Ebnee.
And you thinking: I am no son of yours. While thinking also of the man to whom you are in fact a kind of son, who must be sitting in that house now, in the room he made for you, on the chair in a room you will never return to, before the desk upon which you left that old battered book. Open. Open to the page with the blood smear and the words about Paradise. Which you left there deliberately, as if the verses of that sura would explain sufficiently where you have disappeared to. A world of gardens and fountains. And why you did what you are going to do. Because it was the only way to get there. The only way, jaddi … But how can you? How can you walk into that place called Urgent Care and pull the cord hanging from the front of the vest that you are now wearing (which your body is now registering the full weight of), igniting the explosive liquid in the tubes taped there, and propelling the ten pounds of nails, screws, and ball bearings toward the hearts and heads of a hundred (maybe more) sick and terrified people, some of whom, far from being inimical to you, might be nothing but sympathetic: who, if given a choice of helping or hurting you, would help, just as the old man seated at that desk, looking even now at the open pages of the book, had helped you … And while thinking all this, you are also speaking, though not any words that parallel your thoughts. You are reading from the paper while Yassim stands beside you holding the rifle and the second man points his smartphone, you reading though not hearing your own voice though you know a voice is coming out of you and being recorded and the voice which is yours but also not yours, saying: He ejected the magazine from the gun. But this vest you are wearing. What if you pulled the cord right now. Reached for the cord without apparent forethought and no warning and pulled. The explosive liquid would be ignited here. In this ugly room. And there would be no bombing in that hospital tonight. And the declaration of martyrdom now being recorded will never be uploaded and never viewed, and will never encourage any other boy to do what you are on the verge of doing—and so it might be said that at the end you did a good thing, Karim, a good thing at the end. To accomplish it you need only move your hand the space of a few inches, feel the cord and pull. Suddenly. Without premeditation. Without reasoning. For all thinking on this subject is nothing but instinct. An omen in the nerves and muscles a moment before the cerebellum sends the requisite command, which it is about to do, about to generate the action potential that will spread through the muscle fiber network and prompt the pulling of the cord when the sound comes through the wall behind you: the baby: crying again: so near, so clear, there might be no barrier at all.
What is happening to Dorian Wakefield behind the closed shower door in the bathroom of his family’s safe room? Insofar as an “answer” to this question is relevant when so-called physical laws are in the process of being eroded (or perhaps a more accurate phraseology: when such laws are being, if not revised, than at least superscripted by the human mind), that answer might best be attempted through a process of historical comparison across the horizontal axis of the grid. At a distant point in the past, in Quadrants I or IV (say, x = −500), Dorian’s experience in the shower would almost certainly be considered supernatural, a mystical vision or a demonically induced delusion. At x = 0 (his present moment), a psychiatrist like the one he saw for two months back in the fall might diagnose a dissociative disorder, possibly an episode of depersonalization brought on by the panic caused by the fear of his mother dying and the fear of his own probable death. At future points on the axis, however (in Quadrants II and III: at, for example, x = 109), we know that what is actually happening is this: He is thinking of a point in the far reaches of the first quadrant — and that point, that summer from the past of a different pathway, is the very same one that his mother has been imagining-as-remembering while in the throes of a multisystem syndrome that is soon going to cause cardiovascular collapse. And the configuration of that point, that moment from another past, is so convincing and so longed-for (and we could say necessary in the context of a present situation moving rapidly toward total darkness), that Dorian is consumed by a sudden surety that the events transpiring here and now (at 0, 0) are not real at all.
“Dodo,” his father says.
“Mm.”
“You all right in there.”
“Yeah.”
“Can I open the door?”
And the door opening and Dorian exiting the little enclosure, unsteady on his feet, a rush of disequilibrium in his head, which might be a symptom of disease, but feels to him more like a kind of physiological adjustment, as if he has been at a great depth of water and is returning now to a surface.
“Dad. I’m going to tell you something. It’s important.”
“Sure.”
“It doesn’t really matter what you say back. It’s just important I say it, because it’s going to help us get out of this.”
(Nodding.) “All right.”
“She picked me up at school that summer.”
(Still nodding.) “Who did, pal.”
“Skyler. She was home that summer, not in the city. And you remember the firehouse?”
“Yeah.”
“And remember that sign? It told you about the fire danger. Every day, I would explain it to her. Like, it’s red, red means high … I just remembered that.”
“Listen, Dodo. I want you to put this in your mouth and hold it there until it beeps. Okay?”
He does as told. Sitting very calmly and pressing his tongue down, keeping the thermometer steady. His father on his knees beside him, a hand resting nervously on his shoulder. And now beeping. And his father taking it and angling it in front of his eyes. Saying: Normal. 98.6. And then: “All right. Cliff, come here. Listen, guys.” And telling them to sit tight. “Stay in this room. Keep the radio on. I’m going to make sure Mom is taken care of and then I’ll be back. An hour at the most. Then I’ll be home.”
And thinking to herself (as she is wheeled unconscious, strapped to a stretcher, out of the back of an ambulance by two EMTs in biosafe suits and through the in-patient entrance of the emergency room, into a scenario of suffering and panic and inadequate epidemiologic response: upwards of a hundred people, the sick mixed with the worried, half of them unmasked and half of those vomiting blood into sickness bags), that the reason she is thinking about all this — about that summer and how Skyler might have been in the city that day but wasn’t — is that she drove down into the valley earlier today, surrounded by the hills yellowed by sun and heat and lack of rain, and just as she was passing the firehouse and the fire warning sign (the arrow pointing to orange), she came suddenly, after a curve, upon a car driving slowly and cautiously, with a bumper sticker that said: 8-11 NEVER FORGET … Not that I ever do. Every single day, some part of me (if not concretely, then in the abstract) remembers what happened and what might have been and gives thanks (to whom or what I’m not really sure) for my family’s deliverance. Still, in the summer, it’s different. As we come closer to that date in August, the anniversary of a thing I guess we are just never going to understand, I feel the coming of it, like the fog that builds over the ocean, inevitable and integral, moving closer and massing overhead like memory. So, I was behind that car this morning, which was going far more slowly than the speed limit — and how could I know why. For all I knew, the driver (say, a woman like me: fifty, a mother) was thinking of that day and a child she lost, a daughter or son who was in the city on that day, whom she had not stopped (and saved) from being there, the way I stopped Skyler — and for all I know, she’s weeping right now behind the wheel, the landscape a blur of grief. And my mind starts doing something that it does sometimes, that once it starts I can’t bring a halt to, which is: darkly envisioning who I might be — what would be left of me — if she had been taken from me; if, on that day that the city was burned and turned to ash and sickened, my daughter had been there and I here, a hundred miles away, which might as well have been light-years of spacetime for the impossibility of reaching her and helping. And I see myself in the house with the boys. Waiting and hoping (and praying to a god I don’t even know) and trying to keep from Dorian what is happening; and waiting not only to know if Skyler will be all right but waiting for Mitch to get home from Mendocino; and trying not only to convince Cliff that Skyler will be all right but myself as well — and believing she will be because any credence given to the alternative is an acceptance of an unacceptable fate. (Breathing faster and more shallow now, central venous and arterial pressures falling.) Where was I? Coming into town. Yes. The car with the bumper sticker turning east. And instead of completing the errand I had come to do in avoidance of the brief I didn’t want to write, I took 116 west, along the river, all the way to the end, to the beach where the harbor seals birth and nurse their pups, though the seals are long gone by summer. The beach devoid of people, too, and I sat alone against a log, a section of tree which, having been washed long ago into the ocean, had come ashore in a new form, contours rounded by wave action and bark bleached to near whiteness by sun and salt, and I sitting against it now, holding my phone and slideshowing through photos of us stored in the cloud as waves rolled and beat heart-like against the sand, and getting to this one: taken here: of me and Mitch and Cliff (I wearing sunglasses with lenses the size of tea saucers): remembering that Sky, eight or nine then, had lain in the sand in front of us, having actually made a shallow cavity in the sand so she could point the camera up at us, though she had managed to bring the ocean into the frame as well as the rock formation in the middle distance: the arch with its archway like a gateway. Which I sent to all of them (the photo, I mean: to Mitch and Skyler and Cliff and Dorian) with a note reading: VISUAL EVIDENCE NOTWITHSTANDING, I SWEAR UNDER OATH I NEVER PUT ON ANY SUCH PAIR OF SUNGLASSES. And I there, losing my connectivity to time, staring out at the ocean and the rock and its archway: no living thing around me, nothing moving on the sand or in the air above, nor the air itself, and at last even the ocean seemed to be still.