The Thirty Names of Night Read online

  “Keef halik, Teta?”

  “Alhamdulillah.” She squeezes my hand. “Sit, sit. I never see you sleep anymore. Where you go all night?”

  I kiss her papery forehead. “Let me get the heating pad.”

  When I come back, Teta’s nodded off again with the coffee in her hand. I set it on the table, but my hand slips trying not to wake her, and it spills on my jeans. The cup clatters back onto its dish.

  “Storm of the storms!” Teta exclaims while I curse under my breath and wipe myself with a napkin. She’s been calling me that ever since I broke one of her teacups as a kid. She must have heard it on the news at some point, storm of storms, maybe. Somehow it journeyed through Arabic and was resurrected as storm of the storms, and now my clumsiness has its own nickname. Teta means it lovingly, but my face burns. I inspect the cup for chips.

  When I slide the heating pad behind her, Teta furrows her brow at me. I bend forward, a force of habit, and hope my loose tee hides the fact that I’m using the shapewear she gave me to flatten my chest, rather than smooth the belly and hips Teta thinks I’m self-conscious of. I take a breath, and the cloth pulls across my ribs. This, too, is a border I am transgressing. Last week, I slashed the polyester at the rib cage to flatten the passengers on my chest that hide the surface of me. I have not told Teta this. I wouldn’t know where to begin.

  “Hope I didn’t wake you banging around in the kitchen,” I say before she can question me again. I sit down across from her on the sofa, a gorgeous old Damascene thing with a wooden frame and rolled arm pillows whose damask patterns have long since faded into gold and burgundy splotches, an heirloom from the bilad.

  Teta holds my eyes for half a second before glancing away out the window. She laughs, shifting her back against the heating pad. “I sleep heavy these days.”

  There’s no way she didn’t hear me talking to you, but this is the response I expect. Though we both see you, we never admit it. You are first on the list of things we don’t talk about, questions we don’t ask, ghosts we don’t count. I’ve never told her about the others, but I know she’s seen you.

  The envelopes in my pocket crinkle when I cross my ankle over my knee. This is the second thing we do not speak of: money. I’m Teta’s only caretaker now, the one who pays the bills and the rent, and though Teta often tries to write out checks for birthdays or for food shopping, both our savings are dwindling. It’s an ugly thing, but your social security only goes so far for two people in the city. Teta and I have reversed roles now; when you and my father were still together, she changed my diapers and babysat me until you both came home from work. She cooked meals for us, took me to the playground, quit her odd jobs when the family needed her. Now, long after your divorce, after your death, after my father has stopped even feigning promises of help, I’ve done the same. Though we both thank God for the Medicare that covers the bulk of Teta’s medical bills, we are still paying off the cost of chemo and radiation a year later. I scold myself for it, but I’ve begun to hope Reem will start helping out now that she’s finally taken a corporate job, though I know Teta’s pride would never allow her to accept Reem’s money. Here in this city whose lifeblood is the dollar, our solution to its weight is silence. It’s not that Teta doesn’t think about money—that’s a privilege our family will never know—but to discuss her anxieties with me would be ‘ayb. It would be a mark of shame; she’d feel like she’d failed me. The children and grandchildren of “real Americans,” the ones who made it, shouldn’t need to fear poverty. But Teta has found walls in this country that she never could have imagined.

  I drain my demitasse and roll the warm ceramic between my hands. I’m sitting in that way you used to correct me for, legs spread like a boy, elbows on my knees, leaning forward so my hair drops in my eyes. I clear my throat and try to draw myself up, mussing my hair out of my face, but the movements are wrong. They are always wrong: my elephant feet, my way of closing cabinets with a bang, my bad posture. Do you see? I’ve memorized even your comments that used to drive me crazy.

  “Mom would’ve been fifty-five this year.” I glance up to meet Teta’s eyes. “Wouldn’t she?”

  Teta sets the half-empty cup of coffee on the side table and folds her thick arms over the blanket in her lap. She shifts her weight forward and then back, rivulets of pain cabling her face until she settles into the heating pad. “It was beautiful, the day, until the rain.”

  The cup in my hands yields its heat to my palms. “Beautiful.”

  “When I was young,” Teta says, and a smile sneaks onto her face, “we used to stay inside and play tawleh when came the rain. My father, Allah yarhamu, when he was alive, all the men in our town used to come to our family café to smoke arghile and talk politics. Immi kept the coffee hot all day. When it rained the men start to come, until we had the place full.”

  I want to ask her how my great-grandfather died, but it is one of the stories Teta has never told me, one of the many she keeps in her locked trunk of memories. His death, too, is on the list of things we don’t discuss. “How old were you when he passed away?”

  “Seventeen,” she says, and then she drains her coffee and falls silent.

  It’s no use. The television drones from the corner, too low to be heard. “Tell me again about the bicycle woman.” I look up from the sludge of coffee grounds at the bottom of my cup. “The one who flew.”

  Teta perks up in her chair. She’s always preferred to tell fantastical stories rather than recount the past, and this is one of her favorites, a fail-safe. The first time she told it to me was after Jiddo died. In that first version, Teta spoke of a woman in her village in Syria who built a flying machine out of a bicycle and two sets of linen wings. She peddled hard to gain speed, then hit a ridge and became airborne for a quarter mile before crashing in a field outside the village. The story didn’t bring me any comfort then, but it felt real, and I never quite believed the version she told after that, the one where the woman on the bicycle escaped gravity, never to be seen again. As a kid, it was more comforting to imagine this woman ending up somewhere warm and colorful, like San Francisco or Miami, but it was too easy an ending. Teta never said where the story came from. I knew better than to ask.

  “It was my friend saw her go up into the air,” Teta says when she’s finished recounting the story. She’s told it so many times I could probably relate it by heart. “No one else in the village thought she could do it. Immi kept me home that day, but I heard every detail. We were all of us amazed.” She ends with the same bewildered shake of her head and a reminder to believe in the unbelievable.

  “They called her Majnouna,” she says, wagging her finger.

  “I know, Teta. The crazy woman.” I take our cups and pat her hand. She is cold, has always been that way, and her circulation has gotten worse these past few months. This, too, the myeloma took from her. We don’t get much sun in this western-facing apartment, and the nights are starting to turn cool. I’ve told Teta a thousand times to turn the heat on at night to keep her blood flowing, but she knows how much it costs. In the winter, it will be worse.

  I smile to keep Teta from reading all this on my face. “If Asmahan starts drinking our coffee, Majnouna will be the least of our worries.”

  After I get up, Teta clears her throat and calls out to my back, “Fifty-four.” When I turn to her, she directs her eyes to her hands. “November,” she says, “she would be fifty-four.”

  * * *

  I retreat to my room. Your presence is still here, everywhere, your hand on everything. The photo albums I saved, stuffed with pictures, my first days of ninth grade and high school graduation, shots of you braiding my wet hair before bedtime and making goofy faces at the camera. An old, half-empty bag of henna powder in a ziplock bag, the last one you used to make my hair soft and shiny. Your prayer rug that I keep in a place of honor, draped over the bench that sat in front of your worktable where you kept your bird-watching supplies and journals. You always said you’d replace the s
carred worktable someday, but here it is, covered in your stray pen marks and smears of acrylic paint. It’s cluttered with the books that were in your study when you died—bird-watching manuals, Audubon’s Birds of America, a few Arabic ornithology texts I can only read the short sentences of. Everything I know of birds, I learned from you. When you were gone, I learned from these pages turned by your hands. These books taught me the names of birds in Arabic, things you must have thought you’d have time to explain. Your last sketchbook sits in the corner, a couple of your colored pencils still lodged inside as a bookmark, deforming the binding. I remove a pencil, and a photograph slips out onto the floor. It’s the two of us posing in front of my elementary school door: me in patent-leather Mary Janes and a polka-dotted dress you’d picked out for me, you with that unguarded grin that showed your gums, your arm pressing me to you as though you could fuse us forever.

  When you came with me to first-grade parent-teacher night, I was so excited to have you meet my teacher that I’d begged a friend’s dad to take this picture beforehand. You’d somehow gotten the money together for a private school. You wore your best silk blouse that evening and dressed me in a new outfit, hoping we’d both make a good impression. I had the sense, without being able to name it, that we didn’t quite belong. We arranged ourselves in front of the school’s wooden door, me tugging down my hideous dress while you laughed and hugged me to you, my shoulder curving into the space above your hip. We held the pose while my friend’s dad fumbled with the camera. We pressed into each other with the rise and fall of your breath. Then came the flash, blinding.

  I tugged you inside, the warm stripe of your touch still painted on my shoulder. Mrs. Wilson greeted us at the classroom door, the blackboard free of chalk and her can of pencils still full, a pristine leather handbag perched on her desk. Then Mrs. Wilson’s face twisted into shock, and when you started to speak, my teacher frowned and leaned in as though she couldn’t understand your accent. She forced a smile, looking from me to you and back again.

  “It’s lovely to meet you,” Mrs. Wilson said. “But I was expecting—well. It’s only that she looks so—”

  My fingers twitched in yours, our knuckles interlocked. You pursed your lips and knit your brows. Mrs. Wilson pushed her chin forward above my head and raised her voice, taking your unease for a lack of understanding.

  “She must look more like her father,” Mrs. Wilson said, slowing and separating her syllables. “You understand?”

  I dropped my eyes to the floor. You tensed and shifted your thumb against my hand, the nail scraping my skin like nicked leather.

  Then you smiled without parting your lips. “A colleague told me that once,” you said in smooth English, “when she saw the picture of us in my office, next to my master’s diploma.” Then you squeezed my hand and steered us away.

  You said nothing more of Mrs. Wilson that day. You shut the door that night when you ran the water for your bath, and I laid my head on the wood. I listened for the squeak of the faucet turning off and wished I never had to leave this little studio apartment again, tried to imagine a home where other people’s words couldn’t separate us as cleanly as any wall.

  I run my fingers over the burnished pine. I vowed I’d paint at this table after that day half a decade ago now, to honor your memory. But the sight of it made Teta cry, and I couldn’t paint at all when I sat down at it. Our sadness had seeped into the wood. Soon I couldn’t paint anywhere else, either. I’d just graduated art school when you died, but your death rendered all those years of planning useless. Art school had kept me away from home in what turned out to be the last years of your life, and though people told me not to blame myself, a dark thought took root: that painting itself had separated us. Every time I lifted a brush, the undertow of my guilt tugged me down. The following year, Teta fractured a vertebra pulling thistles from around your grave, and we discovered multiple myeloma had made her bones weak. Still, I nearly had to confine her to the apartment to keep her from returning to her gardening: she was adamant that the thistles were choking the roots of her roses. It turns out that even when you plant roses, sometimes thistles come up instead.

  Asmahan tangles herself between my ankles, the walls tighten with grief, and your memory threatens like rain. That burning stench begins to rise from the nails, from the carpets, from the floorboards, summoning the one moment I refuse to remember. I drag my fingers over the worktable, and the black scars of fire spring up across the burls in the wood, as though even the lightest touch of the living is enough to scorch the dead.

  I throw on my canvas jacket and my Converse. “Yalla bye, cutie.” I rub Asmahan’s chin, trying to make my voice upbeat. “Back in a few.”

  On the way out, Teta’s gentle snoring follows me from her bedroom. As I shut the front door, I turn the knob so it doesn’t click.

  * * *

  It’s because of your textbooks that I know so many birds by their Arabic names. Sometimes it takes a minute for the English to come, and other times it doesn’t come at all. There is no nightingale among my index of birds, only the bulbul; in Farid ad-Din Attar’s Sufi poems, Solomon’s confidante is called not the hoopoe but the hudhud, crowned by the other birds to lead them to the legendary Simorgh. Many of these birds I grew up naming without seeing. The cinnamon-colored hudhud with its crown of feathers, for example, isn’t typically found in North America, but the books you left behind taught me that the European and north Asian subspecies migrate across the Mediterranean to breed, and once, after reading about the hudhud’s migratory flights over the Himalayas, I dreamed of a flock of thirty birds emerging from a cloud bank, the gold of them as real as any photograph.

  I walk down to the Barclays Center and take the R toward Manhattan to Rector Street, then walk down to the tenement building at 109 Washington, where I’ve been working on a mural of a hudhud of my own. I avoid the gauntlet of catcallers near the subway exit, crossing the street to avoid a man who shouts repeatedly for my name, then my tits. The main thing, I have learned after more than a quarter century in this body and this city, is to keep moving.

  The lower West Side, especially near the 9/11 Memorial Museum and One World Trade Center, is crowded with souvenir shops, cafés, and bars these days. A couple blocks down from the new bone-white Oculus transportation hub, the new hotels stop and old brick buildings begin. The transition feels stark and surreal. What used to be a neighborhood of tenements inhabited mostly by Syrian immigrants is now nearly obliterated, much of it lost to eminent domain and the demolition that cleared the way for the Brooklyn–Battery Tunnel in the forties. The rest was brought down for the construction of the World Trade Center two decades later. Most of the inhabitants were forced out to Brooklyn’s Atlantic Avenue, others to New Jersey, Ohio, Michigan, and beyond. The only exceptions are this five-story tenement, still occupied and sporting a new restaurant on the ground level, and the community house connected to it, empty for years and recently condemned. The local historical society has been trying to get them declared landmark sites or a historic district for years, but with the exception of St. George’s Syrian Catholic Church, the white terra-cotta chapel next to the community house, they haven’t been successful, and the inside of the church is now home to an Irish pub. Eventually, these buildings, too, will probably be swallowed by the pace of development in Lower Manhattan. Despite all the work you did to try to save them, the history they represent has never been deemed worthy of protecting.

  The bars around the corner are filling with twentysomething finance-sector employees beginning loud rounds of beer pong. I leave the sidewalk and stalk through the empty lot next to the tenement and around to the back of the building. Back in the thirties and forties, this empty lot held a front and back tenement separated by a sliver of courtyard that functioned as an airshaft, providing ventilation and light to the two cramped buildings. The back building had already been demolished for years by the time you tried to save the front one, the older and more beautiful of the two t
enements on the block; what a waste it seems now. That second tenement, too, was pulled down just a year after you died. The scarred brick of the building next door and a weed-infested lot are all that’s left of your fight, a flattened piece of earth awaiting the construction of another high-rise hotel.

  You’d laugh at the way I look everywhere for reminders of you—even in the old community house, I still check the locks and try to get up the courage to slip inside. I haven’t succeeded yet. Maybe it’s for the best; though I’ve scoured newspapers and art history books about the painter you loved who used to live here, Laila Z has always remained obscure, reduced to a line I once found in an article about how she lived for a while on the fifth floor of the community house doing social work and providing “cultural activities” for recent immigrants, one of the few decent jobs a woman could get in those days.

  I’ve never dared to break in and look for signs of Laila Z’s presence. Tonight, like all the other nights I’ve come down here, I settle for the satisfaction of paint on brick. I pull out my chalk and sketch the next area of the mural I want to get done, the hudhud’s black-and-orange crown. I wind my bird around old spray-painted tags and crumbling, gouged wall. I know the risks, but it’s the only way I can paint anymore, the only time I’m not blocked. It’s my way of reminding this neighborhood of its past.

  I miss the city I knew as a child: the subway cars graffitied down to the last inch of wall or door, the rank phone booths, cigarette butts at the sidewalk edges, kids running through the fountains in Central Park in the summertime or dancing in the rainbows of busted fire hydrants. That Manhattan is invisible now, a city that lives only in the memories of those of us who were there.