Homeland Elegies: A Novel

by Ayad Akhtar

  “—Dad.”

  Benji shot me a quick dissuading glance.

  “I used to treat famous people, too. I was a doctor to kings! Did you know that, Benji?”

  “That’s what you were saying, Doc.”

  “Kings!”

  “So I’m gonna go get your things,” Benji said. “And let you gentlemen be on your way.”

  “My car?” Father asked again, confused.

  “I’ll take care of it, Dad. Don’t worry.”

  Benji headed up the stairs as Father tottered to the cell door, still finding his feet. I reached out for his arm, which he snatched away angrily, banging his hand against the bars. He yelped, cursing in Punjabi, “Bhenchod,” then trundling off up the stairs to the front door.

  I met Benji at reception, where he handed me Father’s wallet and keys. “I’m sorry about that,” I said. “He’s obviously embarrassed—”

  “Please. It’s nothing. Compared to stuff I’ve seen? He’s a kitten.”

  “Pretty oversize kitten.”

  “Aren’t we all?” Benji said with a smile. “Is it true he was really Trump’s doctor?”

  “Did he tell you that?”

  “Said he treated him for a heart problem years ago. They were friends.”

  “I don’t know about the friends part, but yes, he was his doctor for a while.”

  “Wow. What a trip—maybe have a real talk with him tomorrow…”

  “Absolutely. And thank you, Benji. This was incredibly kind of you.”

  “Good luck next week. With your opening.”

  “Thanks,” I said, heading for the exit. I stopped in the doorway: “You want to come?”

  “To what? Your opening?”

  “Be my guests. Monday. You and Jess.”

  “You sure about that?”

  “One hundred percent.”

  “I’d love that. Let me check my schedule and get back to you.”

  Out in the parking lot, I found Father already nestled in the passenger seat. I drove us home in silence, not realizing—until we were in the driveway—that he’d fallen asleep and was now drooling against the glass. After waking him, I took him inside into the living room, where I helped him onto the couch on which my mother had died and where he’d slept every night since. As I unlaced his shoes, he started to drift off to sleep again, mumbling my name and something else I couldn’t make out.

  “What was that, Dad?”

  “I saaaid…if she waaaas my own daaaughter, I would have dooone the saaame.”

  I was confused. “If who was your own daughter?”

  “Christiiine,” he blared. He turned away from me again as I pulled off his socks. He kept muttering into the cushions. It wasn’t long before he was snoring.

  * * *

  Who Christine was and what she might have had to do with being his daughter I wouldn’t understand until the next morning, when he told me about his case. The reference to his daughter had confused me only because I knew he had one, a daughter, my half sister, whom I’d discovered two years earlier in an episode at once absurd and improbable, which surely merits extended treatment of its own. And yet though I’ve clearly shown neither shame nor compunction about exposing my loved ones—and myself—to the ridicule likely headed our way upon publication of this book, I’ve decided (mostly) to leave my half sister, Melissa (not her real name), out of it. She’s young. She’s had no proper father (she and my dad haven’t spoken for years). She’s still trying to find her way and herself and certainly doesn’t need this headache. Oh, and let’s be clear about one thing before I offer this briefest of ex parte accounts:

  We did not. Sleep with each other.

  It was in February of 2016 that I found myself ensconced deep in the toe of a scarlet tufted horseshoe booth on the main floor of a Manhattan strip club. Trump had just won the New Hampshire primary. I was there with a group of young husbands and bachelors celebrating the impending nuptials of our friend Ashraf, the actor and comedian who’d starred in two of my plays. Ashraf and the other celebrants had all repaired to the private rooms for Champagne and dances (and likely more). A barely clad shapely young woman found me sitting there with only my drink to keep me company. Her skin was not quite as dark as mine; she wore a nose stud, and her eyes were lined with a thin rim of kohl. She went by the name Noor. I wouldn’t buy a dance from her, but she planted herself beside me anyway. I found her lively and acerbic, mature beyond her years. (She said she was twenty-four.) My interest in her choice for an Arab stage name got her on the topic of sexual fetishes. She told me a story about a friend—like her, part Muslim—who turned tricks advertising herself in a face-covering niqab on erotic websites. I was startled to hear, even anecdotally, of the demand among US war vets to act out sexual fantasies on a female Muslim cipher. Most of them, Noor said, wanted to fuck her friend with her veil on. I caught the inkling of a story and gave her my card. Three days later she called me, and we met at a Korean restaurant in midtown. I sat across from her and took notes for an hour as she alternated between tales of her life in the sex trade and a bi bim bop without beef. We saw each other twice more before the evening when I ended up in her living room in Woodside and, on a bookshelf just outside the bathroom, I noticed a picture of my father.

  I’ll leave the rest for you to imagine.

  I confronted my father that night, in a conversation that had him in shock, and ended with him hanging up on me. The next day, he called, sniffling, humbled, contrite in a way I’d never heard him. He had always planned to tell me someday, he said, and was glad I finally knew. He’d tried to do the best he could given the situation, he explained. He loved his wife; he loved his mistress; he loved both his children. He’d been too weak to make a choice, and Melissa’s mother—bless her heart—hadn’t pushed him. He always assumed my mother suspected something, but—bless her heart—she never asked. To hear him tugging at me for sympathy made me livid, but I kept my anger to myself. I told him Melissa was stripping, which surprised him. She needed money to get back into school, I said. He promised to send her what he could; I would eventually give her more. That summer, she returned to community college, studying to be a stenographer. She’s almost done and, yes, still works in a strip club a few nights a week. Even if she didn’t need the money as much as she did, she says, she wouldn’t give it up; she’s too used to what she calls a “certain intensity of attention” she just can’t get anywhere else.

  * * *

  The morning after my father’s trip to jail, I found him downstairs at the kitchen table, perusing the sports page, a pair of cracked readers perched at the edge of his nose. “You want me to make you a cup of tea?” he asked in a basement baritone as he sipped from a cup of his own. “Just warning you, though: there’s no sugar.”

  “It’s fine. I’ll make coffee.”

  “We’re out of that, too.”

  I went to the cabinet and pulled out a glass, filled it with water at the sink, then sat down across from him. “What happened last night?” I asked.

  He shrugged without looking up from the paper. “I got bad news. I needed to take the edge off. I just—I let it go too far.”

  “You seem maybe to be doing that more and more—”

  “—I’m a grown man,” he snapped. “If I want to drink, I’ll drink.” I watched him turn the page and pretend to read.

  “So what was the bad news?”

  He looked up now, but not at me. Through the view out our sliding kitchen doors, a pair of deer were moving along the tree line at the yard’s back edge. They stopped, one of them lowering its black nose to the grass, the other seemingly distracted by something in the woods. Just then, a third deer appeared: a buck with an imposing tangle of antlers on its head. “They’re like rats,” Father said blankly. “Can’t get rid of them. Got into the garden this year and ate everything down to the roots. Even after I put all that rhubarb in to keep them away. What am I going to do with rhubarb?”

  “You could make pie.”

/>   “What?”

  “Rhubarb pie?”

  He looked at me, completely dumbfounded. “What is that?”

  “Forget it, Dad…What’s the bad news?”

  “I’m being sued. For malpractice.”

  “By who?”

  He brushed off my concern as he pulled his readers from his face. “It’s nothing new. This has been happening since 2014. The attorneys kept telling me it would get settled. It was the deadline yesterday. No settlement, so now we have to go to trial next week.”

  “Who’s suing you?”

  “Family of the patient. She was young, but she was the breadwinner. Her husband is on disability. Injured in Afghanistan, I think.” He stopped again. “The science is on my side. I already know that, but it’s what everyone else is telling me, too.”

  “So why did your lawyers want to settle?”

  “Legal fees. Press. Headache.” He stopped. “The company’s lost two malpractice suits in the last two years. They’re worried about losing a third one now.”

  “But the science is on your side?” I asked. He nodded, proceeding to tell me the story of Christine. As he spoke of her, something vivid and mournful came into his eyes. His description of her was spare—a pleasant young woman, two months pregnant with her first child, who reminded him, he said, of some of the girls he’d seen me grow up with in the area—but the emotion in his voice as he recalled her case sent me searching for an image of her online later that day. I found a picture of her standing alongside the pupils in one of her music classes, a woman with a face more round than oval, framed by two waves of parted shoulder-length hair; her nose was large and Roman, and its faintly rounded bridge connected two unusually wide-set eyes. I also found a photo of her gravestone, where not only her name and dates were etched into the granite but an image as well: that of an antlered buck towering over a lounging doe.

  3.

  Langford v. Reliant went to trial the following Monday at the La Crosse County Courthouse with Judge Elise Darius presiding. I missed jury selection and opening arguments because of my show in Chicago. Opening night went fine. Benji came with his wife. “Pretty neat stuff,” he said to me on the way out, “though I’m not so sure about what you wanted me to think about that guy.” The reviews the next day indicated a similar ambivalence. Compelling but marred by reliance on stereotype is how I would characterize the general critical sentiment. Exactly what the stereotype was in this case, no one made very clear. To a critic, they yearned for a Muslim character driven to valiant ends by unimpeachable motives, not the tortured, vindictive antihero on display center stage for so much of the evening. In our era, one increasingly without political nuance, Muslims were just the minor premise of the social syllogism that formed our American nation’s outraged theory of the downtrodden: you were either for the victim or against her. Muslims were victims. Therefore you could only be for a Muslim or against her. It didn’t matter if you were one already. Art, like everything else, was drowning in the tidal wash of ubiquitous and ascendant anger. Authenticity was measured now in decibels. Every utterance, every expressive gesture, was read as a pledge of allegiance to some discernible creed. The politics of representation were in ascendance, increasingly mistaken for the poetics of narrative craft. One reviewer commented that she was giving up what little hope she’d ever harbored that I might move on from this “constant parade of Grand Guignolesque Muslim caricatures ranting, raving, refusing the promise of America.” She had Muslim friends, she wrote, and they loved this country as much as she did. It had never occurred to me that jingoism—however nuanced—was part of my job description.

  On Tuesday, my commuter flight from Chicago into La Crosse was delayed, and I didn’t get in until after 11:00 p.m. As I checked in at the front desk, I heard my father’s voice coming from the hotel bar. I stopped in before going up to my room and found him leaning into the counter, watching as the bartender poured him a double Bushmills, neat. He turned and saw me in the doorway. His face lit up. “That is my son,” he announced, stumbling from his stool to gather me in his arms. He reeked of whiskey. “My wonderful, wonderful son,” he chimed sloppily as he presented me to the bartender, a thickset bearded man pushing thirty, maybe. “A famous man now. More famous than his father.”

  “Dad—”

  “Killed the father. Isn’t that what they say? You did it, beta. You killed me.”

  I made a show of ignoring him. “I’m sorry, sir. He’s under a lot of stress—”

  The bartender shook his head, not seeming bothered in the least. “I was getting a kick out of your dad here telling me about your success. Working with the stars in Hollywood now, he told me. That’s gotta be neat.”

  “I mean, I’m not really working in Hollywood, but…”

  Father’s sudden angry frown was clownish. “Yes, you are!” he shouted. “You are working in Hollywood! Writing your own TV show. Why are you lying to him?!”

  He needed a splash of cold water.

  “Dad. I was working there. Then I got fired. Did you forget that part?”1

  His cheeks dropped, and his smile vanished, the sudden, crestfallen look on his face revealing the nasty mood I knew was rumbling underneath this carelessness.

  He retreated to his bar stool, dejected.

  I signed for his bill and cajoled him into the hall and elevator. Upstairs I took him to my room, filled a cup with water, and made him drink it before heading into the bathroom. When I came back out, I found him watching CNN. The day before marked the thirtieth anniversary of the Senate vote rejecting Bork’s Supreme Court confirmation, and the channel was still running its segment about the man’s legacy. “I don’t care about this bullshit,” Father said, pointing the remote to change the channel.

  “No, Dad. Leave it. I want to see this.”

  “Ancient history,” he said. I sat down on the bed and watched, surprised by a report that didn’t once mention what I now understood to be the man’s real American impact—as the Robespierre of the consumerist antitrust movement. Father poured himself another whiskey from the minibar and got back into bed. When the segment ended, he muted the commercials, muttering to me about the day’s humiliations: the blatant lies in the plaintiff’s opening statement, his fellow physicians not bothering to phone him, the insulting message someone he called Quaker Oats had left on his voice mail. He was being treated like a common criminal, he complained, when all he’d tried to do was help that girl. “I would have done the same thing if she was my own daughter,” was the refrain he repeated as he dozed off to sleep.

  The following morning: water, greasy eggs from room service, Advil. I walked him down the hall to his room and waited as he showered. He was gruff and complained as I got him into a blue shirt and black suit. Hannah, his lead lawyer, had picked his attire. Black for all her physician defendants, he told me, contrary to received courtroom wisdom. Black signaled status and authority and tended to alienate juries, but in the case of malpractice, authority was precisely what the plaintiff’s team would work to undermine, so black was best. It was a performance, and the costume had to be right, she’d said. He handed me the tie she’d brought with her, a simple midnight-blue pattern. “She’s a good lawyer. Nice person. I told her you were coming. She wants to have dinner with us tonight. If you can.”

  “Of course.”

  He nodded distantly. I could tell he was feeling fragile. “Not too tight,” he said softly, as I nudged the knot to his bulging Adam’s apple. I noticed his bottom lip start to quiver.

  “Dad,” I said, and tried to hold him, but he wouldn’t let me.

  The courthouse was a ten-minute walk away. By the time we got there, he’d mostly put his vulnerable state behind him, though when Hannah found us on the third floor—just outside the courtroom—she wasn’t fooled. She was an intense woman with intelligent eyes that scanned him now, mercilessly. He introduced us, and she shook my hand warmly. Then he shuffled off to use the restroom. When he was gone, Hannah dropped her gregarious
front.

  “He looks terrible,” she said bluntly. “Was he drinking last night?”

  I nodded. “I found him at the bar when I got in. Close to midnight. He’d been at it for a while, from what I could tell.”

  “Jesus fucking Christ,” she said as she bit into her lower lip.

  I felt the need to make an excuse for him: “It’s really only been like this since my mom died.”

  “I’ve been doing this twenty-five years, and I’m telling you: he needs to stop. When we’re done, he can go back to it—whatever the reason. But until then, not a drop. I’ve already told him: if the insurance company finds out he’s drinking like that—and we lose? There will be consequences. And he won’t like those.”

  “I’ll talk to him.”

  “He needs to get it under control,” she said again, her nostrils flaring as she marched into the courtroom.

  * * *

  The chamber had nothing even vaguely ennobling about it—no vaulted ceiling, no Greek columns to remind us of the birth of democracy. There was no mahogany finish or railed balcony for onlookers. Not an echo of Maycomb or a hint of that soundstage replica of the New York court where three decades of rightful justice were meted out by the hour on Law & Order. The wood on the walls didn’t look real, though it was—broad maple planks finished with a sickly yellow varnish. No one sat upright. Not the jury, not the plaintiffs or their lawyers, not my father or those few of us, like me, looking on. We were all sinking into our scooped-out seat bottoms, our buckling spines chilled by the steady whisper of cold air trickling down through the vents above us. At one point, I started to wonder if this was what it would feel like to be trapped in the crisper drawer of a fridge—by any measure, hardly a place to battle for one’s reputation.

  Father was the only person of color at either of the tables before us; I was the only person of color in the audience. There were two jurors of color, one black, the other Asian. In total, I counted thirty-six whites around us. Christine’s family was there. Her mother was going to be testifying; her widowed husband, Nick, was officially listed as the plaintiff. Nick Langford was a pale, depleted figure—unshaven, dour, with a full head of unwashed sandy brown hair. He’d come into the courtroom that morning in a bright orange hunting cap and camouflage vest. The brim of that orange hat peeked forth from one of the vest’s front pockets, and the vest was dangled over the armrest of his chair in full view of the jury. No black suit for him, I thought. He looked every bit the part of a husband broken—a half decade on—by grief. Beside him sat his lawyer, an imposing brown-haired man in a visibly threadbare suit that seemed to match, at least in spirit, his client’s attire, a plaid wool jacket pilled in places, the edge of its collar frayed from years of rubbing up against home-starched shirts. A bushy goatee encircled his lips, and he was shuffling papers before him with the disregard of a man more used to holding a Pabst Blue Ribbon—or a .45—than a manila folder. Even his name seemed to fit the role: Chip Slaughter.