillers. No, after five minutes, the pain was still there, nestling among her organs, as if she were now carrying two infants: beautiful, perfect Daniel in her womb and outside it a thorny pineapple.
And Daniel wasn’t kicking at all.
But he was okay. She wouldn’t allow herself to consider the alternative. Daniel was okay. His father was dead and his mother was dying, but he was going to be fine. Her sister and brother-in-law would raise him with the substantial funds that Sara and Rayyan had already squirreled away for his education. Daniel would attend the best schools. And unless college costs increased geometrically in the next eighteen years, he would even have some money left over to travel.
“Go to the island of Hydra,” she would tell him. “It is off the coast of Greece. There is a ferry. Don’t forget to buy one of those motion sickness patches first. The waters can be choppy. But once you get to Hydra, you have to check out this Cypriot cafe. I forget what it’s called, but you can’t miss it. The outside is painted black and so are the tables and so is the uniform that the servers wear. But don’t order the coffee. It’s overpriced and salty. Order the yogurt. They ship it in from Cyprus. I don’t know what they feed those cows on Cyprus, but it is the best yogurt in the world. You will literally thank the All-Merciful Creator for having made it possible. And then you should explore the island. It has a rich history and at sunset, when the breezes flow over the hills and the tide yawns back from the shore…if you’re lucky, the love of your life will be standing beside you with a ring.”
Their trip to Hydra hadn’t been planned, or at least that was what Sara had assumed, but after Rayyan had proposed and she’d said yes, he told her that he’d researched online for months for the most romantic, off-the-beaten-path locales during their two-week European jaunt to get down on one knee and pop the question. The island of Hydra hadn’t even come up in many of the guidebooks. Rayyan had found it in a biography about Leonard Cohen. It was where he had first found love with his muse, Marianne.
Sara tasted sweat. Rivers of it had been rolling down from her forehead and were now emptying into her mouth. She fought back another wave of nausea and reached for the notepad and pen she had demanded the nurse bring her a few minutes earlier. How much time did she have? How much time did anyone have? She started to write.
It wasn’t a letter to Daniel.
If she had time, maybe when she was finished, she’d write a second letter. She’d address it to him and somehow carry to him a lifetime of wisdom in a bushel of paragraphs. But she had been monologuizing to Daniel for months now. She had shared her favorite recipes as she prepared them. She had provided explanatory commentary to him during particularly confusing episodes of TV shows. She had consulted with him while shopping. The red dress with the green piping or the green dress with the red piping?
He was an expert listener.
And he was listening. How else to explain the way he fluttered his feet whenever a Beyoncé song came on? He had been absorbing his mother’s voice for months, and now, in a final act, she needed to share it not with her son, but with her millions of YourMuslimFriend subscribers.
She referred to them, and herself, as Planet Peace. Because they were all in this together, this family of millions who believed that differences were stepping-stones to education and to celebration; who believed that hate did not have to be the first response, did not have to be included at all; who believed that unity was made stronger through diversity.
Her followers came to her for hope.
Her followers were optimists. Idealists, even.
What fools.
As her final act, in this final broadcast, Sara was going to rub away the stars in their eyes. She owed it to them. She was as much responsible for their naïveté as anyone. She had preached it because she was certain it was true.
What bullshit.
Hundreds were dead. Maybe more! She hadn’t watched the news in the past hour. A dozen more mosques could have been dest
royed. A dozen more congregations.
And then there was the plague. Ha! Who could forget about that? What a perfect complement to everything else. After all, it was the arrival of the plague during the Middle Ages that set off the first great mass slaughter of Europe’s Muslims and Jews. The plague seemed to avoid their communities and so the finest Christian minds of the time deduced that the Muslims and Jews must have been responsible for it. Only centuries later did science reveal that the low incidence of plague among Europe’s Muslims and Jews stemmed from the cleanliness their religions mandated. To this day, the life expectancy of the average Muslim American man and woman was longer than that of their non-Muslim neighbors due to abstaining from pork and alcohol.
Except, no, not quite.
Not today.
No.
Sara stared with white-hot fury at the blank page of the notepad. She was about to refute the central doctrine of her channel. Even the name itself—YourMuslimFriend—bespoke the mind of a simpleton.
“I thought I was making the world a better place,” she muttered to Daniel.
What a joke.
She knew now that peace was dangerous. Trust was dangerous. Lambs were devoured by lions. It was more New Testament than Quran, but it fit. Men who had nothing but love in their hearts, men who stayed up past midnight for months and months just to find the best location to propose to their wives, men who were not perfect and were more perfect for it, men and women and children, had been massacred.
It was time to arm her lambs.
And yet she still hadn’t written a word! What was wrong with her? She quite literally did not have time to dawdle. She did not have time to craft the optimal phrase. She needed to have her sermon—and that was certainly what it was—she needed to have it ready for when Malik returned with his phone. She hoped he’d captured some good footage of his partner lying there, helpless. Another victim. It would so righteously illustrate her point while she narrated her final message:
The lion will never lie down with the lamb. The lion will feed and the lamb will die.
So be the lion.
This was not a more enlightened time. Social media hadn’t created a new solidarity. It was all smoke.
The tip of her cheap black pen hovered less than an inch over the white paper. The blank white paper.
Why was this, the most important gift she could ever impart to her followers, so difficult to compose? Did she not love them enough to wake them up? Did she not owe it to them? What was stopping her from—
Then Daniel punched her in the spleen.
Sara gasped, then smiled. He must have been napping. He was fine. He was healthy and happy and…
“You crafty little string bean,” she muttered. “You’re blocking my writing, aren’t you?”
Because how could anyone vent cynicism while a ball of sunshine rolled around inches below her heart? Even Sylvia Plath, who had been Sara’s favorite poet during much of high school, had to pause her pessimism when it came to the life inside of her. Sure, Plath had hated pregnancy, but she was in awe of the gold inside her self-perceived tarnished shell.
“You sneaky little bugger,” Sara told Daniel, but with a grin among her syllables. “So what do I do now? I have to say something. I have a responsibility. I owe it to my fans. I owe it to your father. Where is the silver lining in all these deaths? Isn’t it ghoulish to even try to find a silver lining in such an act of…”
Except there it was. There was her message.
She began to write.
Chapter 24
How was Ray Queen not dead?
He appeared dead. He lay on a bed in a room on the fourth floor. Critical care ward. His hands were wrapped in gauze. Ointment oozed through the gauze and gave it a sticky, slimy sheen. More gauze covered his ears and neck and chin and cheeks. Ray Queen had been mummified.
Only his eyes and lips were bare. No, not quite. His eyes were shut. His eyelids were bare, but the eyes beneath them were flat and unmoving. No REM sleep for Ray. As for his lips…they were not really lips anymore. There was the twisted maze of flesh where his mouth ended, but to call that lips was a polite lie. They were a mountainous alien landscape and they were black.
A thick tube ran into his mouth from a machine. Feeding tube? Breathing tube? Malik could have asked. The nurse station was just outside the room.
“What was the last thing he said?” Ray’s wife asked.
Malik glanced over at her. She was pretty, although her tears had smeared along the contours of her face. Dirty-blond hair. Cheap pantsuit. She must have come from work. Malik had no idea what she did for a living. He didn’t even know her name. She had introduced herself as Ray’s wife.
He didn’t even know Ray was married.
“He…” began Malik, and then stopped. What was the last thing Ray had said? Malik searched his memory for the answer, but he kept bouncing back to that off-color joke Ray had told in the locker room, the joke that got Ray assigned guard duty in the first place. A Baptist and a Muslim walk into a bar. The Baptist—
“It doesn’t matter,” said Ray’s wife. “I remember the last thing he said to me. It was last night. Because when he left this morning, I was still asleep. I didn’t even see him go.”
“What was it he said last night?”
The woman absently knuckled at the dark paint under her right eye. “We were lying in bed. We both sleep on our sides. He sleeps behind me and I face the bathroom and he always, you know, drapes one arm over me and holds me close. He always has. But just when we’re falling asleep, I had to go to the bathroom. So I try to, you know, wiggle out from under his arm, but it’s like he’s got me pinned. I mean, he’s asleep, but he’s still strong. So I—”
Someone knocked on the door, and then it opened, and then a nurse entered. She sanitized her hands and then approached the patient. She knelt down and checked the contents of the urine bag—empty—and asked, “How are we doing?”
Ray’s wife looked to Malik. Malik looked to Ray’s wife. Was the question directed at them? Was it directed at Ray? Was it directed at the urine bag?
The nurse stood straight and noted the readings on Ray’s various machines.
“He’s hanging in there,” she said.
“He’s waiting for his father,” replied Ray’s wife.
The nurse nodded and then bent over to examine the bandages. She pursed her lips in a grimace of dissatisfaction and then headed for the door.
“I’ll be back if anything changes,” she said.
She sanitized her hands once again and then left.
Malik waited until the door had closed before asking, “Ray is close with his father?”
Ray’s wife rubbed her palms on the thighs of her pantsuit. “Oh, you have no idea. You know the saying ‘mama’s boy’? Well, Ray, he’s a daddy’s boy. Now, I don’t mean that as a slight! I think it’s wonderful for a man and his father to maintain a solid relationship. Truth is, you don’t see that too often. You close with your father?”
Malik shrugged, which was all he had to say on the matter.
“I was never too close with mine, but that’s fine. He went away when I was eleven. I like my stepdad. He works in construction. You know the new ballpark over in Cobb County? He’s helping to build that. But Ray’s father…let me tell you, the way Ray talked about his old man, you couldn’t ever measure how nervous I was to meet him! I was expecting to shake hands with a saint! I even said to Ray, teasing him, ‘Should I wear sunglasses in case his halo is too bright?’ Ray didn’t like that too much. He never had a good sense of humor when it came to his father.”
“Does he live nearby?”
“Oh, sure. Got a house in Cabbagetown. Over by the cemetery? We go there every Sunday morning for brunch. He raises his own chickens. But that’s another story.”
“If he lives in Cabbageto
wn…” said Malik, but he was reluctant to finish the sentence, reluctant to imply that maybe the love streams didn’t flow both ways, reluctant to imply that there could be any reasonable excuse for a man not to be at the bedside of his dying son.
After all, where was Malik’s mother? Where was his sister? Sure, he wasn’t dying, but for fuck’s sake, he had been seriously injured in a terrorist attack! He was in the ER! At the very least, he had made the news. But no, no, they had better things to do.
He clenched at the tires of his wheelchair. The grooves of the treads pushed against the sores on his hands and he winced but did not let go.
“Maybe it’s the plague?” he suggested. “Maybe that’s why his father isn’t here? Sergeant Gallagher said the whole hospital is under quarantine.”
Ray’s wife replied with a silent civil smile.
Ray’s machines replied with their intermittent hiss.
After a minute of this, Ray’s wife spoke. “Can I ask you a question?”
Malik answered with a noncommittal shrug, all the while hoping her question was not, once again, what her husband’s last words had been, because for the life of him, Malik still had no idea and not only did he have no idea, he had no magical ability to suddenly find out. His memory didn’t work like that. Never had. Frankly, he’d always been skeptical of people who claimed their memories did work like that, people who, when asked about an event from their distant past could, after a moment of squinting and, in general, appearing to take a mental shit, shovel up on command the nugget of history from the caverns of their brain. Half the time, Malik suspected, they were lying and half the time they were guessing, and this charade passed for pleasant conversation? It really—
“You’re Muslim, right?”
Oh. That question.
Even worse.
“Did I say that correct? Is it ‘Muslim’ or ‘a Muslim’? Like, I’m Christian but I also am a Christian.”
Malik nodded. Sometimes it was better to nod and remain silent than wade into the tall grass of a discussion of how his girlfriend had left him and now he was agnostic or atheist, or perhaps she had left him because he was agnostic or atheist.