So the sheikh was correct. Of course correct. As everything he has ever said to you and your friends was true. How could it be otherwise? How could a messenger of the Almighty speak anything but the truth? And yet you. You listened to another voice. Chose to listen to a voice that said: Why call the number today? What’s the rush? What is one more day in the scheme of eternity? Heaven isn’t going anywhere, is it? How clever that voice was. To not issue commands. Only to pose questions. And not even in words, but in the form of hot food, a soft bed, a cool pool of water … Well, what is so wrong with food and a bed and water? Wouldn’t your mother and father want you to have these things? Didn’t they speak, often, of how the internment would end some day, some day soon — and you would all return together to a life in the real world? (He is holding the eyeglasses.) And it did end, and here you are. Without us, I know (the voice his mother’s now), without me, I know, but yesterday you had friends — friends, habibi — and even that boy so unlike you, with skin unlike yours and a history so different. Even he. I understand why you hurt him. And, of course, of course, I want to be with you, also. But think. Think, Karim—
“Allahu Akbar …”
“Allahu Akbar …”
It’s the muezzin calling him to sunset prayer. He turns the sound off, sets the eyeglasses on the desk.
Downstairs, the TV is tuned to a baseball game. The old guy on the couch. Asleep. The sportscaster saying: “After one inning in Houston, Yankees 8, Colt.45s nothing.” Karim can see, through the bay window that looks over the front lawn and the road, that the boy is in his yard again, pushing the mower. He watches him steer the machine, moving it across the grass in straight parallel lines. The job almost finished. Perhaps a dozen more crossings from one end to the other. Karim watches him cross once, twice. Then, very suddenly, thinks to himself: I am going to whisper now. If the old guy wakes up, I go down and pray maghrib; if he stays asleep, I go across the road.
“Jaddi.”
Not a muscle in the sun-browned face so much as twitches. As Karim steps onto the patio and eases shut the sliding glass door, he can just hear the words: “Top of the second, heart of the Yankee order coming up …”
Time of a summer evening when the world is being downsampled toward grayscale. The air cooling, a change that seems to be caused less by the setting of the sun than by the fading of color; and the legions of cicadas falling silent, as if color was the thing driving them mad and making them scream. His mother told him to think: words not from beyond the grave, but from a current of mother-talk that moves like constant water through the mind, carving out ideas and shaping beliefs. Unsure at first what she meant, beyond a caution to think twice, think carefully before taking actions that can’t be taken back. But now, turning the corner of the house, Karim Hassad is thinking (insofar as acting is a form of thought), that perhaps one must know not only what to do, but also when to undo actions that can be undone. He walks down the slight grade of the driveway, the nerves in the soles of his feet sensing that the asphalt is still warm … Dorian doesn’t see him coming. His eyes are fixed on the last line drawn in the grass by the lawnmower, which is getting harder to discern as the light slips away. Then all of a sudden the kid is standing there, like something pasted from another window into a destination image. He startles and lets go of the bail bar. The engine dies, the wheels stop turning; and there they are, facing one another in the gloaming.
“Sorry,” Karim says. “I mean, for scaring you.”
“You didn’t scare me.”
“Oh.”
“Anyway, it’s too dark now,” Dorian says. “I was gonna stop anyway.”
“You’re almost done.”
“I know that.”
“So you should just finish,” Karim says.
“Did you ever cut a lawn?”
“No.”
“Well, it’s too dark now to see the line.”
“What line.”
“That’s the point,” Dorian says. “If you can’t see it, it’s too dark.” Karim looks up at the sky.
“Anyway—”
“No, wait,” Karim says, pulling something out of his pocket. “You want a green?”
“Here?”
“Yeah, why not.”
“What,” Dorian says, “does he just let you smoke?”
“Sort of.”
“Whenever you want.”
“Two a day,” Karim says. “Until the agonies stop.”
“The what?”
Returning the box to his pocket, he says: “I used to smoke Dream.”
“Dream,” Dorian says. “Like, opium.”
The kid nods.
Dorian has heard the rumors. Not only that opium was used in the camps, but that government agencies — in league with traffickers allied with anti-Islamist rebels in the Caliphate — actually helped to introduce the drug and to keep it coming through the fences, thereby reducing the people within to a state of perpetual semi-consciousness. A conspiracy theory. Same as the drones. Same as the allegation (so outlandish, it made the notion of aliens from another galaxy seem credible) that 8-11 had been planned in Washington and carried out by a secret command of the Defense Department. Dorian has never believed such things. But speaking of things hard to believe: Here he is, standing on his front lawn in the gathering dark of a midsummer night, having a reasonable conversation with a Muslim who jacked him the day before during a game of croquet.
“I guess you’re pissed,” Karim says.
“I dunno.”
“I hit this friend of mine one time. I thought he was the thing I was mad at, but I realized later …” (Silence.) “Have you ever?”
“Hit a friend?”
“Hit anyone.”
“Not really. No.”
Again, Karim looks up, as if waiting for something to appear in the sky, a star maybe, and says: “I have some issues that require professional help. That’s what the old guy says. I call him jaddi, which means grandfather, but … I don’t know what I should call him. Anyway, if it wasn’t for the issues— I mean, what he thinks is, if I talk to someone, I won’t do anything like that again.”
“You mean therapy,” Dorian says.
He nods.
As each waits for the other to say the next thing, both realize that the cicadas, too, are silent.
Karim says: “They finally shut the fuck up.”
“I know.”
And as if to underscore the cessation of the din: here and there, the mute flash of a firefly.
“Well, I better …”
“Yeah,” Karim says. “But one more thing. You know that girl from yesterday? She wants to friend you but she doesn’t know your last name.”
“Oh.”
“She’s one of my friends, so if I friended you …” (Voice trailing off.) “Or I could just tell her.”
Now, in the space between them, the pale green strobe of a firefly. Each flash like a dot in a line of demarcation disappearing even as it’s drawn. Dorian says: “Whatever, sure …” A few moments later, Karim is walking slowly (almost thinking, home) over the freshly cut grass, making the walk slow because he knows the boy is watching. Then he hears the mower being maneuvered, the turning of the wheels on the axles. As the garage door goes down, Karim stops. Waits. Watching the space around himself — standing at the heart of a neighborhood dark and somnolent — until a firefly appears, like a mote of magic dust. He reaches out with both hands cupped, and misses.