by Joshua Corin
Sometimes it was better to nod and remain silent.
“The reason I ask,” said Ray’s wife, “and I hope I’m not offending you, you believe in Mohammed, right? You believe he’s your Jesus?”
Not even close.
But Malik let her continue.
“So, like, I know you think that if you die in service of Mohammed, you go to heaven and get to be with all these virgins and whatever, and that’s cool. The thing is, before Ray became a cop, he didn’t walk the straight and narrow, if you know what I mean. See, he told his family we met in a bar, and that was sort of true, except neither of us was there to drink. You promise not to judge me?”
Nope.
But Malik let her continue.
“It was a bar but it was also sort of a club. With dancers. Who took off their clothes. Which is what I did for a little while. And Ray would come to the club every so often and he was handsome and he was funny and he was real sweet, but the other girls told me to stay away from him because he…dealt smack. Anyway, eventually I quit my job and he quit his job and he joined the force and I went to work for Delta and nobody was the wiser. I mean, we were teenagers, right?”
Malik glanced at the clock.
“So I’ve been sitting here and thinking these thoughts and wondering. Me and Ray go to church every Sunday. And I know that Jesus forgives. But what if, I don’t know, what if it isn’t Jesus who’s up in heaven? What if it’s Mohammed or Buddha? So that’s what I want to know. Would Mohammed forgive a man for what he used to be and still let him into the kingdom of God?”
Malik, who had been force-fed the Quran and its commentaries from a very young age; who had paid attention perhaps too well; whose study of the scriptures and their contradictions and their outdated moralities was in part responsible for his “fall from grace”—Malik Ali, whose name literally translated to “lofty king”—oh, how he wished he had some truth he could give this woman, whose sorrow he suddenly felt with agonizing weight.
But he had nothing, and no capacity to make one up. There were no white lies in his quiver. She stared at him over the body of her dying husband, begging for a reply, anything, peace of mind, maybe even preferring him to lie to her, please.
Please.
Fortunately, this was when the door to the room opened and in strolled Ray’s father.
Chapter 25
More to the point, in strolled the scent of Ray’s father. Strolled, rolled, did a little clumsy dance. Ray’s father carried with him a peripatetic companion, invisible to the eye but oh-so-detectable to the nose.
Enter Ray’s father and his unseen but undeniable bathtub of moonshine. Ray’s father took one look at his son and then leaned against the radiator, over by the windows. The bathtub took up nearly half the room.
“Who are you?” he asked Malik.
Malik told him.
“Yeah? Where’s your uniform?”
Malik told him.
“I think Ray’s been hanging on till you showed up,” the wife said.
To which Ray’s father chuckled. “Always was a stubborn motherfucker.”
And then a rather peculiar thing occurred.
Ray had not been conscious for hours. In fact, the doctors were fairly certain that a prolonged lack of oxygen had left him brain-dead. Had it not been for the bandages on his body, visitors would have been able to see what was left of his skin shift from pink to a sort of gray-blue. The machines were offering mild assistance to his lungs and heart, but they weren’t keeping him alive, so Ray’s wife’s assertion that it was will alone that kept him from coding—this wasn’t medically provable, but it wasn’t unprovable, either, because despite mortal injuries to his entire body, despite very little indication that Ray Queen was even still there, Ray Queen was, for all intents and purposes, still alive.
Until his father had entered the room.
Neither Malik nor Ray’s wife nor Ray’s father had noticed the change. They had been too occupied with their perfunctory chat. And it wasn’t as if the machines had ceased their beeping and hissing. The heart monitor didn’t suddenly hum a monotone of death. It did flatline, but it did so silently. This was the protocol at Piedmont Hospital.
The second heart monitor at the nurse station did blink an alert, and Ray’s hygienic nurse hurried into the room. Only then did Ray’s three visitors ponder if something was amiss.
Because Ray Queen was DNR, at least according to his wife, what happened next was fairly simple. The nurse verified the machines’ statuses by checking Ray’s pulse both on his wrist and on his neck and then by checking Ray’s eyes for movement, and then she confirmed the status on the clipboard at the base of Ray’s bed.
Ray’s eyes were left open.
“I’m sorry for your loss,” said the nurse.
And she left them alone with the corpse.
Ray’s father, breathing firewater, leaned toward his son’s face. Seemed to study it. Then he reached forward and with a hand that trembled from liquor and age and maybe even grief, he touched Ray’s eyelids and drew them shut.
“Stubborn motherfucker,” he muttered again.
Ray’s wife was weeping.
So Malik got the hell out of there. Or at least he made every effort to speed away, although given his sore appendages and his inexpert handling of the wheelchair, this took a solid minute and a half. Opening the door and maneuvering through the doorway took another thirty seconds, and by then he was in full view of his colleagues from the force who were milling about outside the room. They must have heard or saw the weeping from Ray’s wife because they immediately knew their brother in blue was gone. Forget about the fact that another brother in blue was sitting right in front of them, still alive, still in pain. They poured into Ray’s room to offer their condolences.
Malik, meanwhile, rolled down the hall toward the elevators. He wasn’t upset, per se, or if he was upset, he wasn’t only upset. He was also at that moment very, very confused. Because Ray had been far away from consciousness before his father had arrived. No pistons had been firing between Ray’s ears. The bereaved at the side of the dying man—that was all to provide comfort for the living. The dying man had no idea. And yet he had hung on until hearing his father speak. Far away from consciousness but not too far away to identify the sound of his father’s voice.
It made no sense.
Could the timing have been a coincidence? Maybe.
But maybe not.
This was really fucking with Malik’s atheism.
Yes, atheism. Despite equivocations to ex-girlfriends, he was an atheist. Catholic schools created lapsed Catholics and a childhood of madrassa indoctrination had turned Malik godless. Except no, sorry, even that was too easy. His rejection of the miraculous had as much to do with the mundane wonders of the secular world. A bacon double cheeseburger. The ice-warm kiss of aftershave lotion along the jawline. The only problem, of course, with assimilation, as millions before Malik over hundreds of centuries had learned, was that one could assimilate mentally and one could assimilate emotionally and one could even assimilate spiritually, but to assimilate physically, to become visually indistinguishable from what one was…
Case in point: as Malik rolled himself down the corridor, he became aware of the furtive looks and suspicious once-overs his presence inspired, and not because he was a man in a wheelchair in a hospital but because he was a brown man, an Arab American, and oh, Malik had long since grown used to the looks and once-overs but oh, he never had grown to enjoy them. It had been better before 9/11, but the world before 9/11 was locked away and long gone.
Still, Malik had taken a modicum of comfort in the fact that he could blame his fellow screwed-up human beings for all their foibles and quick-draw judgments, but if, all this time, God was real? If the omniscient, omnipotent God of the Quran existed?
Well, that changed everything.
On his way to the bank of elevators, Malik passed numerous rooms both to his right and to his left, rooms full of grieving people, anxious people gathered around sick people, dying people. The doors to these rooms were closed, of course—well, all but one door, which was propped open as a hospital worker delivered a tray of lunch. Inside the room, a middle-aged couple stood at the foot of a bed. Inside the room, inside the bed, was a young woman, maybe even a teenager. Whatever illness she had so obviously sucked out the fullness from her body so Malik had difficulty pinpointing her exact age. The young woman was not conscious, but the hospital worker delivered the tray of lunch nonetheless. Malik was suddenly reminded of a cartoon he’d seen as a child with a robot blindly walking again and again and again into a wall. What a silly robot! What a funny cartoon!
Malik rolled on past the room and reached the elevators. He had his phone on his lap because his hospital johnny had no pockets, and the momentum of his wheeling coming to a halt caused it to slip between his legs and tumble to the floor. Fortunately, a boy in a Braves cap, also waiting for the elevator, scampered over and handed Malik his phone.
“Thanks.”
The boy smiled and returned to where he was standing. He appeared to be alone. What was he doing in the ICU? Who had he been visiting?
Who among his loved ones had God stomped upon?
Because that, Malik concluded, was the point. If God was real, then God was evil. This was as logical as 1 + 1 = 2.
And as Malik glanced down again at his phone, he realized something miraculous: he had the power to share his revelation to the masses. That pregnant woman from the ER—her YouTube login was still active on his phone. She had expected him to film Ray dying—what was up with that request?—but this was a day for dashed expectations. This was a day for hard truths.
Now Malik just needed a quiet place from which to broadcast.
The elevator doors opened with a ding. Malik and the Braves boy got on board. Along the back wall of the elevator were two advertisements. One, framed, glossy, colorful, was for a nearby B&B. Come stay at the lovely Buckhead Inn while your loved ones convalesce. The other was a reminder that the south wing on floor 2 was closed for renovations through the end of the month. Perhaps the patients on floor 2 had been moved to the lovely Buckhead Inn.
Wait.
Yes!
If the south wing on floor 2 was closed for renovations, surely Malik would be able to find a location thereabouts quiet enough and private enough for his audiovisual essay. What a perfect solution! God may be evil, but opportunity could often be golden. Malik asked the boy to press 2 on the elevator console. Twenty-three seconds later, Malik was rolling out onto the second floor of the hospital and following the signs to the south wing.
Not one of the hospital employees he passed along the way stopped him. Not one of them asked him to turn around. He had the look of a man who knew.
The nurse station at the head of the south wing was unmanned. Several cans of paint decorated its countertops like potted plants. The floor around the nurse station was draped in paint-splattered canvas. An aluminum stepladder stood underneath a nearby light fixture. Farther down the south wing, the lights were out. The workers must have been evacuated by the CDC.
Perfect.
Malik rolled on, treading down the corridor, and then dipped into the first room on his left. Naturally, it was empty. Even the furniture had been temporarily removed. Malik took his phone out. He had trouble operating it with all this crap still on his damaged hands, but after a few minutes, he managed to get to what he believed was the correct screen for recording video.
And now the moment of, yes, truth. Truth.
He held the phone an arm’s length away, selfie-style, and opened his mouth to begin—
—and instead heard some laughter from down the hall.
Had the workers returned? Had the plague been contained? Malik leaned toward the open doorway of his room and listened.
“I could watch that footage a thousand times, man. Every time that fireball appears, I practically cream my jeans!”
“Man, I did not need that image in my head.”
“Can you believe it worked? I wasn’t sure it was going to work.”
“Don’t jinx it, man. We still got a few more balls in the air. Is it time yet?”
“Almost.”
“Let’s get this TV turned on, man. I want to watch this press conference live.”
Malik glanced down at his phone. He had recorded their conversation.
But what did it mean?
And what was about to happen at a live press conference on TV?
Chapter 26
Before he and the FBI were scheduled to deliver a joint press conference on national TV, the governor of Georgia had to sit through a briefing session with his deputy chief of communications, Judy Diller, in which she would probably drill him about how to pronounce words like explosion and tragedy as if he were five years old. And so as soon as Judy made herself comfortable in his executive office, the governor pretended that he had a vital document to read on his computer, promised her it wouldn’t take longer than thirty seconds, and then he stared at his monitor screen. There was no document on his screen.
Judy didn’t move, didn’t say a word.
The governor glanced at the clock in the corner of his screen. How long could he keep her waiting like this? The press conference was in—let’s see—forty-one minutes, but the special agent in charge of the Atlanta Field Office of the FBI would be here soon to bring him up to speed. And the governor had a bit of news for the FBI, too.
That would be an important meeting.
This meeting with Judy Diller was obligatory bullshit.
What it came down to in the end, the governor knew, was that he simply didn’t like being handled. Few real men did, and he was a real man. It was how he connected with the voters. It was why he so enjoyed giving speeches—and why his constituents—nay, his fans—so enjoyed hearing them. They needed leadership and he needed to lead.
“Almost ready,” he said.
Judy smiled at him.
The governor had no personal grudge against Judy Diller. He would have iced out just about anyone in her position. Over the past few weeks, he had excluded her from several top-level discussions because he really, really did not want to have to deal with someone in the room worrying about appearances. Politics was the art of the possible, not the art of the digestible. The whims of polling data were not going to drag down his lofty goals. It was the vocation of men like him, rare men, true leaders, to show the people what they wanted even before they knew they wanted it.
And so:
“Judy, I’ve prepared a short statement for the start of the press conference. Want to take a look?”
He held up the folder containing his typed draft.
Judy raised an eyebrow in curiosity. “I don’t remember preparing a new statement for the press conference. Is this something different from this morning?”
He let the draft speak for itself.
She took it from him, read it.
Her mouth opened wide. So did her eyes.
He didn’t care that much whether she approved of it or not—he instinctively knew she wouldn’t—but he was amused by the level of her shock.
Then her ex-husband rambled into the room and suddenly this dour affair became a party.
“Poncho!” The governor beamed. “I feel like I haven’t seen you all day!”
While Judy, increasingly aghast, finished reading the draft, the two men glad-handed.
“What can I do for you, buddy?”
“Judy suggested I show up. Something about how she had a lesson to teach me.”
“They’re always trying to teach us a lesson,” the governor said with warmth. “Don’t get me started.”
Judy
stood up. Her face had gone as white as her teeth.
Poncho touched her on the arm. “You okay?”
“It seems your former better half is upset because I wrote my own statement to precede this afternoon’s press conference. Nobody likes being reminded they’re expendable.”
Still speechless, Judy simply handed the file to Poncho.
He looked to the governor for permission.
The governor nodded. Of course Poncho could read it.
So Poncho read it.
Twice.
“Well,” said Poncho.
“You see?” the governor replied. “I managed to dot my i’s and cross my t’s without anyone’s help.”
Poncho looked to Judy. Judy looked away. So Poncho looked to the governor instead and asked him, “Who else have you shown this to?”
“Okay. You caught me. The i’s and t’s aren’t one hundred percent my own. I may have leaned a little on a lawyer friend of mine.”
“A lawyer friend?”
“All in the name of due diligence. You taught me the importance of due diligence, Poncho. Remember how I used to be, back in the day? I was Wile E. Coyote. That’s what I was. So intent on getting what I wanted that I would have run myself off a cliff if you hadn’t sat me down and shown me the value of patience. Strategy. Now I’m the Road Runner. And nobody is going to catch me.”
“Sir,” said Poncho, “first of all, thank you, but second of all, and I say this both as an advisor and as an old friend, you got to put this speech back in a drawer. Better yet, destroy it. Burn it. This office has got to have a paper shredder.”
Poncho searched the room.
“We’ve always embraced bold ideas. My bold ideas are what first drew you to be my advisor and my friend. And what I’m proposing in this speech about our Muslim population may be bold, Poncho, but I also know you agree with me. These aren’t new ideas here. We’ve had conversations, you and me, about this very subject for years. But the time was never right. And then this morning’s tragedy occurred and this old proposal of ours certainly wasn’t the first thing that crossed my mind, but…well, it’s my job to be an opportunist.”
