Night Soul and Other Stories (2 page)

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 brother—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.”