We face each other, two candles flickering. Sami’s sweat smells of chamomile and musk. When we dance, I am a bird shaking loose the night from its wings. I kiss him, my hand behind his jaw, his hands in my hair. He gasps into my mouth and goes soft as water, our bodies molten glass that I am shaping with my kiss, and I wonder if it’s true that there is nothing on this earth that is not born of the sweet ache of flame.
* * *
A couple hours later, we assemble at the ladder and climb back up into the night, then scatter like a network of veins. Reem and Sami fall asleep on each of my shoulders on the subway ride home, Reem with her hand curled around Qamar’s, who stretches out with their combat boots on an empty seat and lays their head in Reem’s lap.
At Teta’s apartment, Qamar and Reem fall exhausted into bed, but Sami and I are still so wired that we go up to the roof with a blanket and a sleeping bag and sandwich ourselves between the covers against the predawn chill. Teta’s plants have been forgotten up here, creating a makeshift garden. A late drizzle has transformed the firepit into a lunar reflecting pool.
Sami’s arm is a ghostly heat on mine. He reaches over with his pinky finger to stroke the back of my hand. “You know,” he says, “I never came out to my mom. I always thought she kinda knew, seeing the friends I invited over. But I thought we had more time.”
I lay my head on Sami’s shoulder. “She would have understood.”
“Maybe I’m just telling myself that.” Sami pulls a snapped rubber band out of his pocket and twists it as though he is braiding dough. He is tying yet another knot, repeating a rhythm he can’t escape. “I don’t want to rewrite history just to spare myself the truth. People can be okay with something in theory, but when it’s their own family, they freak out.”
I’ve spent so long trying to forget that Sami’s enchantment to keep memory alive feels alien. I spent so much time wishing I could rewrite the past that I never allowed myself to imagine what might come after it. But if I think of your notes, of Laila’s notebook, or of Teta’s handkerchief, the past seems so much more complex than I could have ever imagined. I am a fool. I spent so many years feeling alone, not knowing how to ask the right questions. Even now, if I admit that I have spent a lifetime denying myself, I will also have to grieve the time I lost trying to become someone else.
I place my hands over the rubber band in Sami’s hand. “You’re gonna run out of places to put those.”
He doesn’t move away. Warmth pools in the pit of my stomach. To my surprise, he is trembling.
A shape no bigger than my palm sails down to the edge of the roof and perches there, preening its gray wings. It’s a Kirtland’s warbler, with a golden face and belly and a gray-green back scaled with black stripes. I’ve never seen one; their habitat is in Michigan, and they’re incredibly rare. This one must have lost its way, or been drawn, maybe, like the others. The silence up on the roof, unusual in this neighborhood at any time of night, is foreboding. Tonight’s the night: any minute now, they should be setting up the explosives for the demolition of the building on Washington Street. It’s a clear night. From up here, we might even be able to see the cloud of dust dissolve over Lower Manhattan. The warbler preens itself. Sami squeezes my fingers.
“Would you look at that,” I say. The warbler hops along the ledge, showing us its golden belly. “Lots of birders go their whole life without seeing one.”
Sami laughs. “We found you a rare bird. Just not the one you were looking for.”
“I don’t know what I’m looking for anymore.” I shiver under the blankets. “Maybe I just wanted a reason to be brave.”
“Ya Nadir,” Sami says, touching my knee, “brave is one thing you have always been.”
I take Sami’s face in my hands and lower him to the blanket. He takes off his shirt and unfurls himself under the moon. I tell him I want him, and he whispers that he wants me, too. We roll through the dark, I on top of him and he on top of me as though we are wrestling gravity. We begin from our hands rather than between our legs—our hands entangled, my hands in his hair, his hands crumpling the blanket when I move my lips below his collarbone. The condom in his pocket is a ring against my thigh. When he is inside me for the first time, I cry. It is the first time I’ve made love to a boy as a boy, which is to say that this is the first time in my life that I have been naked and not been invisible. When I roll him onto his back, he is not inside of me. I am inside of him somehow, rocking into him like the tide, and when he touches my face and asks me if I find him beautiful, I tell him he is the most beautiful creature I have ever seen.
Afterward, we dress each other in the chill, sneak downstairs to pee, and come back up to the roof with snacks. By now the sky is streaked with dark blue clouds, and the moon is seated low on the horizon. I touch Sami’s cheek, and he strokes my face with the back of his hand.
“I see you,” he whispers.
I put my arm around his shoulders, and he snuggles into the crook of my armpit. I laugh into his curls. “Imagine if they hadn’t been able to open the manhole.”
Sami laughs. “Fuck.”
“I finished Laila’s notebook last night.” I trace spirals across his shoulder. “They’ll be bringing the community house down this morning.”
Sami kisses my neck, but he knows better than to try to make me feel better. A breeze forms an arrow of ripples across the rainwater that has collected in the firepit. “I don’t know why we don’t use this spot more often,” he says.
He’s right, of course. You used to talk about making a little space for us up here, a small garden, a few cushions. But we never found the time, and so we never claimed a space for ourselves. I think of Laila, the desk she gave her mother so she’d have somewhere to pray, a place to put her things. The body itself should be a sacred space.
Something could be built here, I think, something resembling a family. If an object can become sacred by placing it on a table and calling it an altar, then who is to say we cannot sanctify our own bodies? When I touched those eggs in the nest, I understood that to love something, even oneself, is its own terrifying act of faith. Years ago, Laila placed my teta’s wing in a box with her own aquatints, set it in a hole in the wall, and stopped fearing the sound of the sea. In the same room, her mother guarded her own secret life in the drawer in her desk, and she may as well have been as far away as Saturn.
I sit up, rigid. Across the river, there’s still no dust cloud over Little Syria. The building is still there, though not for much longer.
Sami sits up. “What’s wrong?”
I pull Sami up by the hand. “I know where the missing bird is.”
TWENTY / LAILA
I SHOULD HAVE KNOWN she’d found it when I saw her stoking the fire last night, should have known it by her silence, or by the way she looked at me, or by the way she snapped at me when I asked her if she’d gotten all her things from our apartment. My mother knows who you are, B, and there is no hiding it now that she’s taken the box with your wing, not to mention the other pieces I’d been keeping in there. It’s all gone now, all of it. I don’t know how she managed to smuggle it out of the apartment without my noticing. She must have taken it while I was out at the galleries and hid it in her trunk.
I saw that the hole in the wall was empty as soon as I came back from Khalto Tala’s apartment. I went to confront her. When I arrived, my mother was poking through the cinders of a fire, which is how I knew she had burned everything—your wing, my illustrations. She wouldn’t admit to it, didn’t want to talk, just shook her head with furious tears until it all came tumbling out: that she had read my notebook before I removed it from the box and had waited for me to leave the house before taking everything.
“Tuyour, tuyour, tuyour,” she cried. Just birds, birds, birds, each one a symbol of you.
I was so angry that I burst into tears and screamed at her in English. “You witch,” I cried, and called her names she didn’t understand. I took a power from her then that she could never
take back. English itself had carved a canyon between us, and you were only a part of that canyon, B. The truth is that I knew exactly who I was writing to when I picked up this notebook after all those years, remembered every word I’d set down, every word I’d scratched out because I couldn’t risk being seen.
I brandished my English against my mother like a weapon. Afterward, I returned to this apartment and wept for the fact that, no matter how many blessings I might have in my life, my mother has finally succeeded in closing the wound of you, the one wound I hoped would never heal.
TWENTY-ONE / NADIR
IT’S STILL A COUPLE of hours before dawn by the time I jolt Reem and Qamar awake and we arrive, breathless, at the community house on Washington Street. We leave Reem’s station wagon a few blocks away and post up in the alley behind the building, watching the work crew roll up with their demolition equipment and discuss how to set the charges. Most buildings are brought down these days with a minimum of ceremony, the building imploding rather than exploding, falling into its own footprint to avoid damaging the structures around it.
“We’ve got some time, but not much. Less than twenty minutes to be safe.” Reem walks to the back door, locked but not as securely as the front, and heaves down the bag she pulled out of the trunk with a clank. “I’m not much of a lockpick, but let’s see what we’ve got.”
“Whatever you do, hurry.” I peer back through the alley. The work site is being taped off and potential traffic diverted with orange cones, though no one is driving down here at this hour.
While Sami and Qamar keep watch, Reem fiddles with a pin in the lock, but it’s no use. She grimaces and tries again with a second pin, then shakes her head.
“Forget it.” I scout the side of the building for windows I can pull the boards off of. “We don’t have time for this.”
“I figured you’d say that, so I brought this.” Reem turns to rummage for something in her bag, then turns back to us with a metal rod in her hand.
Sami steps back. “Is that—a crowbar?”
Reem pulls her curls into a high, round bun. “I’m full of surprises.” She uses her body weight to put torque on the crowbar, and with a crack, the lock flies off the door and into the wall of the neighboring building. We duck our heads, and when we look up, Reem is kicking the door. Qamar joins her, and the door bursts in.
When I give them an open-mouthed look, Reem and Qamar grin. Qamar stifles a giggle. “I’ve always wanted to do that,” Reem says.
Sami catches my arm. “You don’t need to do this.”
I touch the curls at the back of his neck. “I’ll be right back. You all keep watch.”
Inside, the construction crew’s voices are a muffled murmur from the front of the building. I keep to the shadows and head for the staircase. Others must have broken the glass and gotten inside since the last time I was here. The living room ceiling has crumbled onto the hardwood, and the walls are covered with spray-painted tags. The floorboards groan with my weight, so there must be a cellar below. I raise the flashlight on my phone to a patch of plaster that is missing above my head, revealing exposed wiring. The electrical system in this old building has been eaten away over the years, making it vulnerable to catching fire and earning it a condemnation notice. Easier to tear down than to repair.
I head up to the floor where I found Laila’s notebook. Here, I pick out her apartment by the orange wallpaper in the bedroom. The old bedframe pushed up against the wall is still there. The wallpaper has peeled in the humid nights since the last time I was up here, and spider carcasses hang by their cobwebs from the dried glue.
I run my light over the floor and over to the upended desk in the corner of the room. I kneel and tug on the jammed drawer, but it doesn’t budge. I brace myself against the wall and pull until the wood begins to give, then wiggle the drawer back and forth until it unsticks from the desk. At last it slams out, and something hard inside smacks my fingers. I wince and lift up a wooden box about the size of a backgammon board inlaid with eight-pointed stars and diamonds in mother-of-pearl, its rusty tin clasp still tightly shut.
There’s a loud pop, and a vibration spreads across the floor. I drop to my knees. The smell of burning reaches me from the walls. Downstairs, the workers are shouting. Something is wrong. It’s far too early to start a detonation, not with the crew still on-site.
I cough and raise myself up on the corner of the desk, waving away a string of smoke that escapes from behind the wallpaper.
I shove the desk aside and grope the wallpaper with my fingers. The brick behind it is hot to the touch. Where the wallpaper covers lines of electrical wire, it smokes and melts.
“Nadir!” One of Reem’s mechanical birds zips into the room a second before Sami appears in the doorway, coughing and waving smoke out of the air. Behind him, the stairwell is gray, as though full of fog. “One of the charges malfunctioned. A spark got into the walls. Yalla, let’s get out of here.”
“I found it!” I grab Sami and move for the door. The smell of smoke is undeniable. The fire is spreading through the wiring, through the ceiling and up inside the walls. We reach the stairwell, but it’s already full of smoke. As we reach the steps, one of the walls bulges, then disintegrates, and flames spread across the stairs.
We run back into the apartment, looking for another way out. I try to force the window open, but it’s stuck and won’t budge. I heave my weight against it—nothing. The room begins to fill with smoke.
“Fuck,” Sami says, hacking. “Fuck.”
You were the one who had the courage to push us both out onto the fire escape the night of the fire. When I saw the fire trucks arriving, I thought everything would be okay. But then you tipped me into the firefighter’s arms, and as we descended you became smaller and smaller, and the platform didn’t hold, and all the power I attributed to you was stripped away. Every ground looks solid until the rains come.
If someone finds me here after the fire has parched my body, will they see the resemblance I bear to you? Once, on an autumn afternoon, we stumbled upon an owl perched on a fence in upstate New York that had died in its sleep. It looked nothing but peaceful. If I find death now, it will not be because I’ve gone looking for it. I am a lifetime away from the forty-eight sparrows above Teta’s rooftop.
I harden my fists and turn my knuckles toward the glass. I step back, take a breath, and charge forward, throwing my shoulder to the pane. My weight shatters the glass, and I drop, bloodied, onto the fire escape. My shoulder hits the chipped iron hard enough to cut.
“Nadir! Sami!” Reem and Qamar stand below us in the alley behind the building. Qamar shouts up, “Get out of there!”
“We have to climb down one at a time.” I shove Sami toward the ladder. “What are you waiting for? Go!”
He grabs me with both hands. “I’m not leaving you.”
I hold his face between my palms. I taste his tears on his lips. “I love you. Go.” I push him toward the ladder, forcing him to grab the railing and put a foot on the rung below.
He looks up at me, terror in his eyes, but he begins to descend. His old knee injury makes his steps shaky. On the seventh step, the ladder sways, and his foot slips off.
Reem positions herself below the fire escape. “You’re almost there, Shaaban.”
Qamar calls, “Keep going. We got you.”
Sami reaches the second platform and starts down the final ladder, but as he prepares to drop, there’s another loud pop, and the window above the second platform explodes. All of us scream. The ladder wrenches free of the fire escape, and Sami drops to the ground, knocking Qamar and Reem down in the process.
I clear the smoke in the window and try to make out the rest of the apartment. Flames have chewed through the staircase from the front of the building, leaving a gaping mouth of charred wood and smoke. There’s no way back now. The heat from the window, even on the platform, is suffocating. My eyes tear from the smoke. I take off my jacket and hold it over my nose and mouth. Swea
t runs down the cleft in my lower back. The hairs in my nose burn and turn bitter.
“You gotta jump,” Sami calls up. “We’ll catch you.”
But they are twenty feet below, and all I can see is you sliding from the fire escape half a decade ago. Behind me, the fire reaches the window. Flames press their way through the broken glass and lick my back.
When you fell from the fire escape, you spread your arms. Astaghfirullah. In your final moments, you, too, became a bird.
A shadow passes overhead. A dark arrow slips between the moon and me, the feathers of its wings an iridescent flash, its curved beak pointed toward the west where the night is retreating.
I climb over the railing of the fire escape and open my arms to gravity.
TWENTY-TWO / LAILA
LITTLE WING,
I sit writing this in Ilyas’s and my bedroom in the community house, now emptied, the bedframe and this old desk with the remnants of my mother’s candle the only things left. A line of blackbirds perched on the demolition equipment this morning. The wrecking balls are waiting, the dynamite ready. The work crews are shuffling toward the work sites, as they call what will become of our homes.
This last morning dawned pink and long. I went up to the roof of my mother’s building just before sunup to release the pigeons from their dovecotes. Ilyas stopped by my mother’s apartment to take her steamer trunk with him to our new apartment in Brooklyn, but I went straight up to the roof. I didn’t want to speak to her. From the rooftop of the tenement, I looked down across the courtyard and into the window of the apartment. She was sitting there watching me, seated on the windowsill. She has a relationship with these walls. The past few days she’s been speaking strangely, telling me my father is in the sitting room or telling me to go down to the village oven to bake bread as though we’re still in the bilad. She lies awake at night and speaks of time passing as though it were a rope tied to itself. It’s the leaving that’s unraveled her memory this way. She once begged God to spare one of his angels for her. But time has passed, and no angels are coming.
The Thirty Names of Night Page 25
