No one asked where Eli was, either. They’d gotten used to his truancy, his distance. The first-years barely knew it was different. He was in the barn, standing outside the bolted door of Galahad’s stall. Without exactly meaning to he’d taken note of a pointed shovel within arm’s reach and a hay fork only yards away. If you paid close attention, it only took two to show a pattern. But he had neither tool in his hand. He had oats, and Galahad’s expressive lips were scooping them up, rubbing his palm with the soft rubber of their skin. As long as Eli had food, Galahad let Eli pet him over the ears, above his bulbous eye, and down his long forehead to his muzzle. “How right he was about you,” Eli said to him. Even the nostrils of horses had fine muscles. Every fine little hair had its own luster. He reached down to the bucket for another handful of oats, wondering when he would ever sleep again.
DENTISTS
From my window, I counted the shadows in the Maliks’ driveway. I could only see them when they passed in front of the open garage door, backlit by the opener’s dim bulb, but it was easy to make out Dr. Malik’s silhouette. Like many tall doctors, he was gently hunched from leaning close to his patients, and he was a little soft in the back and the belly. Mrs. Malik was not hard to distinguish either. She was taller than both her girls, and though at various times one of the three of them would disappear back inside, she mostly stood behind them with a hand on the shoulder of each, as if they were taking a shadow portrait. In the daylight their hijabs and their family resemblance made them easy to confuse with one another at a quick glance, but these circumstances changed them. In the darkness, Mrs. Malik’s headscarf looked like a trendy bob, whereas the lack of light played a different trick with the girls, somehow turning the smooth fabric of their coverings choppy and angular. It was their posture that distinguished the two girls now. Amina, who was in high school, stood upright and patient like her mother. Safiya, on the other hand, leaned and pulled and made movements toward the house or the vehicle.
The back of their Acura minivan was open, and Dr. Malik made trips in and out of the house to load it. It was October, and my window was cracked open. Their whispers made a hissing sound in the night that I’d first mistaken for a faucet left on in the bathroom. I was curious about what they were saying, but I didn’t want to make a sound by opening the window further. I didn’t want to alarm them.
I had some idea why they were leaving under the cover of night. I’d heard about the executive order during my restaurant shift after school. After the Baitul Hameed Mosque bombing, and the ones of the previous week, not to mention the assorted beatings and killings around the country, the government had said they lacked the resources to shield Muslims from violence, and were asking all practicing Muslims to relocate to designated Protection Villas—some cleared-out apartment blocks—where the National Guard could watch over them. As unappealing as that prospect was, when I heard some of my coworkers cheer the order, and others saying that the last thing Muslims deserved was protection, I could imagine worse things than National Guard protection.
My father had taken a harder tack. He’d been drinking in a kitchen chair when I got home, looking like a bad actor trying on a Eugene O’Neill character. He was playing at a roughness belied by his slender, slouched shoulders, his faded olive button-down, his softly shaven cheeks, his thin-framed glasses. He looked the very picture of The Liberal in Defeat. Had he auditioned for such a role, he’d have been dismissed as too on the nose.
He and I had been close before the last year. Our distaste for one another had not come about in the usual way of an arrogant teenager shoving off from authority. It was more personal, more like a marriage that had soured. He’d started telling me that as I got closer to adulthood, not seeing what was happening in front of me became a personal failing. I would shrug and suggest he was being hysterical. We were in an ugly swing of the political pendulum, but would swing back. After I’d rebuffed him like that a few times, his tone toward me changed. He began speaking about how good a heart I’d had as a child. How open I’d been to the world. How sensitive to other people’s misfortunes. It was his elegy for me, which he delivered in front of me, as if I’d died young. What had happened? he’d ask my mother, who was only a prop in the act for which I was the audience. Now, he said—this was his real mantra—I was “like the ones who had let it happen.” My mother would retreat to her room. I’d roll my eyes and do the same, not without a parting shot about him acting like a frail old maid. I’d started thinking of him as having an illness. A weakness of character, and a degenerative one.
Sitting at the table with his bottle that night, he started telling me about shoes. Rooms had been filled with them. Mountains of old leather husks. Warehouses brimming with them. You wouldn’t believe you could fill a space that big with shoes. And if you imagined a person in each pair? They don’t teach those kind of details anymore, he said. He’d asked some of my history teachers. Jewelry, furs, clothing. Gold teeth. They’d had a whole staff of dentists.
I went upstairs. I actually did share a lot of my dad’s ideas, and probably would have shared them more forcefully had I not associated them with him. He had been raised under a peaceful sign, I thought, and had never developed the fortitude necessary for dark times. But even if that fortitude was a quality I credited myself with, I did have trouble sleeping that night. That’s why I was up to see my neighbors’ hurried departure. They went down the street with their headlights off, and I watched, as I’m sure they did, to see if any bedroom lights would turn on as the van passed. None did. When the vehicle rounded the corner, it occurred to me that I would never see the Maliks again.
I knew so little about them. Dr. Malik had been four when his parents moved to the US from Pakistan. His wife had been a fetus when her family immigrated. Conceived in Lahore, born in Houston. The girls, of course, had lived their whole lives here. If not for my father, one of the only people on the street who spoke with them regularly, I don’t suppose I would have known their names. They were fashionable people, he said. A bit bougie, even. I didn’t see it, but what room did I have to argue? With regret for the blank spaces I’d left behind their cutouts, I stared at their garage door, which Dr. Malik had rolled down manually and left open about six inches, as you would for a cat. I didn’t even know whether they had a cat. If they did, and if they had left it, the house was still a home to something. If not, the place was now purely archeological.
My house was dark as I crept down the stairs. The kitchen light was off, meaning my father was no longer there, but the oscillating fan outside his room was off as well, and he was unable to sleep without it. My mother was working her night shift at the hospital, and it wouldn’t even be her lunch break yet. Streetlight through the kitchen window backlit the rangy arms of houseplants and fuzzed a pile of dishes and cups with gray. With our own house as seemingly abandoned as the one next door, I simply left through the front door.
The Maliks’ garage door rolled up silently and easily. Dr. Malik’s Lexus, resting inside, would be a boon for someone. Inside, I turned on the lights. I wasn’t scared to do so, and realized how surreal it was that in the course of a day it had become safer for me to be in their house than for them to. The laundry room floor was tiled in large, symmetrical diamonds that continued into the kitchen. No sign of a litter box. The lid of the washing machine was open as if waiting for a load. The kitchen was clean and well appointed. There wasn’t much in the way of Islamic decor. A few nicely framed bits of a foreign script, Urdu I presumed, hung on the walls. The turquoise backsplash had a vaguely South Asian flair to it, but overall I felt more like I’d walked into a cover of House Beautiful than a home of the devout. There was something on the island, though, set out in front of the bar stools. It was black velvet embroidered with golden thread and little circular mirrors, and it stood up on the counter like a hat. Thinking it was a hat, I picked it up and found a teapot underneath. I crouched down to look at it more closely. I don’t know that I’d seen a more beautiful artifact. Th
e gleaming brass was laid over with a thick stripe of royal blue, with a careful, complex fretwork of the brass below tracing the outlines of branches, leaves, and flowers. It was as if all of the intricate and detailed Pakistani designs I’d expected to find suffusing the house had been concentrated into the teapot, hidden there under its cozy.
The refrigerator contained so many vegetables that they didn’t all fit in the crisper. Zucchini sat in a plastic bag on the shelf. I picked up a half a bunch of celery, which had gone limp. Two-percent milk. Commercial Greek yogurt. A rotisserie chicken. Margherita pizzas in the freezer. Pistachio ice cream. I don’t know what I’d been expecting. Muslims did not eat pork; the women wore scarves or veils; they prayed in the morning and evening, maybe more, on mats that they faced toward Mecca. And with that I’d exhausted my knowledge of the religion, though for some reason I’d always felt I had a deep, or deep enough, understanding of it.
Peeking into a nook off the dining room, I thought I might see mats laid out on the floor. The room was empty, making me think I was correct about this being their prayer room, but the only mats were hung from the wall like tapestries. On one little delicately engraved table was a group of beaded strings, something like rosaries, but in varied colors. I would have thought they would take those with them, needing them wherever they went. I would understand more soon enough. I didn’t bother with the computer in the office, figuring it would be password protected and not wanting to sit down, to allow time to slip by unnoticed. The entryway had a nicely constructed set of cubbies, mostly filled with shoes. They all had a taste for chic footwear, and while surely they had each departed with a pair on their feet, it must have been hard to leave so many behind. It was no warehouse, but now there was no looking at the sets of shoes without seeing their empty spaces as their defining features.
I should take off my own shoes, I thought, but it seemed too late for that.
In horror films, heading up the stairs can be a fatal mistake. There was a bit of that chill as I took to the steps, though the danger I felt was not a physical one. I felt as if I was about to walk in on the Malik family’s murdered bodies, though I knew I’d seen them drive away not an hour ago. The hallway was quiet and still. Even with the light on, it had a particular emptiness.
But the girls’ rooms were girls’ rooms. The one with clothes on the floor, boy-band posters over an unmade bed, and rumpled lined paper and worksheets spread chaotically around the desk belonged, I assumed, to Safiya, the younger daughter. That would leave as Amina’s room a spotless, well-decorated space, appointed in an adult style. The walls were painted a latte color. An oval mirror in an ornate silvered frame hung above a writing desk. A small jewelry tree sat on the dresser, adorned with a few dangling necklaces and earrings. The one exception to order was an overcrowded bookshelf, with paperbacks stacked sideways on top of the properly shelved books, filling in all the negative space. There was a stack on top of the shelf as well, with library labels on the bottoms of their spines.
The master bedroom was not in a normal state. It did not appear ransacked, but it didn’t look untouched either. Piles of women’s shirts were on the floor in front of a dresser. A pile of pants was on the bed, which appeared to be a California king. I had seen the rooms of messy people—my mother’s side of my parents’ room—and this was distinctly different. An empty duffel bag sat outside a slightly open closet door, looking deflated. Beyond the visual evidence of the Maliks’ life in this room, there was a tour of scents that I believe could have led me through the space if I closed my eyes: sandalwood, soap, jasmine. I was sure the fragrances could be mapped to different parts of the bedroom, but I could not read that map, and so they seemed to me as jumbled as this hastily evacuated chamber.
I opened one of the small top drawers of the dresser: socks. I opened the next drawer. In the front was a pile of women’s underwear, a bit drab, showing too many times through the wash. Behind that was an equal-sized pile of silkier, lacier stuff in a variety of colors. Behind that, but not exactly tucked away, was a sleek purple vibrator. I picked it up by its white plastic handle and held it aloft. Its surface was nearly reflective. I turned it on, and it waggled its long finger at me. I’d never held such a thing before and I didn’t feel comfortable doing so. I turned it off and put it back.
On Mrs. Malik’s nightstand was a book I recognized. My mother had tried to convince me to read it. On its cheesy cover, a mother was standing on the beach, holding her young daughter and looking out at the sea. Elena Ferrante, the cover read. They had left their smartphones in a cluster on the bed, which puzzled me until I thought of the GPS trackers they contained.
It was the bathroom, though, that was in the greatest state of disarray. Socks on the floor, other clothes. In the bathtub were three piles of women’s hair, and though I had not seen their hair uncovered before, except for Safiya’s when she was younger, I knew whom each pile belonged to as easily as if they had been labeled. What is it that makes hair younger? That distinguishes the hair of a woman from the hair of a girl? But I knew that the long, silky pile of black hair was Mrs. Malik’s, and that the two thinner, duller, messier piles belonged to her daughters.
One of the dual sinks was furry with the salt-and-pepper trimmings of Dr. Malik’s beard. The other sink was stained with a maroon hair dye, the open box on its side nearby, empty. In between the two was a just-opened cylinder of styling wax. I could tell it was new because the plastic safety seal was right next to it. Cosmetics were loosely scattered around the counter. All the lids were back on, but they had not been put back in the open case that held a deeper repository of shades and colors. Glinting amid the mess was a simple gold heart-shaped locket on a thin chain. I picked it up to look inside. There were two portraits, one of each girl.
I did not put it down. The redhats would be by in a day or two to go through the place, and I did not want to think of it melted or thrown in the trash, or the pictures replaced with those of two white girls. This was the last I wanted to see of the place. I knew I would not sleep again that night, that I would lie in bed with that feeling in my stomach, and it would not be until sometime in the midmorning that physiological need would wrestle down worry and I, like my mother, would sleep through the day.
I turned off each light as I retreated through the house by the same path I’d entered. I rolled up the garage door quietly and left it slightly open for the cat that did not exist. My house and the Maliks’ house were dark twins in the night, the facades only superficially different. As I walked back inside, I thought of my mother for some reason, and how she was in a different world than I was at the moment, an interior world whose lights never went off, where staff still wandered the halls, sat at the stations, and tended patients, some of whom would be awake as well. I didn’t think anything more about her. I just pictured her there.
As I crossed through the kitchen, the lights flipped on, and I froze where I stood. My father was in the same chair I’d seen him in earlier, watching me. His hand was still stretched out to the light switch next to him. I felt a momentary, reflexive disdain for him, and then a wave of shame for that reaction. He had always judged me. Maybe in the way all fathers judge their sons. Maybe worse. But oh how he was judging me now. From the first moment, his eyes were on the locket that dangled from my fist, as if he’d known where to look. He never met my eyes. I knew he was thinking of the shoes, the dentists. Living under his judgment so long had been like holding up a boot trying to crash down on me. To finally see myself through his eyes—to see what I was holding, to know where I’d been—was like letting it. How I’d judged him, too, and for so long. For his softness, for his aura of defeat. For his preemptive disappointment in me. But now I could see that he was so defeated because he had seen the future. He had seen the future long ago, and now it was here.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
There are many to whom this book owes its thanks. To my editor, Nicola Mason, for bringing the book into being and helping it become what it is. To my m
entors, Liza Wieland and Steve Yarbrough, whose guidance from my earliest writing days has helped me be able to always see the way forward. To those who helped me hone and improve these stories: Erin Cook, Carole Firstman, Sally Vogl, Phyllis Brotherton, Jim Schmidt, and especially Elizabeth Schulte Martin. To friends smarter than I am, without whose knowledge and expertise many of these stories would not have been possible: Maryam Attia, Samina Najmi, Bob Allaire, Tim Ellison, Jesse Rorabaugh, and Jessica Sweet.
I am also thankful for the literary magazine editors who first published these stories: David Lynn and Caitlin Horrocks of Kenyon Review; Carolyn Kuebler of New England Review; Megan Sexton and Soniah Kamal of Five Points; Michael Griffith and Nicola Mason, once again, of Cincinnati Review; Jonathan Freedman and Vicki Lawrence of Michigan Quarterly Review; Linda Swanson-Davies and Susan Burmeister-Brown of Glimmer Train; Stephen Corey of Georgia Review; and Bill Henderson of The Pushcart Prize.
To the Smittcamp family and all the staff and leaders of the Smittcamp Family Honors College, who have created a miracle and sustain it daily.
To my fellow students from English 42H in fall of 2002.
Warnings from the Future Page 14