End the call.
Turn around. Your father in conversation now with a police officer. But your neighbor still looking at you while the lights of the cruisers flash like nerve impulses carrying messages between neurons …
The next day is Friday. The old guy can’t take him to jummah because he has to be at the police station with a lawyer present answering questions about the night’s bloodshed. So Karim gets to “hang out” for the day and go to prayers with Omar Mahfouz. At nine on the dot: the doorbell. Mrs. Mahfouz. Who appears none too pleased with the situation. The old guy asks her to come in for some sweet tea. She declines. Karim gets in the car and they drive for a good five minutes in total silence before she says: “I’m glad you’re safe, Karim. But what was done last night is not God’s way.” And so on. Karim sits in the passenger seat, pretending to listen, nodding from time to time. Knowing perfectly well that God has more ways than one. The house they arrive at is larger than the one he is living in. With an in-ground swimming pool and an in-ground basketball hoop with a glass backboard. Inside, downstairs, there is a room dedicated exclusively to a giant wall-mounted television: which is where Karim finds Omar, controller in hand, on a couch that seems to be digesting him slowly and alive.
“Hey,” Karim says.
The other boy, over and over again, is pulling a sort of trigger. On the screen, not people, but vaguely human beings with gray skin and unseeing eyes, are being shot repeatedly; and though their flesh is tearing off in clods on impact and blood is spraying everywhere, they don’t appear to be dying.
“What are you doing?” Karim asks.
“Dumb question.”
“What are those things?”
“What things.”
(Pointing to the television.) “That you’re fighting.”
“Are you kidding?” Omar says.
Only when the action freezes and GAME OVER appears on the screen does the other boy look at him.
“You want to play?”
“No.”
“Suit yourself,” he says, and starts it again, while Karim stands there and finally sits on the couch. Speechless for the duration of another massacre. When it’s done, Omar, like a follower of timeless rules of hospitality, again offers his guest the controller. Karim ignores him. Gets up and leaves the room. Mounts the stairs of the strange house and enters the kitchen, which is wide-open and silver, and still. He opens the refrigerator. What he wants is a soda; and like a wish granted, there it is. He sits by the pool and drinks it and thinks about taking out his coin and practicing his meditation, but he doesn’t want Omar to come out here and find him in a trance state. So he takes out his phone instead and checks Lifebook. There’s a post from the girl, Khaleela (two hours ago, in Washington, D.C.: standing beside a giant statue of a guy in a chair, a president whose name Karim can’t remember). Forty-three people like it and he adds himself to the list though he doesn’t actually like the picture. He links to her page. She has more than a thousand friends. He goes to his own page. Nine. One of whom is the boy downstairs. What kind of friend is he? It doesn’t matter, because with the coin Karim can go there any time; and even when the time is over, he can go there in his mind again tomorrow and be with her in his mind. Which is good. It is. And yet. I don’t want to pretend. I want to go to Paradise for real. And for always.
“Hey.”
Turning. And Omar, from the door of the kitchen, saying: “Dude, time to hasten to the remembrance of Allah.” As if prayers and God are a joke.
When they get there, a recording of the azan is playing over the parking lot. Karim and Omar go through the men’s entrance. Mrs. Mahfouz falls in behind a couple of grandmothers in long shapeless robes. The hall is on the second floor. They climb the stairs together and remove their shoes together. But as soon as Omar puts his loafers on the shelf, he leaves Karim there, on one knee, untying his laces. When he finally walks in, the musalla is half-fulclass="underline" maybe a hundred men and boys doing their rak’ahs. Karim takes a rug from the pile. Omar off to the left. Beside him: one of the other boys who was at the pool party. Don’t. Don’t make a fool of yourself. Go to the middle of the room. By yourself. Say your prayers. (To one side of you, a guy in a Yankees jersey; to the other, an older man in a dishdasha.) Bow, kneel, touch your forehead to the rug — and after the second cycle of prayer, waiting now for the arrival of the imam and the start of the service, survey the halclass="underline" Omar and the other one whispering and joking; the mothers and girls and the littlest children roped off in the back. Maybe two hundred people now. Not just Arabs, but lighter-skinned Middle Easterners and dark-skinned Blacks. Even a white man. Whom you can’t help but stare at and be suspicious of.
Watch him lower his head to the floor. As he does so, the person just in front of him and to his right will come into view:
A boy.
The resemblance in profile so strong you would swear … Then he turns, to his left and back, where you are — and you squinting in disbelief. But it is. It’s Yassim, making a face that seems to say: Oh, there you are.
Dorian down arrows until he is back at 2:09 a.m. UNKNOWN CALLER. And there is the number. An area code unrecognized. Why talk to him? Not because he wants to. Only because he has to. Because what if his neighbor, the doctor, is right? Last night, a couple of strangers killed: men enlisted in a kind of army, soldiers fighting a war, ready and willing (or so one might assume) to die for what they understand to be their country. But what if someone innocent were to die tonight, and I never even tried to stop it? He walks outside, out the sliding door and onto the deck, where there are some Adirondack chairs and a gas grill and a bug zapper, non-functional, hanging from the eave of the roof like a memorial to generations of executed insects. And over the cul-de-sac: a crescent moon, a waning crescent. Horns pointing to the right. An Islamic moon.
“Who is this,” he says.
“Um. It’s Dorian Wakefield.”
“I can see that.”
“Is this—” (Don’t call him by name: address him personally and you only make borders less secure.) “Is this the man from that organization?”
He laughs.
“You called me,” Dorian says.
“I called you?”
“This morning.”
“I don’t recall the conversation. I probably made a hundred calls this morning. I’m very busy. Some haji-lover killed a friend of mine last night—”
“Wait.”
After a period of silence — a time long enough for the siren of an ambulance to reach Dorian’s ears and fade away — the man says: “I’m waiting.”
“I guess you were right,” Dorian says.
“Was I.”
“Look. I have to talk to you …”
“Really. Well, you didn’t want to talk to me this morning. It’s coming back to me now. You’re the kid with the black eye. I called you and you hung up on me. This isn’t a good time. Your neighborhood has gone flashpoint. There are more than a hundred comments now.”
“About what?”
“The post. I sent you the link, Dorian. I come out there, I blog about you. Last night, a guy loses his life and you can’t be bothered to open your mail.”
“It’s not that.”
Silence again. Then the man says, in a changed tone: “No, it’s not, is it. It’s not that you don’t care. It’s the exact opposite. Let me guess. You want me to exercise the better part of valor.”
“I don’t know.”
“Do you know what the better part of valor is?”
“No.”
“Discretion,” he says. “That’s what a famous coward once said. Is that what you’d like me to do?”