“Well what do you-all think about ISIS?” he asks. I wish we were on campus and I could defer to Hugo or Meredith since it is really against protocol for me to talk about Issues as opposed to Programs. I am supposed to plan and find funding and administer, not have Ideas, although paradoxically I would never have been hired without a demonstrated interest in Ideas, since Hugo and Meredith are terrible snobs about credentials and need someone to write their research proposals and keep them company and Karen was a marketing major and has never left the country. That said I don’t really know anything about ISIS, what I do know is a hundred Turkish verbs that begin with k, but I have half-listened to many lectures and panels that I try to recall now. “Well, a lot of people don’t think that ISIS really counts as an Islamic group,” I say as I suck down my drink, quickly because the taste of almonds makes me gag. “They kill a lot of people who are Muslim.” “But they’re running a whole country on Islamic Law,” Cindy tells me. “That’s the whole thing they want.” “There are a lot of different interpretations of what Islamic Law means,” I say. “Some people think they are actually operating more like a nation state, like they decide what they want to do and then they find the justification for it later. Like, the uh, U.S. does.”
I can feel the booze zip like a friendly fire through my veins. “It’s kind of like if we want to blow up some person in another country we do it and then we do some law thing to make it legal afterward.” This feels like the wrong tack. There is a litany anyone who is interested in the “Muslim world” aka a huge swath of the known world knows: Without Islam we wouldn’t have algebra or astronomy. Or Plato, whom the Arab scholars brought forth from obscurity for the Europeans to froth over. Not to mention we wouldn’t have Hafez or Rumi or Yunus Emre or Ibn Khaldun. We wouldn’t have the Registan or the Dome of the Rock or the Umayyad Mosque—well, that’s gone now I think. I go with “Muslims consider Jesus a prophet too, you know.” Cindy rolls her eyes but Ed says “Well, that’s interesting. Huh. I did not know that.” But I’m not done, I’m drunk and I must now issue my verbal Facebook meme. “There are over a billion Muslims including my husband’s family and the majority of them don’t want anything to do with ISIS or even know what ISIS is about,” I say, with a pang as I picture again his wounded expression, his onetime Barış Manço mustache or maybe it’s Erkin Koray who had the mustache. But what I know from my deceased dad is that diplomacy is hard and requires dissembling and betrayal.
Ed also did not know this and it prompts Cindy to give him the rough and basically sympathetic outline of Engin’s visa situation during which Honey begins kicking. She squirms off my lap and I give her half of The Very Hungry Caterpillar, the half with the one apple two pears three plums four strawberries five oranges. She sits next to my right foot and turns these pages and sticks her little index finger through the holes that the very hungry caterpillar made. I order a greyhound. It’s nice to be in a bar, it’s nice to talk to people, even these people, it’s nice when your baby is sitting nicely behaved on the floor of the bar.
“So what do you think we should do about ISIS then?” Ed asks me and Jesus, ISIS, ISIS, ISIS, what fear we’re all living with. “I don’t think anyone has a good answer,” I say. “Sometimes I think we should just hammer the shit out of them and Bashar al-Assad too” and Ed laughs and we all cheers and I feel savage and parochial and bad, all this activated so quickly by $4 punch. Why do Americans always go back to the bomb. I feel my face bloom into a glorious Irish sunrise.
Honey is on her feet and halfway out of the bar before I register her absence, mostly from Cindy’s expression, and I turn to see as she trips and falls over the hummock where the linoleum of the bar ends and the patterned floral wall-to-wall of the restaurant begins. She pops up like a top and begins brushing her hands anxiously the way she does now when she falls down, but I sense immediately through the Irish sunrise that something is different. Unlike with most of her falls she starts yelling, one anguished yell followed by a silence that I know portends real screaming. I lunge for her, knocking the table with my ass and sending the greyhound onto the seat where I’d been sitting. I run across the bar and squat down and try to wrap her up in my arms but she is frantically wiping one hand on my chest and screaming like I’ve never heard. A streak of blood appears on the placket of my white shirt and my stomach becomes a lump of plutonium. I cannot get her to hold her hand still. I see the hostess and Cindy hovering in my peripheral vision, the hostess holding out a napkin which I take without looking at her. “Oh my sweet baby my sweet Honey, show Mama your finger,” but I still cannot get her to hold still and finally have to grip her wrist very hard to see that the fat part of her tiny middle finger, her little grape, has torn open. Her sounds are no longer supported by the scaffolding of crying and are just awful rhythmic shouts. I look up and the hostess points to the corner and the bathroom. I bundle up the baby and smash her hand to my chest and run through the dining room where there are about five tables of people. I stumble on the way and hear the clatter of silverware as a man in a cowboy hat swiftly stands to intervene, but I right myself before he can take my arm and I say “Thank you” and keep running. I shut the door behind me and lock it set Honey on the counter and turn on the faucet. “Amee-amee-amee” she says, which I think is Mommy, and she looks at me with an expression that is equal parts puzzlement and pain, and she cries again and continues to wipe her finger on my chest as blood wells up again and again, and my body tenses as I imagine the flap tearing further through her agitation and I know that if I do not get a hold of myself I will throw myself around this bathroom like a terrible screeching missile and I have to settle and suddenly I do, I am calm, and I say “It’s okay.” “It’s okay, baby.” “It’s okay.” It occurs to me that she has never seen blood in quantity before, never had any kind of bleeding injury, and I see that after she wipes a new red gout onto my shirt she uses her other hand to try and wipe it off. I have to angle her body down and forcibly hold her arm straight to get it under the cold faucet and droplets of blood spatter as she flails. Someone I think is Cindy knocks on the door and says “I’ve got a first aid kit here” and I open the door with one hand on writhing Honey on the counter and take the proffered kit. Cindy muscles in and raises an eyebrow. “Think she needs stitches?” she says, looking at my shirt. “I… think with a cut like this you are supposed to do cold water and then see if the bleeding will stop.” The toilet paper mechanism rattles as I snatch a long trail of toilet paper. “I have this toilet paper,” I tell her moronically. I hold Honey’s arm hard enough there will certainly be a bruise and I endeavor to isolate the wounded finger from its mates, and see that blood continues to well out of the flap. Cindy puts a stabilizing hand on Honey’s shoulder and I twist the toilet paper around the finger in a lumpy, inelegant turban.