She reached out and took my hand, this small woman who’d gestated me. I assured her I would pass this message along.
As you know, in the first contest in Iowa, Senator L. Victor Love and Governor Pat Formisano tied in the Democratic primary while on the Republican side, the white separatist talk-show host Jennifer Braden defeated the president of the United States by four points, setting off a political earthquake.
In April I returned to Michigan to move my mother out of her home as the country was upended by what became known as the Great Eastern Flood. My colleagues and I had watched in awe from the offices on G Street as an astonishing confluence of hydrological events shattered our models, specifically a warm, wet winter saturating much of the Eastern Seaboard and Middle West, several tropical depressions moving from the Gulf to the Southeast, followed by three frontal cyclones, storms of phenomenal power, crossing eastward from the plains. As you well know, there was hardly a riverine municipality that did not experience some degree of flooding. Statistics are unwieldy, but I believe when viewing the flooding in aggregate, as one event, rather than a series of ill-timed, compounding disasters, FEMA will total approximately 3,800 fatalities across twenty-five states and $209 billion in damage, dwarfing Hurricane Alberto’s record-setting tally. The cities of Memphis, Nashville, St. Louis, Kansas City, Chicago, Pittsburgh, Baton Rouge, and New Orleans account for much of that human toll, as levee failures, sewer system overloads, spillway collapses, and other infrastructure failures left residents with little time to escape. It’s easy to forget that human lives exist behind the integer. I remind myself by thinking of the staff of a Missouri facility for the physically and mentally disabled who abandoned a bus full of patients in a roadway as a bridge began to wash out. The staff members escaped, and all forty patients drowned as the river flipped the bus and overtook it.
Back in Ann Arbor with my sister, her husband, Peter, and their two children, we had a glimpse of one of these extratropical cyclones, followed by four days of powerful microburst storms. The air turned green, and a tornado alarm began to blare. All the noise felt like broken glass being raked on the inside of my skin. I knew my panic was unnerving Noor and Gregory, and I had to retreat to a bathroom without windows and push the smooth side of a hairbrush over my arm to calm myself. The next day, on our way to the store, Peter and I saw homes with their walls ripped out, bikes, clothing, and lawn chairs in trees, cars blown onto their sides, and one structure where the roof had been cleanly removed. That particular storm system spawned three tornadoes across Michigan, none of which was as destructive as the flooding of the Huron River. Said Peter:
“Fuck me. Where’s Bill Paxton and Helen Hunt when you need ’em?”
In addition to the storm, my mother was insisting I go to mosque with her, and this had led to a bitter argument. She insisted it would pry me from the grip of a “great sin.”
Haniya tried to argue with her that my choices could be justified by Qur’anic text while I sat there silently, recalling my childhood when mosque and the imam terrified me. I recalled how he would take me to task for refusing to go through the motions of raka’ah, or how he ridiculed my Arabic pronunciation. Now both my mother and sister were in tears, as Hani tried to build a bridge from the dogma of our ancestors to her brother’s life. As they carried on, I marveled at how little power all of this wielded over me anymore. Finally, I left to go play trucks with Noor and Gregory.
That night, in my childhood bedroom where I’d once pinned up long reams of the basketball statistics I adored, Hani knocked on the door. We talked about the sale of the house until she finally asked a question I could not believe she didn’t already know the answer to: “Have you ever believed, Ashir? Maybe as a child?”
I picked up a toy model of a pirate ship I had built as a seven-year-old with our father. It had remained on the bookshelf in my old room all these years. “Not to my recollection. The first time I remember hearing the idea of God, I was five. I went to the library with Papa to try to figure out where these realms or kingdoms could possibly exist within the physical structure of the atmosphere or deep mantle. For maybe two minutes, I wondered if the beings and locales of those stories were contained in the mesosphere because it lay between the stratosphere where the jets fly and the thermosphere where astronauts would clearly bump into such marvels as akhirah. Obviously, this all collapsed rather quickly.”
My sister has a wide and beautiful face with cheekbones that stretch outward like they are trying to escape the skin. This gives her every utterance a calm that can often feel cold. Her social cues remain some of the most difficult I’ve ever had to read: “You were not actually that literal when you were five, Ash.”
“It only shocked me that none of this had ever occurred to anyone before. I tried to tell Mumma, and she smacked me.”
The sting of my mother’s hand stayed with me, and not only because of the guilt and confusion that followed, but because her reaction seemed endemic. What I felt in the drill of her hand as a child, I hear in The Pastor’s voice all these years later: The piffling anecdata of the faithful peddled as law and conscience. The world is in the throes of a desperate religious revival as believers plunk their heads into the sand to shield themselves from what is happening to the biophysical world. As she grows mentally frailer, I suppose there will be no reconciliation with my mother. Her moments of tenderness are fleeting, and her fury at my relationship with Seth seems the one thing she can easily recall. No doubt she will forget me before she forgives me.
It took us a week to make the arrangements for my mother to move to New York where Peter and Hani have been caring for her with their significant financial resources. I was left alone in Ann Arbor with the task of closing up our childhood home. Instead of ruminating pointlessly on uninteresting nostalgia, I took the opportunity to don my new VR set and enter The Pastor’s Slapdish worlde. I’d first had the idea in January when a man I’ll refer to as “Ned Stark” contacted me and asked that we meet clandestinely in VR. I thought of The Pastor’s gaudy megachurch-theme-park worlde, which was dense, crowded, and allowed anonymous entrants. I’ll spare you the description, only to say that Ned Stark and I met on a tower spire’s precipice where I couldn’t help but step my foot off the ledge repeatedly, musing at the strange disconnect between my brain telling me I would fall and my foot finding the carpet of my childhood bedroom.
“She wants to wait until after the primaries,” he said. I call him Ned Stark because that is the avatar he’d chosen. I myself was dressed as early NBA analytics hero Shane Battier. “Love has got it in the bag, it looks like, but the RNC can’t seem to manage to put Braden down. This all gets very different if Braden manages to pull this off.”
I asked: “What is the eventual plan?”
“We’re going to come together and reveal ourselves.”
“I’m putting a great deal of trust in you with this.”
The avatar made a cheap facsimile of a grimace. “Yeah, well, so am I.”
Across the futuristic Christian theme park, Jumbotrons displayed the shellacked smile of The Pastor. He’d been busy celebrating the spring’s flooding as his prophecy coming true rather than an excess of water vapor in the atmosphere powering the engines of devastating storm systems. He inveighed:
“And who is the one who foresaw this? Who, just a few months ago, warned you of this?” He flipped open his self-authored book of scripture and quoted: “ ‘For there will be fire and flood, and a man will appear giving warning of these tribulations. The vested powers will tell the people to ignore him for he may carry the blood of the Christ in his veins. This man will make rain, and he is the future.’ ”