Will kneels down in front of him and says: “You’re a Dream addict.”
“Yessir.”
“How’d you get the stuff.”
He shrugs and hugs himself harder.
Will reaches into the breast pocket of his coat and takes out a pack of greens. He shakes one out and hands it to the kid, then produces a disposable lighter, and the nun says:
“Mr. Banfelder …”
“Sister, I’ve seen this before. I knew a guy once, back when I served, who got into this shit. Said he never coulda kicked if it wasn’t for grass.”
He lights the cigarette.
The kid sucks and exhales. Shivers. Wipes his eyes.
“How long?”
“Five months, I guess.”
Will nods and lets the kid take a few more drags. “Feel any better?”
“A little.”
“Mr. Banfelder, I don’t think—”
“Opinion noted, Sister. But Karim is my responsibility now. Legal guardianship and all that jazz.”
The nun gives a kind of smile. Then she says her goodbye to the kid, a hug and a kiss on the cheek; then she shakes Will’s hand and is off to her next good deed. Which leaves the two of them.
“You called me ‘sir,’ ” Will says.
“Yessir.”
“Don’t do that.”
“Okay,” says Karim. “So, what then?”
“You know Arabic?”
He nods.
“How about ‘jaddi.’ ”
The kid looks at him and wipes his eyes again. “You speak Arabic?”
“Na’am.”
“Jaddi,” the kid says. “Like, grandfather.”
“That make sense?”
“Sure.”
“Okay, then. Jaddi it is. Finish the smoke and let’s go. It’s an hour to Sioux City. We’ll get you some vitamins and a milkshake.”
The trip to New York is hell. Although Karim has been through this before (several times since he started using), every other time he’s had the agonies he lay still on the mattress in the half-light of the lean-to — Hazem and Yassim with him, all of them on the twin mattress like a litter of whining dogs — until withdrawal had become a state of suspended animation. You sort of forget you’re alive. But this time. The world racing past the window at impossible speed, the glare of the sun, the heat of the sun and the chill of the air conditioning, the stink of a cattle farm. (How can something possibly smell worse than that open sewer by the lean-tos?) But the speed is the worst part. Even when he closes his eyes, he can’t rid himself of the sense that nothing outside the window is staying still. Somewhere on the first day, they get pulled over by soldiers in desert camo — and even though the old guy has got stamped papers, they search the car. They pull up the false floor of the trunk and take out the spare tire. Then they make Karim remove all his clothes right there by the side of the highway. Though he is finally stationary, the motion of the car won’t leave his head and he pukes up the milkshake from Sioux City. That night, they stay in a motel with two beds, where Karim, curled fetally in the clean sheets, feels like he’s adrift on a lifeboat. He drifts off and has a dream in which the camp hospital is heaven. His mother, wearing the jilbab she died in, looks as though she has waded waist-deep into a river of blood. Yet her eyes are open, and she’s squinting — and saying: Karim, is that you? Where have you been, habibi? You have my eyeglasses. He wakes up and it takes him a long space to understand where he is. Not heaven, not yet. Not the lean-to. Then he hears the old guy in the other bed, making a sound in his sleep like a flooded car engine. After this, he can’t sleep. Feels like there’s something inside him, clawing at the dead shell of his self, trying to split him apart and get out. Perhaps this is your soul. He lies awake, thinking of the sheikh. Dark beard with twisting hairs, a beard of thorns.
3
By the next day, the insects have changed once again. The eyes are still red but the body has gone from white to black; the veins on the wings from pale yellow to brown. And the males have found their voices. The world is full of the noise: a dizzy trilling that gets trapped like a greenhouse gas below the dome of the sky and echoes as endlessly as surf in the helixes of a conch shell. Dorian and his friends are outdoors, playing a kind of game. Each boy has captured a fully matured cicada and pinned it, alive, to one of the four corners of a cork board. Each of them has a magnifying glass from a science kit and is using it to concentrate the energy of the sun into a single point on his insect. Whoever’s catches fire first wins. But the whole thing is a bust: All that happens is, they burn a smoking hole through the poor things. The lack of a dramatic conflagration leaves an emptiness where there might have been a thrill; and other feelings, annoyance and pity, for example, claim the hollow space. The dizzy echoing noise, the chorusing, which comes not from screaming mouths but from vibrating abdominal membranes, seems to get louder.
“Whose bright fuckin idea was this?”
“Keenan.”
“Brilliant, dude.”
“We did prove something,” Dean points out. “They’re not flammable.”
“Idiot,” Keenan says.
“What.”
“It’s just not enough heat is all. Phase two, we need a medicine dropper. Everybody gets two drops of lighter fluid …”
This is when the car comes up the curve of the road. Mr. Banfelder’s Argo Electric, which has not been sighted for a week. He sees the boys and gives two friendly taps on the horn. There’s someone in the backseat.
A kid.
They all see him. And the window is down, so they see him pretty well. They see shaggy black hair squalling in the slipstream. Skin that isn’t black or white, but an unmistakable in-between brown.
“It’s a haji,” Keenan says.
“Jeezuss.”
“Am I right?”
“You’re right,” Dean says.
“Zeb?”
“I didn’t really see him.”
“Dorian?”
But Dorian doesn’t answer. He watches the car follow the curve of the cul-de-sac and pull into the driveway of the house with maroon shutters and the old lawn jockey statuette on the grass. Car stops. Passengers disembark. It’s a kid, all right. A boy. Judging from his size relative to that of the car: eleven, twelve years old. He’s looking up at the air, at the trees. (That sound.) Then he crouches down and picks something off the blacktop of the driveway. Holds it in front of his eyes. (What the fuck is this?) … As a finger whistle whipcracks across the subdivision.
“He wants us.”
“Us?”
“To go over there,” Dean says.
Dorian sets his magnifying glass down on the corkboard where the four insects lay impaled and scorched, and starts walking toward the Banfelder house. One at a time, his friends fall in behind him.
Will has been anxious about this moment ever since committing to the adoption. He knows these boys well. He’s known them for years. The Wakefield boy in particular. All good kids. Except for the one who dressed up like a Jew from the Holocaust last Halloween. Actually shaved his head. Keenan. But other than him, they are as good as you can expect. Still, is it too much to ask of them? To befriend a Muslim. No, not that. Just accept him. Understand him and let him be.
“Karim.”
The kid doesn’t respond or move. He’s in a crouch, holding a cicada by the wing, though not looking at the insect. Watching the posse approach. Four kids: three white, one black. Will says, in Arabic:
“Stand up, Karim. And give a proper greeting.”
For the first time, Will has spoken to him in what you could call a fatherly tone of voice. And the kid obeys. Though first he looks up — with eyes to make an old man think of a past that won’t let go. (Like a time we were at one of the old palaces, where we weren’t supposed to be, but in the early days everyone was: We’d ride into these fallen citadels in our up-armored sport-utility vehicles, firing in the air like Yosemite Sam and any towelhead who didn’t put his hairy face in the dirt wasn’t alive for evening prayers, which is how it went on this one day in Samara or Babylon or Tikrit, who can remember anymore, all incidents and settings seem interchangeable now, but wherever it was, there was a haji in a dishdasha with a camel; and even when the team leader, an ex-Marine named Brainard, walked directly toward them with the sawed-off Winchester 1887 he’d brought from Toad Suck, Arkansas, herder and animal just stood there, staring us down. It was not surprising when Brainard put the muzzle of the shotgun to the patella of the camel’s left foreleg. Shot. All at once, the lower half of the leg was dangling from a bloody cord of muscle and fur. The guy came next. Same place. In the kneecap. Brainard ejected the spent shells and started toward the palace; and as usual, because the suffering didn’t seem to unduly concern anyone else on the team, you were the one to clean up the mess and put each thing out of its misery. The man didn’t bother you so much, the way he swore and spat at you. But the animal. Which had stood for a few moments on three legs before collapsing suddenly onto the road. Kneeling beside it, you thought: Odd animal. The hump and the two-toed hoof. As you knelt beside it, the head on the long neck craned strangely. Eyes searching, for what?) Back then, what Will Banfelder did was: He stroked the smooth fur of the head, once, twice, then pressed a gun to the top of the skull. What he does now is: Puts an arm around his new son’s shoulders (think son, use the word in your mind), and says, “It’s all right. You’re going to like them.”