You’d like Khalto Tala, little wing, I’m sure of it. Did I already tell you that? She lets me draw my own patterns on the lace now, bringing them to life with careful stitching. I think the drawing helps. We told Mr. Awad they were Khalti’s at first, since I was only supposed to be tracing her patterns, but he likes them. I get bolder each week, outlining sparrows and robins and the petrels I saw at sea. Well-to-do ladies who have heard about my designs from a friend or seen them on a cousin’s curtains drop into the store from uptown now, wanting their own. Mr. Awad pays Khalto Tala by the piece, so it’s more money for the family. My parents have already talked about pulling me out of school after this year to get a full-time job if we can’t make rent. Khalto Tala is the only one who’s resisting this plan, with the excuse that she can’t fit another body in that cramped workroom for more than a few hours a day.
It was Khalti who gave me this notebook, once I’d started reading on my own, though it took me almost a year to get up the confidence to start writing. She took me into the bedroom we shared and, even with the peeling orange wallpaper, it was like we were celebrating Christmas, the way the notebook was wrapped in brown paper and tied with twine. She had set it in a wooden box from the bilad, the kind inlaid with geometric designs in mother-of-pearl and secured with a tin clasp. In the box, below the package of the notebook, lay a magnificent set of colored pencils. Never had I owned anything so fine. “You have talent, Leiloul,” she said to me then, “and I want to help you make the most of it.”
I placed your wing in the box with the pencils and set it beneath my cot. Out on the street, they were lighting the gas lamps, and the pigeons were alighting for the evening on the rooftop across the courtyard. I still haven’t seen any bird keeper, though there must be one. I imagined God taking the form of a starling to alight on the carts of the men selling tea and ice cream. That was the night I began to draw.
SEVEN /
IN THE YEARS SINCE your death, the city has been drawing birds the way an open wound draws flies. The latest to arrive are the goldfinches, which appear the day they dig up the empty lot beside the last remaining tenement of Little Syria. It begins as a flashing cloud of yellow gold that draws bystanders and cameramen for the evening news. Then the tornado of birds shuts the Irish pub on the ground floor of St. George’s Church for the better part of an afternoon. Nothing gets through the swarm of beaks. A news van arrives and sends a reporter into the yellow cloud: she goes in, disappears, and comes out screaming, her pink sheath dress shredded at the shoulders, her face tallied with scratches. The stunt is not repeated.
The storm of goldfinches rages until well after sunset, transforming two and a half blocks of Washington Street into a cacophony of chirping and whirring, a shimmering plague. The birds appear as though they’ve dug themselves out of the earth, and one by one they start to disappear the same way, landing dazed on the pavement, blinking, and vanishing into the empty side lots or through the doors of buildings. Some of the people who came to watch had grandparents or great-grandparents who lived in the tenements, and the ones who can still remember the neighborhood as it used to be elbow one another and say the birds are part of the brick and the brownstone, that there will be no stray feathers for the supers of the neighboring buildings to find. Still, for a few hours after the storm subsides, a bird hunt is conducted, and the staff of the hotels and bars grumble that next time they’ll just get someone to drive their car through the cloud and clear up the mess.
By about nine at night, the last of the birds have disappeared. Aisha and I scour the blocks for injured birds, but we find none, so Aisha heads back out to Queens empty-handed. The crowds drawn by the noise have long since dispersed.
I approach the mound of rubble that is now the empty lot. The construction company has put up a fence around it, advertising a future high-rise apartment complex, blue glass in the sunlight of an imagined morning. I slip through without so much as a scrape. Inside, the machines have gouged the building’s blank face, clawing away my graffitied hudhud, leaving only a deep wound where I’d set down golden paint.
“No. No.” I fumble around on the ground, seizing chunks of brick and testing them in the holes left in the side of the building. A couple of pieces are still painted, but I can’t match the colors. I run back to the fence and squeeze my way through to the street, then stalk over to the windows of the community house and peer inside. The construction company has gutted the inside of the building from top to bottom, leaving only the remnants of a staircase in the corner and preparing for the demolition that will take place in a couple weeks. They will be replacing this building with an overpriced pub or a restaurant for the good old boys, the chalkboards advertising bourbon drinks and artisanal charcuteries. Though the church is protected, the two lots that house the tenement and the community house have been bought, and soon something unfamiliar will stand in their place.
I am tired. I am bleeding again, and my body feels heavy and bloated, my chest so sore that I want to rip off my binder and feel the night air on my skin. I lay myself down on the step in front of the boarded-up door. The clang of a construction site rings out into the night. A block away, a street sweeper makes its rounds. I touch the film of coolness on the sidewalk and hear the voices of the workers who laid the cobblestones beneath; below that, I hear the whispers of the enslaved people who were forced to clear the land to build the walls for which Wall Street is named. I used to think remembering could be a kind of resistance, but I’m not sure it’s enough. For years, I forced myself to pore over my memories of you, to do as much remembering as I could stand. I hang on to a handful of moments that don’t hurt: the fountains in Central Park in the summer, the curve of your back over your work table, sitting with our feet on the fire escape under the moon. There aren’t many stars in this city, but you told me a full moon can show you your own shadow. I know the fire wasn’t my fault, and the collapse of the fire escape was a freak accident, but the ghosts of things are circular enchantments. You cling to every iron ladder in the city now, slipping off every platform into the night.
Something buzzes past my face. I reach up to swat it away, and the last goldfinch escapes into the building’s broken window. A red silk fisherman’s knot is tied around the chained door handles, swinging in the night breeze.
Oud music drifts toward me from the street. I get up and dust myself off, then follow the sound. Manhattan is hushed, listening. Away from the streetlights, my body is invisible. The plucking of the oud’s strings turns the corner from Washington onto Albany, and so do I.
A boy strolls toward the Hudson River esplanade playing a bowl-bodied oud. A rope of red silk, identical to the one tied to the sealed doors of the community house, is fastened to one of the tuning pegs. The falconer’s knot on the end sets the rope swinging like a pendant. Sami once told me this knot was used to tether birds of prey to their perches, two knots of the same type beside each other, because birds in captivity often untie their bonds and free themselves. The oud player passes under a streetlamp. He is humming a maqam to the darkness.
“Sami.”
The oud player and his music stop. Samer Shaaban turns to me, the red knot brushing his thigh. He is as fragile and invincible as a cord of spider’s silk. The goldfinch is perched on the neck of his oud, its head cocked as though listening. Sami laughs, and the goldfinch flutters off on the ribbon of his voice.
“Girl,” he says, grinning, “where have you been?”
* * *
I’ve avoided Sami for six months, long enough to forget how persuasive he is. He convinces me to hang out for a few hours, so we take the 4 back to his place in Crown Heights. With nothing to say and Sami smiling so broad it’s like he’s never been happier to see anyone, I try to remember that this is how he treats all his friends. Still I blabber on about your notes, and Laila Z’s last painting, and the bird Sabah and Aisha don’t believe exists. By the time I finish the story, we’ve arrived at Utica, and we wind our way off the platform and past th
e cops posted at either exit. Aboveground, teenagers huddle in clusters up and down Eastern Parkway, and the faint smell of weed permeates the street. Carrying his oud in its soft black case on his back, Sami leads me past open-late laundromats, tiny liquor stores with their clerks behind bulletproof plastic, and half a dozen barber shops. His apartment sits atop a Trinidadian braiding salon; the owner’s husband is outside chatting with their neighbors when we arrive. Sami gives him a fist bump and they exchange a few words before he unlocks the door to the staircase that leads up to his apartment. It’s a studio, populated by a fold-up futon, a refrigerator that looks like it’s from the seventies, and a coffee table that doubles as Sami’s workspace. The table is scattered with bits of dyed rope, scraps of linen, and braided silk. Sami straightens the blanket on the futon, which serves as a couch, and gets me a soda from the fridge. It’s his last can; he’s probably been saving it for visitors. He lights a fat candle on the corner of the table.
I sink down onto the futon. “I like your new place.”
Sami laughs. “Don’t say that. Every time I get to like a place, they raise the rent. Maybe liking it is bad luck.” He flops down next to me and picks up a light-brown length of braided linen, not yet dyed. He ties a simple overhand knot like a meditation. Then, as though remembering something, he gets up, favoring his left leg, and opens the window to drink the night air. An ashtray filled with the butts of hand-rolled cigarettes and the stubs of incense sits on the sill beside him.
I roll my soda can between my palms, grateful for a bit of distance. I can still see Sami catching his toe in the gap between the subway car and the platform, gashing his knee on the concrete to the white, bloodless bone. I sterilized it, bandaged it, changed the gauze on the way home when it bled through.
“You never got that checked out, did you?”
“Unbelievable, considering how many places are dying to give you a job with health insurance, right?” Sami tugs at the keratinized scar, a purple circle of tight, shiny skin. “Could’ve healed worse.”
I pick up an oysterman’s stopper knot tied on a length of white rope. “The reporters said an illegal breeder had a shipment of finches escape on Washington Street. You believe that?”
“Not for a second. But it’s their job to explain things.”
“You say that like it doesn’t piss you off, but I can see your ashtray from here.”
Sami laughs into the knot in his hands, a good-natured belly laugh. This is what I love most about him: he is always laughing, especially at himself. “Have pity on me, I’m a Pisces. Virgo season has me all neurotic.”
We both laugh. My chest hurts because this is just how it used to be, Sami and me, holed up in whatever rent-stabilized apartment he’d managed, miraculously, to snag a sublet in, sharing a cigarette even though neither of us smoked because it took the edge off our hurt.
I hold up one of his silk knots. “Is that why you’re holding a bondage convention up in here?”
Sami shrieks with laughter and wipes away a tear. He’s grown a short, dark beard. I never saw him bearded when we used to hang out. He’s wearing a vibrant purple T-shirt sporting one of his own designs, an illustration of a peony that looks like the love child of O’Keeffe and Leyendecker. These six months have given him a couple gray hairs, but he looks younger than ever, sitting on that windowsill with a bit of rope beside him, sparking a lighter against a cigarette.
“You look good.”
Sami doesn’t hear me. “I use the knots to mark where things happened. Marking a thing is a kind of witnessing. The past is already bound to the ground where it took place. I’m just making the bond visible.” Sami leans out to check for people on the sidewalk, then ashes out the window. “Plus, knots are sacred. Traditionally, we called Pisces ‘the cord’ instead of the fish, and Alpha Piscium was called al-Uqdah, the knot. So according to Arab astrology, I was literally born for this.”
I laugh. The candlelight is warm, the kind of light you could fall asleep in. “Kind of woo-woo, but I can get behind that.”
Sami cants his hips and lowers his chin to his chest, and the earring in his right ear sparkles in the candlelight. “You know me. I love woo-woo.” He takes a drag of his cigarette and grins at me again, a childlike grin that tells me he is glad that I am here, and I feel guilty for wishing I were somewhere else. I take a swig of my soda and set it on the floor. Beside me is a pile of sketchbooks, the top one open to a portrait in progress of Hajjeh Shaaban. Sami is drawing from a photo taken just before her death, eight months after we lost you.
“Of course,” Sami is saying, “the knots don’t actually matter. The whole point of binding things is to draw attention to them, to keep them alive.”
“About that.” I want to get up and join Sami at the window. I bounce my leg up and down instead. “Everyone’s telling me the birds are a dead end.”
“It’s not your fault. Laila Z was talented, sure, but you’ll never be able to prove that what she saw and what your mom saw were the same thing.” He puts out his cigarette on the windowsill and settles back into the futon.
“I know this painting exists. It has to.”
Sami raises his eyebrows, an Arab no.
His disbelief burns. “Maybe we don’t have to prove it. It would be enough for me just to know.” I blink in the candlelight. “If I could find Laila—”
Sami snorts. “With a seance? Laila disappeared after they demolished her building. Her last act of resistance was facing down a wrecking ball. Girl was made of iron.”
“We don’t know for sure that she’s died.” I wring my hands to keep from picking my cuticles. “What if she just got tired of the spotlight? Moved away from New York?”
“Don’t you think somebody would have heard from her?” Sami says. “That she would’ve gone on painting?”
I bristle. “Look, I’m just saying we don’t have all the information. I’m not giving up until I know for sure.”
“Suit yourself.” Sami sighs and runs a hand through his curls. “I’m supposed to meet a friend at this party in Bed-Stuy in an hour. We do it every couple weeks. You should come.”
The room feels stifling. I get up and go to the window. The street is deserted except for the black trash bags on the curb and a lean rat darting between them. The breeze strokes my face. To the night, I am a body without a past or a future, a pillar that bends light. The night doesn’t know my name.
Sami lays his hand on my arm, and I flinch at the lightning of it.
“Hey,” he says in a softer tone. “It’s just a couple birds.”
* * *
On the nights when I’ve been dancing—which aren’t many—I’ve always loved the girls I couldn’t be: the ones with arms open, those sneaker-dancing, thunderstorms-in-their-blood girls whose soft wisdom was a flood. Sami and I roll up to the bar in Bed-Stuy, an unassuming building next to a masjid and a grocery store, blue neon buzzing in the window. Inside, televisions play music videos full of pastels and neon, and people in bright leather jackets, trucker caps, bangles, and mesh, glitter and hair piled atop their heads, fill the space. Someone slides past me in a purple mesh tank top and glitter eyeshadow. Couples make out in the back booths, sipping vodka or soda or some kind of blue concoction dreamed up by the bar staff.
When I turn back to the bar to look for Sami, he’s already down at the end greeting a Black femme in overalls, a black-and-white keffiyeh, and chunky black boots, box braids piled up atop a fresh undercut. The place is too packed to get by, so I squeeze by a couple at the bar and wave an awkward hello over Sami’s shoulder.
“This is Qamar,” Sami yells over the music. “Qamar’s doing their PhD thesis in art history.”
“Defending next week,” Qamar yells back. “You a friend of Shaaban’s?”
I nod and nudge Sami to the side so I can rest my elbow on the bar. I yell back my name and wish the noise of the bar would swallow it.
The bartender hands Qamar a beer, and they sip the head off the top before lif
ting it from the bar. Their nails are painted a vibrant shade of magenta that throbs under the blacklight, and they wear a gold crescent moon choker at their neck to match their name. I cannot imagine loving one’s own name enough to wear it as an adornment. Sami gets us each a beer, and the three of us retreat to the back to sip our drinks and people-watch.
“Yara? Malik?” Sami asks.
“Yara had to work. Pretty sure we lost Malik to that guy in their building.” Qamar sips their beer and raises their eyebrows at Sami.
Sami rolls his eyes. “You know what, fuck it. Tonight we celebrate you.”
I raise my drink. “To your defense next week.”
Qamar laughs. “Don’t jinx me,” they protest, but we toast anyway.
I lean over to make myself heard over the DJ. “I love your keffiyeh.”
“It was my mom’s.” Qamar smiles and touches the scarf’s white tassels. “From Ramallah.”
Sami claps me on the back before I can respond. “She’s an artist,” he tells Qamar. “A painter.”
I almost choke on my drink. “Not really. I just went to art school.” An awkward pause. “What’s your thesis on?”
“My grandfather was an ornithologist,” Qamar says, “and a birder, back in the twenties and thirties. I’m completing his work.”
I freeze. Before I can open my mouth, the DJ turns the music up, and Missy Elliott comes on. Sami grabs my arm. “Reem! She would love this. Would she pick up if we called her?”
“She’s up in Boston at her new job. You know, being the responsible kid.” I drain my beer. Qamar takes out their phone and scrolls through their messages.
Sami pulls me onto the dance floor, and I don’t protest, though I want to. I’ve become just like the white boys at middle-school dances: the boys by the wall, earthbound boys, wing-severed boys with stiff bodies. There is nothing behind the door in my chest that should uncage the kind of feminine softness I should have, the kind you told me would settle into my chest and my hips. It never did.
The Thirty Names of Night Page 10
