by H. M. Naqvi
In rare moments of clarity, I considered a strict regime of push-ups, stomach crunches, jumping jacks. I considered God, prayer, jihad, but mostly I considered sustenance—hot dog, chicken wing, cherry tomato—small meals, nothing fancy; a slice of Wonder Bread would have been manna. When lunch or dinner finally arrived—lentil-like gruel and a piece of round, hard bread served on a plastic tray—it tasted like old oatmeal and Styrofoam and made me even hungrier. Prison is like that; no consolations, no catharsis. You might hold your head in your hands, pound your fists, sob like a baby, but the floor will remain wet, the toilet backed up, and your cell will continue to stink like a chicken run. And just when you think you’ve figured the routine, things change.
At some juncture, the black guard entered, cuffed and hooded me, and led me out by the elbow in a hurry. For all I knew, he might have been taking me to the shooting range out back where they would read me my last rites and execute me before a firing squad, no dying request, no nothing. Instead I found myself in a locker room. In an open locker, I found my blue jeans, six dollars, Abdul Karim’s car keys, and wallet in the pockets, but no cigarettes; my polyester shirt was folded on the top shelf; my jacket hung from a peg below; my lizard-skins lay beneath.
For the first time in days, maybe weeks, I felt joy. After putting them on, I was ready to be taken wherever, whenever, shooting range, hell. I was going to part with them again. Suited and booted, I waited for direction, for a sign; then there was a knock on the door.
It was Grizzly, hands in pockets, legs astride, manila folder tucked under his arm. Marching, he ordered, “Let’s go.” Trailing by a few paces, I followed him past offices staffed with diligent corrections officers in gray uniforms, armed with holstered pistols. Ominous signs along the way read METROPOLITAN DETENTION CENTER. Unlike the gritty, brick borough precincts, the building seemed to be a recent construction, featuring tiled corridors and slick fixtures. There were cameras everywhere, monitoring my every step, gesture, move.
When we reached the cavernous lobby, Grizzly proclaimed, “You’re outta here.”
“I beg your pardon?” I blurted.
“I made some calls, tracked down your returns, your transcript. Your story checks out.”
“You’re sure I’m not a terrorist?”
A flicker of something like amusement crossed Grizzly’s forehead, then straightening his shoulders, he loomed over me and said, “I’ve stuck my neck out for you.”
“Thank you, sir, thank you for granting me—”
“You’re welcome,” he growled. “Now don’t screw it up.”
As he turned to leave, he added, “There’s one more thing: your visa runs out in five days. You’ve got five days to leave the country. We’ll be watching.”
“Wait!” I cried as he walked away. “What?”
“You heard me, boy.”
“Hey!” I yelled. “And what about my friends?”
In the background, the security personnel stationed at the metal detector by the main entrance tensed.
“I’m not dealing with them—”
“Yeah, well, I’m not leaving without them.”
“Don’t be a pinhead!” Grizzly yelled back. “Go home, boy!”
In the scrutiny of at least six closed-circuit cameras, I considered my options—principled stand versus strategic retreat—and opted for the latter. It was not much of a choice really. I walked out, walked fast without looking back. The Brooklyn-Queens Expressway rattled above. The Sunset Park station was not far away. It would be a twenty-minute ride into town, half an hour to Mini Auntie’s.
10.
Once at Tja! my sommelier friend Roger had informed me that a black man has to adhere to a tacit code “right here, right now, today, in the twenty-first century US of A.” It was late, and he was several drinks into the evening and kept talking while I sat wordlessly beside him in a booth, hands folded, eyes glazed. The lights had come on and then, by popular demand, had been turned off again, but in the brief interlude, you could see the stains on the upholstery and the browning crust of water damage across a portion of the roof above us.
“It’s not about glass ceilings and that kind of intangible shit. It’s an everyday thing. You know I can’t make quick body movements in public? My presence threatens people. When a big white guy moves quickly, people laugh, but when a big black guy moves quickly, they take cover: mothers fear for their children, I’ve seen cops reach for their batons. And I work chi-chi restaurants. I dress well, speak English in grammatically defensible sentences, hey, I even speak French, j’ai pas d’accent, tu sais? But I could be talking about a six-hundred-dollar bottle of wine, like, I don’t know, a ’95 Château Margaux, and I look into the eyes of these people, and I know they’re thinking, you got no business telling me about no Lestonnac family and no Pavillon Rouge! Know what I’m sayin’?”
Although I had knowingly nodded, Roger’s heartfelt spiel did not make sense to me then. You could have attributed his earnest indignation to misunderstandings, miscommunication, misplaced sensitivity, his third martini, a rough day at work. After all, how do you peer into somebody’s heart or head? It wasn’t that I was a Pollyanna, but I had no functional appreciation for prejudice, because I had never faced any. Besides, it was noisy, and I had had other concerns that night.
There was a girl perched on a distant barstool, unattached or unattended, not quite beckoning but not quite cool to my furtive, admiring glances, and though I considered approaching her, when push came to shove, I found I could not summon the playboy inside. As usual, entropy had me by the cojones. And other dramas were unfolding then. The Duck had Jimbo pinned in a corner—I couldn’t tell if they were smooching or squabbling from my vantage—and on the other side of the room, AC had picked a fight with a Scandinavian who was taking advantage of a swooning Japanese girl in fishnet stockings. “Pick on somebody your size,” AC boomed, “you Viking son of a bitch!” Then, when the lights came on, Roger announced, “Closing time, man, it’s closing time.”
In prison, I finally got it. I understood that just like three black men were gangbangers, and three Jews a conspiracy, three Muslims had become a sleeper cell. And later, much later, the pendulum would swing back, and everybody would celebrate progress, the storied tradition of accommodation, on TV talk shows and posters in middle schools. There would be ceremonies, public apologies, cardboard displays. In the interim, however, I threatened order, threatened civilization. In the interim, I too had to adhere to an unwritten code.
On the subway ride from prison, I looked away when people looked at me. An ancient Chinese couple in matching embroidered Mao suits watched me unflinchingly and, it would seem, unforgivingly. Two seats over a hipster mother nursed a baby in a sling while glancing sideways from time to time. A group of Hispanic teenagers equipped with rucksacks huddled by the door, joking, making eyes. And in the far corner, a waifish man sporting a streaked crew cut eyed me while tugging the stud in his ear. It was a free country: he was free to stare; I was free to cringe. I scratched my temple, studied the floor, pretended to commit to memory the banner advertising cures for erectile dysfunction. I was conscious of the way I looked, behaved, the way I anxiously scratched my nose, my ear. When they announced “Please report any suspicious activity or behavior” over the speakers, I closed my eyes like a child attempting to render himself invisible. When a hand grabbed me by the shoulder then, I almost cried bloody murder.
“Take it easy, man!” Swinging above me by the handrail, his crisp white shirt, as always, opened to his navel, Legionnaire Jon was peering down at me with bug eyes.
“Sorry,” I blurted. “I’m a little jumpy. You know, lot on my mind, not enough sleep—”
“No problemo, old friend. I know how it is: too much coffee or too much coke, but it’s best to keep your nose clean these days. Otherwise,” he said, making a fist, “the city will close in on you like a vise.”
“Yeah—”
“You know, back in the old legionnaire days, I
was sent to Kisangani, and when I arrived I could tell that something was out of whack. There was a real estate boom going on and the sapeurs were raging, but people were trickling out—back to the bush, or Brazzaville, wherever—and those who couldn’t or wouldn’t were wasted on khat and mokoyo…”
Staring into blur behind me, he trailed off for a moment. He seemed different from his behind-the-bar persona, a little smaller, a little louder. “Anyway, what are you doing in these parts? You don’t have to say. Let me guess? You have a bird here, and you needed your fix. I know your kind: stealthy, deadly.”
“Something like that—”
“You know they just discovered that alkaloids use the same neural mechanisms as love? Both fire up this area of the brain called the caudate nucleus,” he kibitzed, pointing in the vicinity of his nape. “Is that wild or is that wild?”
“Pretty wild,” I offered, but before he could update me on other developments in clinical research, I said, “Man, I missed you last time at Tja!”
“Oh yeah?”
“Yeah, it wasn’t quite the same.”
“Thanks, old friend,” he said smilingly. “Well, since we go back, I’ll share some news with you, but keep it on the down low. I’m heading south for the winter. I’ve some chinks saved up, and I’m thinking of putting them in this lot in Playa Brava. You know the Playa? Of course you do. It’s warm there, and there’s the smell of salt on the breeze, and women in the water, like mermaids—”
All of a sudden the lights went out in the car. The train lurched and slowed, skidding on the rails. A nervous clamor rose about us. The teenagers whooped, the infant began to howl. Then we ground to a complete standstill. There were bursts of static over the PA system that sounded like the cries of the conductor being devoured by a swarm of killer bees. A voice implored, “Somebody do something, for God’s sake.” It was a weird moment, at once typical and vaguely apocalyptic; for all we knew, the sky might have fallen, and sitting there in the dark, you could imagine the Hudson turning red. I began to whistle softly.
When the lights came back on—no more than ten, fifteen seconds later—the Chinese couple was locked in a wordless, expressionless embrace. They disengaged unconsciously, as if the episode had been a dream they had woken from, and returned their respective hands to their respective knees. In the meantime, the hipster mother was hunched over, head bowed, arms gathered around her child. Then a miniature pink fist poked out of the veil of tresses, waving angrily in the air. Unlike everybody else, the baby was not unsettled by the drama. As soon as the child was suckled, the wailing ceased.
All this time Jon had been crouching next to me, eyes agog, palm planted on the floor. Standing up, he dusted his hands, and I’m sure I heard him mutter something like not coming back. As the train jerked ahead, he rearranged his feet for balance and grabbed the overhead railing. I was going to say something about the weirdness, but Jon was lost in thought as we were pulling up to the Pacific Street stop. Apparently we’d been stranded just a few yards from civilization. Turning to me, Jon announced, “This is where I get off. It was good to see you, old friend.”
“And you.”
We shook hands officiously, and though his palm was clammy, his grip was firm. “Look me up in the Playa.” As he exited, he did a two-finger half-salute and cried, “Drinks on me, as always …” The others left with him: the Chinese couple, the blonde with the baby, and the raucous teenagers. Only the character with the crew cut remained, sequestered in the corner, staring baldly, but as more passengers entered, I lost him.
The mood and demographic changed as we neared Manhattan. There were people chatting and chirping and nodding to music. It was nice to be in a packed car, in a crowd, and in earshot of conversations concerning the weather, the best spiced tripe in town and that New Yorker piece on geological wear and tear. The guy next to me pointed out a Poetry in Motion poster to his girlfriend. “Can’t see it from here,” she said. “What does it say?”
Craning his neck, he read the following verses haltingly:
“You ask me about that country whose details now escape me, / I don’t remember its geography, nothing of its history. / And should I visit it in memory, it would be as I would a past lover, / After years, for a night, no longer restless with passion, with no fear of regret. / I have reached that age … when one visits the heart merely as a courtesy.”
The words remained with me as I disembarked at Union Square and resonated quietly in my head as I meandered through the station. Before switching lines, I bought a remainder copy of the Sunday Times with the last three dollars in my pocket. The weight of the paper tucked under my arm somehow felt good, felt right. There is indeed solace in ritual. But then as the train pulled up to the platform, I thought I caught a glimpse of the guy with the crew cut darting into an adjacent car. Either he was gay or a tail. They said they would be watching.
11.
The Upper East Side was familiar, familial territory. It was here I had first ventured after spending six days in and out of a suitcase and a bright, bare, windowless dorm room near Astor Place. Either I had arrived too early or my roommate, Big Jack, had been late, but I had found the room so horribly oppressive that I had decided to return to Karachi on the returning Sunday night flight that had brought me to New York via Manchester. Lying on the plastic-wrapped mattress, using an undeclared mango for a headrest, I counted the hours. I figured I had one hundred and forty nine to kill, less an estimated fifteen minutes, the time it would take me to pack my belongings, an inventory that included a rug (which, Ma averred, could also serve as a prayer mat), an unnecessary stainless steel lota, three pairs of wash ’n’ wear pajamas, and a lifetime supply of Chili Chips, jammed somehow into a single suitcase. The suitcase had been my father’s and was produced from storage after a thorough dusting and presented to me by Ma as some coming-of-age guerdon. Decidedly Old School and Old World in its construction and capacity, it featured leather flaps and beige trimmings, and one of its many pockets yielded a box of blue matches with gold tips and a glazed pen impressed with my father’s name. There was some story there but I didn’t know it. I didn’t know anything about anything.
The enigma of arrival was compounded by the fact that the New World was so unexpectedly new. Before I arrived, America had become terra cognita as I had been educated by classics such as Coming to America, Crocodile Dundee, and Ghostbusters, and by American programming on PTV that included the A-Team and Manimal. And of course, I had listened to tunes on bootleg cassettes by the likes of Boss and the King of Pop. But you learn that everyday, commonplace things operate differently than you would expect, according to a whimsical set of laws, a rarefied ethos. Not only do you drive on the other side of the road, but sockets are slits, not hole-shaped, and taps turn open counterclockwise. You learn to deploy quarters into washers, dryers, public telephones, vending machines. You discover Twinkies at five in the morning, when you’re disoriented by jet lag and there is a clawing emptiness in your belly and your soul. In the violent throes of cabin fever, teary and at wit’s end, I found myself clutching ripped tags that read,
WARNING: THE REMOVAL OF THIS TAG IS ILLEGAL.
VIOLATORS WILL BE PROSECUTED TO THE
FULL EXTENT OF THE LAW
Hopping off the mattress, fingers outstretched, teeth clenched, I took three deliberate steps back, as if that were the right thing to do:
IF YOU’VE MISTAKENLY RIPPED THIS TAG TAKE
THREE STEPS BACK
For a full minute, I dizzily scanned the room for other dire warnings, pools of quicksand. The world had stopped making sense. I needed to talk to somebody, anybody, a mandarin, my mother. I needed to hear bromides, cooing words of reassurance. It occurred to me then that Ma had dispatched a palm-sized diary in which she had painstakingly catalogued the numbers of her friends and friends’ friends in America.
With a sense of urgency, I searched for the thing in my clothes, in the pockets of the suitcase, and once located, I scurried out, found a
public phone down the hall, popped in a quarter, and dialed the first number. The phone rang for a long time, and when the answering machine switched on, I followed the explicit instructions. Just as I was about to hang up, a gravelly voice interrupted me: “Ah. Hullo?”
“Hello, hello?”
“Yes?”
“May I speak to Mini Auntie, please?”
“No, you can’t.”
“I can’t?”
“She isn’t here.”
“She isn’t?”
“That’s correct.”
“Oh!” It would be fair to characterize the tone of my voice as hysterical. “No!”
“No need to get excited, chum. I can have her call you back. She will eventually return.”
“Yes, yes,” I stuttered. “Thank you,” I added, “thank you very much,” but before I could hang up, the voice asked, “Who are you?”
Introducing myself, I mentioned that Ma and Mini Auntie attended the Convent of Jesus and Mary as classmates, and that I had just arrived from Karachi, in Pakistan.
There was a pause, the sound of chewing. “So, ah, what do you make of the US of A?”
“It’s strange,” I blurted, “very strange … because it’s so familiar … but it isn’t at all … I’ve realized I don’t know anything … about anything … I think I did but don’t—”
“Listen chum, I’ll tell you a little story. When I was a lad of, ah, five I made the mistake of telling my father of my fear of the dark. My father, an old-fashioned patriarch, made me march around our house alone at night. I yelled and protested, but he packed me off with a swift kick to the butt. It took me close to eternity to cover the rolling grounds, but I did it, and guess what, chum? That night I lost my fear of the dark.”
There was another pause, punctuated by the sound of ice cubes and a gulp. “Upon arriving in the city, I decided to get completely lost, so I walked the five boroughs, the fifteen bridges. I’ve been to the Cloisters, Fort Wadsworth, Mount Loretto in Staten Island, the abandoned DeKalb Avenue platform. Once I landed up in this place called Bushwick. Make a note, chum—you don’t want to go there. Crack epidemic. High homicide rate. Anyway, what I mean to convey is that after a time, I knew this city like I, ah, know myself. You’ll find your way around. Everybody does.”
