If her father were here, if Jack, he would probably agree. And, yes, she felt a separation, a distance. This crowd did not return to her a sense of belonging. She was here for the kid, to allow him to walk in the midst of dissent, to see and feel the argument against war and misrule. She wanted, herself, to be away from it all. These three years past, since that day in September, all life had become public. The stricken community pours forth voices and the solitary night mind is shaped by the outcry. She was content in the small guarded scheme she’d lately constructed, arranging the days, working the details, staying down, keeping out. Cut free from rage and foreboding. Cut free from nights that sprawl through endless waking chains of self-hell. She was marching apart from the handheld slogans and cardboard coffins, the mounted police, the anarchists throwing bottles. It was all choreography, to be shredded in seconds.
The kid turned and watched the man weave through the crowd, stopping here and there to make his announcement.
“Jazz musician,” she told him. “Charlie Parker. Died forty or fifty years ago. When we get home I’ll dig out some old long-playing records. LPs. Charlie Parker. Known as Bird. Don’t ask me why. Before you ask, don’t ask because I don’t know. I’ll find the records and we’ll listen. But remind me. Because I forget.”
The kid took more leaflets. People stood at the edges of the march handing out material on behalf of peace, justice, voter registration, paranoid truth movements. He studied the leaflets as he walked along, head bobbing so he could see the marchers in front of him, read the printed words in his hand.
Mourn the Dead. Heal the Wounded. End the War.
“Give yourself a break. Walk now, read later.”
He said, “Yeah right.”
“If you’re trying to match what you read and what you see, they don’t necessarily match.”
He said, “Yeah right.”
This was a new thing, the two drawled words of breezy dismissal. She pushed him toward the sidewalk and he drank his soda in the shade with his back against a building wall. She stood next to him, aware that he was slowly sinking down along the wall, a gestural comment on the heat and long walk, more drama than complaint.
Finally he came to rest in a tiny sumo squat. He sorted through his literature, spending some minutes looking at a particular leaflet. She saw the word Islam at the top of the middle page in the fold, followed by an 800 number. This was probably the leaflet he’d taken from the woman in the black headscarf. She saw words in boldface, with explanations.
A troupe of elderly women marched by singing an old protest song.
He said, “The Hajj.”
“Yes.”
He said, “The Shahadah.”
“Yes.”
“There is no god but Allah and Muhammad is His prophet.”
“Yes.”
He recited the line again, slowly, in a more concentrated manner, drawing it toward him in a way, trying to see into it. People stood nearby or shuffled past, marchers straying onto the sidewalk.
He recited the line in Arabic now. He recited the line, she told him it was Arabic, transliterated. But even this was too much, an isolated moment in the shade with her son, making her uneasy. He read the definition of another word that referred to the annual obligatory fast during the month of Ramadan. It made her think of something. He kept reading, mostly in silence and sometimes aloud, sticking the leaflet in the air and waiting for her to take it when he needed help pronouncing a word. This happened two or three times and when it didn’t happen she found herself thinking of Cairo, some twenty years earlier, the vaguest shapes in her mind, herself among them, stepping off a tour bus into a vast crowd.
The trip was a gift, graduation, and she and a former classmate were on the bus and then off the bus and in the middle of some kind of festival. The crowd was large enough to make any part of it seem the middle. The crowd was dense and streaming, sundown, taking them along past booths and food stalls, and the friends were separated within half a minute. What she began to feel, aside from helplessness, was a heightened sense of who she was in relation to the others, thousands of them, orderly but all-enclosing. Those nearby saw her, smiled, some of them, and spoke to her, one or two, and she was forced to see herself in the reflecting surface of the crowd. She became whatever they sent back to her. She became her face and features, her skin color, a white person, white her fundamental meaning, her state of being. This is who she was, not really but at the same time yes, exactly, why not. She was privileged, detached, self-involved, white. It was there in her face, educated, unknowing, scared. She felt all the bitter truth that stereotypes contain. The crowd was gifted at being a crowd. This was their truth. They were at home, she thought, in the wave of bodies, the compressed mass. Being a crowd, this was a religion in itself, apart from the occasion they were there to celebrate. She thought of crowds in panic, surging over riverbanks. These were a white person’s thoughts, the processing of white panic data. The others did not have these thoughts. Debra had these thoughts, her friend, her missing double, somewhere out there being white. She tried to look around for Debra but it was hard to do this, swing the shoulders free and turn. They were each in the middle of the crowd, they were the middle, each to herself. People talked to her. An old man offered her a sweet and told her the name of the festival, which marked the close of Ramadan. The memory ended here.
He recited the line in Arabic, by syllables, slowly, and she reached down for the leaflet and did her version, no less uncertain, only quicker. There were other words he handed up to her and she pronounced or mispronounced them and it made her uneasy, small as it was, reciting a line, explaining a ritual. It was part of the public discourse, the pouring forth, Islam with an 800 number. Even the old man’s face, in memory, in Cairo, brought her back in. She was in that memory and on this sidewalk simultaneously, the ghost of one city, the frontal thunder of the other, and she needed to flee both crowds.
They rejoined the downtown stage of the march and listened briefly to someone speaking on a makeshift platform in Union Square. Then they went into the bookstore nearby and wandered the long aisles, in the cool and calm. Thousands of books, gleaming, on tables and shelves, the place quiet, a summer Sunday, and the kid went into a bloodhound imitation, looking and sniffing at books but not touching, his fingertips pressed to his face to create sagging jowls. She didn’t know what this meant but began to understand that he wasn’t trying to amuse her or annoy her. The behavior was outside her field of influence, between him and the books.
They rode the escalator to the second floor and spent some time looking at science books, nature books, foreign travel, ficción.
“What’s the best thing you ever learned in school? Going back to the beginning, to the first days.”
“The best thing.”
“The biggest thing. Let’s hear it, wise guy.”
“You sound like Dad.”
“I’m filling in. I’m doing double duty.”
“When’s he coming home?”
“Eight, nine days. What’s the best thing?”
“The sun is a star.”
“The best thing you ever learned.”
“The sun is a star,” he said.
“But didn’t I teach you that?”
“I don’t think so.”
“You didn’t learn that in school. I taught you that.”