In the Language of Miracles

by Rajia Hassib

  Forty years had passed, and Ehsan still told stories of her husband.

  “Do you still miss him, Mama?”

  “Of course, habibti.”

  Nagla bit her lower lip, rubbed her eyes with the back of one hand.

  “I still don’t get the whole memorial service idea,” Ehsan started after a pause. “But I’ll tell you one thing: I do think there is some sense behind doing something to make it all better.”

  Nagla stubbed her cigarette against the brick of the house’s outer wall and then flicked it away, watched it fall on the grass next to a dozen or so others. She would have to pick them all up before Samir saw them.

  “What did you do? To make things better after Baba died?”

  “Oh, I had no time for anything but worry.” Ehsan sipped at her tea. “He left me with koom lahm, a heap of meat: five kids and barely enough income to afford bread and fava beans for all of us. I did not quit worrying till you got married. Worried all day, prayed and cried myself to sleep at night.”

  Nagla put the window screen back, stared at the warning: Screen will not prevent a child from falling.

  “You know what you can do, though?” Ehsan asked. “You could stop torturing yourself.”

  “What do you mean?” Nagla turned around to face her mother.

  “You think I don’t see you? Up there in that attic all the time?”

  Nagla crossed her arms, rested her back against the screen.

  “What use is that? Keeping his stuff up there like it’s some sort of shrine to sidi Al-Hussein?”

  “That’s not what it is.”

  “Then what is it?”

  “I just—I’m not ready. I don’t know what to do with his stuff.” Nagla’s eyes watered.

  “You go through it. You keep a thing or two and give the rest away. Sadakah garyah. A good deed in his name to ask Allah for mercy upon his soul. Nothing better than a donation to do so.” Ehsan paused, took a sip of her tea. “I’ve been telling you for some time, Nagla, and I’ll tell you again: You cannot grieve forever. It’s been a year, habibti. You can’t go on walking around the house like a ghost, passing by your kids and husband as if you don’t see them. I don’t mind doing the housework, but there are things I cannot do for you. I cannot be a mother to Khaled and Fatima. They need you back, habibti.”

  Nagla nodded, and with every nod she could hear the wire screen give a low, screeching rattle.

  • • •

  She waited until her mother settled in the kitchen and started preparing tonight’s dinner before she ventured out in the hallway, stared at the folded-up pull-down stair.

  Her mother was right. She had walked up there often. Whether this was a bad habit, though, was a matter of opinion.

  She could go through her son’s things. She could open the drawers, sift through the boxes, flip through the magazines, the notebooks, the leaves of paper that the police had not taken away.

  She walked into Fatima’s room and grabbed the chair she always used when she needed to reach the pull-down chain. She climbed on the chair, reached out, and held the chain, wrapping the cold metal around her fingers, letting her hand warm it up before she pulled.

  5

  ENGLISH: Birds of a feather flock together.

  ARABIC: Birds fall upon those similar to them.

  Garrett lay on the floor, texting Hailee. Khaled stretched out on Garrett’s bed and, leaning against the headboard, browsed the Internet on Garrett’s laptop. He liked sitting on Garrett’s bed because it was so different from his own: bright, not encumbered by an upper bunk, not claustrophobic. The shades were drawn, yet strips of sunlight still shone directly at him, the glare making the screen flicker in dazzling stripes. He fidgeted until he found a spot where the sun would neither shine directly on the screen nor in his eyes. He was not comfortable, but stayed put. He preferred the bed to Garrett’s swiveling desk chair, and he refused to resort to the floor, Garrett’s new favorite spot. If Garrett’s mom hadn’t been home, they would have lounged on the living room sofas, watching TV. Today, however, she had come home early and brought a friend. Both women sat in the kitchen, their incomprehensible murmurs occasionally interrupted by laughter.

  The computer desk hutch was buried under dozens of books. In one, Garrett had read that Buddhist monks slept on low, hard beds. In an attempt to one-up them, he had taken to lying on the floor, his back against the wooden planks. Apparently, hard surfaces were conducive to meditation since they afforded only light sleep. His devotion to meditation being less than his devotion to sleep, however, he slept in his bed, but took to the floor during daytime. “How am I supposed to stay awake at school if I only get light sleep?” he had protested when Khaled pointed out the futility of his efforts. Even on the floor, Garrett often ended up with a book in his hands: about Buddhism or Zoroastrianism, a safari travel guide, an overview of the botany of Siberia. Eventually, he ended up holding the phone, texting Hailee.

  Khaled looked at the pile of books. He knew Garrett had one on lepidoptera—a booklet, in fact; Khaled had picked up two copies at a science fair a few years before, back when he still hoped to interest Garrett in entomology. From the bed, he tried to spot the booklet in the pile, too embarrassed to ask about an old gift that Garrett had probably discarded. Khaled wished he had taken his copy to school with him that morning to reference in his latest post. His blog, started to cure him of Facebook withdrawal after he abruptly closed his account, had quickly evolved from one about bugs in general to one dedicated to migrating butterflies. Today, someone had challenged one of his earlier posts, and Khaled had spent the previous hour surfing the Internet, trying to find information that he knew was on the top right-hand side of the seventh page of his booklet—at home. The Internet provided him with answers, but he felt the booklet would supply the necessary proof. He would have to wait till he got home. Or write something temporary that he could later edit.

  Migration is different from dispersion. Dispersion is more random. Butterflies go from spot A to spot B and then C and so on. Migration is more direct. They know where they are going, and they fly to get there. I do have a booklet at home that explains it very well. Check again in a few hours and I’ll scan the page and put it up.

  “Okay.” Garrett suddenly sat up, his back straight as if he were about to start a series of crunches. He looked again at the phone, chuckled, and put it on the desk. Khaled knew Hailee had a sense of humor, but he did not ask what funny thing she had written. Even though he and Garrett had been best friends since kindergarten, he could never find the right way to talk to him about Hailee. Khaled had never had a girlfriend, and any discussion of Garrett’s relationship always reminded Khaled of that lack. His closest attempt at a relationship had come during his sophomore year. He had taken an interest in basketball, attending every girls’ game in order to cheer for Grace, a junior he would have sworn he was in love with and would remain in love with for the rest of his life. She had long blond hair that she pulled into a ponytail and was almost as tall as Khaled. Three days before Hosaam died, Khaled had finally approached her after a game, and, the following day, he mustered the courage to walk up to her at lunchtime. Then Hosaam died, and Khaled never spoke to Grace again.

  “So how come we’re not at your house but here, listening to Myrtle gossip?”

  Khaled shut the laptop and shoved it to his side. “How do you know your mom is gossiping?”

  “She never invites anyone over unless there’s a fresh scandal at work. I’ll be hearing all about it over dinner tonight. You might, too, if you stay.”

  “What’s for dinner?”

  “Don’t change the subject. How come you called off my interview?”

  Garrett got up and slouched in his computer chair, swirling from side to side. “Did Setto change her mind?”

  “No, no, she didn’t. She’s honored. Thinks it’s a huge thing she’ll be mentioned in a newspaper.” Khaled smiled as he remembered his grandmother’s earnestness in accepting the in
vitation to talk to Garrett. Khaled never understood why Garrett had hit it off so well with Ehsan. Ever since Garrett was a kid Ehsan had fascinated him, swirling her incense above his head and chanting prayers to protect him from all evil because he was a good American boy who had befriended her grandson. Garrett’s mother believed Ehsan was the reason Garrett had walked into her bedroom and declared he would one day tour the world—a trip he had been saving for since he was ten. Today, Garrett had planned to interview Ehsan for a piece he was writing for the school newspaper. Khaled had not asked what the piece was supposed to be about. Knowing Garrett, he was certain he could turn any subject matter into a tirade advocating multicultural understanding.

  “So how come you changed your mind, then?” Garrett asked

  “I just didn’t think today would be a good day.”

  “Why not?”

  “My parents had a fight yesterday. Mom is probably scrubbing bathrooms or something. I didn’t think you’d be comfortable.”

  “Hey, man, I don’t care. I just wanted to talk to Setto,” Garrett said, shrugging. Khaled smiled. He always liked how Garrett, too, called his grandmother Setto, pronouncing the Arabic nickname as if it were second nature. Setto.

  “We can still go, if you want to.”

  “Nah, that’s fine.”

  “Do you want to go to the city tomorrow?”

  Garrett shook his head. “Can’t. We’ve set up a basketball game for tomorrow.” Then, after a pause, “You should come. We can go to the city together on Saturday.”

  Khaled reached for the laptop again, opening it. He said nothing.

  “The guys all ask about you, you know,” Garrett added.

  Khaled nodded. He hoped his school friends truly were asking about him, though he suspected Garrett might have made this up. He still remembered the days following his brother’s death, when even Khaled’s closest friends would pass by him in the school’s hallways and turn to look the other way. “They’re just embarrassed,” Garrett would reassure him. “They don’t know what to say to you.” Even if Khaled had believed Garrett’s assertions, he was still hurt. It had taken weeks for some of his friends to nod a greeting when they saw him, for anyone other than Garrett to join him at the lunch table, for Bud Murphy to get tired of aiming a thumb-and-pointer gun at him whenever Khaled passed his way, his hand rebounding with the shock of the imaginary shot, his lips pursed as they whistled the sound of a flying bullet amid the cheer of Bud’s entourage. Even now, a full year after what happened, Khaled still felt that his presence among people who had known Hosaam and Natalie increased the collective awkwardness. Garrett was the only one of his old friends he still felt comfortable around; Brittany, the only new friend he had made during the previous year. If it were not for these two, Khaled would have spent his entire previous year online, toggling back and forth between his blog and his new Facebook account, both digital portals connecting him to an outside world that rejected Khaled but seemed indifferent to his alter ego, K.A.

  He had started his blog on a sleepless night a month or so after his self-imposed exile from a Facebook that had become hostile after Hosaam’s crime. Sitting alone in his room, Khaled had realized he could counter the Internet’s potential hostility by taking advantage of the anonymity it offered. His blog was simple: daily entries about lepidoptera and, occasionally, beetles and caterpillars he came across either on websites or on his hikes. Nothing personal. Even simpler was his signature: K.A. No way to identify him. Letters revealing no ethnicity, no identity, and no connections.

  Though the signature came as an afterthought, he had used it for only a few weeks before its usefulness became clear to him. Areas of the Internet that Khaled had shut himself out of, K.A. could potentially enter, unnoticed. Suddenly, and after two months of abstinence, Facebook became a possibility again.

  His new Facebook page contained a picture of him in profile, the sun shining so brightly in the background his face was visible only as a dark silhouette, the shade of his skin undecipherable, his features one dark mass. Those whom he befriended on Facebook could see a couple of other pictures in which he was recognizable but his surroundings were not: self-portraits of him out on his hikes, with backdrops of trees and open meadows. His face, a dark tan that could have easily passed for any ethnicity, from mixed to Hispanic, was not antagonistic. People did not object to his face, he learned, as much as they objected to his name. And his initials, though they were still his, could imply any name. Karlos Aguilar, with roots both in Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic. Khristos Agathangelos, standing in the front yard of his Mediterranean villa in the Greek isles. Or, his favorite, Kevin Anderson.

  Garrett was the only one of his friends who knew of his Facebook page, and even he learned of it by accident. Sitting in Garrett’s room one day, Khaled had logged on to his account but forgot to log back out before letting Garrett on the laptop. On the floor, a bunch of Garrett’s CDs sprawled in front of him, Khaled was taken aback when Garrett, his laptop on the desk in front of him, yelled, “Dude, you call yourself Ka? That’s brilliant!”

  Khaled, too startled to make sense of what he’d heard, blurted, “What?”

  “Ka! Your Facebook page. Hey, how come I’m not on it?” Garrett turned to him.

  “I didn’t want anyone from school to find out.”

  “But I don’t have anyone you wouldn’t want on there. I unfriended Bud and his Buddies a long time ago!”

  “Not just Bud,” Khaled said, smiling at Garrett’s name for Bud Murphy and his gang. “I just didn’t want anyone to find out.”

  Garrett shrugged. Khaled, eager to change the subject, asked, “What did you mean it was brilliant?”

  “You seriously don’t know what Ka means? And you call yourself Egyptian?”

  “They’re just my initials,” Khaled said, bewildered.

  “Ka: The ancient Egyptian name for the human soul. The part of you that makes you alive. You seriously didn’t know that?”

  Khaled shook his head.

  “Man. Your culture is wasted on you.”

  • • •

  The blog’s biggest achievement—besides allowing him hours of indulgence in entomology—was connecting him with Brittany. He logged into his Facebook account one day and found a friendship request from her. His heart pounding, he had read the unfamiliar girl’s short message: Nice blog. Cool pics of the monarch. Immediately accepting her request, he spent days obsessively browsing her numerous photos, elated at the bliss of having a girl interested in insects seek his friendship. When he found out she lived in New York, he was dumbfounded. Ehsan would have deemed this fate.

  Days later, he hopped on the Amtrak to New York. It took all his strength to shoot down the panic that had paralyzed him for days ever since he’d known Brittany lived close enough for them to meet. Sitting in that train, he spent the entire forty-five-minute ride assuring himself that he could do this. He could go seek out a young woman he did not know and introduce himself. Pursuing a logic that he would later remember with a mixture of fondness and embarrassment, he told himself he was, in fact, being a good Muslim. Hadn’t Ehsan always told him that Islam shared the root of surrender and that a good Muslim therefore always surrendered his will to God’s? Who else but God would have steered Brittany toward his blog? He truly believed that having an attractive young woman seek him out based on their mutual interest in bugs had to be an act of divine intervention.

  She worked in a coffee shop a few blocks away from NYU. Inside the cramped, busy store, he stood in line, watching her, thinking that he had not known her work schedule and that she could have easily been off that day. Yet there she was, working behind the counter, placing pastries on white plates and handing cappuccinos with overflowing froth to customers. He ordered a black coffee and a slice of marble loaf, and was served by a tall, skinny young man with shining silver disk earrings and cropped black hair. The man was pale, his lips pursed, and Khaled felt too sorry for him to resent the way he had jumped ah
ead of Brittany to serve him, depriving Khaled of the one opportunity he had rehearsed all the way here to introduce himself. Now, sitting in a corner of the coffee shop in a large armchair, Khaled sipped at his coffee and watched Brittany work as he thought of how he could approach her.

  Watching her made him uncomfortable, like he was doing something wrong or creepy, like he was intruding, spying on hapless neighbors through a telescope, for instance, or peeking into someone’s private Facebook account and browsing through pictures he knew were not meant for him. There was something else, too, some other discomfort that was only his, that no one else would relate to: the discomfort of knowing Hosaam had probably done something similar to this, had probably peered through parted blinds to watch Natalie’s house for any sign of her. The continuous, nagging, suffocating discomfort caused by his inability to totally dismiss Hosaam from his thoughts.

  Outweighing his discomfort was the thrill of being so close to her. He had never done such a thing before. Even back when he went to watch Grace he had not felt as nervous as he did now. He feasted his eyes on Brittany’s plump lips, painted a lavender that complemented the streak in her hair, and on her white, clear skin that contrasted with the black T-shirt she wore, the coffee shop’s logo printed in green, stretched tight over her breasts: Claire’s Coffee and Cakes. Deep dimples appeared on her cheeks whenever she smiled, which was often. Stretching her arm across the counter, rows of silver bracelets with charms hanging off of them slid back on her wrists and then forward again with each movement. He wondered what the charms were. He imagined himself picking out charms for her, maybe friendly ones, at first, a small coffee cup or a clock to remind her that time would pass each day and she would eventually get to go home, and then other charms, a small heart, a dangling Cupid’s arrow, or a miniature house with smoke rising out of its chimney. He wondered if she wore anklets, too.