Night Soul and Other Stories Page 2

  Walk where another has walked to see what he has seen, would be a way of putting it.

  “That game,” I began, “that Ali’s friends had bough—” “LAB!” “Labyrinth and laboratory?” Ali shook his head in awe meaning Yes. “—linked up (?),” I continue—with this other game he now outlines for me, enthusiastic about theft on a big, even regional scale—

  “Friends?” I ask.

  —thefts by agents of one caliph expanding until an entire city is stolen by another caliph towed away along with the weather by his agents and held for ransom down to parks and fish ponds and secret curving lanes with passerelles above like bridges or balconies looking north and south, borders shrunk, streams straightened, the price either a whole nation or inside a dusty vessel a minute horse that has swallowed a ring that brings genie-like military figure named da Vinci if the wearer unconsciously rubs the ring by bringing his hands suppliantly together, and so on, the trick being to find all the ways back “homeward,” to “get back home.”

  Your family? I asked. Mother, father, uncle, big brother, Ali listed them, little sister Sharah, “me.” She is lucky, I find myself flattering Ali. “I am supposed to read to her but…” “What?” “At bedtime sometimes I tell her the story.” “Even better.” “Some nights we open a picture book we have and I make it up. Sometimes it is just words, no picture (?).” I’m nodding eagerly. Sometimes Sharah drew a picture for the story. “She is…” Ali shakes his head, grinning. “Sometimes I tell about the fisherman and the genie. My parents do not like them—” “They—?” “—those stories.” “They’re too…(?)” “I don’t think they mind,” says Ali, was he reversing himself? (I nod wisely.) Big brother Abbod he just came from Canada, Ali’s eyes wide and black, daring me to be with him. “What are you?” he asks.

  Ali was calling me by my name another day when we returned to the record store window. He wished to be a drummer and his family would not hear of it. I might surprise him.

  To go from thing to thing, unafraid—knowing the truth has a better chance sudden and unforeseen, than settled and…

  What was the poem, who was the poet? Ali asked—“my unfortunate land”?

  This kid.

  “Mandelstam,” I said. (Should I buy Ali a used Green Day CD if they had one?)

  A saying can be shared, Ali and I put together the thought—a name, a photo, a dispute, a war, but maybe not a special friend—as a cop on horseback stopped at the curb writing a ticket for a medium-size orange and brown RV. Some nomads drank horse milk, I said. Ali laughed, the cop knew him from Prospect Park.

  Da Vinci those call him who think that was his name, said uncle, who confirmed that Leonardo had set out to move a river. Nomads would not do that. They would cross it.

  Your father’s family, Ali was thinking—was I a spy, was I an agent? “Who are you?” They were good Christians, I told him. We saw a fat man almost get hit by a car. We laughed and Ali spoke further about games. Ali knew he could help his friends play and beat them too, though not a “gamer” himself—though only if they could call him a friend—because he had understood the game. He even told his Sharah bedtime stories out of that game (or truthfully that the designer had stolen).

  How did Abbod make it down from Canada? Abbod has had adventures. A traveler, he told Ali. Say your prayers, you are always facing the desert. Was Abbod really and truly a praying man? How far is Canada?—wait…I know from the map in class—Quite a hike, said Abbod.

  Winter had turned out unseasonably mild, the weather seemed to cling to you yourself. You wanted to know what was what. The heavens were pretty much a constant.

  We have passed on down the block speaking of real bats, not those animation stills slick and inaccurate shown in the game store window, and Ali is reminded of the record store we’ve ignored, deep in conversation, when he himself, witness first and last, reported high-tweeter tones heard in the basement of a project on Foster Avenue the other side of Nostrand where his uncle had looked at an apartment (wanting his own place at last, having lived with the family in Astoria, where he had lost his dog, then in Greenpoint over a deli, now in Newkirk). Ali knew they were bats, bats find bugs by echoes he told me yet did I know that their fossil ancestors had ears too simple to do it like that? Though, wait, we had passed the record store and did I know Green Day?

  A white Toyota with a sign like a file tab along its roof darted past a bus and a truck with antlers tied to the grill, and Ali said it was the automobile driving school. Was it near where he lived? He thought a moment. Did I know those cars had dual controls? Hey, my wife was in the business of selling dual-control used cars to driving schools part-time, I said (her second job, I did not say). That car had only one driver, I think, said Ali, again ignoring what I’d said, I thought. I want to get a camera, he said.

  Proprietor of a moving company, Irish father of a classmate, heard from his son the story of Ali’s cousin the anti-American nomad coming here and wasn’t sure he liked it. And the big brother?

  Genie, his head in the clouds, feet deep in the center of the earth, but he can become small enough to fit into a little lamp, said Sharah when Abbod came into the room to turn out the lights. What was he mad about? A phone call. Always on the phone. A dreamer, father said, when Ali brought in the red-blotched naan hot from the broiler. “Nomads drink horse milk,” said Ali.

  But Abbod had dreams going on.

  The record store window next to the game store seemed to remind Ali: telling me with a secret generosity in his eyebrows thick and blackly frowning that the imam when he had visited New York had said, “Walk where another has walked to see what he has seen.”

  Astonished to hear these very words from my wife this morning over my coffee and oatmeal with raisins now repeated to me by some kid, I believe words circulate in our city like thoughts, contagiously. Though this boy would add his own.

  And I—having heard those words spoken by my wife before she had to leave for work—was dumbfounded now, or as I looked into the record store window, destined, hearing words added on to hers by this foreign kid: Walk where another has walked…see what he has seen…but find… him.

  Words of a nine-year-old more acute than trusting (though already calling me Mr. Mo). In himself, his fall-back plan (since he would not be accompanying the schoolmates home who had just cut him by noticing him) more trusting than in me, more a remarkable person or child in his own right than any stop-gap employment job I was to find even in this neighborhood that had been randomly clued for me at breakfast by a woman in her underwear.

  Surprising or not, to learn as we found our way back to the game store window that Ali had never been here before today.

  Another day Ali wanted a camera. He would take real pictures, I knew.

  My wife turned a tidy profit dealing second-hand dual-pedal automobiles to driving schools. How could this be?

  The times. A statement. We would go camping, my wife said. We? I said.

  “I need a camera.” Two afternoons ago it was “want.” A clarity in the voice, a mission.

  Where was the $3? Mom said, who’d given it to him on a morning forgetting that he had a student bus pass. She never forgets, so what is it? Her grown son Abbod hadn’t slept there last night. She had cooked special lamb with mint stalks that were Ali’s assignment.

  What was my job?

  The $3? Ali gave it away. To a poor person? she asked “a faquir?” No, a friend in his class.

  “What is your job? You don’t work in the afternoon?” Ali asked. “I am a poet,” I said. We’re in a large deli with a small haul of apples, orange, bananas in a basket, bag of SunChips. “You are a poet!” He is interested and we will meet again. “I write poems—sometimes,” I caution, appreciating his verdict on what I am. And I add, “Either you are one or you’re not.” “I am one then,” he plucks a Balance Bar from a candy rack near the register and looks at it, as I weigh my sort-of lie. “I write advertising copy but I don’t have a job right now.” “My big brothe
r—he has a job to do and he also does not have a job.” Showing a card at the checkout I address the girl by her tag, “Shakira,” adding, “You people have the greatest names.” “Debit or credit?” is the reply I deserve. “You ladies here at the register.”

  I found the words to every thought I never had, but I wanted the person to speak them to. My wife half hears me, the other half knows me, she thinks.

  What’s that name mean? I ask Ali aside, thinking, What is my job? I’ll be clocking in somewhere soon, hearing a man at the back call her, “Hey Shak.”

  Outside something hit the pavement from two or three stories up. I laughed. What was it? asked Ali. Two men race past the deli. Three others gather. “Something my wife said.” What? said Ali, a dark flash of the eye. (News of another family?) “‘Pounding the pavements’ is what I said to her.” Ali pointed out the window, I shook my head. “No, looking for work is what it means.” “That’s what I told her I was doing today.” “Looking for work?”

  “Yes, what she said was, when she left for work, ‘Try pavements that intersect. With the old, your father’s, with father neighborhood’—she’ll say anything—you have to listen, put it in context. ‘Coney Island,’ she said, but I thought Coney Island Avenue.” “Where you met me,” said the boy, delighted.

  The rest I kept to myself, I could smell her, the jasmine and behind it some green tea and witch hazel message, “map your day, Mister Mo,” says my wife, “you ahead of someone else, someone there ahead of you.”

  He knows percents. I will try him on decimals. He went to the store for his mother. He could “crunch the numbers” in his head, his pride, his old algebra.

  I find in the leather-and-stacked-bath-towel-smelling closet one night the digital camera I’d been thinking about. I think that he should have it. I give it to him Monday. “This cost a whale of a lot of money,” he says, his face glowing darkly. “It’s yours.” Ali leafs through the little dog-eared pages, “In…structions in four languages.” My cell phone goes and I let it ring and Ali is cool with it. “Everything must go,” I say.

  Kids didn’t invite Ali home.

  I will save Ali, it comes to me. From what?

  The game’s the thing, it’s another day, crossing against the red: Did he know the stories from his part of the world actually, like Noureddin and the beautiful Persian and the caliph who disguised himself as a fisherman, did he know Ali Baba and—“Forty Thieves,” Ali breaks in—“Ancient and interlocked—?” I went on but “Ah!” says the boy, a friend from some olden time. The two dreams of treasure? I said—and I’m explaining that the first dreamer follows his to Isfahan, is arrested among thieves by a man who dismisses the dream and tells his own, disbelieving it too, freeing the first dreamer, sending him back home to Cairo where amazingly he finds the second dreamer’s dream true—a treasure in your own backyard. The Arabian—? I began, or did Ali know The Thousand and One—?—looking over his shoulder at something behind us—tales broken off to be continued—“You bugging?” he interrupts—meaning Of course I know The Thousand and One Nights—that go on and on, always interrupted—Not always (Is the boy…? Had I gone too far?)…“They are not true,” said the boy. “Well they’re what could happen,” I said. “And bad things in them, I think,” Ali added. “Who said?”

  Ali’s father. The imam, too, Ali thought. Your family, I said.

  Not everyone. “Maybe not me,” the boy says huskily. “My big brother, he says I got to pray but—” “For what?” “He don’t say his prayers all the time.” “But sometimes he does, Ali.”

  Mom asked why had Ali walked home. Abbod had spotted him on the sidewalk halfway from school waving to someone. The game store, was the answer. He knew she looked in his backpack.

  Pray for what? again I ask. “America,” Ali chuckles. (Can he be nine?)

  Abbod seems to have a license. Got it pretty quick.

  “If you’d never visited our game store…”—Ali heh-hehs (Is it my our?)—“how come you were there?” “Oh I heard guys would be there that I knew.” “You heard?”

  A tough young Arab never a day sick. My wife had a call, a guy wanting to know what driving schools she’d sold cars to but she thought quickly and answered she was only a middleman on the phone, and it was dual-control. Not quite true, she had a list.

  That game store: the day we met was the first time, did he mean? Could it be true?

  Ever been to the Brooklyn Bridge? “What do you take me for?” the boy replies, to say the words. “Ever walked across, I mean?”

  When he saw Ali halfway home on the sidewalk, why didn’t big brother Abbod stop? Abbod was in a car. Questions came to me, like I’m being asked.

  Seen it? Yeah. (You crossed the Manhattan. I think so, said Ali. Right onto Flatbush, I confirmed.) “Mister Mo? I like you like I like my uncle. He is tall. We go out for a run. Music helps you remember. You said that.” “I did?” We’re standing in front of the record store and, hearing a siren, turn to see a squad car racing north the wrong way. Ali’s life is not mine. “I hear a song, I remember where I listened to it,” I turn back to the window. “Or this store,” says the boy, “you hear Rap coming out of the speaker you recall Green Day bass, nothing like.” “Come here not knowing why, you could find a record you wanted,” I add. “I always know why,” I catch the child’s eye. Did he know Ska? Ska? The music…I will learn how he thinks.

  What we might know between us. Our depth together.

  He’s describing a game, a bus passes. Up the block another, the B8, crosses along Foster Avenue bound for Bay Ridge where I could gladly escape some intelligence that’s questioning mine, my city, my job (what is it?)—with a view there at the end of the bus line of the Narrows, the entrance to the harbor, a tanker, a huge, rusted hull at anchor, the winds across the water, the Verrazano Bridge, some responsibility to this boy at risk for whom I have begun to want what (?), some everything that he deserves, doesn’t care for the oranges here.

  Ska? I explain—white California reggae, horns and a super drummer, well Jamaica to UK to Calif, the wife’s favorite sometimes. Ali is on his way. “White? I am late. I remember what you say.”

  Ali plots out for me the new game LAB another day. The fighters exploding on being hit, bazookazillas trained on them by the players, everything a target, anything. So you seek and find in a labyrinth that is a laboratory a treasure that can become what you need only if you know where to take it. Fighters are exploding, you need to keep yours safe, you can move them in four directions but also, unique with this game, you can shrink them inward so they become some other thing they can be but only if they were about to get hit when you hit the shrink function.

  She had a fine little boy in her class, she said. With an imagination. A little isolated, yet totally not. What an ear you would say. (A speaker?) Well, to the point. The boy said he was not afraid in the playground, he would take care of his enemies in a New York minute. Middle-Eastern—Syrian, Iraqi. (You don’t know which he—?) Yes of course, and the family—they’re Muslims—the imam said such things about the boy…

  You want to get your guys into the lab and there the treasure can become what you…it’s becoming more than the game. They are fighting for you, I say, but Ali’s a step ahead multiplying force interactively within the exponential poem of it all.

  “Fighting for you these fighters?” I try and understand; “and you are?” I ask—“but what if you lose,” I break into my own query. And “Do they ever blow up by themselves?” I ask—“it happens,” I add. I have said too much. I am sick at heart for a second, hearing a secret that’s been withheld but by no one particularly—maybe from me by me. Trips. Parts breaking up. “And you?” the boy asks.

  “What am I?” I replied: “…gone / Quite underground” but to make me see again, I mouth another’s words but I mean them. Drawn into his family—at what risk?—do we teach each other some mystery?

  We should take a quick trip to the Brooklyn Bridge, maybe tomorrow, I tell him. “
Men died building that bridge. I know a man who slept there.” “A man?” “Yes, a man.” “A poet,” I add.

  Nomad, the boy adds, his voice curious. And I, wandering no doubt: “Come to think of it, nomads used to be very regular in seasonal movements. Yet now the seasons themselves are moving. Which at first dislodged the old sense of their moving toward us as much as we toward them, yet we adjusted to the change.” The boy won’t admit he doesn’t understand.

  Ali describes a photo taken when his father was arrested and released before they left to come here. They said he had Ali’s eyes. “We were safe and sound by pure luck”—the boy’s speech almost poetic—“one whale of a bomb.”

  Ali has shown his teacher the camera. (She knew that camera, a good one, she told him, says the boy.) Told her he is going to photograph the Brooklyn Bridge. “She is a good teacher, I gave her a good review,” he tells me, “she gives a hundred and ten percent.”

  The camera…what features…Four years old, adrift, the black case gathering dust.

  “Say a poem,” Ali commands. “I am: yet what I am none cares or knows,” I quote. “It’s good.” “It’s someone else’s.” “Mister Mo?” He wants to say something to me but doesn’t.

  Family would rather home-school Ali but they all work. Uncle had an atlas. An attitude—toward Ali—hopeful, linguistic, American, both of them runners—that this was the place for them. Uncle was funny. Uncle had taken a book from a book store, read it, and returned it. Didn’t get along with Abbod.