Work. As methodical as the cutting of stones, laborious as the plowing of a field. This is what writing is — or at least, what it always has been for you. But that night, for the first time in almost twenty years, something mystical happens. You wake up in the smallest of hours — and a character is speaking to you. It’s the girl from the photo. Not addressing you (not calling you by name), nor pronouncing words in a literal sense (that would be impossible, wouldn’t it, since the voice — if it can rightly be called a voice — is located in the abstract space of the mind). No, not a voice speaking words. More accurately, a flow of encoded data. Dimensionless. In fact, in this received form, meaningless. Without you, the voice cannot make sense. Get out of bed. Notice, without in any way factoring the information, that the time is 1:57. For all you care, the time might be Δt = 2Tc + 4Ta. In the bathroom, fill cupped hands with cool water and raise to your face. Be as quiet as possible. Don’t wake up your wife. If you do, her voice, a real one, will speak over the wordless one speaking to you, then you also will have to speak. Downstairs, do not power up the computer. What you want is paper — a notebook, wirebound and ruled at intervals of seven millimeters — and a pen, black pigment ink, with a very fine tip. And don’t stay in the room. Where you want to be is out in the night. Exit through the door your sons use when they don’t want to be heard coming in after curfew. On your way across the lawn (still scented from the recent cutting), look up into the sky; and before you reach the small outbuilding under the trees, you will see a planet, set like a precious stone in the zodiac. In the gazebo, switch on the lamp. Place yourself in the rounded spot of light. Open the notebook. Uncap the pen. So this is inspiration. So there really are goddesses to help us and holy spirits to speak through us and divine winds to bring us visions … Of a ghostly shape. Could be a quasar, but could just as plausibly be a girl. Now observe the bigger picture. The girl is a reflection in a tinted lens. The lens is attached to a pair of sunglasses being worn by a woman. This woman is the mother of the girl in the reflection. Beside her, two other people lie prone on the sand. A very young boy and a man. The boy is her son; the man her husband. Now watch as the picture is set in motion. Seven years will pass. And another child, a second boy, will join them unexpectedly — at the very edge of the woman’s potential for such a thing. The daughter (a teenager, beautiful and brooding) has been slipping away from the family, growing distant, moving towards nothing, just moving away. The baby will bring her back. When he is in the womb, the girl puts her fingertips against the mother’s transforming belly, and, with her lips close to the smooth taut membrane of skin, speaks to him about things they will do together; at the birth, not only does she want to be present, she wishes to cut the cord — and after the boy is out, covered in blood and fluid and vernix, does so with the shaking hands of someone performing the first of countless important acts of responsibility; and in the early days, in the night when he can’t sleep, she spells her parents, holds him and walks throughout the house whispering to him with gentle patience — or, better, if the night air isn’t too cold, carries him outside, where a pale green moonglow or the sparkle of the galaxy works a quieting magic. The parents think of it as devotion. Their new-age friends call it astroharmony, a clear-cut case of Pisces and Pisces. But to the girl, turning fifteen, then sixteen (as her brother learns to crawl, speak, walk), the emotional reality is more complicated. At the beginning, she fears he’ll die in his crib — and she checks obsessively to be sure he’s sleeping on his back. Later, it’s the stairs: what if her other brother, a careless seven-year-old, forgets to secure the safety gate. Yet these kinds of worries, about accidents preventable through vigilance, are nothing compared to the darker visions of dangers we can’t control. She can see now (the baby has shown her) that to be in the world is to be in danger; and to move through the world is to be in a constantly shifting relationship with tragedy: we avoid it by a wide margin, or we narrowly escape it, or we feel it suddenly upon us, a thing too big and fast-moving to be outrun. The boy is two. They give the crib away and he starts sleeping in a single bed; and gets into the habit of waking in the middle of the night and migrating into his sister’s room. According to the parents: not a good idea. What happens in a few months when you leave? Granted, you’re not going far, just into the city — but the point is, you won’t be here anymore, and he’s becoming more and more dependent on you. The conversation brings tears to her eyes. A couple of years ago, she was wishing away the rest of high school, dreaming of a faraway college in the New England Colonies. Now the idea of moving just two hours away is more than she can bear. In this fragile state of mind, she says foolishly: You should’ve had him sooner. (They try not to laugh.) You think it’s funny. No, but— I’m going to miss everything. Honey, we didn’t intend to have him at all. Well, you should’ve messed up sooner … And so on, until Mitchell Wakefield has filled ten, twenty, almost thirty notebook pages with words that are neither memory nor fiction, nor a writer’s elementary commixing of the two, but something other and more (though he can’t imagine what), until around four o’clock the pen slows down, and he can’t think of what should come next. Because the voice is gone, like a spirit that has ceased, suddenly and without explanation, to participate any further in a séance; and the moment he realizes he is no longer writing is like the moment when you wake up and realize you’re no longer dreaming.
First there had been the phone call from Omar’s mother. Then the e-mail from Omar. Then out of nowhere, Karim. Not apologizing, thank God. Not making me accept an apology. But the way he came over and all the stuff he said: it was like, if he could, he’d go back in time and do things differently. After he left, I wheeled the mower into the garage, took a cold shower, and found a message in my inbox: KHALEELA KINGSLEY WANTS TO BE FRIENDS ON LIFEBOOK. I confirmed the request instantly. Scrolled through her feed. Found the photo of me and her at the party, and became the twelfth person to like it. One of the other likes was from him. Which made me think. The kid came to you. Then he gave her your name so she could find you. The least you can do is add him. Five minutes later, there he was. Number 526. A little after that, my father appeared at my door to ask if my face still felt as bad as it looked, and also to say:
“This is your call.”
“What is.”
“What to do now. You remember what I said before. You want to go to the police, I’ll take you there.”
The next morning, I was looking in the mirror. The bruises weren’t gone, but they were starting to disappear; a few more days and no evidence would remain. I couldn’t figure out how I really felt about it. The police. That idea was way behind the curve. But was the incident really going to just fade out of sight and mind, like a post that no one cared about, that wasn’t even worth a comment?
No. Because even if, on that same morning, Keenan Cartwright hadn’t told a counselor at Invention Camp (an engineering major from the Rhode Island Colony, who had suggested to Keenan the week prior, that you had to watch Muslims very carefully in a camp that teaches electronics skills potentially usable in the construction of remote triggering devices) — even if Keenan had not told this young man about what had happened in his neighborhood over the weekend, the incident would not have been forgotten. In fact, over time, it would have been spoken of often, as all concerned parties, children and adults alike, came to see that something good can come of violence: that the prejudices that lead to violence can be overcome — not through acts of violence, but by passing through such acts … Although an outcome of this type is purely theoretical. Because Keenan Cartwright is a constant across all pathways. When given the option, he will always tell his counselor at lunch on that Monday what occurred at the pool party on Saturday — and by Tuesday will be in receipt of an e-mail from a representative of the local chapter of a nonprofit organization called the American Resistance Alliance. I’m sure you’ve heard of us. Keenan has not. But he needs no information beyond the profile picture on the group’s Lifebook page — the flag of the Islamic Caliphate going up in flames — to know that he (along with 3,582 other people) likes them, and that they should talk to Dorian.