In the Language of Miracles

by Rajia Hassib

  He saw her whisper something to a coworker before stepping outside. Through the glass front of the coffee shop he could see her smoke, the cigarette dangling between her fingers, her hand carrying it to her mouth and then back again every few seconds. In her left hand, she held her phone. She stood with her back against the glass, the sole of one heavy boot resting against the storefront, her leg covered in thick black stockings. She was wearing a gray miniskirt, but he could not tell whether she wore anklets. He imagined she did, under her boots.

  She was texting, he could tell. Or typing something. Quickly, he got his phone out and checked Facebook. Yes—she was updating her status. “One more hour to go . . . too nice a day to stay in,” she wrote. His hand shook, and he wiped sweaty fingers on his jeans. His heart raced as his fingers typed, “At least you get smoking breaks,” followed by a winking face. He saw her look at her phone, then around. Glancing down again, she clicked something on her phone. Probably his name, he thought. Maybe trying to get a better look at his picture. She looked around her one more time, then back at the phone, typing something. He checked his phone. “Spooky” was all she added. He stared at the phone. He had to type something smart, something that would keep her interested. He didn’t want to reveal his location that fast. “Not spooky. Simple,” he typed. He clicked on his own picture and magnified it. The picture looked okay, enough like him for her to recognize him, he hoped.

  “How?” she typed back. “Spying?” He stared at the word, squeezed the phone in his fist. Cold sweat collected on his forehead. “I don’t spy,” he wrote back, punching the letters through the phone’s touch screen. I don’t spy, he told himself. I’m not a creep. I don’t spy, nor do I stalk. He got up, stared at the phone and then at her. He should leave now. He no longer felt he wanted to talk to her. How would he explain being here anyway? What kind of coincidence would that be? Of all the places in New York, for him to end up in her coffee shop? Of course she had the right to think he was a creep, spying on her, stalking her. Again Hosaam’s image flashed in his mind. He looked down at his phone one more time. He would leave now. He touched the screen and saw she had replied, “Just kidding, K.A. Chill.” He stared at the initials, and then sat down, touched two fingers to his forehead. Chill.

  “Look behind you,” he typed. His hands were not shaking. When she looked back, he lifted one arm up, waved, and smiled. She smiled back.

  • • •

  Later, they had walked through Washington Square Park, and he had confessed to his obsession with her pictures. Talking to her had been effortless, his words lured out of him by her ability to listen. Later, it would seem to him that he would have told her everything, had she asked the right questions. The one question she did pose he answered more honestly than he had planned for.

  “So what does K.A. stand for?” she asked as they strolled through the park.

  He swallowed. Minutes earlier he had reminded himself of his new moniker, the one he had settled on as he sat in the coffee shop waiting for her to finish her shift: Kevin Anderson. He had repeated the name to himself, engraving it in his memory, letting the letters roll silently on his tongue until he got used to them. Kevin Anderson. Now, walking next to her, the zeal he had felt as he clung to this name was gone. Instead, he was overcome by a desire for the extraordinary, a sudden conviction that this girl walking next to him would be more impressed by the exotic than by the common. Also, he had found neither the courage nor the desire to lie to her.

  “They’re my initials. Ka is also the ancient Egyptian name for the soul. My parents are from Egypt, originally.” He glanced sideways to see her reaction. His eyes met hers, and she smiled.

  “Cool,” she said.

  They walked across the park and waited for the traffic light to turn red before crossing, heading east on Fourth Street among a flow of pedestrians. He had not truly answered her question, yet she did not press on—and because she did not, he added, “The K is for Khaled.”

  “Khaled. That’s nice. I don’t think I’ve ever met a Khaled before.”

  He looked straight at her, scrutinizing her smile, her half-curious, half-friendly gaze. No judgment, none of the caution the mention of his name might have evoked. He would not tell her his last name, even though he knew the absurdity of fearing that she, living in New York, would recognize his brother’s name in his. But he had told her his first name, and that was all that mattered. That was enough.

  • • •

  Sitting on Garrett’s bed, Khaled sneaked a look at his friend, who had gone back to texting Hailee. Guilt consumed him again at never having told Garrett about Brittany, at never having told Brittany about Hosaam, at the secrets this past year had taught him to keep. Garrett never kept any secrets, as far as he could tell. Khaled had always envied his friend his ease with people, his ability to approach strangers and start talking with no apprehensions. The day Khaled met Brittany for the first time, he had tried to emulate Garrett, even after it was clear to him that Brittany’s friendship was all he would ever be able to gain, if he was lucky enough. Almost daily, he regretted his inability to evoke the ease and frankness that came so naturally to his two friends. Then again, neither one of them had to live with his memories.

  6

  ENGLISH: And they lived happily ever after.

  Traditional fairy tale ending

  ARABIC: And the two brothers abode with their wives in all pleasance and solace of life and its delights, for that indeed Allah the Most High had changed their annoy into joy; and on this wise they continued till there took them the Destroyer of delights and the Severer of societies, the Desolator of dwelling-places and Garnerer of grave-yards, and they were translated to the ruth of Almighty Allah; their houses fell waste and their palaces lay in ruins and the Kings inherited their riches.

  From the ending of The Arabian Nights

  Samir used to make fun of Nagla for claiming she could smell things he could not: the new-car scent a year after they had owned the car; fresh grout months after he had remodeled a bathroom; the traces of frying oil on her kitchen apron after it had been laundered twice. He often teased her, saying that she was cursed not only with the nose of a hound but also with the ears of a cat, hearing the swish of a pin through the air before it hit the floor. Sitting cross-legged on the only carpeted area in the middle of the attic, Nagla thought that perhaps he was right, that her mother could not understand her obsession with the attic because she was never able to detect what Nagla could: Hosaam’s lingering smell, a faint scent that seemed always to originate from a spot right over her shoulder, as if all she needed to do was turn around and she would find him there, a halo of aftershave mixed with traces of sweat that the attic’s mustiness could not mask.

  Today she carried a plastic storage bin upstairs—one larger than what her mother would have approved of, but, if she had to sort through her son’s stuff, Nagla reasoned, she should at least be allowed to keep as much of it as she wanted to. She had been in the attic only half an hour and the bin was already almost full: Hosaam’s collection of drumsticks; a notebook filled with doodling, notes, caricatures, and words written in block letters across full pages (Rock Nation, Got Nothing Better to Do); some music paper that he used back when he was getting into songwriting, the groups of five lines littered with penciled dots and sticks that Nagla stared at, marks her son had made that meant something to him but nothing to her, a coded message in a language that she never learned. His manuscript had to stay, of course, if only to honor the time he spent working on it. Sorting items by what they meant to him, not to her, made sense, at first; it gave her a gauging system that would prevent her from keeping everything, including the tossed sock that had made its way under the low cabinet and stayed hidden there for at least a year until she had pulled it out moments earlier.

  Soon enough, though, she found it difficult to determine even what Hosaam would have liked to keep. The attic was his private sanctuary, and nothing seemed trivial enough to discard; his magazin
es, his CDs, his posters of Manchester United and AC Milan (left over from an earlier obsession with soccer), his two guitars and the music stand—his things. Nagla stared at the black garbage bag across from her, sitting empty and exuding disappointment. She got up and made her way to one of the guitars, standing in the corner behind Hosaam’s drum set. Even in the morning the attic was so dimly lit that she had to step carefully to make sure she did not trip over some cast-off shoe or a stack of magazines. Reaching the guitar, she carried it over to the room’s only window, held it up for inspection. Some kid could get pretty excited about this, even though Hosaam never really did. He had entertained the guitar idea for what—two weeks? Three? And then he was back to his drums, pounding on them at all hours of the day and forgetting all about his guitar-related plans. She wasn’t even sure both guitars were his, and, glancing at the other guitar, she wondered whether one of his friends had left his there and forgotten about it. How did he end up with not one but two instruments? She put the guitar down, let it rest against the windowsill. Looking back, it seemed that she had been more excited about Hosaam’s guitar prospects than her son ever was. She distinctly remembered thinking of him on a stage, guitar in hand, playing some prolonged solo in front of a hysterically enthusiastic audience. This could not have been a true memory. At the time, though, it had seemed plausible enough.

  Hosaam’s musical ventures had irritated Samir. At first, he had grudgingly accepted them as a phase his teenage son was passing through, but when the days stretched into weeks and months, Samir grew impatient. Every time bursts of drum solos blasted out of the attic, Samir winced.

  “He’s wasting his time,” he complained to Nagla one evening as they both sat in the kitchen drinking their after-dinner tea while continuous, muffled drumrolls played in the background. “He’d be better off studying.”

  “He can’t study all day long,” Nagla protested.

  “He can’t play music all day long, either.”

  “He’s not. He only practices in the evenings,” Nagla lied.

  “He already wastes a couple of evenings a week practicing with this band of his. He should spend the rest of the week studying. How does he expect to go to a good college if he can’t even maintain an A average? How is he going to survive medical school if he doesn’t develop good study habits?”

  But Hosaam had not been interested in medical school, nor, it turned out, in higher education in general. Considering how well she believed she knew her own son, Nagla should have anticipated what came next. Yet when Hosaam walked into the living room one evening and announced to his parents that he would not be applying to college, she was thunderstruck.

  Samir was furious.

  “He has nothing except this band stuff on his mind,” Samir had yelled the moment Nagla managed to pull him into their bedroom and away from Hosaam. “I told you we should never have let him join that band. But you wouldn’t hear of it, would you? Let him have fun!” he mocked her. “Now look where this fun has taken him. He’s going to be a total failure!” Samir took off his sweater, threw it against the wall.

  “No, he’s not! Maybe he’s just not meant to be a doctor. Maybe he can—”

  “No one is meant to be a doctor. You work for it! You earn it!” Samir cut her off. He was walking around the room in circles, folding up the sleeves of his shirt, tearing his tie off. “He’s not going to be a doctor because he is a lazy, good-for-nothing bum who thinks he’s going to be a music star!”

  As if in response, a crescendo of drumbeats exploded out of the attic, right above the bedroom. Samir looked up.

  “Wallahil-azim, if he doesn’t stop that racket I will walk up there and break that thing into a million pieces,” Samir hissed.

  For weeks afterward, Nagla tried to reason with Samir, whose anger with Hosaam had driven him to ignore his older son, ceasing all communication with him except for the occasional remark thrown in whenever Hosaam was close enough to overhear it. “Some people have no ambition,” Samir would grumble as Hosaam walked into the kitchen to grab a snack. “I wonder how long he thinks I will support him.” Always speaking of his son in the third person.

  “Just give him some time, Samir,” Nagla would plead. She had truly hoped that time was the only thing Hosaam needed and had convinced herself that she had good reason to believe so. In the months preceding Hosaam’s decision not to apply to college, he had grown closer than ever to Natalie, and Nagla knew that he dreaded the strain that distance would put on their relationship, if he and Natalie ended up going to colleges states apart. “We’d be away from each other for five whole years, Natalie!” she had heard him whisper on the phone one evening. “Five years!” Even as she regretted the year her son wasted, Nagla had hoped that he was only waiting to find out where Natalie would go so that he could apply to the same college or, at least, to a college nearby. In Nagla’s mind, Hosaam’s decision to postpone—not forsake, just postpone—going to college testified to nothing other than his romanticism. Samir would have balked at this theory, of course, but that’s why she never mentioned her suspicion to him, reveling, instead, in the belief that she understood her son better than his father ever did.

  Hosaam had been fine all the way until he graduated high school, Nagla would later tell herself again and again. But something happened during the months that followed. His bandmates all went to college, leaving him behind. And Natalie? Nagla never found out what happened between them, why or when the rift came. Perhaps she would never even have suspected anything was wrong with Hosaam, had the noise coming from the attic not stopped, the incessant practice replaced by eerie silence.

  Samir had been glad. “Maybe he’s finally coming to his senses,” he had said.

  Later, Nagla would remember that moment and shudder, wondering how things would have turned out if she had responded to Samir’s statement, voicing the concern that had started gnawing at her, the fear that, whatever was happening to Hosaam, it was not a return to better sense. In those days, she had watched her older son become more and more withdrawn. He would walk up to the attic like he always did, but instead of the outburst of music that usually followed his ascent, nothing but silence would ensue. By the time Nagla noticed her son’s change of habits, she could not pinpoint the last time she had heard him play the drums, nor could she recall having recently seen him go out with his friends or sit up with Natalie on her porch, like they always used to do.

  “Something wrong, habibi?” she asked him one day as he passed her on his way up to the attic. He looked at her, said nothing, and then continued walking.

  “Something bothering you? Tell me, Hosaam.” She followed him up the stairs to the second floor, watched him climb up the pull-down ladder to the attic.

  “Nothing for you to worry about,” he muttered, pulling the trapdoor shut behind him. “Not for much longer, anyway.”

  Perhaps it was another phase, she had told herself. Perhaps he had had a fight with Natalie—his first broken heart. Perhaps he was getting bored with staying home and would soon start thinking about college; a little bit of boredom might be productive. For weeks she had waited, keeping her worries from Samir, thankful that he was beginning to grow less angry with Hosaam now that his musical aspirations seemed to have waned.

  “He’ll be talking about college soon, you’ll see,” Samir had reassured her. “He’ll recognize that he needs an education, if he is to become anyone in this world.”

  Nagla, nodding to everything her husband said, had hoped he was right.

  • • •

  Standing in the attic, lost in the midst of her son’s belongings, Nagla remembered how naïvely optimistic she had been, waiting as she did for her son to return, willfully and of his own accord, from whatever foreign territory he had wandered into, hoping that, any day now, he would start talking to her again, he would start going out with his friends again, he would regain his appetite, he would play music again, or, at least, he would find his way out of the attic where he seemed to hav
e been serving a self-imposed prison sentence. Looking around her, she wondered what role that attic, so cluttered and claustrophobic, had played in her son’s decline. She had to admit the room was depressing. For one thing, the attic was always dark, even in the middle of the day. The attic’s only window, circular and overlooking the backyard, was coated with dust. Looking out the window, Nagla pulled the sock she had found out of her pocket and held it to her nose, sniffing. Even she could detect nothing but dankness. Why had she kept that sock in her pocket? A single, musty sock—if she kept it, it would become one more thing to care for and obsess over, one more silly thing to mourn when it got lost. She held the balled sock in one hand, hesitated, and then, deliberately avoiding further thought, used it to wipe a section of the window clean. She scrubbed the window, pushing and pulling until her upper arm hurt. When she still could not see through the glass, she reached for the latch, pushed the window open, rotating it on its horizontal axis, and then started vigorously wiping the external surface. She wiped even after the sock had turned black and she had to turn it inside out to clean the smeared dirt off the window. When she closed the window again, she could see through it well enough to detect the edge of her backyard, the border of Summerset Park, where Natalie’s memorial service was to take place in only three days.

  The trees seemed vexingly neutral to all that had gone on around them. In her mind, those trees should have all been burned down by now, should have burst in a willful act of spontaneous combustion, leaving an arid, gray expanse, a testimony to the horror that their branches had sheltered. She remembered Cynthia’s plan to plant a tree in memory of her daughter and felt an overwhelming urge to smoke.