This.
A word referring to nothing: You did nothing.
But I did.
He is looking through the window at the place where he did it. Beyond the swimming pool. In the grass. Where the elements of the unfinished game — the little silver arches, the wooden balls and the mallets — are as motionless as objects in a painting. One mallet (mine, which I threw before hitting him) lies far away from the others. That is where. But maybe the sheikh received the pictures and the message made perfect sense. Maybe he understood what I did and why. But saw no worth in the action. You struck an infidel in the face. So what. What is this supposed to prove, Karim? (He can hear the voice, deep as the skies of Dakota.) It doesn’t change anything. You are no martyr. You are nothing but a boy with nothing … And yet isn’t this exactly what the sheikh had told them — Karim, Hazem, and Yassim — over and over again in the camp. That they were nothing, but there was no shame in this. For in their nothingness was a great power. It is hidden in each of you, he had said, this power — and he touched each of them in turn, touched a finger to the breastbone of each boy. You know about the atom and its energies. No? How particles of matter too small to even be seen, when properly influenced, can produce a power as strong as the sun. This is what God did on 8-11. It is said by the infidels that we used the power of the atom against them. My sons, do not believe that lie. There was no plane. There was no bomb. In a great explosion generated from nothingness by the will of the Almighty was that city of sin destroyed. As an example to us of the power of our own nothingness. Each of you is likewise an atom. And when you become a martyr, the power hidden within you will be released and you will become pure energy, the energy of God, and you will travel at the speed of the angels (which is fifty-thousand years to a day) along the celestial ladders, which the Qu’ran calls the ma’arej, feeling no pain, only a sensation like being carried on a wave, which will be a wave of pure and heavenly light, and the energy you have become will pass through the doorway held open for you and in this way, in a fraction of a second, you will find yourselves in another universe called Paradise.
He hardly slept last night. Between the grandfather clock and the pain in his face every time he rolled over. Now it’s early afternoon. Since the conversation in the kitchen, Dorian has been in his bedroom, in a sort of self-exile. At some point, he pulled down the translucent solar window shades; and now, lying on the bed — not in darkness, but in the kind of shadow that can only form when light is obscured but not extinguished by an occluding object — he is unable to keep his eyes open. He is asleep for two minutes and thirteen seconds when the landline rings: a mechanical trill. The waves of sound cause his eardrum to vibrate, but his brain is not processing the resultant electrical impulses. Which is to say: He doesn’t hear … In the living room, Kathryn takes the receiver from the base. F. MAHFOUZ. She doesn’t recognize the name, but the number is local.
“Hello.”
“Yes, hello. Is this Ms. Wakefield?”
“It is.”
“My name is Fawzia Mahfouz. I am calling to apologize for what happened yesterday. To your son.”
After a calculated pause, Kathryn says: “You’re one of the mothers.”
“Of Omar.”
“Omar.”
“His behavior,” the woman says, “is inexcusable.” And as she goes on to explain that she is the leader of the youth group at Masjid al-Islam in the capital, and that what her son and the other boys did is completely contrary to the mission of the group, which is to promote not fisticuffs between children of different backgrounds, but rather understanding, Kathryn is experiencing a feverish flush of humiliation. In this woman’s place of worship is where Dorian wrote those words.
“Ms. Mahfouz.”
“Yes.”
“My son is Dorian Wakefield. Is that a familiar name?”
“It is, yes.”
(Silence) … While in the house above the bay, overlooking the water and the bridge, Noah is saying: Mesopotamia with a hotel, five hundred. Dorian turns away from the window to the boy, whose facial features are enough like his own to give the sense, as he speaks, that he is speaking to himself. I’ll pay the rent, he says, if you promise to not look out the window. With two fingers, Noah makes a peace sign. Then Dorian feels a realization: The money is in the other room. The one where his sister writes. Wait here, he says. Then he goes into the other room. From there, the scene outside is more frightening because the window is much larger. Skyler is at the table. Watching the spaceship: a silver disc of unbelievable diameter and circumference that appears to be spinning on a central axis as it hovers above the two towers of the bridge. In the last dream, he made a mistake. He waited too long and then it happened. Now he can feel a vibration in his mind meaning: Say her name. To say it is to slow the spinning of everything, from the planets in their solar orbits to the thoughts in the vortex of your mind.
Skyler …
She turns to him, and looks at him, her eyes saying: I know you, even in worlds where we never met.
Now he notices the computer on the table; and on the screen, the photo of his parents and his brother on the beach, which he understands to be composed not of pixels but of all the words she has been writing. The picture is the story. In the sky above the bridge, the spaceship is turning again, faster and faster. Before it happens … His thought only complete when she completes it. By laying her fingers on the laptop. Pressing a key. Holding it down while pressing a second. Operation invoked. As a new window appears, she says: I’m saving it to the cloud.
9
While that digital photograph from Path M50 — M50 was becoming a consequent in pathways including, but not limited to, B39 — R61, Kathryn Wakefield and Fawzia Mahfouz were speaking of forgiveness and reconciliation, teachable moments, and a lesson their children would carry into the future. After the conversation, Kathryn opens her Lifebook page. To find the friend request — and an image of the woman to whom she has just spoken: a smile showing white teeth; eyes like black pearls. Later that same afternoon, Dorian gets an e-mail that reads (in part): YOURE NOT A ARYAN OR YOU WOULDNT HAVE EVEN COME … I WAS A MAJOR DICK … SINCERELY OMAR MAHFOUZ.
With these words echoing in his mind, he goes to the garage and takes out the lawn mower. Inserts the battery, turns the key, starts pushing. The drone of the engine cannot drown out the chorusing of the insects, which are not only in the trees, but in the grass. Nothing to do but go over them. The dream seems so fresh, almost like a wet painting. He thinks of it and something — not color, but a kind of pigment — is left on his mind. The spaceship, for instance; the blur of its spinning hull. He had read, just a few days ago, on some web portal, that theories of alien responsibility, which have always occupied a middle ground between the explicable and the supernatural, are becoming more prevalent — that nearly one in five Americans now believes that 8-11 was an act of “extraterrestrial terrorism.” Pushing the mower forward, stopping at the property line, reversing direction, Dorian thinks: What if. If that’s what really happened, then what about the internment camps and the drone strikes (if there ever were any)? Suddenly, the mower stalls out. The battery is dead. Has he really been turning these thoughts over in his brain for a whole hour? He carries the bag of clippings into the woods by the gazebo. Mixed in with the grass: the body parts of cicadas, some cleanly severed, others mucked with what belongs inside. Then he sees one moving. Alive and whole. Drawn like the others into the updraft of the whirling blade, but miraculously spared the violence of it.