by H. M. Naqvi
As I sidled inside that night, Jake, illuminated by the glow of his TV, looked up from his perch and nodded. Twin hunched silhouettes lurked by the bar in the background while Jimbo and AC sat in the alcove up front among empty glasses, bottles of beer, and a wrinkly pack of American Spirits. Ensconced on the ottoman, Jimbo mulled the symmetry of a cigarette. After due deliberation and a persistent wheeze, he had quit cold turkey some three weeks earlier, an inopportune moment in the history of the summer. In the interest of economy, I had attempted as well but failed. AC, meanwhile, slumped, shirt untucked, as if lapsing in and out of an ontological stupor. When he saw me, he leaped up, crying, “Where the hell have you been?”
“I’m sorry, yaar,” I panted, “there were no cabs anywhere—”
“You can’t do this to us, chum. We were worried. We’ve been waiting for hours,” he fulminated, making something of nothing, but I listened demurely, deferentially, as usual, thumbs hooked in pockets. At that instant he could have been delirious from insomnia or high or, worse, both. “You have to remember, we have responsibilities to each other, as friends, and more importantly as, ah, human beings. We cannot allow ourselves to be cauterized. We are the glue,” he announced, waving an arm about him with rhetorical flourish, “keeping civilization together. Without bonds and good manners, without commitments, even small commitments, we’re nothing, unconnected, uncivilized, animals! Do you follow?”
I nodded and then again for effect.
“Dude, you’re never sure,” Jimbo interjected, “and you’re sure you could be right—”
“I’m not interested in your, ah, pablum,” exclaimed AC.
“That like phlegm?” Jimbo wondered aloud.
“I’m sorry, AC,” I said. “I really am.”
We settled into hard chairs and a mysteriously grim mood. We lit cigarettes, passed around warm beers, and concentrated on the floor. Although I wanted to get the Girl from Ipanema episode off my chest, I was afraid to disturb the studied silence. Jimbo, however, leaned forward, elbows on knees, verging on conversation. I could sense that grand themes didn’t occupy his thoughts. Something else was on his mind, something parochial, closer to home. “Duck’s AWOL, dude,” he finally announced.
“Fuck the Duck, chum!” AC proclaimed.
“Can’t, pussycat,” Jimbo retorted. “She ain’t here.”
“What’s happened?” I asked.
“Dunno,” he replied, creasing his considerable eyebrows. “She ain’t returnin’ my calls … must be pissed … gotta go see her.”
Grinding a cigarette into a butt, AC rose determinedly and disappeared into the back.
“What’s eating him, yaar?”
“Civilized soonkers and such.”
“That’s what he wanted to talk about back there?”
“No, dude, the Shaman.”
Mohammed Shah or the Shaman was dark, lanky, over the hill, and could be described as a drifter, a grifter, an American success story, a Pakistani Gatsby. Apparently he quite literally jumped ship back and subsisted day to day, hand to mouth for years, working gas stations along Palisades Parkway and Queens Boulevard. This, however, was mostly hearsay. A few things we knew for sure: he told the Long Island natives whom he courted at hotel bars that he was an Arab sheikh. Sometimes it worked. Moreover, in recent history the Shaman had managed to secure a position at a top-tier insurance company, and suddenly though not entirely unexpectedly, he was on the up and up. In celebration, he had leased a scarlet Mercedes 500 SEL and mortgaged one of those rubblestone and wood houses in Westbrook, Connecticut, where he hosted ostentatious parties while slinking soberly on the periphery.
“What about the Shaman?”
“Man’s AWOL too.”
After 9/11 we heard not only from family and friends but from distant relatives, colleagues, ex-colleagues, one-night stands, two-night stands, neighbors, childhood friends, and acquaintances, and in turn we made our own inquiries, phone calls, dispatched e-mails. When AC returned with a shot of Wild Turkey, he told us that he had called the Shaman, left messages. “Something isn’t right. I’ve the feeling—admittedly the, ah, proverbial gut feeling—that the Shaman’s gone missing.” As he gravely lit a cigarette, Jimbo and I exchanged bemused, skeptical looks, stretched, cracked our fingers.
The Shaman was an unreliable character at the best of times, going underground for ages, only to surface unexpectedly as you’re leafing through a copy of Big Butt at the corner bodega. At any other time, we might have told AC to chill the hell out, but he was in a particularly excitable state that night. Jumping up, as if bitten in the ass by a carnivorous butterfly, he sent the balls whirling on the pool table behind him with a sweep of the hand. “Goddamn it,” AC exclaimed, “somebody say something!”
We watched the balls zigzag and rebound against the sides and against one another and roll into the pockets with hollow clunks. Jake coughed up phlegm in the background, crying “Buono, buono!” Then I asked, “Don’t you need more to go on than your gut?”
“Precisely, chum,” AC replied, pounding the meat of his palm with the eight ball. “We should find him immediately—tonight! We need to go to his house, stake it out, break in, whatever it takes. We’re his friends, maybe his only friends. We owe it to him … we owe it to ourselves—”
“He could be out of town, dude,” Jimbo interrupted. “This one time the city was really gettin’ to me—hadn’t been away for like ten months—so I went upstate, with the Duck, and I wasn’t stoned or nothin’, but the blue and green of the sky and water like really hit me, like the colors were alive or something, maybe ’cause blue and green are in the middle of the color spectrum—I dunno—but I was like, give it to me baby, I’m dyin’ here—”
Suddenly AC’s eyes flashed, the only hint of an imminent outburst: “I DON’T CARE ABOUT THE FUCKING COLOR SPECTRUM, CHUM! I care about the Shaman! I care about this city.” His thick, wavy locks kept falling over his eyes, and he kept pulling them back. “Those bastards,” he continued, “they’ve fucked up my city! THEY’VE FUCKED UP EVERYTHING!”
Again there was silence, save the susurrus of shadows from the far end of the bar and the white noise from Jake’s TV. But Jake was not at his perch. He’d probably ducked into the bathroom for a line. Just then the two figures from the bar materialized. They had prominent chins, heavy shoulders, thick torsos, the waxen physiques of brawlers. Tense and unsteady on their feet, they lumbered toward us like two big bags, provoked, it would seem, by our shibboleth. “Whatch-ugonnafuckup?” one of them asked; the other echoed the query in a sharper pitch as if to clarify connotation or import. Like us, they had been drinking, exorcizing their own demons.
Jimbo and I looked to AC, the seasoned bar brawler among us. Built like a wrestler, a village pahalvan, he was meaty, possessed a low center of gravity, and often claimed that he had coined the maxim, The Golden Rule of bar fighting is the loser goes to hospital, and its corollary, And the winner goes to jail. Clearing his throat, he said, “I think you misunderstood, chum,” evenly, unapologetically.
“Misunderstood my ass” came the reply in a tenor that suggested violence.
We all froze like dancing statues, knowing in the back of our minds that at that moment apologetic grunts could have been uttered and we could have shaken each other’s hands, patted each other on the back, gone home unscathed, and slept like babies. But it wasn’t happening. It was almost like we weren’t just contending with each other but with the crushing momentum of history. Brawler No. 1 hissed, “A-rabs.”
Repeating the word in my head, I realized it was the first time I’d heard it spoken that way, like a dagger thrust and turned, the first time anything like this had happened to us at all. Sure, we’d been in donnybrooks before but for bumping into somebody in a foul mood or not letting go of a cue stick. This was different. “We’re not the same,” Jimbo protested.
“Moslems, Mo-hicans, whatever,” Brawler No. 2 snapped.
“I’m from Jersey, dude!”
> “I don’t care, chief!”
Then for some reason that remains inscrutable to me, I rose as if I had just been asked to deliver an after-dinner speech—throat dry, hands at my sides, notes hopelessly misplaced—and with uncharacteristic chutzpah, proclaimed, “Prudence suggests you boys best return to your barstools—” Then there was a flash, like a lightbulb shattering, a ringing in my ears, the metallic taste of blood in my mouth. I didn’t quite see the fist that knocked me flat on my back.
Gathering my senses and cigarette, I looked up to see AC come from behind and crack a Bud Light across Brawler No. 1’s head. I watched his head jerk, legs buckle. I watched him topple the construction sign and hit the ground facedown, dark blood seeping from a hidden gash in his head. Just then Brawler No. 2 lunged at AC, swinging a wild, looping fist, what they call a haymaker. AC expertly pulled away, then came at him, waving the jagged edge of the broken bottle. “Maar maar ke mitti karan ga,”he raged in Punjabi before reverting to local vernacular: “C’mon, you stinking son of a—”
Suddenly Jake appeared, flapping his arms like an albatross, and pushing himself past Brawler No. 2, thundered, “GETATAHERE! ALLAYOUS!”
“We’re cool, we’re cool,” Jimbo said, extending his palms before him. “We’ll make things right.”
“GETATAHERE!” Jake yelled again. “NO ROOM FOR YOUS!”
Jimbo picked me up in his arms, though there was no need, and we made our way through the hallway and courtyard and onto the street. We heard Jake cry, “Jesus! I got fucking blood on my suit!”
Pumping his fists in the night air, AC cried, “Niggaz start to mumble / They want to rumble / Mix ’em and cook ’em in a pot like gumbo …”
But we’d been kicked out of Jake’s. Things were changing.
3.
When I woke, it was dark, and for a few moments I didn’t know where or who I was, but then I felt thirsty and sore, and my bearings became clear when I perceived the outline of the drawn, dust-swept blinds at the far end of my apartment. The day was either over or overcast, though the second-story walkup didn’t get much sun anyway since it overlooked a concrete area framed by the discolored backs of neighboring townhouses. It did, however, have what passed as character in the classifieds: high ceilings, hardwood floors, exposed brick, and a large functioning fireplace that I never had the opportunity or inclination to use. During winter, the prewar radiator abruptly switched on, emitting noises that sounded like distant seagulls. As a result, I would often wake to the sensation of being adrift at sea.
There wasn’t any of the clutter that would suggest that I had lived there for almost a year: no rug, bookshelf, toaster, ironing board, plant, or full-length mirror. Indeed, the apartment was clutterless: there was a thirty-inch TV in the center; a fancy stereo system with gold-tipped heavy-gauge cable—a purchase informed by Jimbo’s technical know-how—stacked in a corner; and a striped aquamarine futon, a hand-me-down from AC, pushed up against a wall. Four identical chairs with steel backs were arranged in a semicircle, draped with trousers, ties, underwear.
The arrangement may or may not have contributed to positive feng shui, but I abided by it. One weekend though, feeling tired and bored with myself, I had managed to decorate the entrance wall with four framed pictures: me as a three-year-old, left on a rooftop somewhere to contemplate the world; my late father as a young man sporting a young mustache, his elbow resting on the balcony behind him; a photocopy of the Victoria’s Secret model Yasmeen Ghauri, hugging her bare legs in a way only women with beautiful legs do; and another of M. A. Jinnah, the founder of Pakistan, playing billiards, biting a cigar.
The classifieds had not mentioned that the apartment featured an antediluvian mustard-tiled bathroom with a musty air and a flimsy door or a mustard-tiled kitchenette with fittings that suggested overuse. I had once prepared poached eggs and fried toast in it. Save the many empty ash-flaked cans of Coke, two mistakenly pilfered shot glasses, and some clear plastic cutlery, the kitchen was also clutterless, though the drawer above the sink housed an untidy collection of powdered spices. Ever since I had moved in, I had planned to cook, employing the recipes my mother dispatched with unfailing regularity, but then the thought of eating home food, comfort food, alone made me shudder. And yet I had no hesitation in devouring a five-dollar burrito with extra sour cream and guacamole before the TV, or sitting on the windowsill, looking down at the accidental, communal backyard with a Styrofoam plate balanced precariously on my thighs.
Many windows opened into the courtyard, but from my perch I could only peer into the apartment opposite mine. It was also sparsely furnished, as if the tenant had just arrived or was just about to move out. A slender, squirrelly guy with close-cropped blond hair, he spent most of his time in printed boxers lounging on an easy chair, expertly picking at takeout cartons with chopsticks, watching TV, remote clasped in hand. Late at night the apartment flickered phosphorescently, and once or twice I had happened upon desperately fumbling shadows, the brief, stirring profile of a breast. Mostly, however, we were home alone.
It wasn’t as if I didn’t have plans for the place, plans I would review in idle moments, sitting on the can or on the commute from work, featuring floor-to-ceiling bookshelves from IKEA, a steel coffee table, a round walnut breakfast table, a drop-open mahogany bar, a stretch fish tank, a double-knotted Pakistani carpet, a hookah, and a leather couch on which you could sit cross-legged, arms thrown back, surveying the accoutrements of urbanity. With the requisite infrastructure, I would have guests over for cocktails and after-after-hours: college pals, women, hipsters we knew from Tja! It’s all going to come together, I kept telling myself. And it almost did.
In the bright fall of a giddy year, I became a banker, an investment banker, not because I was swept by the spirit of the age, by bullish sentiment, or by the Great Bull Run, but because my mother told me to. A woman of the world, Ma was cognizant that banking and “aiytee” had displaced medicine and engineering in the last decade as coveted careers for able young Pakistani men (and we both knew that I never quite had the aptitude for the sciences). The pursuit of happiness for us was material. Since I had no particular calling, having majored in lit, a discipline in which, I learned, anything goes, I did what I had to do: after dispatching résumés on thick paper and making some phone calls, I secured interviews and then a job at a big bank that had just become bigger. It all happened just like that, quickly, efficiently. When I received the offer, I called Ma, announcing, “I got it,” who in turn called friends and relatives to tell them about her Wall Street son, adding, “They make millions!”
That was not accurate. Starting salary on the Street back in 2000 was forty grand plus bonus—not exactly a million bucks—but ample for us. Once I began work, I transferred cash home every month via the hassle-free, under-the-table hawala system—an operation later shut down by the feds—housed at the Kashmir Restaurant near the Port Authority. And the grand plan was that after the bank sponsored my green card, a process that in those days took about three, four years, I would sponsor Ma’s. Then we’d live happily ever after like a happy, all-American family, minus father figure.
Ma had gushed, “Oh, your father would have been so happy,” though there wasn’t much evidence to support the claim. Although my father was a chartered accountant by trade—traditionally a third option for able young Pakistani men—I suspected he would have rather pursued photography, his childhood hobby. This odd biographical footnote was corroborated by albums of monochrome still-life shots I had discovered as a teenager and the beautiful old Rolleiflex that rested on the armoire (alongside a miniature glass replica of the Kremlin) in our drawing room like out-of-reach testaments to a man I never knew. I am not even sure how he “passed away.” According to family lore, he slipped in the bathtub, but I had a persistent suspicion, substantiated only by aborted conversations and skittish expressions on faces of aunts and uncles, that he committed suicide.
In any event, banking seemed grand at the time, and I
looked and played the part: on the first day and every morning for just under a year, I slicked my hair back, harnessed a pair of paisley-print suspenders, my only sartorial extravagance (apart from my shoes), and donned one of my father’s three narrow-trousered woolen suits that had luckily returned to style, retro as it were (and, I was told, brown was the new black). I worked fourteen-, fifteen-hour days, including most weekends, “crunching numbers” and assembling “pitch books” for multimillion-dollar mergers, acquisitions, and debt and equity issues. When I had downtime, I played Tetris glazy-eyed or chain-smoked while pacing around the block, counting the concrete squares beneath my feet.
In the odd, inspired moment, my VP, a thirty-year-old guy from Metuchen, NJ, would walk over from his office, tie slung over shoulder, or swagger—if he had brokered a deal that morning or scored the night before—preaching the gospel of prosperity: “What do we do here? We create value, make markets more efficient.” Conversant in Street-speak, he demanded due diligence and granular analysis and insisted on mixing metaphors: “Ball’s in your court, sport. Now run with it.” Nodding, I would roll up my sleeves and dig in, feeling vaguely part of the secret, intricate, if procrustean machinery that made Capitalism tick. Even if I didn’t always buy it, I figured, who ain’t a slave?
By all accounts, I was well regarded in the department and in time became what is known on the Street as the go-to guy. If you needed a qualitative take on revised EPS projections for a company, or comps on a space that defies easy categorization, or a pitch book on acquisition ideas for a Big Pharma player in the morning, I was the man. Indeed, Chuck it became a sort of catchphrase, and though it may not sound particularly flattering, those in the know will appreciate its resonance. In the semiannual review, my VP wrote: “Dependable. Conscientious. Sees projects through with min. supervision. Thinks about problems. Writes very well.” Although it was a fine assessment of a lit major turned banker by the exacting standards of Wall Street, I was by no means a Big Swinging Dick. The review went on to delineate KEY AREAS OF IMPROVEMENT: “Needs to improve multitasking, attention to detail, grasp of financial concepts.” I had some work cut out for me. I would get there. I had time. I had the will.
