he could see the marchers in front of him, read the printed words in his hand.
Mourn the Dead. Heal the Wounded. End the War.
“Give yourself a break. Walk now, read later.”
He said, “Yeah right.”
“If you’re trying to match what you read and what you see, they don’t necessarily match.”
He said, “Yeah right.”
This was a new thing, the two drawled words of breezy dismissal. She pushed him toward the sidewalk and he drank his soda in the shade with his back against a building wall. She stood next to him, aware that he was slowly sinking down along the wall, a gestural comment on the heat and long walk, more drama than complaint.
Finally he came to rest in a tiny sumo squat. He sorted through his literature, spending some minutes looking at a particular leaflet. She saw the word Islam at the top of the middle page in the fold, followed by an 800 number. This was probably the leaflet he’d taken from the woman in the black headscarf. She saw words in boldface, with explanations.
A troupe of elderly women marched by singing an old protest song.
He said, “The Hajj.”
“Yes.”
He said, “The Shahadah.”
“Yes.”
“There is no god but Allah and Muhammad is His prophet.”
“Yes.”
He recited the line again, slowly, in a more concentrated manner, drawing it toward him in a way, trying to see into it. People stood nearby or shuffled past, marchers straying onto the sidewalk.
He recited the line in Arabic now. He recited the line, she told him it was Arabic, transliterated. But even this was too much, an isolated moment in the shade with her son, making her uneasy. He read the definition of another word that referred to the annual obligatory fast during the month of Ramadan. It made her think of something. He kept reading, mostly in silence and sometimes aloud, sticking the leaflet in the air and waiting for her to take it when he needed help pronouncing a word. This happened two or three times and when it didn’t happen she found herself thinking of Cairo, some twenty years earlier, the vaguest shapes in her mind, herself among them, stepping off a tour bus into a vast crowd.
The trip was a gift, graduation, and she and a former classmate were on the bus and then off the bus and in the middle of some kind of festival. The crowd was large enough to make any part of it seem the middle. The crowd was dense and streaming, sundown, taking them along past booths and food stalls, and the friends were separated within half a minute. What she began to feel, aside from helplessness, was a heightened sense of who she was in relation to the others, thousands of them, orderly but all-enclosing. Those nearby saw her, smiled, some of them, and spoke to her, one or two, and she was forced to see herself in the reflecting surface of the crowd. She became whatever they sent back to her. She became her face and features, her skin color, a white person, white her fundamental meaning, her state of being. This is who she was, not really but at the same time yes, exactly, why not. She was privileged, detached, self-involved, white. It was there in her face, educated, unknowing, scared. She felt all the bitter truth that stereotypes contain. The crowd was gifted at being a crowd. This was their truth. They were at home, she thought, in the wave of bodies, the compressed mass. Being a crowd, this was a religion in itself, apart from the occasion they were there to celebrate. She thought of crowds in panic, surging over riverbanks. These were a white person’s thoughts, the processing of white panic data. The others did not have these thoughts. Debra had these thoughts, her friend, her missing double, somewhere out there being white. She tried to look around for Debra but it was hard to do this, swing the shoulders free and turn. They were each in the middle of the crowd, they were the middle, each to herself. People talked to her. An old man offered her a sweet and told her the name of the festival, which marked the close of Ramadan. The memory ended here.
He recited the line in Arabic, by syllables, slowly, and she reached down for the leaflet and did her version, no less uncertain, only quicker. There were other words he handed up to her and she pronounced or mispronounced them and it made her uneasy, small as it was, reciting a line, explaining a ritual. It was part of the public discourse, the pouring forth, Islam with an 800 number. Even the old man’s face, in memory, in Cairo, brought her back in. She was in that memory and on this sidewalk simultaneously, the ghost of one city, the frontal thunder of the other, and she needed to flee both crowds.
They rejoined the downtown stage of the march and listened briefly to someone speaking on a makeshift platform in Union Square. Then they went into the bookstore nearby and wandered the long aisles, in the cool and calm. Thousands of books, gleaming, on tables and shelves, the place quiet, a summer Sunday, and the kid went into a bloodhound imitation, looking and sniffing at books but not touching, his fingertips pressed to his face to create sagging jowls. She didn’t know what this meant but began to understand that he wasn’t trying to amuse her or annoy her. The behavior was outside her field of influence, between him and the books.
They rode the escalator to the second floor and spent some time looking at science books, nature books, foreign travel, ficcion.
“What’s the best thing you ever learned in school? Going back to the beginning, to the first days.”
“The best thing.”
“The biggest thing. Let’s hear it, wise guy.”
“You sound like Dad.”
“I’m filling in. I’m doing double duty.”
“When’s he coming home?”
“Eight, nine days. What’s the best thing?”
“The sun is a star.”
“The best thing you ever learned.”
“The sun is a star,” he said.
“But didn’t I teach you that?”
“I don’t think so.”
“You didn’t learn that in school. I taught you that.”
“I don’t think so.”
“We have a star map on our wall.”
“The sun’s not on our wall. It’s out there. It’s not up there. There is no up or down. It’s just out there.”
“Or maybe we’re out here,” she said. “That may be closer to the true state of things. We’re the ones that are out somewhere.”
They were enjoying this, a little tease and banter, and they stood at the tall window watching the end of the march, banners lowered and folded, the crowd splitting, drifting off, people moving toward the park or into the subway or the cross streets. It was amazing in a way, what he’d said, one sentence, five words, and think of everything it says about everything there is. The sun is a star. When did she realize this herself and why didn’t she remember when? The sun is a star. It seemed a revelation, a fresh way to think about being who we are, the purest way and only finally unfolding, a kind of mystical shiver, an awakening.
Maybe she was just tired. It was time to go home, eat something, drink something. Eight or nine days or longer. Buy the kid a book and go home.
That night she sorted through her father’s collection of jazz records and played a side or two for Justin. After he’d gone to bed she thought of something else and took a jazz encyclopedia down from the dusty upper shelves and there it was, in six-point type, not only the year but the month and the day. This was Charlie Parker’s birthday.
She counted down from one hundred by sevens. It made her feel good to do this. There were mishaps now and then. Odd numbers were tricky, like some rough tumble through space, resisting the easy run of what is divisible by two. That’s why they wanted her to count down by sevens, to make it not so easy. She could descend into the single digits most times without a stumble. The most anxious transition was twenty-three to sixteen. She wanted to say seventeen. She was always on the verge of going from thirty-seven to thirty to twenty-three to seventeen. The odd number asserting itself. At the medical center the doctor smiled at the error, or didn’t notice, or was looking at a printout of test results. She was troubled by memory lapses, steeped in family history. She was also fine. Brain normal for age. She was forty-one years old and within the limited protocols of the imaging process, pretty much
