She turns on the hot water, letting it run, squirting some liquid cleanser over the dishes. Four dishes, one each for Raymundo and Eddie, Marcela, and Timmie. The water warms her cold hands. She glances at the refrigerator, where photos of the kids are attached to the door with magnets. On the table is a copy of Diario de México, the new paper with all the terrible news from the old country.
EJECUTAN
A TRECE
Thirteen more killed in the drug war. Usually along la frontera. This time in Mazatlán, to the south. It’s as if Raymundo is sending a message: We can’t ever go back to that country. Our lost country.
She thinks: Oh, how will I tell him?
She thinks: And what will we do?
She tries to remember Mexico. To forget their two floors in this house, the kitchen and the room with the TV and the garden on the first floor, the bedrooms up one flight. To forget Sunset Park. Writing the rent checks. Addition and subtraction. Clothes for the boys. New shoes for Marcela. Instead, she pictures birds in the morning in the house in Cuernavaca. She is seventeen again, working up north in Cuernavaca, and sending money home every two weeks to Mama in Oaxaca. She sees the stone house in Cuernavaca, with light streaming into the rooms while she mops, and the pool blue and glassy and the birds singing. Señor Lewis said one time that birds were the first musicians. He was right. And on the second floor, Señor Lewis is in his studio, sipping coffee, painting in shorts and T-shirt. She sees the narrow bed against the studio wall. The bed where—
Señor Lewis.
Perhaps he can help.
She has his address in New York, from fifteen years ago. She has never gone to see him. Not once. Not after—
Señor Lewis.
His kindness. His heart.
She thinks: I don’t even know if he’s alive.
I must try to find out.
2:28 a.m. Malik Shahid, aka Malik Watson. Sunset Park, Brooklyn.
Rain and rain and rain. Malik moves with caution, his kufi behind him in a sewer, his shoes soaked. Here nothing grows. Paradise is a garden, says al-Quran, but this is not Paradise. Here is only concrete and slate and asphalt, skeletons of trees, dead cars whose floppy airless tires caress stone curbs. He thinks: I am alone in rain and night. I hear the tearing sound of cars above me on the expressway but can’t see their lights. A few taxis, roof lights saying “Off Duty,” move south to their garages.
Under his watery canvas jacket, Malik hugs the plastic bag from the Korean store, lowers his head, moves through black shadows. He needs to vanish. After tonight, after the holy mission of redemption, he must disappear. To make the final cleansing on Friday night. Holy night. With Glorious, or without her. With the child, when all is over. Yes. Above all, with the child. A boy, they told Glorious at the clinic. A son of Islam. Inshallah. Me and the boy. To the sacred places. Now he sees sleeping bodies under spread blankets, scrunched up against ugly girders that support the expressway. Shoe-covered feet jut from packing crates. Some mixture of rain and piss finds channels between fractured cobblestones. He sees garbage in black plastic bags, and a banana peel turned brown. A patrol car hurries by, dome light turning, and Malik flattens himself on the dark side of a girder. When the police car is gone, he gazes at the vacant side of the avenue, the one that carries traffic to Manhattan.
And runs.
In the rubbled street leading up the hill, there are three parked cars, each one alone, separate, two on one side, a solitary on Malik’s side. Just a few, as always. In summer, hornboys from New Jersey come here for twenty-dollar blow jobs from the filthy infidel women. Jizm in the throat, junk in the veins. On this night, the parked cars seem empty but Malik cannot be certain. He slides into the front yard of a condemned corner house, windows boarded up, and hunches behind the remains of a battered stoop. He peers at the dark parked cars, looking for steam on the windows, or a match lighting a cigarette. Nothing. The Lots are part of a vast project organized by some developer: housing for yuppies, or for NYU students to share, or for Jersey types who wanted a place to get laid before driving home; an office building too, and an Italian hotel where tourists could pay in euros. The selclass="underline" Wall Street just fifteen minutes away through the Battery Tunnel. It was all set to go, until Allah punished America, punished the crusaders, punished the Jews, punished the filthy infidel women with their polluted cunts and sucked-out tits. Allah gazed down upon them and broke their fucking economy, exposed their filth and usury and greed. The project stopped dead.
Now all is gone except a few lonesome old-time tenements, somehow missed by the bulldozers, including the tenement used by Malik and Glorious. The whole area weeps now. It looks like a wet Baghdad. The one he sees in newspapers. On TV. That ruined city. Baghdad without the Muslim dead.
He says out loud: Be there soon, Glorious. We got things to do. Hey: the rain is lighter now. All of a sudden. A message, for shit sure. Gotta go home. Gotta get dry. Gotta bundle these clothes. Gotta chop this beard. Gotta sleep. Can’t sleep, then hold the tits of Glorious, bursting with God’s milk. Oh. And enter her. As you have willed it, my beloved Allah. No papers from any authority. Just your will. You created women for us, didn’t you? Glorious doesn’t believe it, doesn’t believe anything, not Yahweh, not Jesus, not Buddha, not Allah. She’s not into it, she says. Won’t even wear a hijab out in the street, to cover her hair, to hide it from the lusting eyes of strangers. Why not? He didn’t ask her to wear a chador, covering her face, even her eyes. Just the hair. She says no. He keeps telling her that belief will come, that she will accept, will submit. Thinking: She’s a puppy, that’s all. One morning she’ll wake up and understand everything and accept Allah. But now she says something like What’s all this shit about submitting? Submitting to what? To who? And Malik always says: Submitting to Allah’s order, Allah’s rules. Told in al-Quran and the Hadith. And she says, You mean, submitting to you, right? And laughs.
That’s the way she is. An example of jahiliyah. Ignorance of God. She knows as much as any puppy. She should be nasty but she isn’t. She’s got a good heart, Glorious, but she’s her mother’s daughter. The mother that named her. A filthy woman for sure, who lived with a Muslim, some asshole who pledged allegiance to Elijah Muhammad and his Lost-Found bullshit Nation street hustle. She left him because she loved junk more than the creed passed to us by the Prophet. Malik remembered talking about such traitors as heroinfidels. The mother went on the stroll, Glorious told Malik. Probably fucked a thousand guys, at least. Poor Glorious doesn’t even know who her father is. Some dude threw a load into her mother’s belly and moved on. Maybe even a white dude, ’cause Glorious is tan, not black.
Later, after Glorious was born, some other dude threw the mother the virus. The usual shit started after that: moving around, shelters, different dudes moving in with the mother and trying to fuck Glorious, foster care, one school after another, until finally Allah put the mother out of her misery. Just last year. Around the time Malik met Glorious in Newark. Even now, Glorious wakes up calling for her mother. Imagine. Not Allah. Her filthy mother. Malik thinks: I never cry for mine.