I was just about to fashion all my thoughts into an indirect compliment when Candace looked at her phone and face-palmed.
“Shit.”
“What?”
“I just remembered. I have to get some footage of this thing in Old City.”
“You need to go?”
“I do. The story was my idea.”
I took one more shot of whiskey and paid the tab. Ali Ansari was nowhere to be seen so we went outside without him, staring at one another. Far down the street I glimpsed an old church I hadn’t noticed before, its walls caved, its glass shattered. In the faint glow of the restaurant’s sign I turned to Candace and tried to kiss her cheek.
Before I could make my move, however, she grasped me by the collar and hopped a couple of times. “Why don’t you come with me on this thing?”
“Me?”
“Yes.”
“Are you sure?”
She put her right hand in the air and made a C. Then she lowered it to her chest and nodded.
She called it “stamping crescents on the heart.” It was meant to replace “cross my heart and hope to die.”
* * *
The time before dawn. We headed out. Our fingers laced together, a stitch to fix the wound of loneliness. We were a unity and before us the contradictions of North Philly spread out in every direction. Here there were lofty pillars and buildings that seemed like they were carved out of rocks. There the earth had been leveled, pounded, and crushed as if rank upon rank of icy angels had been tumbling to their demise in Philadelphia.
We caught a cab in front of the Divine Lorraine. The driver was an old man in a skullcap blasting Koranic recitation on his radio. He was happy to see Candace and said salaam to her. She replied effusively and touched her palm to her chest. When I failed to respond, she gave me a little rap on the knee, and had me offer the driver blessings of peace. The man’s English was not very clear; but from the sound of it he wished us well for the sacrament of marriage and for avoiding the fate of the shameless people who only wanted to “fuckchu.”
Without any traffic we flew across the city, the driver weaving through the numerous potholes, nearly running over a pair of homeless men stumbling onto Market Street. Candace took a mini — video camera from her purse and tried to pull a shot.
We disembarked at the Federal Courthouse on Market Street. The Philadelphia History Museum was just about coming to life, a solitary worker in the cafeteria mopping the floor. Candace directed us toward Independence Hall, where the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution were hammered out and presented. The horse-drawn carriages that took tourists around Old City had started to arrive. The breeze that swept off the Delaware River wasn’t as intense as usual. It was also humid. A slant of light from the cloudy sky cut at the buildings in Camden.
I asked Candace where we were going. She asked me if I remembered Ken Lulu, the guerrilla marketer. It turned out that after she converted, he revealed to her that he was also Muslim. Ken was short for Kenz, which meant Treasure, and Lulu meant Pearl. When she left Plutus she had delivered to him the names of a couple of her clients. In return she had requested his help for a vision she needed to execute. I asked her what it was, but she just pointed the camera in the direction of Constitution Hall and put a finger over her lips.
Suddenly, without warning, I heard the beginning of the Muslim call to prayer. Clear-throated, well-pronounced, loud, but with a slight musical accompaniment behind it. There were a total of seventeen lines recited. Then the call, rather than ending, transitioned into a rhythmic drumbeat, followed by a symphonic melody featuring a flute and piano. The composition sounded similar to some of Liszt’s Hungarian Rhapsody, except there was a chorus of men chanting “Hu! Ya Allah!” at regular intervals. Much like Boléro by Ravel, which began pianissimo and rose to a crescendo to fortissimo possibile, the chant expanded over the ostinato rhythm of drums, which stayed constant through the piece. The end came in the form of an explosive “Hu!” that rang loud, true, and immense throughout Old City, a reverberation. My pulse raced from the rhythm, my blood felt as if it might explode out from my cuticles. My cheeks were hot enough to make the rest of my skin feel cold. A deep exhale escaped my lips.
The sound, however, was not the entirety of the piece, or even its primary vehicle. The action was in the visuals, a light show projected onto the walls of Constitution Hall. As the call to prayer and music played in the background, a giant Allah written in Arabic appeared on the wall, winking and blinking, ominously gaining in size, until it sat at the top of the building in big bold lettering. After that, one by one, ninety-nine pieces of Arabic calligraphy appeared on the wall, flickering and expanding in size like the initial Allah, but disappearing after a second or so. The music picked up and so did the pace of the projection. The names scrolled to various corners of the wall, like birds upon a tree, almost as if they had been etched into the redbrick monument, until they started to coalesce, the calligraphy interlocking to create an eight-pointed arabesque, then breaking up and reorganizing in the first Allah that had appeared on the wall, expanding and contracting like a beating heart. A beating. Heart.
A small crowd had formed during the light show. They snapped pictures and made videos. People as far away as the courthouse and the Liberty Bell Museum had stopped in their tracks to witness the projection. Even a pair of security guards posted in the area were riveted. Each time a word passed over the building I felt my insides collapsing and then exploding out into the city. By the end I felt like I had been splattered upon the streets.
Candace turned off the camera, gave a thumbs-up to Ken Lulu in the distance, and turned toward me. “You aren’t saying anything,” she pressed.
“I’m at a loss for words.”
“Is that a good thing?”
I didn’t know. This was the most intriguing thing I had seen in a long time. To place, in today’s paranoid and prejudiced world, the name of the God in the tongue of the terrorists, onto the walls of America’s most hallowed building, was nothing short of audacious. If this was Candace’s personal attestation of faith, it was more powerful, more inventive, more astonishing than any other spiritual rebirth.
I pulled her against my dark body. She was light.
* * *
The apartment was still when we entered and stayed still as I pushed Candace against the wall and we threw tongues and sighs upon and into each other. A boiler gurgled in the walls and a high neighbor blasted James Blake’s falsetto into the halls. Midkiss she pushed me away; as I told her I missed her lips, she retreated toward the bed and my arms elongated and tore her clothes. Underneath she was all rib and clavicle and sternum and bone. Her spine a series of edged diamonds going down her back. My fingers filleted through the rest of her. Her hands measured me like she was a seamstress. I dug into her gaps and spaces, prodding, testing, confirming her frailty. She was sparrow. I was snake. She was doll. I was child. I had never squeezed anyone so hard. I wanted to take her gasps from her. We got naked and I opened her up. There were no barriers between us, manmade or divine.