Night Soul and Other Stories

NO MAN’S LAND

The little brother Ali was little enough but you didn’t know what he would come up with, and they laughed when he told what his teacher had said, that we are all nomads.

His little sister laid the table, the mother from the kitchen calling Ali, the bread was waiting and the bowl of meat, and the very big brother Abbod tapped in a phone number, while Ali’s father and uncle, aware of Abbod because he’s only just unexpectedly blown in from Canada, to say nothing of sleeping on the couch, were plotting a new business venture, eased by aromas of lamb and onion, herbs and crusty, paper-thin lavash just out of the oven—so no one asked at first why the fourth-grade teacher at a Brooklyn public school had said what she did about nomad to Ali.

What is your job? I ask myself, on the move.

In the small shopping plaza above the B & Q train stop, they posted a news photo of a patrolman killed in line of duty. This not far from Ali’s family’s apartment, which in turn is a walk from his morning bus stop on the way to school with a walk at the other end.

Nomad? Nomad?—just like that? What does she know? the uncle said at dinner.

In geography Ali had the answers and then some. Original was the only word for it. And when the teacher said a river takes us where we want to go and he put up his hand, the class became quiet. "Sometimes they take the river and they move the river, Ali said. Class quietly laughs at the nerd terrorist, yet waiting for teacher. But Ali proves his point. Once they moved a river to try and win a war, I think." In the yard later someone would trip him up and he would fall and skin his cheek on the hard, black rubber surface by the jungle gym, but fall lightly.

The family wanted to know a little more about it, this nomad point because…because Ali’s an original boy, in need even of monitoring, of serious questioning—for what could happen? Unafraid, called terrorist and "Arab" by the boys in the school yard, what was he? A nine-year-old, a terrible asker of questions, small for his age.

Where is Mexico, where is Canada? asked the teacher, wondering at her own map hanging over the blackboard, where is California, the Arctic, the ice fields and polar bears, Brazil? Atlantic Ocean, Mediterranean Sea! What is the mouth of a river? Tigris River where they used to fish—no more. Where is Turkey? OK, where is Syria? See what country they have borders with. Borders? See the lines—one line is mostly river. "Sometimes—" she begins, but one question can interrupt another, the teacher was so quick with a question she interrupted herself, a happy person (and to have this Muslim child in her class who picks up her turns of speech), she and her map routes, a river is a moving road, she said, and was off. Caves, said Ali, the bell rang, he raised his hand too late.

Nomad can wait, we know. Because he moves in season. He and his people. Everyone busy. Nomad knows his job. Children quite safe. He may return next fall to where he was, even when things fall apart.

One day the boy would have to make a living, he would have a job to do, said the father. A dreamer, Ali’s head was in the clouds, you didn’t know what he was thinking—and then he told you. Imam passing through had said that the boy had mouths all over his body.

All over? she asked Ali (his teacher, one lunchtime, one-on-one, for she said he was better at math than even she…). Well, this imam was from Mosul, visited New York, got followed but not before he had trained his camera on the evil billboards and the great bridges, Ali told her. Did she know an entire bridge had been moved part by part from England to Arizona? His uncle had told him.

His uncle knew. His uncle got mad, not at him, stood up for him. (Ali can crunch the numbers.)

Who all were these nomads? We know roughly where they are. In olden times the Scythians would surprise the enemy, make some trouble and retreat. Let’s make a map of nomads, the teacher said. What is a map? she said. Anything that came into her mind, she would say it. The bald kid at the back who’d been sick but wasn’t anymore showed his notebook to the kid next to him.

Abbod wore a hunting jacket he’d picked up in Canada. He was bent on obtaining a New York driver’s license hopefully. What matter if it’s stamped third class not valid for U.S. government purposes? He’d always known, from birth, how to drive—what’s the problem? He had driven a white taxi from Beirut to Dimashq and when his uncle’s cousin had shown up to collect the fare at the post office by the train station, it was how things worked, which always came first. Didn’t he get paid? Ali asked. Post office next to a theater where you are too young to go, Abbod jigged his eyebrows.

Abbod knew how to take orders. It was how you learned to give them. Ali, age nine, thought if he didn’t ask for a camera he wouldn’t get one. But who could he ask?

What is my job? Ask no one but yourself, things falling apart some days like a song high above the street or in the distance.

Photos on the living room wall—a dark man, his eyes bugged at some awful thing about to happen. Next to it a picture of a gold-and-silver-threaded pharaonic tapestry with a band around it showing ducks flying and their wings like crowns, very pretty Islamic thing. And a tinted photo of, you’d guess, a rug and leaves growing all the way around it, and Ali would look at the leaves. Of what tree? A fruit tree, maybe existing someplace. Look, too, at their California calendar peeling the months up and back, with a hang glider or backpacking trail above each month of days, or high, bellying waves of surf, or a quake-proofed bridge.

Nomads, said Ali’s father, the way he said things. The big brother had left the table to make a phone call and Ali recounted only that teacher had a picture of a tent in the desert and had asked what a nomad was, and Ali had told about their sheepherder cousin. Maybe a cousin, maybe not a cousin. A singer, we heard he was a singer, said the father who had an attitude because big brother on the phone again or because Ali storytelling.

Forsythia, the surprise along Newkirk, its early yellow bearing in its very light a suspicion of green in a front yard next to Ali’s building. Late winter, early spring, seasons in question, a matter for the authorities.

And now big brother couldn’t drive legally without at least the third-class license Albany had promised if Governor would only stop changing his mind every other week on the three-tiered plan, what’s the matter with him? (Didn’t you get paid in Dimashq? said Ali remembering from two nights ago.) Cops see it, maybe they stop you maybe they don’t. Third category license was for driving, not I.D. except if you’re stopped with it you’re an immigrant in limbo, you could be on the BQE or Coney Island Avenue. Abbod had just arrived in New York Limbo? asked Ali. It means trouble, said Abbod. Did he fly from Canada in an airplane? How else you gonna fly? (Did Abbod answer Ali’s question?) Ali hopes he will stay. What the dickens is the BQE? "What’s the BQE? laughs big brother. The Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, man—what did you say, Ali, what the what?"

Father and uncle were looking into a storefront at the lower, better end of Foster Avenue across from the NYPD security camera mounted above the street and nice older brick and wood houses, and seeking a private source of financial backing which would save their violating Sharia by applying to a bank in Greenpoint where they had once lived and had a dog.

Canada nothing like Syria, Abbod told Ali. Mom told him to go to bed, Abbod can tell you all about it tomorrow, Sharah is waiting for you to read her a story. Abbod slept on the living room couch, gone early in the morning before Ali was up. Ali must have understood something. Was it the job that brother Abbod was looking for? Why did Ali feel he had found it? Abbod wouldn’t take the messenger job because he didn’t have a bike. That’s right, you don’t take a job you don’t want.

The bedtime story was his job, though only a boy, helping care for a female child in the family. Ali was interrupted three nights running—Mom, Dad, and, strangely, the third night big brother Abbod, angry after a phone call—and each time Ali got back into the story though he skipped a step or two of the tale but added some bits. Same fisherman pulled up in his net: first, a parcel holding a princess’s body all cut up into pieces that seemed more than pieces; second, a great talking stone which asked to be dragged onto dry land, a fallow field, and then heavily lifted to discover beneath it amazingly a hole that hadn’t been there and a narrow door; third, a jar and a genie plus interactive adventures to enlist the genie’s help or escape him and—and little sister Sharah, eyelids trembling with sleep, thought the genie was going to kill the fisherman, had he done so?

Nomads. A considerable tent dipping in the wind with a great flat oblong top. The teacher pointing, Anyone know what a nomad is? Ali spoke without putting up his hand, he had a cousin who was a nomad. He used to keep sheep, you know, but was herding also larger beasts now until he could come to America. Oh? said the teacher. The class laughed with relief, as if they didn’t believe in that cousin living out there on the borderland of Syria, Turkey, Iraq, but they did, for this cousin Zam-ma’jid often on the move who didn’t speak a word of English to his goats and even camels that might lie down exhausted—and why would he anyway?—he didn’t like America and that was final. So why come here? He had a horse to ride, too—the class became quiet at this—but it might be taken from him. Teacher more than sort of liked Ali and she looked at him and said, We’re all nomads.

Two boys jeered at the Muslim kid. Get Shorty. An airplane passed low overhead. Was it coming out of JFK? Was it bound for Atlanta, Washington D.C.? Ali might well know. His uncle would. And then a second plane.

Big brother Abbod with the camo fatigues you envied was supposed by the family to have come here by way of Istanbul, Warsaw, and then Quebec, where he had arrived with two Polish jazz players he knew from Lodz who had scholarships to McGill, and it was true. But Abbod had soon left Quebec to come here.

What is my job? To see what a child is seeing. However long it takes? Time pounds the pavements and dissolves into a field of chances.

Teacher had two Band-Aids for Ali, he liked them. She heard the boys talking. What was this store on Coney Island Avenue near Foster Ave. the boys went to? she asked Ali. In Flatbush, she said. He shrugged, but she felt he had not known the location of the store.

The Catholic girls’ school near the projects the far side of Flatbush, of Newkirk—Sharah might go there next year. They had asked many questions and had been almost too friendly. It was better than a school where she would be singled out. And homeschooling was not possible, though when they came home every afternoon they studied Qur’an. (Ali’s teacher asked him what difference between Qur’an and other faiths—too much to ask.) Some echo here for me.

Air Canada to JFK? Apparently not. Over the border, then drive? Don’t ask. Abbod knows the city. Ali wants to know what his brother knows.

One day Ali was late getting home.

All but strangers to each other, the tall and the short, a child peering through the store window at video games, behind him like single file a man. We stand before the wares of the West, does he see me in the plate glass?—sees much that is not immediately visible very likely. What is my job? Above his olive-skinned neck a Low Dark Fade they call it at the barber’s school where I go for a $4.99 cut and an experience, the boy small for his age I’d guess, but in the Ocean Avenue game store’s plate glass unmistakable, somehow found—viewing a domain he must often have visited—seeing what is in front of him like a prince, subtle, mighty, and, hearing Green Day from the record store next door, he need not turn yet.

What is one’s job?

That I should have found myself here, to relearn a stretch of neighborhood once my father’s family’s never quite mine you know, but my memory’s, my city’s—and pavements and intersections guessed that morning from words of my wife implicitly like love locating it like a clue a couple of city miles at least from the brownstones of our Rutland Road, those long, turn-of-the-former-century’s blocks of evolving borderland though no stranger to great Flatbush Avenue, the Prospect Park lake/horses/grackles like iridescent crows owning the territory/lilacs on the way—to find myself here might prove worthwhile—a nomad thought more mine than hers, to a virtually unemployed male at 7:00 A.M.

Ali would do anything for Abbod. Ali was up against it in the playground when teacher came out and he was telling his enemies he had a big brother who had come to the U.S. to do a job and Abbod would chill them in a New York minute. "Half-brother," Ali’s uncle said.

Green Day Ali hears like a message, a life, a promise—because he would like to learn to play bass like…

(Never misses school, never home sick, like a chip off your old block he will say two, three days later when I recited a Russian poet—in English—But I love my unfortunate land / Because I’ve not seen any other.)

And would like to be invited to play video games after school with…two kids, for it is them he now turns to see. Not yet the man standing behind him, in the corner of his eye in the store window reflection, but his classmates, one pale, strong, bald, the other a carrot-top, Ali will later call him (his given name Terry), who come sauntering forth jointly holding a single, targeted purchase. Engrossed in the picture on the small packaged game and maybe the fine print, they look up and see Ali and turn away laughing over their collective shoulder at the nerd whose cousin nomad was coming to America, he’d claimed. Knowing nothing of this as yet, the gentleman behind him—as if the Band-Aid on the cheek proves it—assumes Ali is a regular here.

That this proved to be not so seemed later at least as strange as what this boy, small for his age but of a certain stature, turning from the game store window to see two kids leaving the store turning down the block, then said surprisingly to the man standing behind him: What they came for—meaning (I realized) the LAB game postered in the window—though meaning to make the best of things by striking up a conversation.

So we’re walking down the block, not knowing quite what we’re doing—walking is a parallel support for secret hope, man and boy, the talk, the questions somewhere in there like the walking/waiting intersection. Each taking the other as of the neighborhood. Ali not quite answering the unsaid question, whatever it is. The black man we pass, and his hand—been through the mill, Ali says, finding in his pocket only a leaky ballpoint, so I find a quarter. Money can be shared, the boy says. Hit the street, that’s what can happen, I said. Are you real estate? No, this is my father’s old neighborhood, his family. Gone away? Ali asks, out of some depth his own. Gone, I find the word to answer him, a nine-year-old. He suddenly becomes my friend.

I’m Mo, I said, putting out my hand to shake.

Extreme caution marked Ali’s father’s late-night business meetings featuring a risk-benefit analysis for the new partnership, green-card immigrants ever vigilant, uncle so well-informed but irritable and hurried, on the run. Tax preparation, travel of course, maybe real estate though you need a license.

At breakfast my wife would want the best for me. She had taken a moonlighting job, mostly middleman home-based. From her day job, she brought work home too but was not a martyr, though she misses nothing that goes on, children alive, comparing notes, yak-king who likes who, an idea a second, my beauty.

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