Homeland Elegies

by Ayad Akhtar

  “I started walking. I walked down Broadway, through the Upper West Side, through midtown—people were pouring out into the streets, stopping to talk, people who clearly didn’t know one another huddled in groups, corner after corner. In Times Square, the scene was eerie. Traffic was at a standstill. Thousands of people were standing and staring up at the huge screens everywhere, watching it all like it was a scene in a movie.

  “In the electronics stores farther down Broadway, the walls of TVs were showing the same thing, over and over—the fires, the smoke, the second plane flying into the side of the building, the falling bodies, the collapsing columns of steel and powder, the shell-shocked survivors covered in that white, ghoulish dust.

  “There was a blockade at Twenty-Third Street. I told the officer guarding the gate I was trying to get to my cousin at NYU, and he let me through. At Fourteenth Street, the policeman told me they weren’t letting many people below Houston, and nobody below Canal. No exceptions. Here, the smell was so much stronger, like sugar and wood on fire with bitter smoke that stuck like grit to your teeth. Above us, a mountain of rising smoke towered over the buildings. It was so vivid it almost seemed alive. Angry. I remember suddenly understanding why the Hawaiians thought of volcanoes as gods. I was coughing now, and the air was getting worse. It didn’t seem to make much sense going any farther.

  “I should’ve gone back. I should’ve gone home, or to someone’s place, like so many of my friends would end up doing. But I didn’t want to. I felt like I needed to be close to what was happening. So I walked west along Thirteenth Street to see if there was a better view from that side. On Seventh Avenue, people were coming uptown, some of them covered in that white dust. Everybody was worried there would be more attacks, and I heard people say there were boats at the pier taking groups off the island. Another person said she saw on some TV that Palestinians were cheering in the streets. She looked at me. ‘Can you believe that?’ she asked, seething. ‘I mean, can you believe that?’

  “There used to be a hospital on Twelfth Street and Seventh Avenue called Saint Vincent’s. Believe it or not, my dad actually worked there for a few months when he first came to this country. I saw a line in front of it, twisting around the block. I asked an older woman what the line was for. ‘To give blood,’ she said. Someone else asked what my type was. I told her O negative, and I heard a few people say I should get in line. I’d been told before my blood was good for transfusions. If I couldn’t get farther downtown, at least giving blood was something I could do.

  “The guy in front of me was, I don’t know, maybe late fifties? With a blue shirt and thick lips, muttonchops down his cheeks. He kept staring at me. I finally asked him if everything was all right. ‘Well, I think the answer to that’s pretty fucking obvious.’ ‘Yeah, well, I was just wondering why you keep looking at me.’ ‘Where are you from?’ he asked, making no effort to hide his aggression. ‘Uptown?’ I said. I knew what he was asking. By that point, I knew word was spreading that Muslims were behind the mayhem. I’d felt it from the woman back on Fourteenth Street, and I could feel it in the way some people were looking at me now. The guy in muttonchops asked me again where I was from, and I told him again I was from uptown. ‘You a Moslem?’ he asked. Whatever he saw on my face as I hesitated was the answer he needed. ‘You are, aren’t you?’ ‘Is there a problem, sir?’ ‘Fucking Arab Einstein over here wondering if we got a problem,’ he said now for the others. Someone told him to leave me alone. ‘I don’t know what you’re doing here. We don’t want your Arab blood.’ I laughed without intending to, and that made him angrier. ‘You think that’s funny? You think that’s funny, you fucking Arab?’ ‘Would you please shut up, sir?!’ I shouted suddenly. I could hear I sounded weak, which only made things worse. ‘Don’t you tell me what to do, you fucking terrorist.’ And then he said something I still don’t understand: ‘We should have killed you all when we had a chance.’

  “There were a lot of people watching us now. Some of them were pressing in. It seemed like some of them felt the way he did, though I could hear the ones who were trying to get him to leave me alone. The guy kept shouting: ‘We don’t need your Arab blood! Nobody wants your fucking Arab blood!’

  “I remember him making a movement toward me and a large black man in an army cap stopping him. That’s when I felt the warm wetness along the inside of my leg and looked down to see a dark stain creeping down the inside of my jeans. Everyone watching saw me notice I’d urinated on myself. Suddenly, I was shaking. ‘Leave him alone,’ a woman said. The guy in muttonchops was doubled over, his laugh like a witch’s cackle. ‘Look at the fucking Arab tough guy,’ he shouted, pointing. ‘Fucking peed himself!’

  “I didn’t say anything. Some feeling was caught in my throat—I couldn’t tell you if it was anger or fear—and it mixed with the odor of smoke and dust. I couldn’t have made a sound if I tried. I wanted to cough, but instead I turned and walked away. I heard the guy behind me still yelling. I walked as fast as I could. I wanted to run, but my knees were too weak, and I was worried I would fall and look even weaker. At the first corner I got to, I went left so none of them could see me anymore.

  “I walked and walked. My leg itched along the damp inside seam with a terrible bristle. Tears were coming up now, suffocating like snot. I heaved and coughed. My breath went in and out of me, and I couldn’t control it. I started to sob, so I stopped and covered my face even though I saw no one watching.

  “When I finally looked up from my palms, I noticed I was in front of a Salvation Army thrift shop. Standing in the doorway was a balding man in a pastor’s collar. He had a double chin and circular glasses frames, and he approached me with a tender look. I started crying again. He handed me a handkerchief—one of those old hemmed pocket squares. I wiped my eyes. I blew my nose. He put his hand on my shoulder and asked me if I wanted some water.

  “Once we were inside, he disappeared in the back. I could hear people listening to a radio. The narrow entry of the storefront was filled with racks of clothes pressed too tightly together, I thought, for anyone to browse—the rows and rows of fading dresses and blouses, the sweaters and suit jackets and winter coats, and strewn everywhere below them, the heaps of worn shoes. I remember thinking that no one in those towers would ever be wearing clothes now, these or others, a thought that made some sort of poignant sense to me then but never would again. I’d been overhearing from people in the street that more than fifty thousand had probably died that day.

  “On a wire rack next to the cash register, I saw dozens of necklaces for sale. There was a whole row of them with crucifix pendants. Without thinking, I reached out and took one. I heard the pastor coming back, and I slipped it into my pocket.

  “I drank his water and thanked him. I pulled out my wallet to give him money, but he wouldn’t take it. I tried to insist, but he stopped me. I wanted to tell him about the necklace, but I was embarrassed. I didn’t want him to think I needed Christ. ‘God be with you. God be with us all,’ he said as I walked out.

  “I started to walk back uptown. Somewhere around Thirty-Fourth Street, I stopped and put the necklace on, and I didn’t take it off again for three months.”

  I’d thought about it all countless times since that day, about how I would write it, what form it would take, how to shape the details of my peregrinations on 9/11 into a dramatic speech someone could someday speak on a stage. But I never did write it. I’d never even spoken of it to another person before that morning.

  Asha had watched me silently as I spoke, a gravity and stillness in her eyes, but when she realized I was done, something changed. She seemed to force a laugh: “So you stole it?”

  “I tried to give him the money. I wasn’t trying to steal it.”

  “I could never do that.”

  “Take a cross?”

  “Wear one,” she said shortly. I understood. We—like all Muslims—had grown up on tales of the first believers valiantly persecuted for not denying their faith. “Did
it help?” she asked.

  “Let’s just say I didn’t have any trouble until I took it off. That’s when the dirty looks started, more stuff like what happened at the hospital.”

  “Like what?”

  “Look, it’s not that big a deal. I don’t want to—”

  “No, what?”

  “I mean…the usual. The tense looks, the double takes, the old ladies worried when they see me on the bus or the subway. The shit people say under their breath. The Mets game where some drunk guy starts calling me Osama. And then I get thrown out of the park for the argument we get into…I mean, none of it was anything like what you all were dealing with in Texas, guys walking into gas stations and shooting clerks, the rest of it…but we had stuff up here, too. Cabdrivers pulled from their cars. People jumped in the streets. People losing their jobs, even on Wall Street. I wasn’t wearing a turban, so that helped. So did the cross. I’m pretty sure of that…”

  “But then you stopped wearing it?”

  “After a while, I just couldn’t see myself in the mirror with it anymore. Once the fear died down just enough.”

  “Why’d you save it?”

  “I didn’t. I mean, I didn’t intend to. Where you found it’s where I put it when I took it off. I forgot I even had it.”

  She bit down on a piece of buttered chappati. “We bought flags,” she said as she chewed. “Big ones, small ones. The Pakistanis in Houston went crazy with the flags. A friend of my dad’s would walk around with the pole stuck into his lapel buttonhole, with the flag waving around under his chin.”

  “We did the same—”

  She cut me off: “But I never heard about anybody wearing a cross.” I didn’t know what to say. “So what ever happened to your cousin?” she asked.

  I was the one to force a laugh now, aware I was appearing weak, wanting to find some way back to seeming strong. “He’d gotten homesick for Pakistani food and went to stay at his aunt’s in Tarrytown. He was supposed to be back in the city that morning, but he didn’t get on the train. I was wandering a war zone while he was happily eating his nashta of parathas and sooji halwa.”

  “Probably not happily, right?”

  “I mean, no. Of course not. I just meant…if you knew him…”

  She wasn’t amused. “Did you ever go back and pay for the cross?”

  “No.” I lit up with a sudden idea. “Maybe that’s something we can do together…”

  Her ensuing silence completed her retreat. I can’t say I didn’t understand it. I, too, had long avoided revisiting the terrible isolated sadness of it all, avoided any reminder of our repulsive condition, at once suspects and victims when it came to this, among the great American tragedies. There were so many awful reasons we’d spent much of our lives desiring whites—and here I was illustrating the worst of them. She picked up her phone and went to the couch to read what had come in—presumably from Blake—as I’d spoken. I got up and went to the window to sit on the sill for a smoke. The morning’s light was unchanged, clean and gray, but there was no longer any comfort in it. I lit up and drew troubled relief into my lungs; behind me, Asha’s fingers clicked away at her phone’s screen. As I listened to her text, I knew I’d made a mistake from which we were unlikely to recover.

  * * *

  I doubt there was any point at which Asha seriously considered a future with me, but if she did, if she had ever wondered dreamily, the way I did, what it might be like for us to marry and have children, I don’t think she wondered any longer. We lasted two more months, during which time my attachment to her grew stronger and hers to me weakened in perfectly indirect proportion. I will spare you the portrait of my mounting romantic insecurities, the episodes of jealousy over Blake, the humiliating erectile challenges, the torrents of needy nighttime tears. I bought a slightly included carat-and-a-half engagement diamond and asked her to marry me. Twice. Some of this apparent desperation, I must have known even then, was the result of my mother’s decline. She was dying slowly, surely, yet I rarely cried at her bedside. There, my days of vigil were limned with unruly hope, for as I stared at my mother’s morphine-slack face, I dreamed of another, and every reprieve from my mother’s slow demise led back to Houston, despite Asha’s reluctance to have me. Her place was off-limits, so I would take a room at a hotel I knew she loved across town, a converted antebellum mansion, still well beyond my means. I would book a suite for two nights and hope she could be persuaded to stay in for room service on at least one of them.

  The end finally came over the phone.

  She’d told Blake about me, which had the effect—I would later conclude—she’d been hoping for all along: he, too, confessed his infidelities, and after a teary reconciliation, they decided to give up their extracurricular involvements and double down on the relationship. She wished me only the best ahead, she said. I was an amazing person, and I deserved more than what she could give me. Asha sounded like she meant these kind words—or at least like she was trying to—but beneath the patient, saccharine tone, I picked up a dispassion it was hard for me to accept. Could it really be I was simply an errand to be completed, a loose end in her life that needed tying up?

  Barely a month after our breakup, I awoke in my childhood bed, the same bed where I’d masturbated for the first time at the age of twelve, and watched in horror as milky fluid pumped forth from my penis, unexpected, and I, convinced that I’d irrevocably spilled something essential from inside me, pulled off the pillowcase and tried to gather up as much of the sticky mess as possible, in case I might need it for the doctor. I awoke and rose, and as I made my way to the bathroom, I recalled a dim piece of a dream in which my hands had been on fire. At the sink, I turned the faucet knobs and felt an uneven, chalky thickness along my fingers. I turned my hands over to find a stippling of copper lumps across my palms. I was certain I knew what I was looking at. In college, I’d written a paper about Shakespeare’s late obsession with syphilis—“limekilns i’ the palm”—and had spent a long afternoon at the campus medical library, transfixed by the color plates showing pages of variations of the dusky-red palmar rash common to the disease.

  Downstairs, my father was bent over a small saucepan in the kitchen, stirring the medley of breakfast tea leaves, cardamom pods, and skim milk that, once strained, had forever been his daily morning brew.

  “Hey, Dad.”

  “You want some tea?” he asked. He sounded exhausted. He’d been sleeping on the couch beside her for weeks now, up every few hours to feed her pills or porridge. The circles under his eyes were dark and deep.

  “No, thanks. How’s she doing?”

  “Same old. About time for the new dose.”

  “Can I talk to you?”

  “Isn’t that what we’re doing now?”

  “No, I mean—can I talk to you in the garage…”

  “You want to talk in the garage?”

  “Yes.”

  I bypassed the pantry for the mudroom and looked back. “Please?” He stared at me for a moment, then shook his head and switched off the stove fire. As he came up behind me, I reached for the door handle, but then stopped myself. I wasn’t sure if I should touch it.

  “What’s going on?” he asked.

  “Could you, uh, open it?”

  “You’re standing right there…”

  “Could you please just open it? I’ll explain in a second.” I moved to make room for him. With another irritated look, he reached across me and pulled the door open.

  The garage had no cars in it—Father’d gotten rid of Mother’s car some time ago and left his own in the driveway out front. Piles of domestic debris lined the oil-stained bay, a cargo of never-quite-discarded things: the first television (small, black-and-white) my parents had bought in this country; an old microwave without a door whose inside walls were thick with years of curry splatter; dismantled table and box fans; suitcases filled with the saris and shawls and shalwars my mother would buy on her trips to Pakistan and never wear when she came home; the App
le IIe on which I wrote my first short story and the printer into which I’d fed the ream of perforated paper it was printed on; my dead brother’s tricycle; his shattered fish tank; a quartet of torn bike wheels taken from as many ten-speed and twelve-speed family bikes; an enormous ’50s-era Texaco sign saved from the gas station in Baraboo my father once owned; yard tools, toolboxes, a rusting rotary saw no one had used in years; an Atari video-game console and two plastic bags filled with game cartridges; crates upon crates of expired coolant and motor oil and Snapple iced tea and Listerine my parents bought in bulk during a brief membership at Sam’s Club in the late ’90s before canceling their membership after an altercation with a store manager; the mounds of fishing gear—rods and nets and reels—from my father’s middle-age obsession with freshly caught panfish, deep-fried Lahori style, which delight my mother had enjoyed perhaps even more than my father did; and everywhere below and between this ad hoc history of our family’s life, the rolled-up Persian rugs, wrapped in moth crystals and plastic, the relic of my father’s bizarre passion for purchasing and smuggling into this country the contraband carpets for which he never found any use. I nudged the light switch on with my elbow and led him into the lurid pool of light beneath the single yellow bulb, showing him my hands.

  “Huh,” was all he said as he held my wrists, turning them back and forth gently as he studied my palms.

  “Looks like syphilis, doesn’t it?”

  “Syphilis?” he said, astonished. “Are you sleeping with prostitutes?”

  “I mean, no…”

  “So why do you think it’s syphilis?”

  “That’s what it looks like. I mean, doesn’t it?”

  “What do you know what it looks like?”

  “I don’t know, Dad—I wrote a paper about it in college. I’m just saying…”

  “Paper? About syphilis?”

  “And Shakespeare.”