Then Malik starts to run through the Lots, staying low in the black emptiness, avoiding the open spaces, the deep gouges in the dirt, the sudden drops into basements where the houses are gone, one mound of rubble following another, one three-story house with only one roofless story left, an abandoned car without wheels or windows, a fuel drum on its side with charred wood from a dead fire spilling out. Up ahead: the tenement. No lights burning, even on the fourth floor, where Glorious is waiting. Nobody else lives in the tenement. The buried power line comes from the far side of the site, where an abandoned construction trailer awaits workers who went away when the money ran out and may never come back. Malik laid the power line himself. Stole it off a pole. Learned how to do all that when he worked a summer job upstate, near Canada. Malik and Jamal. He was into computers, Malik was a student, just starting at CUNY. But he was Jamal’s student too. A student of Islam. The true Islam. More and more they moved from the banalities of the mosque to the thinking of Sayyid Qutb. To Hassan al-Banna. To the true children of the Prophet. To the brotherhood. To jihad.
Now he reaches the back side of the tenement. He faces the side wall, pale, jagged, broken into rectangles of old paint, the colors of rooms that are now gone, slowly washing away in the wind and weather. In the daytime, the walls are weird and beautifuclass="underline" baby blue, bright red, one wall all black. The people who painted them are all gone now. Now Malik reminds himself: Be careful. He goes to the back door, facing the rubble where the yard used to be. He grips the big key for that door, a small one for the apartment on the top floor. He is jittery. You can never know if some crackheads made it into the building.
Malik inserts the large key, pauses, leans gently on the door, listening, while wondering where Jamal is now. He is sure his old friend, his instructor, is still in the house he bought in the lower part of Park Slope. Bought with money he started making as a designer, after the friendship broke, after Jamal made the haj, with some help from his father, the X-ray guy. And came home a different man. Calling himself a lover of Islam, a hater of jihad. It must have been Jamal’s wife that changed him. Another American bitch. And her having a kid. Or maybe it’s a cover story, a way to exist here as if he were another dumb American nigger, working away, but keeping jihad in the most secret place in his mind. Malik wants to believe that. But he simply doesn’t know. He will have to find out. When this night of red rain ends.
Now Malik inhales, turns the key, leans close, listens. Then exhales. No sound. He looks behind him across the Lots through the rain. Nobody. He slips inside.
He hears faint groans and creaks from the black empty building above him. He has learned that such sounds are normal on nights of hard rain or stiff wind. Still, this night is different. He waits with the door shut behind him, letting his eyes adjust to the darkness. In a corner, a pile of discarded shovels resembles a small monument of iron tombstones. He closes his eyes and remembers the chant recited each night by him and Jamal and Atub. They took turns with the first name, then all three repeated it, heads bowed in submission, barefoot, kneeling on the floor of whatever place they were in.
Khalid al-Mihdhar.
Khalid al-Mihdhar.
Majed Moqed.
Majed Moqed.
Nawaf al-Hazmi.
Nawaf al-Hazmi.
Salem al-Hazmi.
Salem al-Hazmi.
Hani Hanjour.
Hani Hanjour.
Satam al-Suqami.
Satam al-Suqami.
Waleed al-Shehri.
Waleed al-Shehri.
Wail al-Shehri.
Wail al-Shehri.
Abdulaziz al-Omari.
Abdulaziz al-Omari.
Marwan al-Shehhi.
Marwan al-Shehhi.
Fayez Banihammad.
Fayez Banihammad.
Ahmed al-Ghamdi.
Ahmed al-Ghamdi.
Hamza al-Ghamdi.
Hamza al-Ghamdi.
Mohand al-Shehri.
Mohand al-Shehri.
Mohamed Atta.
Mohamed Atta…
A prayer.
Our prayer.
A prayer for our martyrs.
All waiting for us in Paradise.
Allahu akbar!
Now Malik can see, if only the large shapes of ceilings and walls, as he peers up the stairs to the first landing. He starts up. Somewhere up there, a door creaks open on rusting hinges. There is nobody visible, no sounds of breathing, no crackheads grunting, no pigs with badges from Homeland Security or the FBfuckingI. No New York cops. Like my father. Just the wind and the rain. On the landings, puddles are spreading from apartments without windows. The writhing unreadable graffiti on the walls hasn’t changed. On the second flight of stairs, the entire banister is gone, used for firewood in the iron barrels of the empty lots, and Malik hugs the walls. A damp rotting smell is everywhere in the vertical cave of the stairwell. Water leaks from another doorway without a door. He listens as if he were a cat. He hears the distant hum of the expressway. The beep of a horn. Silence, except for the rain. Thinking: I’m coming, baby. I got money, gorgeous. Like I promised. Tomorrow you see a doctor. Tomorrow you go to a warm place.
On the top landing he goes to what was the front door and inserts the key in the lock he installed himself, bought from a locksmith up on Fifth Avenue. The same key can open the bedroom door, with its separate cylinder. Nine hours earlier, Malik locked Glorious in the bedroom, with its tiny closet of a room holding a toilet and nothing else. Afraid that she would go wandering and trip or fall and hurt herself. He lets himself in through the front door, and quickly locks the door again, using his free hand to smother the sound of clacking steel.
Sleep, my Glorious.
Be there soon.
Sleep.
Some clothes hang from a steel rack outside the hall bathroom, a flannel shirt, fresh jeans, socks looped over the bar. Sleep, Glorious, Malik thinks. We have things to do tomorrow. To get you to a hospital at last. To a doctor. He slips into the narrow bathroom, and begins to undress in the dark. He urinates, hoping the sound of water puncturing water does not escape the room. He is very cold. From a plastic milk crate on the tiled floor, he removes a flashlight and a pair of scissors. He tests the flashlight, then shuts it off. On the chipped sink, he lays out some things from the Korean store: a razor, a small can of shaving cream. He hopes he can remember how to do this, after so many years. And there’s no hot water. The rusted boiler in the ruined basement holds no water. Somehow the pressure still moves cold water to the top floor. Malik holds the bag from the store under his chin and begins to chop away his thick beard. The hair is wet and wiry and tough. His body shakes from the cold. After a while, he runs a hand over his chin, feels a kind of bumpy fuzz, then switches on the flashlight. He doesn’t know the face in the cracked mirror. He covers his jaws and chin with cream and begins to shave. He nicks himself in three places, wipes the blood with the back of a hand. My father’s blood. Her blood. Soon it will be the boy’s blood. The blood of Glorious too. Our blood. Allah’s blood. Then he feels the smooth cheeks, makes a square cut for sideburns, and shuts off the light.
He shudders again from the cold, lays down the razor and the bag of hair, and steps into the shower. He doesn’t want to do this. He’d rather fight someone in the lot with bare hands. Not this. But he must. He must wash away the filth of infidels. This water will not hurt him. Inshallah. He reaches around for the shrinking bar of Dove, lying on its metal tray fastened to the water pipe. He turns the tap. His body feels a small death. He tells himself: Paradise is a garden with a stream running through it. Hell is another place, which Allah suggests to us through our living. And must be full of ice. Malik starts to pray as the water courses slowly down his body.