He brakes on the hill above the green and looks down at the war memorial and the carousel and the people gathering.
Seven thirty. The sky bleeding out. The fountain in the pond going hush-hush-hush. Someone strumming a guitar. One of those songs he hates, about a hundred years old and overplayed as a hymn. Projected mental threat: I swear, if you start singing, I will throw that instrument in the water. Then, sure enough: “Imagine there’s no heaven …” Are you really going down there? You know who these people are, don’t you. They’re the freaks who stand on Broadway, on the corner by the post office, with their signs. And remember that one time, they were actually out in the middle of the intersection and there was a woman with a megaphone standing on a crate shouting that her son was dead, go look, read his name on the memorial in the park four blocks from here, he was drafted in the last lottery (and pretty soon you couldn’t even hear her because everyone was blasting their horns and yelling out their car windows or shouting stupid patriotic shit from the sidewalk). Usually, Dorian would’ve just pedaled past. But that time he stopped, because there were four boys out there in the street, teenagers a little older than his brother, and each of them was holding up a piece of paper, and one of them got the megaphone and said: “In case you didn’t know, they still send actual letters. The draft notice is the one and only form of communication left in America that you can delete by burning.” And that’s exactly what they did. One by one, each kid lit his on fire. And then the cops came up the street in helmets with the clubs and the hand-cuffs — and Dorian is thinking now, as he walks his bike down the hill toward the black wall of the memorial, the same thing he was thinking that day: that he will become one of those boys, he will get that letter in the mail and have to make a choice (go or don’t go; report as ordered or refuse to report), same one his brother will have to make a year from now and which they have never talked about as a family, as if silence can be a rampart against consequence. And that surprises you? What have they been doing for eight years now if not trying to make her never exist with silence— Shake it off: this voice, sectarian and oppugnant to the better angel of your nature, whose accusations (lying to you, hiding her from you) you have been repeating aloud for months and believing, as primitive peoples believe in fictitious explanations for phenomena beyond their understanding, when you knew all along (or at least know you should have known): that the truth, be it that of the stars in Heaven or a family on Earth, is infinitely more complicated …
“Dorian!”
He turns to see Khaleela running over the green with a glowstick in her hand, the sky above her faintly glowing and the fireflies sparking around her: a picture of her not to be forgotten and to cry over in future times.
“Dorian.” (Coming to a panting stop.) “Hi.”
“Hi.”
“Looking for me?”
He nods; sets his bike against a park bench; and when he turns, she angles the glowstick in his face.
“Bruises all gone.”
“Pretty much.”
“So it doesn’t hurt anymore,” she says.
“No”
“Come on, then”—and takes his hand, thinking to herself that life can tear apart at any moment. The Caliphate could nuke the whole eastern seaboard tomorrow. Are you going to leave things up to a boy? As if there’s time in this world for the slow confusions of nervous boys, the obviousness of whose attraction to you is rivaled only by the self-evidence of their total cluelessness about how to act on that attraction; while he, heart smacking around in his chest like a bee in a capture jar, knows somehow that the destination of this hurried hand-in-hand transit is the hedge at the foot of the hill — and Dorian knowing what will happen there, what he has to do, which he has never yet done though he has performed the action in imagination and also in dream (remembering suddenly a dream about her: disaster drill at school, basic medical in the fallout shelter, everything like normal except it wasn’t a mannequin, it was her; he slid a hand under her neck and pinched the bridge of her nose), and telling himself now, when you do it for real, you don’t breathe into her mouth—and what in one instant is a yearning-forward shall become in the next the foretelling of a happening willed into existence by the dreaming of it, which is: his hand on the nape of her neck and her palm against his cheek and the two of them kissing at (0, 0) and at myriad other parallel points and sending a spike of love, like an electrical signal neurotransmitted, across the infinity of the grid.
15
As we were trying to figure out how to say goodbye, it happened again. The tone. Khaleela had my phone in her hand because she was putting her number in my book and then the tone was sounding on every phone in the park. And not just the phones. The municipal system was going off, too. Sirens starting up and echoing and multiplying into the sound of a flock of screaming robot birds while a text-to-speech voice, female and ageless, coming from the sky like the voice of a mythological goddess, said: “Attention. This is the Capital Region Emergency Warning System—”
“Khaleela!”
It was her father. She waved the glowstick with one hand and grabbed me by the shirt with the other.
“My bike,” I said.
“We’ll drive you. Come on. What if it’s airborne.”
She took my hand and we ran across the green, past the carousel, the horses motionless and wide-eyed in the dark, while the voice advised without feeling: “The following bulletin may affect your area …” Then I was falling into the backseat of her car and there were her parents in the front.
“Who’s this,” her father said.
“Dorian.”
Her mother (pushing the start button): “Seat belts. Where do you live?”
“Poospatuck Circle.”
“What?”
I told her it was a tribe. “A tribe of what,” Khaleela said. “Poopsatuck,” her mother was saying to the GPS. “Poopsatuck Circle.” Which the GPS of course didn’t recognize. “Point me,” her mother said to me, and I pointed and said, “Poospatuck,” and explained that they were a tribe of Native Americans. Her mother started driving and her father looked back at me with disapproval as he switched on the radio. No one spoke the rest of the way. The only words in the car were the clear commands of the GPS and the vague imperatives of the man on the radio concerning the need to stay informed and follow the instructions of state and federal officials so we could protect ourselves, our families, and our community against an incident of bioterrorism about which no further details were currently known. “Go point-five miles on Washington … There has been a serious incident.”
Where they are now is not where they were the last time when he cut the dog’s throat and he and Yassim, after being measured for the belts, put on make-believe ones filled with twenty-pounds of sand and practiced walking, stopping, and pulling an imaginary cord. That was a farm in the country; this is an apartment on the top floor of a three-story walk-up in the capital, through the window of which (smudged pane of glass, metal screen in the pattern of a Cartesian grid, and small black flies trapped in the interstice) can be seen, down on the street, a smoke shop with a window display of water pipes, and, above and beyond the nearby rooftops, the summits of the pale monoliths of Agency Buildings 1, 2, and 3 …