by Ayad Akhtar
“I told you. To use it as leverage. To get things we needed. To do the job better.”
“So did you?”
“What?”
“Use it as leverage?”
He looked down at the phone. “Make your next left,” he said. “That’s Main Street. Library is farther up.” Around us, the hardwood groves and muddy fields had given way to a baseball diamond and, beyond it, the rest of a municipal park. A row of brick buildings appeared now, apparently the town center. As we slowed into the intersection, I stopped for a pair of young mothers in coats and pajama bottoms pushing strollers across the walkway. “Thom knew,” Father finally answered. “He knew I knew. That was the leverage. I got things for the doctors and nurses I could not have gotten otherwise. I got things for the patients.”
“Left here, right?”
“Yeah,” he said. Then: “It’s why he’s never been able to make nice with me. I mean, not that I wanted to make nice. I didn’t. I don’t. But it’s a fine line between that and getting fired.” He paused midthought.
“What?” I asked.
“No, no—it’s nothing.”
“What is it?”
“I see you scribbling all the time.”
“Yeah? I’m a writer, Dad.”
“Well, you might want to take your notes with you when you go to the bathroom next time.”
“Did I leave them out at lunch?”
“You write it all down, don’t you?”
“You looked at my notebook?”
“—Everything. Details and details. How do you not get bored?”
“It’s my job. I have to make note of the details in case I need them later. There’s a lot of labor involved.”
“Well, I just hope you’ll be fair. I hope you won’t make me look like an asshole.”
I never recalled him expressing concern about what I might write about him, and now he was mentioning it for the second time in as many days.
“If I write about the case…”
“You will.”
“…If I do, I wouldn’t be writing about you. But some doctor like you.”
“Who everybody will think is me.”
“…And who will definitely not be an asshole.”
I laughed; he didn’t. “Okay, over there, on the left. The yellow one,” he said, holding the phone up. He was pointing to a squat, square mustard-colored building with a sign over the front door announcing its purpose: PUBLIC LIBRARY
“I don’t see parking,” I said.
“It’s probably in back. Use that Kwik Mart,” he said, indicating the gas station convenience store adjacent to the library. “I’ll go in and get a few things.” I slowed and signaled, then turned in to the parking lot. If I wasn’t particularly mindful about my parking angle, it was because I didn’t have any reason to be.
Father pushed open his door. “You want something?”
“I’ll come with you. I need to use the bathroom.”
Behind the register inside was another heavyset young woman; she was staring down into her phone. The odors here were pungent, off-putting: the burned coffee and cleaning bleach, the desiccated wieners slowly turning on the roller grill. Father headed for the row of refrigerated cases displaying beer. I wove my way through the aisles to the bathroom in the back corner. When I came back, I found Father perusing a rack of potato chips, a six-pack of beer nestled into his armpit. I noticed a narrow, clean-cut man in the store now, maybe forty, with a furry head of white-blond hair shorn close to his skull. He was standing at the press rack by the register, magazine in hand—but he wasn’t reading: he was watching Father and me. I heard him speaking, but I wasn’t sure to whom. “Fucking rule of law. There’s laws for a reason,” I thought I heard him say.
“You want some chips or something?” Father asked me sweetly.
“I’m fine. I’ve still got water in the car.”
He nodded and headed for the register.
As we approached, the blond man held his ground, staring at us as Father laid out his merchandise before the clerk.
“Will that be all?” she asked without interest.
“That’s it,” Father said.
“—You know, there’s rules for a reason,” the blond man blurted, clearly addressing us.
Father looked over at him, confused. “I’m sorry. Were you in line?”
“I’m sorry. Were you in line?” the man repeated, mocking.
I saw Father bristle. “Is there a problem, sir?”
“—Dad.”
“I don’t know, sir—is there?” the man shot back with a smirk. His small teeth were gnawing on a piece of gum. To call the thin row of hair above his upper lip a mustache wouldn’t exactly have made sense.
“We don’t want any trouble,” I said, stepping forward to pay. I dropped a twenty on the counter and indicated I didn’t want change.
The blond man snickered loudly: “No trouble? So let me ask you, is that your car out there?”
The clerk interjected wearily: “Chuck, these folks are just trying to buy some stuff. You want to leave it alone?”
“I leave it alone when they fucking learn how to drive in this country.”
“What country? Hmm—?” Father snapped. “What country is that?”
“Dad. Let’s go—” I said, grabbing the beer from the counter with one hand and Father’s elbow with the other.
“This fucking country, you monkey. This is not some zoo. We got rules here. Rules of fucking law. Learn how to park your fucking car in the United States of America.”
“Monkey!? Monkey?!” Father shouted back as I snatched him to the door and pulled him through it.
Outside, I saw my offense: an admittedly blithe parking job that had the front end of our car pushing into an adjacent spot. Two spots over, a Ford pickup was gurgling, with no one in the front seat. Mounted to the grille was a cracked buck’s skull and an uneven coil of bony antlers protruding from it. Behind us, Chuck emerged outside just in time to hear me urge Father to get in the car.
“Yeah, that’s right, Dad. Get in the car. Monkey say, monkey do.”
Father turned toward him, screaming. “Will you shut up!!!”
“Dad. Stop it. Get inside,” I said, pushing him into the passenger’s side, my blood racing.
“Can’t wait ’til we build that wall to keep you fucking apes out.”
“You’re the fucking ape!” Father shouted. As ever, that most natural of American imprecations sounded decidedly unnatural on his lips: “Fucking ignorant! Don’t want to work and don’t want anyone else to!”
“Why don’t you fuck..ck..ck..ing learn to speak-a-English—”
“—We speak it just fine,” I spit back at him.
“Oh, nice. So the monkey boy’s got some lip on him, too.”
“Go fuck yourself,” I added as I pulled at the driver’s-side handle. My reflexive glance to note his reaction revealed something I’d missed until now: a strap led down one side of his torso to a leather bulge on his flank.
He saw me notice his gun, and he smiled: “Can’t wait when we build that wall to keep you critters out.” What I felt in that moment was brief, but I won’t ever forget it. The sight of the gun, the visceral threat and primal fear it triggered, the elemental urge to protect myself, the asymmetry of our power in that moment—all of it combined to set something ablaze inside me I’d never experienced before. I wanted to kill him. But the immediate awareness of just how powerless I was to do so threw me back onto myself in a way that eats at me to this day, almost two years later.
Father was saying my name, trying to get my attention. I finally found his eyes. “Let’s go.” His measured tone was filled with alarm.
Chuck began to say something about the wall again, but I didn’t hear most of it. He stepped forward as I started the engine. His hand found its way to his piece as I reversed. Behind him, in the doorway glass, I saw the clerk standing and watching as she munched on chips. I put the car into drive, accelerated onto Main Street, past the l
ibrary, and out of town.
6.
For the better part of Trump’s first year in office, Father and I mostly avoided the subject of our president. I didn’t bring up the man, and if Father did—usually to complain that we weren’t giving him a chance to succeed—it was never with much conviction. When he mentioned Trump, I didn’t push back. I wouldn’t soon forget the dissension the 2016 election had caused between us. I didn’t want to go back there again.
There was another reason I kept silent: I felt him coming around.
Early in May, Time magazine reported that the president served himself two scoops of ice cream at White House dinners while serving his guests only one; Father read that on the same day that Trump fired FBI director James Comey, an unlikely twinning that provoked a curt, uncharacteristically irritated comment about his sometime acquaintance, now leader of the free world.
“Why is he so petty?” he asked over the phone that night.
By mid-August, after the torchlit white supremacist rally in Charlottesville—and after the president refused to condemn the perpetrators three days later—Father’s loyalty seemed to have been affected. The daily cascade of insults and untruths, silly grudges, ceaseless attention seeking—all this was no longer amusing. Before, Father had been inclined to read into this dysfunction an estimable defiance, a fighter’s pluck. But now, as Trump defended the “good people on both sides” in Charlottesville, Father couldn’t hide his disbelief. A week later, when Steve Bannon lost his job over the fracas, Father said simply, “That was a good thing. Maybe now, Donald can finally get to work.”
But in September, during a trip home for the weekend, as I watched a news summary showing snippets of the president’s address that day in Alabama—where he promised an unruly, cheering crowd he would build for them a “great big beautiful wall”—Father, marinating a steak in the kitchen within earshot, turned to me during the commercial break and said:
“I wish he would stop talking about that wall.” I nodded, but I didn’t say anything. He went on: “I mean, what’s the point? A wall won’t keep anybody out. You just dig under it. That’s what we did when we were children.”
“You dug under walls when you were a kid?”
“In the village. When my mother would lock me and my sisters in the room until we prayed. I dug a hole so we could come and go. She never even knew…”
“I don’t think it’s about keeping folks out, Dad.”
“So what’s it about?”
“Giving them a thing to fixate on. It’s classic storytelling. A visible, tangible goal. That’s what gets an audience rooting for a hero.”
“Tangible?”
“Every good story has the same shape. The beginning establishes a goal, the more tangible the better. In the middle we watch the fight toward that goal. The end is what happens when it’s been reached, or when reaching it’s finally failed. What I always say when I teach is: the longer the middle, the better the story. The middle is when we still don’t know the outcome. That’s when we care the most about what’s happening. The longer you can keep the audience engaged in the pursuit without actually resolving that pursuit—that’s real mastery.”
“So maybe he doesn’t want a wall.”
“Wouldn’t surprise me. As long as there isn’t a wall, he’s got an antagonist. The people stopping him from building it.”
“It’s like a game,” he said.
“A game?”
“You know, a match. It’s most exciting to watch when you don’t know who’s going to win.”
“That would be the idea.”
“What a joke,” he said, heading back to his bowl of marinade.
But it wasn’t until the night we got home from Wonewoc that Father finally admitted his feelings about Trump had changed. He confessed that he didn’t recognize the man he’d known a quarter century earlier. Perhaps the pressure and criticism that any president had good reason to expect had warped what was ill prepared and vulnerable in him. Maybe it was true that he wasn’t cut out for the job after all, and now the country was suffering because of it. He twisted off the top of the last unopened bottle of beer we’d bought at the Kwik Mart, sipped, and paused. Then he finally came out and just said it: “Trump was a big mistake.”
* * *
I hadn’t seen Sultan in half a decade, maybe longer. Since then, he’d found religion, which made him the object of some considerable derision on Father’s part, at least from what I gathered whenever I heard Father on the phone with him. They spoke so much, so regularly, I could only have imagined just how tiresome the constant ribbing must have been to Sultan. Apparently, he gave as good as he got on the other end, but still I wondered why he put up with it.
Father and I drove to the airport the next day—Saturday, which was also my birthday—and waited in the food court for Sultan’s flight to land. At one point, Father left to make a phone call, or so he announced with somewhat more formality than was either usual or necessary. It all made sense when he returned after ten minutes bearing gifts: a Green Bay Packers sweatshirt and a chocolate croissant. “I was going to get you a book, too, but I couldn’t figure what kinds of things you read anymore.”
“The sweatshirt’s great, Dad.”
“You don’t have one, right?”
“I do not.”
“And I know you love chocolate croissants.”
“Well, I mean, for breakfast.”
“You can eat it tomorrow.”
“Also nice to know what’s for breakfast a day early.”
Father shrugged. “There he is,” he said, looking up at the bank of televisions above us.
“Did his plane land?”
“I meant Dave—but yeah. Looks like it just landed.” Alongside the blue screens showing arrivals and departures, another showed David Letterman holding forth as a guest on some daytime set in Burbank. “I really don’t know about that beard. I’m glad your mother never saw that.”
“Yeah. I’m pretty sure she wouldn’t have been on board with the beard.”
“She would have hated it.” Father’s chuckle gave way to pregnant silence. I could tell he was remembering her and thought I could almost see her image in his eyes. He smiled: “Like that time she called his doctor…”
“Called whose doctor?”
“Letterman’s. She never told you? When he had quintuple bypass? This was maybe, I don’t know, twenty years ago.”
“I think I remember him having bypass, nothing about her calling…”
“She cold-called NewYork–Presbyterian intensive care. Pretended she was a physician on his team. She asked me exactly what I would say if I were calling from out of town to get an update on a patient.”
“You’re kidding.”
“This is Dr. Akhtar looking to get an update about Mr. Letterman’s condition,” he said, mimicking her. “Your mother could be a very charming woman when she wanted to. She had the name of one of his doctors from the newspaper. Asked for him directly.”
“And?”
“‘Oh, of course, Dr. Akhtar. We’ll get him your message right away.’ Very deferential. Fifteen minutes later, the phone rings. There he is, on the phone. One of Letterman’s specialists. Who then spends five minutes running her through the procedure in the operating room. Where they started, where they ended. What his condition is now. I’m listening on the kitchen phone. Trying not to laugh,” he said, laughing now. “She really never told you?”
I shook my head. “David Letterman.”
“Him and that polka. That’s what kept her going at the end.” He paused. His right hand had found his heart. He grimaced as he rubbed there, mindlessly. And then, all at once, he was on his feet: “We should get to the baggage claim. So we don’t miss him.”
Downstairs, it wasn’t long before Sultan emerged from the gates in his billowing light-brown shalwar kameez; he had a shawl over his shoulder, and on his head was a flat off-white skullcap.
Father didn’t miss a beat, gibing in Pun
jabi: “There he is, in his tortilla.”
Sultan bit down on his grin: “Very funny, very funny.” His accent wasn’t nearly as strong as most I’d grown up hearing in my father’s generation of South Asian immigrants.
“I like tacos, too, yaar. But who puts them on their head?”
“Dad—”
“What?”
“That’s offensive.”
Sultan stopped me. “This is nothing, beta. Compared to what I’m used to.” He hugged Father. “It’s so very nice to see you, too, Sikander.” Then he brought me in for a hug as well. “I hear it’s your birthday?”
“Well, we’ve all got one.”
“I got you something. But it’s in my bag. So I’ll give it to you when we’re at the house…”
He’d lost weight since I last saw him—close to eighty pounds, he would later tell me, the result of a stapled stomach—and it showed in the sagging skin under his chin and along his neck. I’d always thought he looked a little like a sea lion, his eyes lower on his face than was perhaps usual, his button nose and flat upper lip protruding almost like a snout. With thinner cheeks, his now narrower face no longer had the same benign appeal.
“You didn’t need to get me anything, Uncle.”
“But I wanted to.”
Behind us, the belt was moving; bags dropped from the chute. “Which one’s yours?” Father asked.
“Brown duffel,” Sultan said.
“Not that silly Louis Vuitton.”
“Yes, Sikander. That silly Vuitton.” Sultan turned to me, winking. “I just love it so.” He clapped Father on the back as they stepped to the carousel’s edge. To either side of me, I felt the disbelieving white gazes—an older couple to my left; a younger family of four to my right—looks that conveyed not just the affront of our swart joy but also, even more keenly, its apparent implausibility: How was it possible? their faces seemed to say. How was it possible people who looked like us would not be eternally subdued by the fact of their unceasing suspicions?
I glared at them all until it was only the children not looking away.
Father grabbed Sultan’s Vuitton duffel when it appeared, and we made our way out to the car. On the way home, Sultan told us about the passenger first seated next to him on the plane, an elderly woman with an emotional-support terrier who’d inquired if he was a “Moslem”—he told her he was—and then, assuming he would want to be reseated because of the dog, apologized to him for forcing him to move. The woman was surprised to learn that Sultan didn’t have a problem with dogs and so wouldn’t need to be moving, at which point she then requested to be moved. Sultan seemed amused by the episode as he relayed the apology offered by the fellow who took her place—also older, also white—which included a comment about the unfortunate direction the country had taken under our “orangutan in chief.” As he repeated the insult, I noticed Sultan watching for Father’s reaction. If Father had one, he wasn’t showing it.
