Sonora

by Hannah Lillith Assadi

  When we visited Greenwood, it was fall. We trampled through the red and yellow patches of dried leaves. We spied from a distance as two gravediggers presided over the lowering of a casket. We were the only attendees of that funeral. But then a man and woman approached us. They had backpacks on. They passed right beside us without acknowledging our presence. A foot closer, and they would have walked through us.

  “Which of us is alive and which of us dead?” Laura asked.

  “We’re dead,” I joked. We sat at the base of a tree and shared a joint. Laura laughed and lay her head on my shoulder. Her face hurt, her cheekbones. I noticed she had grey in her hair.

  “Don’t they say all the memories of your life flood through you when you die?” she said. “That didn’t happen to us.”

  “No,” I said.

  “What’s your first memory?” she asked.

  “Being in the woods. A woman brought me a small white pony to ride. White as a unicorn. I was with my parents. And I began to cry, not understanding why I would be asked to do such a thing. I felt like it was really evil.”

  “You thought that was evil?” Laura laughed.

  “What’s yours?”

  “The moan of the coyotes in the desert,” she said.

  Laura’s father came to New York the day after I found her dead. He wore a sombrero on his head. He had lost his hair. His hands shook from Parkinson’s. He visited the morgue, had the autopsy performed, and then had Laura cremated. I waited for him outside of the crematorium, on a block across the street from Greenwood Cemetery. “I’ll take her home with me,” he said.

  He cradled the urn as if it were a baby, tears in his eyes. “In a few months, I’d like to take her to the sea. I hope you will come. You were such a good friend, like a sister.”

  “I failed,” I said.

  “She took after her mother, she always took after her mother,” he said. “I tried to love them both, protect them. I’m the one who failed.”

  We stood outside of the funeral parlor looking on into the hills of graves. He hummed something, a sad melody. Just like Laura.

  “Shall we say a prayer for her soul?” he said.

  My father taught me to pray in one way and my mother in another. My father led me outside before our walks through the desert, those long walks trailing Laura and her father. “Get down on your knees,” he said. “Repeat after me.”

  “Now look to your right and say, ‘Good morning, good angel.’”

  “Good morning, good angel,” I said.

  “Now look to your left and say, ‘Goodbye, bad angel.’”

  “Go away, bad angel.”

  “Good morning, Wednesday!”

  “Morning, Wednesday.”

  “Goodbye, Tuesday.”

  “Goodbye, Tuesday.”

  “Now what’s tomorrow?”

  “Thursday.”

  “And the day after tomorrow?”

  “Friday.”

  “Yes, it will be happy, happy Friday!”

  Sometimes for no reason at all, he’d begin to cry.

  The bad angels were the jinn, and the good angels were the jinn too, and we spoke to them both in the desert. In Arabic, jinn has the same root as the word for paradise, jenna. The word for jinn and the word for paradise both have the same root as the word for madness, junun. To be close to the jinn is to be close to madness, is to be even closer to paradise.

  My mother prayed every night, though I never heard her speak of God, and though she always thought I was already asleep, Shama Yisrael Adonai Eloheinu Adonoi E-had, her hands caressing my hair. She kissed the mezuzah upon returning to our home at night, but never upon leaving in the morning.

  I too have developed this habit, of speaking to my angels, to my demons, to Laura, to all those I miss, deep in the night. Never in the morning. The morning is for forgetting; the morning is for forgetfulness.

  When I was a child, I prayed differently than them both. I tried to see heaven. And I saw it by night at the sea. Hundreds of bodies, phosphorescent in the moonlight, slow as whales, swimming to a choreography set long before time. Islands here and there, strangers perching amidst other strangers, speaking with those once lost.

  No one speaks on the drive down Mountainview Road. The house remains the same as we left it, the same brick, the same peeling tawny paint, but it is somehow smaller than the night before. As if it had shrunk and we had grown unbearably big. There is a television in the living room again. It takes up the entire wall. The cat leaps up and down the walls, his voice hoarse from whining for my father, for us all.

  “Hello, you little terrorist,” my father says to the cat. He reaches for the remote. I take it away from him. “I can’t think right now, I just don’t want to think.”

  “I’ll cook something,” my mother says.

  “No, I’ll cook. Ahlam always likes it when I cook,” he says.

  “I go to Mexico in a week,” I say.

  “You need to move on,” my mother says.

  “Isn’t this the day of repentance? Remembering? Whatever?”

  “Aren’t we enough for you?” my father asks.

  I walk onto the porch for a cigarette. The moon is a crescent, hanging there, yellow against the dusk, above the only saguaro in the yard. The fountain is on. There is no sound but the water on its fake rocks.

  How many times will I watch my father from the corner of my eye, confused in the kitchen, clanking pots and dropping slices of tomato as my mother sweeps in behind him to clean up the juice and wash the plates even before the cooking is done? How many times will I sift through my mother’s neatly stacked sweaters, forgetting the sudden cold that comes only in the night, tiptoeing over my father’s clothes strewn in disarray all throughout the carpet of their closet? There will never be a time that I won’t finger his broken glasses left in the hall or on the bar and not remember every time we sat in a restaurant listening to his complaint of the size of menu font and the dim lights.

  I hear the oil crackling and smell the sudden searing of the beef and watch the sun slipping into the earth, the bougainvillea in its last light weeping, the rosebush dead, the cat stalking me with his eyes, and just as quickly as the cigarette has begun, it is over, and my mother is calling “dinner,” and we are sitting in the same seats we always have, my father closest to the television, my mother closest to the window, and me between them. We were just like any normal family, sitting down for dinner.

  In my last dream of Laura, she was outside my window walking toward the canal. The sky was lit a furious crimson as seen only in the desert. In her left hand she carried a birdcage, its door flapping open. I began knocking on the window violently. Forever passed before a bird flew out. Once it did, hundreds of tiny birds flapped about her, above her. She was watching them, amazed. I could feel them against me, inside my stomach, though I was behind the window. Laura called to me. I heard her voice saying my name from no discernible direction. I began to weep. She waved to me. It was her hands, Laura’s hands. Delicate, her nails half painted, half peeled. “You see me how you want to see me,” she whispered from just behind me.

  I have forgiven Sonora. I have forgiven New York, forsaken the recursion of history. But I do not yet know how to forgive myself.

  Long past midnight, after everything that has passed, my father is still awake. My mother is asleep on the couch. The moon passes between the clouds, puffs them through with light. Faintly, I can hear a coyote moan, far from us, far out on the reservation.

  “What are you thinking about so seriously?” my father asks.

  “I was thinking about evil,” I say.

  “Well, that is serious,” he says. “But there is no such thing. Some of us choose love, and some of us choose hate. You know the Sufi love Satan. Because they believe he loved God the most, and this was why he would not submit to the lesser creation,
Adam. Humans. That Satan was the most loyal follower of God and accepted the greatest separation from Him to prove his love. Truly a fallen angel. There are many ways to see the world, habibti.”

  “What if we love the black hole in the center of all things? What if we are people like that? People who love to be cursed?” I ask.

  “Stop your worrying. Look at the moon. We are in the holy month of Ramadan,” my father says and goes to the bar to refill his vodka.

  It is October. My father says he wants to walk in the sea. My mother says she must see the sea. Laura’s father is in Mexico, already, waiting for us.

  As we drive, my father speaks for the first time lovingly of New York. “Every Wednesday I walked to Lincoln Center to hear the free music. Walking to Lincoln Center and back to One Hundred and Sixth and Broadway because I did not have enough money to ride the train. And it was all free. Free music. Where do you hear free music anymore? Everyone only cares about money.”

  “Look, you can see the sea!” my mother says.

  In the faces on the street, I look for Maria. In one, I almost see her, but when I look again, it is only a child in a white dress selling Chiclets. We pass the abandoned ship, the ship Laura and I say we’d live on one day, its hull rusted, its paint nearly entirely peeled off. The sun seems in love with the ship, the way its beams pass through its tears and its holes. A magnificently sick ship.

  In the evening, we have margaritas and chips and watered-down salsa made for the gringos, and the Mexican singers come and sing “Guantanamera” over and over again. The dock sways beneath us, and in the sea stands one fisherman in his rowboat who joins the singing, and when the singing is finally done, he sits and looks off into the dark ahead. There is no moon. The stars have risen and fallen and given way to a new spread, to the smeared heart of our Milky Way.

  “Look at the lonely fisherman,” my father says.

  “Look at his view,” my mother says.

  The Andromeda Galaxy is one of the few blue-shifted galaxies in the universe. Instead of being torn away from us by a force far greater than gravity, the fate that commands the red-shifted galaxies, the force that will cause all the lights to one day go out, Andromeda is coming for us at eighty-five miles per second. In four billion years, far after the sun has grown too hot for us to live, it will crash into us, into the Milky Way.

  My father, a Palestinian, and my mother, an Israeli, met in a bar in New York. Their encounter was a blue shift. An anomaly. A collision. In the end, I understand, it is only for this we live. All I ever wanted was to love.

  On my last day in New York, the sirens would not stop, the helicopters were searching for someone, something overhead, but there was no intercom, no principal that could personalize the calamity around me. I packed my snow globe last. It held the old Manhattan skyline. And I looked out at the view beyond me, of the city, the void of the towers, of the view of New York then, in that little glass ball, and the view of it now. That even in those two visions, there was the coincidence of missing.

  One last time, I walked into the bodega, greeted the obese cat, told all the men there whose names I’d never known, men I’d seen every day for years, I was leaving. “We will miss you,” the owner said. “Hope they have a good bacon-egg-and-cheese where you are going.”

  I passed Daniel and his son. They tipped their hats. Watermelon season had ended. “Safe trip now,” Daniel said. I thanked him. I said goodbye.

  It was still raining in New York. I stood beneath the above-ground awning waiting for the train. I looked out at the canal. The still canal. New York had changed shape already. It had changed its smell. It was already a foreign city to me. I was among strangers. There were five of us there, crowded beneath the tiny awning, waiting for the rain to pass. Waiting for the train to come.

  I was intent on holding the scene when a beautiful stranger approached me. “I know you,” he said. I didn’t remember him. I’d remember such a nice face. “Don’t you remember me?” he asked. “It was years ago at a party where we met, but I know I know you.”

  I faded out. I was for a moment my father tapping on his cigarette, the way he holds it, crushing it flat. I was my mother at the sink, staring into the desert from the kitchen window, dishes in hand. I was in all the beds I’d ever slept in. Me sinking into the sheets, letting my thoughts fall down. I was running alongside the ocean, Laura splashing me with water. I was dancing to a melody I did not recognize, spinning wild and lovely into exalted leaps. I was no one again. I was someone with no name, no past. My face resumed the freshness of birth, the brightness was again in my eyes, the brightness only children own before life begins its wreckage.

  The grey light surrounded us. It allowed all other colors, the colors of our jackets and our shoes and our umbrellas their true brilliance. It was not all a dream. This must be my version of awaiting the messiah. Watching the rain, finding cover. “Hello,” I said.

  We have driven through the desert, all the way to its end. The saguaros are replaced by sand dunes. We have arrived at the sea. It is morning. We walk the stretch of the beach, the autumnal wind like May in our hair. My father says he feels no pain, no pain at all. “It’s the sea,” he says. “It must be the salt air. Maybe the curse has gone.” My mother does not cough once.

  With us walk a trumpeter, an accordion player, a guitarist, two small girls with tambourines. They play a cheerful song. One made for piña coladas and first love. When they finish, they play it again. Before it is all over, I ask at last why Laura went by another name.

  “She hated the desert. She hated it ever since she was a girl. She always wanted to live by the ocean,” her father says and walks on.

  We follow him to the water. He is wearing a sombrero to shield the sun. We do not exchange a word or a gesture. He climbs a wall of rocks that juts out into the sea. We stand on the sand below him in a triangle. My father prays. The sea rushes up to us. Her father kneels and unclasps the urn. Above the waves she falls graceful as snow, my sister, my Sonora.

  We stay through the dusk. The music does not stop. The players gather, depart, walk a stretch to another group of players, and play again. There are children swimming in the sea. The tide stretches farther and farther away from us. I feel a burning spread across my chest and for a moment believe my skin sprouts lightning tracks. I hear Sonora’s voice inside me one last time. I think of the stranger in the rain. The one I knew, the one I once met. I wish he could be beside me now, far away as I am. Venus burns hot and bright amid a parade of stars whose names I do not know. A wave rises, lost in the black sky so large it might be a whale, and then breaks long before shore.

  This is it. This is how I always saw heaven, always by the sea, always by night, always in the dark.

  For book club discussion questions on

  Hannah Lillith Assadi’s Sonora, please visit

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  Acknowledgments

  My deepest gratitude is owed to PJ Mark for his enduring faith, Marya Spence for her invaluable assistance, to Mark Doten for his brilliant vision, and to Meredith Barnes, Rachel Kowal, and everyone at Soho Press—all who tirelessly made this dream real.

  To Joe and Anya Stiglitz for their support throughout, for bringing me along on the tour, and to everyone in suite 212 who lent an ear to the struggle.

  To early readers: Laina Macrae, Predrag Milovanovic, Andrew Spano, Binnie Kirshenbaum and Robert Lopez for their profound guidance.

  To Donald Antrim, Rivka Galchen, Ben Marcus, and long before them Susan Mashburn for their teaching, and to fellow writers for their wisdom in all the workshops over the years.

  To Kellam Clark for his dark, magical home on Dean Street.

  To Jonathan Thomas for the desert walks in the early stages of this book and to Ben Sandler for all the Starbucks cigs and for Paris.

  To Jesse Glendon Tillers for her songs and for all the gorgeous, howling
nights.

  To Sabra Embury, Maria King, and Ashley Villarreal for their incomparable strength, sisterhood, and inspiration.

  To Elena Megalos for living inside this book with me over the years, for her steadfast devotion and loving friendship, without which I would have been lost.

  To all those who passed away too soon at Desert Mountain High School, this book is also dedicated to you.

  To Gandalf Gavan for so much, but mostly for impressing upon me that I had no choice but to write, and whose life endures on every page of this book.

  To my mother, Susan, for living bold and true, for your unconditional love, for being my best friend and advocate, and for believing in an improbable dream.

  To my father, Sami, for teaching me how to fight then fight harder and what it means most profoundly to find home. For your heart, your compassion, and your courage. You are the strongest lion I know.

  And finally to Jake Gwyn, for leading me out, you are my Orpheus, and for letting me look back from time to time for the sake of this book.