In the morning, Dorian wakes with a start and checks the community Lifebook page. A night without violence. As promised. Peace for a night. Now — how to keep it? Go to the meeting and then what. What will they ask of you next? Slippery slope. One step down and you’ll start sliding. Don’t even go near the edge. But if I don’t … He gets on his bike and goes to a place he thinks of as his alone: a wetland area on the east side of town, where a creek flows over rocks and into an expanse of reeds and cattails. The multi-use trail ends, suddenly, at the interstate: the creek disappears into a dark culvert ablast with the thunder of traffic headed toward Albany or New France. Before that, you can enter the water and wade to where the tall plants protect you like ramparts. He shouldn’t go. He should go to the police instead and tell them what he knows. But as he sits there in that place of contemplation — atop a rock amidst the blades of the reeds and the strange brown spikes of the cattails — it seems to Dorian that to tell what he knows will not solve a problem so much as create a new one, a worse one. He can set this right on his own. Without anyone else getting hurt. And with no one ever knowing he had a connection to any of it. As he stares over the marsh into the heights of the deciduous trees, he will come to feel sure of this — and he will suddenly see, perched on a branch like a specimen from the state museum, an American eagle, which all at once, with a shrug of wings, will come to life and fly away, silent as a drone.
At first he couldn’t believe it. But in the days since encountering Yassim at the mosque, Karim has come to feel that what is actually hard to believe is that there is nothing unbelievable about the appearance of his friend. Hadn’t the imam said in his sermon, two weeks ago, that some of us become lost on false paths, but if we pray well and honestly, Allah will guide us onto the path of our true and best destiny — which will lead us finally and unerringly to the gardens of Paradise? I became lost, Karim thinks to himself. I became lost and I didn’t even know I was, but God has sent Yassim …
After the service last Friday, the two had slipped out of the prayer hall together. On the playground, surrounded by squealing children and beyond the hearing of the mothers standing in the shade of the main building, Karim smiled and fought the impulse to embrace his old friend, for if he did, he was sure to cry.
“Yassim,” he said. “I thought—”
“What.”
“Nothing.”
“You mean you thought I was …” He pantomimed an explosion by a sudden unfurling of his fists …
“I guess.”
“I am, dude. I’m a ghost come to haunt your ass from Paradise. Shit, man. Can you believe this?”
“What.”
“All of it. These fuckin mozlems.”
Karim looked around and saw: little boys with neat haircuts, little girls wearing shiny shoes, mothers in fancy hijabs texting on smartphones. Nice families, each with a car in the parking lot and a home to return to.
“The sheikh wasn’t kidding,” Yassim said. “They’re all infidels.”
“But Yassim …”
“Mm.”
“What are you doing here?”
Yassim smiled and put a hand on Karim’s shoulder. There was nothing sarcastic about this action; no joke. His old friend guided him a few feet away from the play-structures, away from the mothers and the children. Under a line of trees, a few boulders were left over from when the land had been excavated. On one of these rocks, in the shade, Yassim produced a smartphone, touched the screen, and handed it to Karim. A video started up. A boy, robed like a little scholar in a short-sleeved dishdasha, a kufi on his head, looking directly at the recording device, said: “Peace be upon you, my brothers.” The voice. That’s what made Karim realize that the boy on the screen was someone he knew. Realization in the form of a denial (not him, ears too big), even as he understood that the ears had been hidden before under hair that had since been cut, and that the boy on the screen really was Hazem — the very boy with whom Karim and Yassim, for half a year, had slept on a twin-size mattress under a lean-to made of scrounged sheet metal and particle board; the same boy who had been joined with them in dependency upon a drug that bore the three to a place far away from where they truly were; the one among them who had always been a true believer, never doubting what the sheikh told them (that, for example, if you lay your life down in the path of God, you will feel nothing when your body explodes). And yet, now — on a playground in the Colonies, a world away from Dakota — Karim still felt a weird doubt. Peace be upon you, my brothers. A thing Hazem would never say. And yet it was him. Was him wearing a suicide vest and standing in front of the flag of the Caliphate, saying: “Every one of you who feels you have no future now but the future of a dog. I thought that was my future. But I have found a new one.” It’s him, Karim thought. Him and not him. And what a strange notion came to Karim next. That this was Hazem’s very self trapped within the screen of the phone, like a djinn in a lamp …
“So, he’s dead,” Karim said. “He’s a shahid.”
Yassim nodded.
In a tone falling somewhere between reverence and incredulity, Karim said: “He really did it.”
“Just like we will.”
“We?”
“It’s a joint operation now,” Yassim said, as a child skinned her knee and broke into tears. “That’s why I’m here.”
The Algonquin: A very big and very old building on Broadway. A four-storied castle of red brick with arches and columns and balconies, made during that gilded age when the town had lured people with its healing waters and horses. Once a hotel, now rental apartments. As he locks his bike to an iron rack near the entrance, Dorian realizes that he never has looked at the building closely. There seems to be something false about its grandeur. He walks up to the door. No video intercom, just a silver frame with black buttons and a speaker. No name next to 30½. He presses the button. No answer. But an interval during which he thinks: You’ve come to them, you’re asking them to let you in …
Through the speaker: “Yeah.”
Dorian’s voice sticks in his throat.
“Hello?”
“Yes, he says. I don’t know if this is the place, but—”
The buzzer cuts him off. He hears the lock of the inner door click. Then he is in. He goes down the dimly lit hallway, past an elevator, and enters a space his mind links to an illustration from his fifth-grade history book: The theater where Abraham Lincoln was shot. What was once a lobby looks now like an empty stage. Two wide staircases sweep up to a second-floor balcony, then a third-floor balcony … Up the stairs. Every door is red with gold numbers. On the third floor, different hallways lead to the ends and corners of the building. He goes down one of them and, not finding 30½, returns to the center and tries the next one, and like a mouse in a maze turns around again. Smell of snuffed-out greens and cleaning agents, and sounds from behind closed doors of videogame warfare and doom metal. Finally, he finds it. Knocks. Door opened by a girl with stretched earlobes. He has seen her before: one of the baristas at Café Pravda. She says, “Dorian, right? God, look what they did to you.” Touching him. Laying her hands on his face, one palm against each cheek. (For a second, he thinks she might kiss him on the mouth.) “C’mon,” she says, and leads him into a room with big arched windows, uncurtained. Not a place where anyone lives. It’s set up like an office. Several desks. A printer on one of them; a scanner on another. Bare white walls. He sees a kitchen and smells coffee. Then he sees the second room, where a voice is coming from. Something about the minutes from the last meeting. Corrections, additions. Eight men at a table, each with a palmtop or a tablet, including Jon-David, from whom he gets a look of acknowledgement, at which a kind of relief moves through Dorian, the kind he feels whenever he starts anything new (a team, a camp, a club) and sees among the new faces someone with whom he shares a background of friendship.