I slip off the tee and fold it on the bed. Sami has already slid on a different shirt, a linen tunic with long sleeves that he rolls up to the elbows. He makes adjustments in the mirror. I use his body to block my own and examine my profile from behind him, my hair now shorter than his. An angular face and strong jaw have appeared where they were once hidden behind my long hair. Unable to see my body, I am hit with the unexpected relief of my sharp, angular profile, as though my brain has always been hungry for exactly this and is having its ravenous fill.
When I look away from the mirror, Sami is gazing at me with his hands folded. “You look like you’ve had that haircut forever.”
* * *
Reem is at the house when Sami and I arrive, up on the roof having a smoke. She’s dragged a couple of cushions up here to make a little seating, and to my surprise Qamar is giving her a light.
“Hey.” Qamar slips their lighter into their pocket and hands me a cup of fresh orange juice, squeezed by the juice cart we passed on Atlantic, one of the ones that sells plastic baggies of sliced mango in the summer. They smile and adjust the headphones around their neck. “We ran into each other at jum’ah. I took the afternoon off.”
“These are delicious, thanks.” I sit down on a cushion and lift the plastic lid from the orange juice. The first sip is honey-sweet and electric cold. “So your family goes there, too?”
“My mom started going there a few years ago,” Qamar says, and I remember asking you, years ago, why people referred to the other masjid in Brooklyn as the Yemeni masjid, or the Bangladeshi one, or the Pakistani one. That was when I learned that being a light- to medium-skinned Levantine meant that you were privileged at pretty much any masjid, blessed with the luxury of walking in and expecting everyone to look like you. “There was a while there when I didn’t go. But the new imam is pretty cool, so the past few months I’ve started to come more often.”
We are all silent for a moment. Reem starts up a conversation she must have been having with Qamar before we arrived, about Qamar’s thesis project.
“Technically it isn’t finished yet,” Qamar says. “My grandfather never actually got to publish his discovery of G. simurghus. The reviewers assigned to his papers kept citing that there were no other documented sightings, that it must have been something else. He couldn’t find anyone who believed him—except an obscure bird artist from Lower Manhattan. The problem is that no one’s found anything with enough detail to make an identification, especially this painting that’s supposed to be out there, somewhere, hiding in someone’s attic. I’ve put feelers out to every collector and foundation in the city, but nothing’s turned up.”
“So if you found it,” Sami says, fiddling with a braided knot he’s pulled out of his pocket, “you’d have enough documentation that you could get his notes published.”
“Theoretically.” Qamar gets up and walks to the edge of the roof. They’re fidgety, like they can’t talk without movement. “My grandpa Ben was the first person I came out to. He struggled with my pronouns, but he tried. When he passed away, he willed his field notes to me, all his notebooks and letters. Even this was his—it’s an early translation of a Sufi poem he read in school. He studied Persian. He was cool like that.” They motion to a pillow, where they’ve set down a small yellowed book with a worn leather slipcover, so old that the spine has long since cracked. It lies open on the pillow, the pages ruffled by the breeze. I look over and read from Attar’s The Conference of the Birds:
If you can contain the whole,
why trouble yourself with the parts?…
Desire all, be all, become all.
Choose everything.
Choose everything.
I say to Qamar, “I know what you mean.”
Qamar laughs to themself. “I chose my name because it was one of his favorite words in Arabic.” They hold up the moon charm on their necklace with their thumb. “The moon itself has no gender.”
Reem puts out her cigarette into a dish and ties up her hair into a bun. “Abu Sabah wanted to know why you didn’t come to jum’ah after you got done baking.”
I busy myself with Qamar’s book. “You know how hot it is back there? We were disgusting and sweaty.”
Reem huffs and settles into one of the cushions. “You know how people talk.”
The first time you ever said those words to me, I was in my junior year of high school. You liked that particular friend of mine, the one who walked me home every day after drama club, which is why I didn’t think you’d be looking when I kissed her goodbye on the lips. I remember what bothered you wasn’t that I had kissed a girl like that, but that I’d done it in broad daylight when someone we knew might have seen. Me, I don’t care, habibti, you’d said, you love who you love. But what will I do? People will talk. That was the moment I saw the net that held me, the mesh of aunties and uncles and cousins and the family back in the bilad, how none of my actions, my joys, or my shames were solely my own. When I told my friend I couldn’t kiss her in public again, she accused me of being a coward. She was white. I have always suspected it was easier for her to say this.
An adhan alarm goes off on Reem’s phone for maghreb. She used to turn them on for Ramadan, when she would try to pray more regularly, and then a few months later she’d visit and they’d be turned off. This time, Reem disappears downstairs and comes back a few minutes later with Teta’s old sajajid and sets them out on the rooftop. Sami declines, but Qamar and Reem move to the corner of the rooftop to pray. With Reem’s hair in a bun, the tattoo on her neck is clearly visible. This is why she only ever ties her hair half-up, I think to myself—because people will talk, and not just about her. Reem and Qamar wrap their hijabs and deliberate about who will lead the prayer. A third prayer rug sits rolled up on one of the cushions like an invitation.
Unlike you, I always wanted explanations for the way God built a bird’s wing. I wanted to understand the machinery of flight. First I collected feathers, lining them up by length on my bedroom dresser. Then came the day I found a whole wing ripped from a jay by a stray cat, all the contour feathers intact. I brought it home and washed it in your tub after you’d gone to bed, letting the grime run down the drain as though making ghusl before prayer. I placed it next to the husks of robin’s eggs and the turkey feather, fat and marbled, laid on one of Teta’s doilies like a spare quill. It was weeks before you discovered it by its smell. You must have stuffed it in a garbage bag to keep the rats and the raccoons away, but when I came home from school and couldn’t find it, I imagined you’d opened the window and tossed the wing onto the street, where it would have fluttered down like a maple key. I spent an hour searching the sidewalk just in case, thinking I might come upon it behind a trash can or in one of the boxed-in maples in front of our building, that maybe someone’s dog had picked it up and spat it out a few buildings down. I never found it. You told me to trust you, that it had been rotting, that I would find more beautiful treasures. But I have never been good at trusting what I cannot see.
I take the rolled-up rug and lay it out apart from Reem’s and Qamar’s. I clasp my forearms across my chest. I asked Sami not to call me girl, but if you were here, if I told you the thing I am too afraid to say, I fear that you would see masquerade and think to yourself that masquerade’s got limits—say, the border of another boy’s body on mine, or the place where my forehead touches the covered earth.
Qamar’s voice reciting verses brushes the night as the lights come on in the apartments across the street. When I kneel with my forehead to the ground, I paint in my mind, each stroke a feather or the sheen on an eye. I push back and stand and recite, then kneel again. I point one finger on my thigh into the east. When I close my eyes, the shape I have painted in my mind is before me clear as the lump of waxing moon: the white-throated sparrow, the first to fall on Brooklyn.
Sami once told me the moment he first believed, really believed of his own volition. He said it was a kind of knowing no one could take away. It happened a fe
w years back, after the rooftop of a nightclub collapsed. His friend was inside when it happened, wearing an evil eye bracelet Sami had picked up for her in Cairo the year before. She was almost crushed, but one of her hands was sticking up when the rescuers came. The flashlight hit the blue of the bracelet’s little eyes, and they pulled seven people out with her. She’s got a couple kids now, last Sami told me.
I make dua for Teta, for Sami, for Reem, for Qamar. The light is fading. Vega, the falling eagle, hangs overhead. Once, I asked Teta about the spring that the French shelled Damascus, Aleppo, Hama, and Homs after the United Nations had finally recognized Syria as an independent nation. She told me she spent the days sequestered away inside her mother’s house tracking the movements of the white storks that migrated north to Turkey to breed in the summer, returning from their overwintering south of the Sahara. She marked the number of storks she sighted with hidden pencil marks on her windowsill and wondered to herself how the world must look to them. Imagining the world from up there was what got her through that long loneliness.
The stork migration was upset that year by the shelling, and only a few storks passed over Teta’s house. Once, a shell blast brought down the pale body of a stork with its pink beak and black-tipped wings. It plummeted in a line before being turned like a branch by the wind. Its wings caught the air and opened, wider than a man was tall, and its body disappeared into the orchard. This was long before my mother was born, yet Teta insisted that stork was the reason that, years later, my mother would come to the States armed with a degree in ornithology from a French university, an irony she never failed to comment on. One event can change everything, Teta told me, so that one small miracle placed underfoot can tumble us onto an unexpected path, and isn’t that, she’d said to me then, the hand of God?
* * *
Saturday morning is hot and humid, a false summer in the middle of autumn. Everything is so damp that the cardboard packages in the mailbox are wet to the touch, flexible as fabric. When Sami and I arrive at Sabah’s father’s shop to make the pastries for the day, Abu Sabah is stomping out the remains of a fire, cursing. The front windows are shattered. The impact of a brick or a stone has broken the neck of an oud and shattered a tawleh box inlaid with mother-of-pearl that Abu Sabah brought back with him from Syria more than twenty years ago. The fire was set in the window displays, evidently, a rag or something soaked in alcohol thrown inside, and the wood is blackened by flame. The white foam of a fire extinguisher is scattered inside the display case like chemical snow. Abu Sabah leans against the doorjamb with his arm over his wet face.
“Abu Sabah! What happened?” Sami and I hurry up to him, and Abu Sabah collapses against Sami, shaking with rage.
“They burned my shop,” he says. “I was coming up the block to open and I saw it. I’ve lived on this block for forty years. I’ve lived in New York more than half my life. I was here when the towers fell. Who would do a thing like this?”
Sami and I exchange quiet glances. In all the years I’ve known him, I have never seen Abu Sabah look older than he does in this moment, his gray flannel work shirt pushed up to the elbows, his hands blackened and cut by the broken display window, his glasses askew on his face. He is an old man lost in his own city. I’ve heard him talk about the decades before the new millennium, when a light-skinned Arab might get by laughing like a good sport at his own name. But I don’t remember those days, or better—I figured out pretty quick that the light skin my father gave me didn’t magically mean I wouldn’t get called a terrorist by my classmates. You made sure I never believed the lie that I’d earned the extra privileges that came with being light, and I learned from listening to you and Aisha that none of this shit was new. I was young when I learned these lessons; Abu Sabah wasn’t.
“Let me put something on your hands,” Sami says, and we try to take Abu Sabah inside, but he is adamant and refuses to leave the broken displays. He takes an elbow to the broken glass and knocks a few pieces inside, then reaches in to try to salvage what he can. There isn’t much to be saved: a few small jewelry boxes; a few evil eye charms to ward off jealousy and ill will; the silver medallion of Ayat al-Kursi, the same verse of the Qur’an you and Teta always hung in our apartments to protect a home.
Sami’s phone buzzes in his pocket. “Reem. Calm down—what? Anjad?” He looks up at me. “The masjid burned last night, too.”
“What?” I set down the rag I’m using to collect slivers of glass from the floor. Sami and I tell Abu Sabah we’ll be right back and jog down to Flatbush, slowing to a walk near the Barclays Center to catch our breath. Even from here, we can see the crowd gathered out front, murmuring. A lot of them are our neighbors, Abu Sabah’s friends and customers, Sabah’s cousins, aunties I remember from iftars and weddings. A lot of them are other Arabs from Lebanon or Yemen or Libya, older folks, some of the same people who come to Abu Sabah for spices and pickled olives and cracked wheat and, every now and then, news of home. Their faces are stricken. This is worse than Abu Sabah’s shop, not only because the impact is legible on the faces of everyone around us, but because as we near the door it becomes obvious that not only was the door bashed in and the lock broken, but the attackers set a fire in the stairwell leading to the women’s section. Qamar and Reem are already there when we reach the door, carrying out the charred remnants of a couch.
“Let me help you with that.” I lift up one corner and help them set it down on the curb. “What happened?”
“The fire downstairs put itself out before it did much damage,” Qamar says, wiping their forehead with their sleeve. Their face is tired, and sweat beads at their hairline. The sirens of fire trucks wail in the distance.
“But the sharmout smashed the upstairs window and threw something inside.” Reem wipes soot from her cheek. She’s got her hair half-up again, just enough to cover her tattoo. “Luckily it landed right on the couch. Thank God for flame-retardant fabric.”
“The ceiling will have to be repainted,” Qamar adds, “but the smoke damage isn’t too bad.”
“Fuck.” Nothing I could say would be appropriate. I don’t know what to do with my hands. I touch the burnt cover on the arm of the couch and am greeted with a rush of despair. “Fuck.”
The crowd breaks into task forces—one group to greet the firefighters, another the reporters who are sure to follow, another to get sponges and rags to scrub the stairwell, another to go upstairs and assess the damage. Two light-skinned women volunteer to deal with the police. Meanwhile, members of another nearby masjid, a historic community of Black Muslims, have already heard the commotion and arrived with brooms and bottles of water, and soon there are others, Bangladeshi Muslims from a masjid in Flatbush, four college kids from the pride center in Bed-Stuy who saw what happened on social media, members of the synagogue a few blocks away. Reem wipes her hands on her pants and slips back into the building after Qamar, stepping over the twisted remains of the lock. The ringlets covering the ink at the back of her neck are damp with sweat.
Sami puts his hand on my arm. “We’d better check on Abu Sabah.”
When we get back to the shop, the police are leaving and Abu Sabah is outside talking to a small group of neighbors who have gathered on the sidewalk. Something in him has broken. He is quietly cursing the last seventeen years he’s spent in this city, the American ban on people who come from the place where he was born, the fires that crop up again and again like weeds because people like Abu Sabah, people like us, are not welcome. His neighbors nod, their faces pensive or sorrowful or terrified. Some of them, though not all, once had the luxury to believe things would be different.
“We should at least call Sabah and let her know you’re all right,” I say to Abu Sabah when he’s gone quiet. “Between this and the masjid, it’ll be on the news.”
This gets Abu Sabah inside, and we dial the number for him. Sami and I slink off into the kitchen to give him privacy, though we can hear him sobbing from the next room. The orange cat comes in and curls up in
my lap at the table, watching my eyes for an explanation.
Abu Sabah appears in the doorway a few minutes later. “Sabah for you.”
When I come to the phone, Sabah’s voice wavers, but she’s calm. “I was waiting for it. Hoped it wouldn’t happen, but I was waiting anyway.” There’s a pause on the line. “Listen. The artist whose studio I came to visit, the glassblower? Laila Z was one of her influences. Laila was here, in Dearborn. This artist has one of her aquatints, a rare one—the yellow-crowned night heron. Some of the people who met her when she came through here in the thirties are still alive. They said she was here for a while—something must have delayed her. She shipped a bunch of prints back to New York when she left. If the records we have are accurate, and a private collector really did commission a complete series from her when she got back to New York, these might have been studies for those later illustrations. A lot of her aquatints were done in Dearborn: her sandhill crane, the cedar waxwing, the indigo bunting, the white ibis. If she painted simurghus, well—no one knows where the damn thing is.”
The idea that art, or the natural world, could ever be anyone’s property has always made me uneasy. A work is shaped not only by the artist, but by everyone who interacts with it; it belongs a little to everyone. This, too, is how a life is made: with the support of many hands. Outside, Abu Sabah is back with his arms through the glass, gathering objects: boxes, miniatures, strings of beads. His blood is on the sharp edges scattered on the sidewalk. The only thing I know of glassblowing is that it’s the fire and the air, not your hands, that shapes the glass. The glass can’t be shaped without the fire; the heat makes it smooth. I list in my head the ways the natural world consumes itself: lightning, volcanoes, forest fires. Abu Sabah’s neighbors have joined in rescuing his precious objects. Word will have spread by now of what’s happened at the Islamic center, and the crowd will have grown. Abu Sabah is not crying now, no longer outraged. He steps back into the darkness of the shop, his arms laden with charred treasures, and begins to coax out the burnt foam with a rag. Abu Sabah told me once that when he first moved in here, the basement, now used for storage, had a massive problem with black mold. Everything had to be ripped out and cleaned. Once he laid his hand on the wall downstairs, he said, and his palm came away green-gray, leaving a fuzzy outline of his hand. It was only when his new neighbors offered to help him clean it out that he felt the place was his, and that he belonged to it. Sometimes, after a long day’s work, he’ll talk about the shopfronts and the neighbors who have come and gone over the years, the cycles of coming and of leaving, the ways in which he is still learning that none of them, himself included, have built any of this alone.
The Thirty Names of Night Page 18
