Love from a to Z

by S. K. Ali

  I was on the couch looking up flight costs for these trips, jotting down notes in my marvels journal, when I got a message from Zayneb.

  Can you meet me at the museum? In an hour?

  Surprised because I’d written off seeing Zayneb today, knowing her mom had arrived this morning, I read the message again.

  I thought she’d be spending time at home with her family. And that I’d be going to dinner with them tomorrow, after Hanna’s birthday thing, so that I could meet Zayneb’s mom.

  But here is another day with Zayneb in it. I tapped quickly into the phone, in case she changed her mind. For sure. By the fountain?

  Yes. She followed it up with a wave emoji.

  Dad and Hanna were out, so I didn’t have a ride.

  I was about to open Uber but then remembered someone.

  Zahid.

  • • •

  “Adam, you look wonderful.” He got out of the driver’s seat to look at me.

  I went forward to shake his hand but then opened my arms for a hug. “Thanks, Zahid. Uncle Zahid, I mean,” I added with a laugh.

  “I’m so glad you called me. Not only for my taxi service. But also as a nephew, huh?” He broke his return hug to smile at me, and I saw that his face was a lined brown one with a full mustache and dark twinkling eyes.

  It was exactly the type of kind face I’d imagined. “Yeah, thanks, Uncle.”

  “You feeling better?”

  “Much better.”

  “Your family knows? They’re helping you?”

  “Yeah.” I got in the front seat, lay my Marvels and Oddities journal on my lap, and buckled up.

  He said a prayer before starting, muttering it quietly, and I joined in, my words meeting his.

  Finishing, he looked at me for a second before turning the steering wheel to edge out. “You know this?”

  “Yes, the dua? I’m Muslim, Zahid.” I laughed. “I guess I should have said assalamu alaikum first, so you knew.”

  “Walaikum musalam wa rahmathullahi wabarakatha hu,” he said, returning my salaam with a nobler greeting of peace.

  I smiled at his benevolence.

  “You are Malaysian or Indonesian?”

  “No.” I shook my head. “I’m Canadian. But my father’s family is originally from China and my mother’s from Finland.”

  “Ah. Okay.” Zahid gave me a thumbs-up.

  “Listen, Uncle Zahid. My father wanted me to invite you for dinner one day soon. He knows about how you helped me. Will you come?”

  “Oh, there’s no need for that, Adam. Why did you tell him?”

  “It’ll make him very happy. And me, too. And my sister.”

  “And your mother? And what about her?”

  “She passed away. But she would have been happy to see you.”

  Zahid drove for a bit, thinking. “Okay, tell me the date for this dinner, and I’ll make the time.”

  “Thanks.”

  “But then you have to come to my house too. And meet my family—my kids are young, but they will like you. They are learning to speak English.”

  I nodded, glad to repay his kindness in whatever way I could.

  • • •

  As I entered the foyer of the museum, I marveled at how different these steps of mine were compared to the ones I’d taken here on Sunday.

  MS was unreliable, but I vowed to enjoy the good days. And the good in every day.

  Today was a doubly special day. I was feeling fine, both physically and emotionally, plus I was getting to see Zayneb unexpectedly.

  After passing the epic staircase, I looked ahead, and there she was.

  At a table by the fountain, facing me, but not seeing me, surrounded by other tables bustling with people.

  Her head was bent over a book on the table, the pen in her hand moving swiftly across the page.

  Writing. She was writing.

  Was it in her journal?

  I had my own in my hand now—I’d taken it with me to show it to her finally—and felt thrilled at the prospect that she had hers, too.

  “Ahem, Zayneb, would you be writing your marvels? Or oddities?” I placed my journal on the table and pulled out the chair across from her.

  Her pen paused, and she looked at my journal, titling her head to read its title, a dawning, surprised expression taking over her face.

  Then she looked up, stunned. “What . . . is that? Adam?”

  I took a seat and smiled. “My Marvels and Oddities journal. I’ve been recording the good things in life since I was fourteen. And the weird things. Lately, more weird. Well, lately until I knew a certain H2O liked me back. Now it’s all marvelous.”

  “I’m going to scream. Like literally scream.” She closed the book she’d been writing in and held up the orange cover. MARVELS AND ODDITIES it announced in big, capital letters. “ADAM, I’VE BEEN WRITING IN THIS FOR TWO YEARS!”

  “And me, four years.” I grinned at the way her eyes were wider than ever. “Well, not this exact one. I’m on my fifth notebook.”

  “I CANNOT BELIEVE IT.” She stopped and closed her eyes. “Wait. What does this mean?”

  I put my elbows on the table and leaned forward. “It means we have something in common.”

  She opened her eyes and nodded.

  “And it’s an amazing thing to have in common,” I went on.

  She nodded again, peering at my tiny-fonted, lowercased marvels and oddities, written in the top left-hand corner.

  I picked it up so she could see it clearly. “I just realized this thing literally got me through the hard, alone years after my mom’s death. That I was able to see the marvels around me through it all.”

  “Wait.” She flipped through her journal. “But that’s not me. So we don’t have something in common. Because reams and reams of pages in this thing are about the awful things in the world. And I’ve got six more of these journals at home. Mostly full of crappy happenings in my life.”

  “You didn’t record any marvels?”

  “No, I did, but they were short. Except, yeah, after we started liking each other. Then it became better.” She opened her journal and did a mock reading. “Marvel: Adam, blah, blah, blah, Adam. Adam, Adam, Adam, and you get the picture.”

  I flipped to random pages throughout my notebook. “Marvel: Zayneb. And here’s another one. Marvel: Zayneb. And another one . . . so you get the picture too.”

  We looked at each other and burst out laughing. Then I looked beyond her, through the windows, to Doha Bay. At the sky above it.

  It was perfect.

  This moment was perfect. That we were so in sync and it was happening at my favorite place in the city.

  “This is unreal.” She took my journal and placed it beside hers and then drew her phone out to take a picture. “Why—I mean, how did you start yours?”

  “Because of this museum. Because I used to come here a lot and wander through the exhibits, and one day I couldn’t stop thinking of that manuscript upstairs. The Marvels of Creation and the Oddities of Existence.”

  “Oh my God. That’s why I couldn’t move when we came here on the weekend. I couldn’t believe I was in the presence of the manuscript. The one I saw online when I was sixteen.”

  “Upstairs. Where we had our weird fight.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Okay, I have to tell you something. But you have to promise you’ll be okay with it.”

  “No way. How can I promise I’ll be okay with something I don’t know. Uh, no, I don’t agree to those kinds of things.” She crossed her arms, laughter in her eyes, and sat back. “I reserve the right to get upset. Proudly.”

  “Fine. The entire time I’ve known of your existence, I knew that you had a marvels and oddities journal.” I leaned back and crossed my own arms. “Because it fell out of your bag. In the airport waiting area. And I saw.”

  “And you stalked me because of it?” She crossed her arms tighter, but her eyes twinkled with humor. “Oh, now it makes sense. That’s why you w
anted to talk to me on the airplane. It wasn’t my magnetic eyes or smile.”

  “I saw that after,” I assured her. “But first, it was your hijab. Not even the color. But the fact that you had one on, and I thought, Muslim alert. Second, it was the color, yeah.”

  “You have a thing for blues, noted.” She reached for her journal and her pen and pretended to write it down.

  Or maybe it was for real.

  I couldn’t tell, because her eyes were smiling.

  “Then it was your journal. That you might see the world like I do.” I paused. “Then it was everything else, all at once—your smile, your eyes, your personality, like a landslide, like Zayneb.”

  She looked up from writing.

  “Um, this is where I admit, for me, it was your looks.” She cleared her throat. “I’m sorry.”

  “Only?”

  “At first I mean. Then when you said salaam, I was like, This guy is super cute AND Muslim? Then it was your layers. Calm, cool, slightly sad layers. You were mysterious, and I wanted to peel you away like an onion.”

  “So you like sad onions.”

  “Yeah, they make me cry, instead of angry.”

  “Is this supposed to make me feel good?” I asked, laughing, but weirded out. Sad onion?

  But it was Zayneb. And anything she said came from somewhere, had some sort of depth.

  But sad onion?

  “It’s supposed to be real, Adam.” She stopped smiling. “I like being real. Like, if I’d noticed that you journaled the same way as me, I would have just whisper-yelled, Hey, dude, I’ve got a journal like that too, right across from you at the airport in London.”

  I nodded. “Actually, I tried. On the plane. But you were sleeping.”

  “Anyway, one way of being is not better. Like, look at me: I’m the one in trouble with my mom.” She sighed and closed her journal.

  “I was wondering about that. Why you’re here when you’re supposed to be with her. What happened?” I noticed the sudden change in her. That everything about her was slumped, her mouth, her face, her shoulders. “Wait. Let me get you something. From the café.”

  She nodded. “Do they have karak?”

  “No, but I can get you regular tea. And something to eat with that. They’ve got cakes and stuff.”

  “Thanks.” She looked over at the café counter. “It looks fancy.”

  “It is. French-pastries fancy.”

  Her eyes lit up. “Oh God, that’s my secret love. Okay, choose something for me. They’re all amazing to me.”

  ODDITY: HATERS

  We took our stuff to a newly empty table by the window.

  I poured her tea and placed the plate of raspberry cream mille-feuille in front of her like a waiter, and she laughed. “Wow. Beautiful. Did you know that I watch dessert-making videos? It’s my de-stressor.”

  “And then you try to make them yourself? The desserts?”

  “No, I just like watching others making them. Less work.”

  “Ahem.” I cleared my throat. “As a maker, I have to advise you that that’s extremely wrong. To watch from the sidelines and not participate.”

  “I’d fail.” She used the side of her fork to cut into the layers of her pastry. “Look at this delicate thing. So many steps, so many ways to get it wrong.”

  “You were named after a maker.”

  She paused with the fork halfway to her mouth. “I was?”

  “Yeah, Zayneb bint Jahsh, the prophet’s cousin. She made leather crafts, bags, and other things. Apparently, she was known for the quality of her work.” I picked up the chocolate chip cookie I’d brought for old times’ sake. “My father, the historian, makes sure I get this kind of info, especially if he thinks it’s about something I’d be interested in. Like other makers.”

  “Oh, yeah, I heard that long ago about sahabiya Zayneb. In Sunday school.” She nodded and took a forkful of her pastry. “Maybe one day I will try making some French dessert. Or maybe I’ll start with my grandma’s roti.”

  She took a knife and cut through her pastry, put half on a napkin, and passed it to me.

  “For me?”

  “Yeah, it’s really good.”

  I accepted it. “So what happened? With your mom?”

  “She found me looking up Fencer again.” She stopped eating, put her fork down. “I didn’t mean to. I meant to dedicate all my attention to her. Because I was so happy to see her again. Truly.”

  I cut half my second chocolate chip cookie and gave it to her. She took it and put it at the side of her mille-feuille plate.

  “But then I remembered this comment I’d seen under this video from last week. Wait. I’ll show you.” She picked up her phone and clicked and scrolled and then passed it to me.

  The video was titled Muslim Girls Save World from Villain Part Two. I lowered the volume as the intro blared, a mix of drumming and a man’s deep voice saying something in Arabic. Two people in niqab, the face covering some Muslim women wear, sat at a table with a tall, obviously plastic potted cactus on a chair between them.

  “Yo, assalamu alaikum. May peace and the Force be with you guys!” the girl on the right said. “Today, my girl Janna joins me again. And we’re going to continue our interview with my ex-brother-in-law, on how he escaped getting captured for abusing my sister. Who, as you dedicated viewers know, is BACK HOME in America finally! But, inexcusably, the villain is at large, the one who kept her locked up. However, friends, never fear—he lent his alter ego, his thorny alter ego, for our interview.” She poked the cactus with a black-gloved hand. “Wait, we forgot to mic him. Guys, can we get the villain miked up?”

  She looked beyond the camera and gestured with another gloved hand as though she were calling a waiter.

  The video went dark then came back on to reveal the cactus wired with a lapel mic clipped to one of its thorny branches, a donut stuck on another branch. I chuckled.

  Zayneb waved a hand nearby in slow motion. “Adam? We can watch the epic Niqabi Ninja videos later, but, for now, scroll down to the comments.”

  I paused the video and found the comments. They were mostly glowing and So happy you’re doing this and Expose him! and other such things until I got to one that had a lot of likes, that veered off from the sentiments previously expressed.

  Why don’t you admit it? Your sister was treated the way she was because of Islam. Not because of your brother-in-law. Not because of Saudi Arabia. You’re peddling the same thing that got her in trouble, hypocrite. Things won’t change until you give up being Muslim. On your own or by other means. I vote for other means.

  I made a face. “A hateful troll.”

  “Look at the account.”

  “Stone Wraith?”

  “Yeah. Click on it.”

  I clicked and saw a channel with one video, a time lapse of a plant. “He’s got one video. But wait, a bunch of playlists. And, whoa, eighteen thousand subscribers?”

  “Check when he joined.”

  “This month? This year?”

  “Exactly. Just when Fencer deleted his other accounts.”

  “You think this is him?”

  “I’m sure it’s him. Because his subscriber count is close to what he had on his old accounts. Not as much, but close.” She reached for the teapot and poured the last bit into her cup. “It’s him. And he has some way to communicate to his old followers. Some forum or something. That’s how they all migrated to his new accounts.”

  “Good sleuthing.”

  “But it was completely out of the blue. Like, I subscribe to those girls, the Niqabi Ninjas, and watch their videos regularly, and I happened to see this comment at the beginning of last week, but it only pinged in my mind as my mom was eating lunch here in Doha, talking about my grandma’s grave, how beautifully taken care of it was. She showed us a picture of it, and it was nothing like the cemeteries we know. But just seeing it brought this grave stone image into my head, and then I remembered that my friends had found out Fencer’s new alias was S
tone Wraith, and then ping, the comment under the Niqabi Ninjas just flashed in my head, and I made up my mind to look into it.”

  I nodded to encourage her to continue.

  “Then I made a mistake, because I got this idea with my mom sitting right there. I pretended I needed to go to the bathroom. But instead I went to my room and texted my friends at home and got on my laptop and was looking into Fencer’s YouTube account and going down this rabbit hole of the videos on his playlists, see what he’s commented on. And my mom opens the door and walks in and sits on the bed to hug me.”

  “Uh-oh.”

  “Yeah, uh-oh. I close the browser windows quickly, but then she happens to see my texts and they’re like Fencer this, Fencer that. And my last one was eat him alive for the last time.” She laughed but in a bitter way. “Can you believe it? Like my mom sees that?”

  This time I shook my head to encourage her to continue.

  “Then she starts asking me questions. Like what have I been doing here the whole time and why haven’t I dropped it and, and . . . We got into a huge fight. And I got mad and left. And there I go again, breaking everything apart.” She took a bit of the cookie and ate it. “I’m sorry. Because again, talking to you, I feel like I’m ungrateful. Because I have a mom. That I seem to always be fighting with.”

  I sat back and looked out the window at the turquoise water. “The thing with my mom was she preferred when I was up-front with her. I wasn’t always, because I was a kid, but that’s what she liked. Like she’d tell me to face my feelings.”

  I told her about the time we made French fries together, when she allowed me to cry.

  “Wow. Adam.” She sat back too. “That’s unbelievably hard. Mine is like a first-world problem compared to that. My fight with my mom.”

  “But wait, I’m getting this new idea from that time. The Time of the French Fries.” I sat up and leaned forward to get her attention, to get her to understand that what I was going to say was serious. “See, this is what I do. I go over my times with my mom and get ahas. Like I have a new one about the French fry memory: What if she was trying to tell me that in order to be strong, you have to be weak first? Like, feel your weakness?”