Ken Hada is a fourth generation Oklahoman, descendant of Danish and Hungarian immigrants:
Gypsy poets, barn dance aficionados, art lovers, amateur philosophers, wheat farmers,
preachers, teachers and common-
“These poems, acting as spare parts themselves, go into the making of one smooth-
-
Author of Pushing the Bear
Queen Village | by Jeff Mark
The corner of the book is bent upward and about fifty of the pages are creased at a right triangle.
The book is otherwise in perfect condition.
The cover is glossed and smooth, paperback, depicting a nature scene with large embossed letters of an author below and silver foiled letters of a title above. The spine so perfectly binds the pages that the flat open end of the book is soft to the touch. Almost fluid. It has book smell. It’s weight is poignant.
But a blemish, the bend.
Fifty triangular corners.
A geometric flaw, wrought from deliberate carelessness in packing.
Protocol demands that such books are to be destroyed.
The employees are not allowed to keep them, even though they cannot be sold. Something about tainting the value of the book, decreasing marketability. Rogue damaged ex libris John Doe.
The conveyor belts hum their constant dissonance as he folds the thick-
Machines buzzing all around him, he looks once more, finds that no one is looking, and slips the damaged book up under his hoody and stores it in the lip of the fold. It is hard against his stomach.
On his end of the warehouse, books are packed and shipped to the publishers.
At the other end of the warehouse, they are made.
Typeface chosen.
Letters set.
Plates fabricated.
Drums rotate.
Ink coats.
Paper runs through, catching.
Signatures sewn.
Pages cropped.
Hard covers glued.
And in between the ends of the warehouse, books wait to be picked and packed on lined dusty shelves, a library under florescent light where no one is reading, and there isn’t an oak smell anywhere.
As the books go by, he runs his hands over the covers, focused to find any noticeable trouble with their construction. His job is superficial, in that he is only checking the binding, the cropped pages, the embossed cover. Whatever lurks within the pages, within the language of the literature, what is inside it all, is beyond his jurisdiction. He does not, perhaps can not, check to make sure the words are right. For him, it’s only straight spines and flat smooth edges. He imagines the people who stand as he is, but who get to open the books and look for the order of the words. Those who read the books to make sure the thoughts are straight, the punctuation correct.
Advanced college degrees.
Thin-
Trimmed beards.
High-
Red wine.
Book clubs.
The books glide by and their covers are so smooth that he swears he is watching a river flowing and is touching the baptizing surface. Ordered like small soldiers, weapons concealed Times New Roman, Courier, Arial; the books march silently, his hand touching each one.
He slipped the book that was to be destroyed up into his jacket when he thought no one was looking, but someone was. A small girl with dark skin and black hair long and loose saw him remove the book from its line and stow it in his jacket.
He notices her looking at him a few conveyors away, her hand also on a line of books passing and passing by. She looks down at his slightly squared stomach then back up to his eyes, the look on her face so impossibly neutral that he is unable to guess her intentions, either to turn him in or remain the silent accomplis.
Her face is so young. Her skin dark. Her eyes dark. Her face completely neutral but staring at his.
Her tiny thin hand held on top of the passing books with the grain, the covers passing by inspected and perfect.
He holds one hand over his stomach like a protecting mother.
His other hand he brings up to his face, the pointer finger extended up.
He places it to his mouth tip of finger to tip of nose and silently makes a mouth of shhhh.
She smiles and nods.
The lunch room is offset to the right of the countless shelves of books. It’s not really a room, but more an open space with lined tables and a few vending machines against the far cinderblock wall. A security desk separates the small artery between the main warehouse and the lunch area, in place to ensure nothing comes out. Except people.
People’s lunches look fake in the florescent light. Plastic. Everyone’s fingers have the orange grainy tint of bags of orange snack foods. A chess board sits on one of the tables unmanned. A few pawns missing anyway. The floor is smoothed cement and the walls are blocked cement; if it wasn’t for the steel structural beams spreading across the warehouse ceiling, it would feel like a mausoleum. From the outside, the building looks like a giant box with two loading docks like sinister eyes at each far end. On the inside, the grey stone looks ancient in the light.
He sits over his sandwich. One triangular bite missing from the corner. That one geometric subtraction from the sandwich enough to stall his demanding hunger and simultaneously remind him that he is tired of cheese and salami and mustard, the combination he’s been eating at this exact time, Monday through Friday, for years. Overtime Saturday’s during the Holidays. The top slice of white bread has three grainy orange streaks from where his fingers gripped the sandwich after he ate some of the bagged vending machine snacks. He stares at the streaks and rubs his fingers together, watching the orange particles descend like dust motes in the late afternoon horizontal streaks of setting sun.
He breathes in.
Out.
This is not an involuntary reflex. It is purposeful. Organized. Planned.
It’s coercive. Making his body draw air.
He picks up the sandwich again.
Cheese and salami and mustard.
White bread.
He bites. He chews. He swallows. He breathes.
He continues, then, to be alive.
Across the lunch area, the dark-
She raises her finger to her lips and makes the mouth of shhhh.
He smiles and nods, looking down briefly at his pregnant hoody.
She gets up and moves across the lunch area with her plate, negotiating the straight lines of tables, and sits down across from him.
He looks at the plate of steaming food she’d set down in front of her and her eyes follow his look down to the food.
“Hmph,” he chortles, arching his back. It cracks. The edge of the concealed book embossing a line above his navel.
He points to her plate.
“It smells good.”
“Thank you.” She stirs around her food. He can see that it is vegetables and rice, mixed together, but there has to be some spice or another in there, because the smell is so different.
“Did you make that?”
“This dish. Well, yeah,” she said, pausing, fork-
“I made this too,” he says, gesturing at the orange-
She laughs, “Impressive.”
He smirks and raises his shoulders, faux proud, and flicks the top of the sandwich. “I’ve perfected it over the years. Takes a certain amount of finesse to make the right sandwich. You really have to know it. The ingredients you know. The bread. Not just how they go but where they come from.”
She raises her eyebrows in a posing way, feigning interest at what was clearly sarcastic.
She extends her hand, “Roya.”
“Roya?”
“Roya.”
“Oh. Hmm. Hi. I’m Troy.”
“Troy?”
“Troy.”
“Oh. Nice to meet you.” They take hands and shake up and down.
“How long have you been here,” she asks.
“A couple years. You?”
“A few months. It’s neat isn’t it? Book making?”
“I don’t know. I’ve always worked in this end of the warehouse. I don’t really know much about how they’re made really.”
“Well, me neither I suppose. I just thought it was neat in general. That, I guess, that we’re in a place where books are made.”
“Do you like to read then?”
“Yes. I mean, I guess that’s why I took this job. Not really because I wanted to do it forever or anything. I’m just out of school. I. . .it was more of a romantic notion I guess, be where books are made. It doesn’t make sense.”
“No. I suppose it doesn’t.”
“Shut up.” She smiles. “You know what I mean.”
He doesn’t. “Yeah,” he lies.
“Listen,” Troy says, “about the book. . .” He trails off and despite the fact that there were thousands of books in hundreds of shelves behind them in the main warehouse, she knows exactly which one he is referring to.
“It’s okay. I’m not saying anything.”
“Good. Thanks. Good.”
She spears a stalk of broccoli that is colored brown and holds it up, making the
mouth of shhhh and blowing the steam from it like detaching the seed-
“What is that smell?”
“Do you not like it?”
“No, I don’t know, I mean. I mean, I’ve never smelled it before. What is it?”
“Qabili palau. Or a variation.”
He looks at her.
She continues, “It’s a traditional Afghani dish. What you smell are spices that I used. It’s usually with just carrots and raisons and some rice. Maybe nuts and lamb. But I like to use broccoli a lot.”
He looks at her again and then down at the dish.
“Do. . .do you want to try it?”
“No. Not really. I mean. We just met. I’m not going to eat your food.”
“It’s okay really. If you want to.”
“No. You want a bite? It’s salami and cheese.”
She laughs and the air from her lungs makes the steam from her plate lunge across the table; he catches a great whiff of the spices she used. “Tempting, but no thank you.”
“Mustard too.”
“No thanks.”
For a few moments, they eat some of their lunch. With only an hour to eat, some
of the time of break had to be spent eating. The lunch breaks are separated for
the different ends of the warehouse by an hour, so those who make the books are foreign
to those who package and send them to the publishers. It is like a great divide.
A Mosesean Red Sea. The two groups never interact. They never speak. Everyone
in the lunch area currently, then, is from shipping. Despite it being the same department
of the warehouse, few people actually know each other very well. There is a quick
turn-
Roya finishes her plate and leans back on her chair, arching her back in the same fashion that Troy did when she first sat down. It cracks.
“So, can I ask you a question?”
“Yeah. Shoot.”
“Why did you take the book anyway?”
“It’s cheaper than a Library Card.” Troy laughs at himself. “Besides, it was damaged anyway. Destined for the compactor.”
“So you take the damaged books?”
“No, not all of them, but sometimes. Sometimes I take them because I think it’s too much of a shame to waste them. To just throw something away. I mean, you know. You’ve seen it. Sometimes the damages are so small, and still, you know. We have to get rid of them. It just feels like there was too much work put into to just get rid of it like that.”
“Yeah, but, Troy, for every damaged book in the compactor, hundreds ship off to bookstores. It’s not really as if the work is lost.”
“Still.”
She takes a moment to let herself understand, “I see.”
The loud bell that always sounded like a fire alarm sounds, signifying the end of the lunch break. They get up and start making their way back to their section of the warehouse as the foreigners of the production department file into the lunch area, speaking the incomprehensible language of the other end of the warehouse.
“So, do you like to read, then?”
“Yeah,” he lies. “I like to read.”
The microwavable pizza revolves on the glass plate as the dulled light heating it with mysterious Universe energy comes through the translucent door and is the only light illuminating Troy's darkening kitchen. He doesn’t turn the lights on preemptively. As it grows dark, the apartment grows dark, and he runs into things before he realizes that he needs to turn on the lights.
The inside of his freezer door is lined with boxes of frozen pizza, always plain
cheese. The rest of his freezer is empty save for a couple trays of ice that he
habitually overfills, resulting in water spilling from the trays before they are
held captive in cubes and coating the bottom of his freezer in three-
Jumps that result in gravity.
Paper that results in cuts.
Spurs that result in cattle movement.
Action that results in equal and opposite reaction.
There’s a ding. Dinner.
Troy pulls the pizza out of the microwave by his fingertips, perhaps a little too soon, because he has to rush over to the kitchen table and drop it so it doesn’t burn him. The pizza catches the edge of the table and falls, flipping, face down, half onto the rug he keeps under the table and half onto the linoleum floor he hasn’t cleaned since moving in.
He didn’t clean it when he moved in, actually.
He stands there looking at the underside of the pizza, the dough, watching it hopelessly.
In the freezer door there are a few other pizzas he could pull out and try again, but he feels defeated. He’s tired in only the way a long day of not doing what you want to do can tire you out more than jogging a marathon. He leaves the pizza where it is, face down steaming, and moves over to the couch, hungry and tired, in the living room.
A room that’s not really a room at all but more of an open space to the side of his kitchen with no divider separating the two areas to suggest different rooms. Years ago, when he first moved in, he was feeling ambitious, and painted the living room walls a different color to give it the illusion of separation from the kitchen.
The illusion of separation.
Like oceans.
He didn’t really want the pizza anyway. It was the same thing that followed the
sandwich at work every night, and it was much more about caloric survival than it
was about enjoying the meal. Troy chided himself for not ever learning how to cook,
somehow prophecizing self-
But Troy was content with the way he was living. He didn’t like what he ate, and he waited just a little too long to turn on the lights, but in all, he was satisfied with his life. Content. He didn’t think life was really about accomplishment, but rather being content with whatever you did, wherever you were. Sitting on the couch with the television off, the day dimming and the apartment lights still off, the pizza smell coming from the kitchen and tickling his stomach; he leans back and smiles. This is the life. Alone, hungry, in the dark. This is the life. The mechanism most people have, the fight or flight that disallows people to stay in one place for too long, is disabled in him. The apartment, the job, the light, the microwave, is all his. A pittance, but all his nonetheless.
He reaches over to the coffee table and picks up the book he took from work that day. He rights the triangular folded pages to their proper place and rubs his thumb on the white cracked bend of the cover. Although folded back, the pages do not seem to want to rest smoothly on their neighbors. They seem to twinge with excitement at returning to the deviant triangle.
He opens the books and peers at the words words words.
He doesn’t read them, he looks at them.
Runs his fingers over the finish.
Pulls the pages up to his nose and takes a long drought of the cold smell.
Flips the pages in a wing flutter.
Squeezes the cover shut tight to feel how hard paper becomes compressed. Back to wood.
Troy opens to the first page and takes a deep breath to begin reading. There is just enough light left to traverse a few pages. Also on the coffee table, is a case with his glasses. He removes them and puts them on. He clears his throat as if he were at a recital. He widens his eyes as if to stretch them. He looks down at the first word of the first sentence of the first paragraph of the first page.
Then he shuts the book.
He goes over to the bookshelf in the corner of the room and places the book, alphabetically, with all the other damaged books from the warehouse. No copies.
As he falls asleep on the couch, he thinks he hears the microwave ding again, but knows this is impossible.
He wakes up and realizes he never had to turn the lights on. It was morning already and outside it is a beautiful beautiful day. The sky bright through the blinds illuminates his whole uniquely colored living room and he stretches his arms high above his head over the end of the couch. The wall clock says he has a couple hours before he has to be at work. He immediately thinks about making his sandwich and collecting 75 cents from around the apartment for an orange snack. The bookshelf of unread books stands floor to ceiling, a scratch mark on the ceiling where he had to force it into an upright position. It fit exactly. The books, now weighing it down, have left a centimeter of space between the ceiling and the top of the shelf, but they are all unread.
Troy turns on the television, and it is what it is.
Queen Village is quiet this morning and every morning. The sneakers hanging from
telephone wires pendulum sway with the breeze, memories of long walks, worn leather
and childhood territorial claiming, like dogs pissing. The streets are so old that
they’ve warped under the weight of cars over the years, creating rounded waves of
concrete that undulate on either side of oil-
Troy negotiates the neighborhood via the smaller side streets, with his hands drawn into his hoody pockets. The side streets are so narrow that most couldn’t fit a car’s width, and some are cobblestoned the way they are imagined to be in the days of colonization. The days of traveling and claiming land. The conjoined houses are not uniform, but hold distinct features, either in the color scheme of the door and shutters, or the brickwork designs, giving the entire row a motley technicolor display that reminds Troy of small European streets, maybe in Italy or France. Or, more accurate, how Troy would presume European streets would be, should he ever see them. The warmth of the side streets is like that of his hoody pockets, and he feels swallowed in the metropolis and open as if in a countryside. In the distance, the buildings reflect bright glares of the sun, but at his feet, he feels alone in a vast outdoors where everything is quiet and right. Where everything is what it is.
Early morning breakfast smells drift into the side streets, so varied that he imagines himself in a buffet. Troy walks down the center of the street, knowing no car could fit, with his hands in his hoody pockets, his mind distant.
The morning’s news report.
Troy doesn’t watch the news.
It was on every channel.
Flipping through with his remote, it was the same image, again and again.
And again.
Grilled into his eyes, lashed across his back.
The images.
Bound like Polaroid photographs tied tight to the front of his face with harsh twine.
Even shutting his eyes, they were there.
Burned into his visual purple like claw marks in sand, washed over and over by the break of ocean waves but not dimming in the slightest. Not filling.
Charcoal-
He steps over the warped crests of blacktop and continues on to the next side street. No one is outside, but everyone is cooking breakfast.
When he turned his TV off, the images were still burned into the grey of his screen. So he pulled on his hoody, and left. Queen Village is as quiet as it is every morning. But it isn’t as it is every morning. The bricks are different. The hanging shoes. The vacant garden lots. The smells. All different. Skewed in some way. Distorted. Violated. Cracks are more noticeable in walls. Weeds are more noticeable sprouting from the sidewalk at odd angles. Chainlink fences droop in wide bows, keeping nothing in or out.
The air is harder to draw.
The sidewalks are creaking under his weight.
And because he could not think of anything else to do, Troy walks back home, fixes his lunch sandwich, and leaves for work without 75 cents.
At the warehouse, others have come in also. The people came in, but didn’t clock in. They sit in the lunch area, both members of production and shipping, for the first time together, watching the TV suspended from the ceiling in the corner of the room. Troy walks in and sees the same images. They fit his memory perfectly, so that when he looks up at the TV, the image behind his lids is replaced with its exact replica on the screen. He sits down at no particular table with no particular person, and watches the screen silently. The warehouse makes no noise. No books are bound. None are shipped.
The lunch area is mostly empty but for those who could think of nothing else but to do the commonplace. To go to work. To try and find any shred of normalcy still left in the world.
For a few hours, Troy alternates from watching the TV to watching the faces of his
co-
People in suits appear boxed in the corners of the screen. Their mouths move but the volume is on mute. Or perhaps the sound doesn’t work on the TV. There’s never been sound. Troy reads the lips of the man as he’s been accustomed to learn sitting in the lunch area day after day and watching the silent TV like a silent movie. Outside of the boxed man are the images.
Again and again.
And again.
But it occurs to him, sitting there with his hands in his hoody, not getting paid for being at work, at a table with strangers, in a room with strangers, production foreigners, that his thoughts drift over and over to steaming broccoli and rice.
He looks around the room for Roya.
But she is not there.
The warehouse did not operate that day. Troy went home and kept the television off. He allowed the sun to set and the light to leave without turning on any of the lights in his apartment. The next day, he went to work as normal, because that was what everyone was doing. Going about normally.
Heads slumped a little lower.
A lot more eye contact.
The warehouse was printing and binding books as if it didn’t know any better. And of course there had to be people running the machines. There had to be people stowing the books in the hundreds of library shelves. There had to be people retrieving the books from the shelves and shipping them to the publishers. So there were. The warehouse was in full production as if nothing had ever happened. The only difference was the fact that something had happened.
Over the next few weeks, Troy ran his fingers over the passing books, watching for any abnormalities. Straining to see anomalies on any cover pages, or spines, or leaves. The monotony of his job helped him focus; the florescent lights of the warehouse muting everything inside to a fine grey scale that gave the appearance of fiction.
Troy enters the lunch area and sits down with his sandwich at a table with a group of people from production and shipping. These days, the workers get together at lunch. The company had to change the lunch schedule of the warehouse to allow for the demand the workers were making to want to eat lunch at different times.
To talk to as many people as possible.
As many humans as humanly possible.
So they began asking their bosses if they could take the second lunch break, or the first, depending on which department was asking, and eventually, the warehouse went into a swing lunch schedule, where each employee would alternate lunch hours on different days, so the lunch area would always seem to have a diverse collection of people.
Troy doesn’t know why there was such a demand for lunch time talk among the employees of the warehouse, but he couldn’t deny that he was also yearning for conversation. He would often sit with Roya, asking her about the various foods she was bringing in, joking with her about his lackluster cooking skills. They didn’t sit together daily, as they were on different lunch schedules, but he always looked forward to that conversation. The accident when their lunch coincided.
Today Roya is on a different lunch shift, so Troy sits with a group of people under the suspended TV. Lately, based on the TV’s speculations, there has been a lot of talk about blame. Workers in production and shipping sit around and argue about everyday threats that a few weeks before, were inconceivable. Troy does much to do nothing during lunch but when he is nudged on the arm by a coworker he asserts his point by registering an agreeing guffaw that provokes smiles and snarls and back claps and table pounding.
“Hey, boys” says a largely built short man with a bald head covered loosely by pulled-
Troy's hair rises on his arms. His neck.
His stomach churns the cheese. The salami. Mustard and white bread.
The denial bald man continues, “Yeah. That little girl in shipping. The brown one. She is, I heard, I think she’s one of those Afghanis running around.”
There is a chorus of noises, base communication. Some affirmations, some denials.
All orange fingertips.
“Yeah” says another, “Troy, you’ve sat with her before. That girl that always eats the, you know, eats the, what is it? The rice things with all the whatever. That girl. What’s her name?”
Troy shifts position in his seat. He can’t lie. He knows they know she sits with him on occasion at lunch. They’ve probably seen him laughing. But he can’t comprehend how they’d ever suspect her of anything. The thought of it is absurd to Troy, but he has to be a part of this group. He needs to be a part of this group.
“Roya.”
“Roya? See, I fucking knew it” says the bald man.
“Knew what?” asks another.
“That she’s one of them.”
“Wait. You. You think she’s one of them? She works in a warehouse man. What she gonna do?”
“I’m just saying,” the bald man continued, “I’m just saying that you have to look out for that. I mean, we weren’t looking out before. I mean,” he gestures up at the suspended TV and everyone, including Troy, makes a quick head gesture to look up and the screen (images) and then back to the speaker, “and it’s all I’m saying.”
One of the other guys at the table says to Troy, “So what of it man? I mean, is she, you know?”
Troy blows on the top of his sandwich as if it is hot and he’s trying to cool it down. The conflicting forces inside of him accelerate crash test automobile in his stomach: his need to sit with these people at lunch, his need to protect her. To protect her?
Did she need protection?
“No. I mean. I just sit at lunch with her. I think, but I think she’s cool. I don’t even know if she’s really from there.”
“From Afghanistan?”
“Yeah,” says Troy, “I don’t even know if she’s from there.”
“She is,” said the bald man, “look at her.”
“Okay, but still,” says another.
“All I’m saying,” the bald man says, “is that we have to look out here. If you think this is the last of it, you’re dead wrong. I’m telling you that. Dead wrong. This is the beginning of something. And I’d rather be sitting here with my eyes open watching than get caught with my thumb up my ass a second time.”
A new round of guffaws issued their agreement from the table. Troy didn’t think there was anything to worry about with Roya. He knew her. He knew her during lunch breaks, where you really know a person. There was something in their conversations, in the look in her eye, that made him know there was nothing in her that was close to what they were suspecting. She was fine. She was okay.
But he affirmed with a guffaw anyway.
The following weeks brought interment.
Questioning.
Deportation.
Military strategy.
Street violence.
Snarled mouths.
In airports, everyone was suspect. It was worse, the darker your skin.
Fingers pointed.
Inhuman voices accused.
No one was anyone enough outside of this to be secure.
It was all enveloping.
Fovea focal point.
Heavy headline.
Bold.
Underlined.
Italicized.
The TV seemed to have only one channel.
The most predominant feeling, shared by everyone on city sidewalks and in rows of
common corn in Midwestern towns with populations of less-
That things fall apart. Every things.
Even things we build that we expect to linger beyond our time. Love. Art. The Colosseum. Time softens just about any permanent thing.
Troy goes to work feeling vulnerable and returns home feeling vulnerable. He looks over his shoulder; he grinds his teeth at night. Queen Village is the same neighborhood it’s always been, but this disturbs him. It should be different. It shouldn’t have the same feeling, the same quiet. The empty side streets need to change, to fit the difference that is now the world he lives in. But it remains the way it always has. Stone ignorant to what people are doing in other cities. This neighborhood, like every other neighborhood, a collection of people all vulnerable but together, fighting for normalcy. Fighting to be the same streets in the same blocks with the same homes in the same city. And when he turns corners, he expects to see things burning. He expects to see flames jumping from the roofs of rowhomes, making dinner candles of the streets. He almost smells the singe. He almost feels the heat.
But, turning the corner, there is nothing but everything there was before.
After work, Troy walks quickly through the parking lot; it’s getting cold and the brisk air of the dash from the warehouse to his car is enough to make him lose his breath. Only when he’s in his car rocking with the engine running, the heat on high blowing cold air through the vents until they warm, does he get a moment to calm down.
He places his hands over the vents, protecting himself from the cold jets of air rushing at him, and presses the accelerator of the car to rev the engine in the hopes of expediting the heat.
He looks over to his right, through the passenger window, and there is Roya in her
car. By the time he gets out of work, it is sunset. It only takes a few moments
before it is dark. In the purple-
Troy shuts off the engine, gets out of his car, and jogs over to the passenger side of Roya’s car, without thinking. He bends down and looks in the window at her as if asking permission. She nods. He enters and sits down next to her, shivering and moaning the solid sounds of being caught off guard by the quick shift of the weather.
Her car is warm.
She’s been in here a little longer.
She laughs at him shaking in the passenger seat.
“Hi,” he says. He adjusts himself to face forward but looks over at her with a
pursed-
Roya coughs into a balled fist. “So.”
“Are you okay?”
“I. Yeah. I am,” she says. She makes no attempt to dry the tears from her face, but just stares out through the windshield. She turns on the headlights and two bright streaks illuminate the white painted wall of the outside of the warehouse. “I’m okay.”
They both look out of the windshield at the wall. It is blank and empty. Inside are thousands of books. The contrast of the temperature of her car is so great that he begins to feel uncomfortable consumed by his jackets. He shifts around uneasily in his seat. The engine revs and he can’t see her feet but knows she is pushing.
“I know what they are saying.”
“What?”
“I said I know what they’re saying.”
“Who?”
“Please,” she says.
“Okay.”
“I know what they’re saying. You can tell by the way a person looks at you Troy. They don’t have to say a word. It’s just the way they look at you.”
“How are they looking at you?”
Roya shakes her head back and forth, black hair following and whipping back with inertia. “I don’t know. You just have to see it. See the way they’re looking. They don’t smile. They don’t scowl. It’s a neutral look. The most neutral look I’ve ever seen. It’s like, when they see me. Like when they look at me, their faces just go limp. It’s like their scared of me. Their faces all limp.”
She blinks and that forces a tear to fall from her right eye. He can’t see if the same happened to her left because she continues to stare straight ahead and his neck is beginning to hurt looking sideways.
“I don’t think they’re scared of you Roya.”
“Why would they be?”
“I don’t know. I mean. You know. With what happened. People just don’t know how to react. And then the news and all.” His sentences are on rapid fire. “I don’t know. People are just scared. They feel vulnerable. Roya. I don’t think anyone really feels. I don’t think they think, well I don’t think at least. . .”
She looks over at him. “I’m not really upset about them,” she says. “And I’m not really upset about what people yell at me from passing cars when I’m walking on the street. I’m not really upset about people whispering to each other when I walk by. Troy, I went to a restaurant in my neighborhood, my neighborhood, and they asked me to leave because some customers where feeling uncomfortable. My neighborhood Troy, a restaurant I’ve eaten at.”
These are things he didn’t know. These are things he couldn’t know. In his revelry on vulnerability, his side street walks expecting to see things on fire and general anarchy, he didn’t for a moment think that he was otherwise okay. That he wasn’t harmed. He wasn’t physically hurt. That a line was drawn in the sand and he was safely amidst the majority that cracked their collective knuckles behind it.
“I’m not even upset about that.”
“Then. Then why are you so upset Roya?”
She turns back to look through the windshield. He has only known her for a short while, but there was nothing wrong about her. He was sure of it. Nothing at all wrong with her. At all.
“I might be deported.”
Her engine revs higher.
The streams of heat from her vents increase in temperature and he can feel sweat converging on and dripping down his sternum.
“What?”
“I could be deported. I was questioned.”
“Wait. Roya. What? I don’t understand.”
“I don’t either.”
“But what do you mean deported? To where?”
“Afghanistan. Where I was born.”
Somewhere, the bald man is nodding his head.
“Okay. But you live here now. I mean, don’t you have papers?”
“No.”
The realization of it hits him hard. The blow hurts.
“Oh.”
“I was born there and brought here as an infant. But my father never got citizenship. And when he and my mother died, I was alone.”
“But. . .”
“I don’t know how it works Troy. What my father did. But he changed our last name. We had IDs, birth certificates. Social Security numbers. I thought I was a citizen until just before he died, when he told me I wasn’t.”
“So you’ve been living here illegally?”
“Don’t say it like that Troy; you make it seem like I’m a criminal. Like I’ve done something wrong. I didn’t do anything illegal. I was brought here as a baby.”
“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean. I’m sorry.”
She takes a breath to calm down and says “It’s okay.”
Something occurs to him, “Well, if you’ve been living here for so long, how do they all of a sudden know that you’re here ille. . .that you don’t have papers?”
“It seems, now they have a reason to know.”
“So. What? They’re just going to deport you to Afghanistan?”
“They may.”
“Do you know anyone there?”
“No. My family hadn’t returned since we left. I never knew anyone there. My parents never even taught me the language.” Full emersion.
“So you just have to get on a plane and land there? That doesn’t make any sense.”
“I know. I don’t know what to do. I don’t know how it works. All I know is that I was brought into a room by men who wore guns and they told me that I was under investigation and that I faced deportation. Then they asked me all kinds of questions Troy.” She begins to cry again and her voice elevates, “They asked me all kinds of questions. Questions about. . .about it Troy. I’ve lived here all my life. My parents didn’t even teach me their native language. I don’t know anything about the country.”
“You know about the food,” Troy says, a jovial comment he intended to calm her down and make her feel better with, but it doesn’t work.
“If they send me there, I don’t know what I’ll do. Where I’ll go. How can I survive there?”
“Wait. Roya, just calm down. Wait a second. It’s not set in stone now okay? It is unreasonable for them to send you away. You didn’t do anything so it wouldn’t make sense.”
“There isn’t a lot that makes sense right now Troy.”
The truth of what she said sticks with him over the next fifteen minutes where neither look at each other or say a word.
The car is warm and Troy unzippers his jacket. He doesn’t know what to do, but he knows he isn’t supposed to leave just now. He isn’t supposed to get out of her car and go home. Walk away. Walk back around his neighborhood where everything is so different but he can’t tell anything is different just by looking at it.
The parking lot is empty except for their cars and her headlights. It is getting late and all the other employees are back at their houses watching the news.
“If they try to deport me, I’ll run,” Roya says to break the silence.
Troy sits there but doesn’t respond. He thinks about what she eats at lunch. He tries to remember the name of it but can’t. She is okay, he tells himself over and over. She is and she’ll be okay.
She doesn’t look at him, but says, “I need a place to go.”
Images.
The television floods broken dam with them.
Dominoes fall, bullets fire.
More things fall, more things fire.
Anthrax scare.
Subway scare.
Airport scare.
The worst thing about feeling safe is that you let your guard down.
Tensed muscles.
Clenched jaws.
Lines drawn.
Knuckles popping.
Freedom, liberty, the pursuit of happiness.
Roya enters Troy's apartment and thinks it is a lot less messy than what she thought
it would be. It is a stereotype, young men who live alone. She expected overflowing
trash bins, rotting food on the counter, dirty dishes in the sink. She thought for
sure there would be an unmade bed, beard trimmings in the bathroom sink, smells.
A pull-
Stereotypes.
But when she enters she sees an apartment that’s reasonably ordered, at least to the common eye. Things are in their places. The trash bin is shut tight; there are no distinct smells coming from it. The bed is made with the comforter smooth laid atop the sheets. The sink is empty. There is no perceivable chaos to Troy's apartment, but Roya notices the small things. The dust on a night stand. The dotted toothpaste spots on his bathroom mirror. The finger smudges on a window. Things that aren’t noticed on a first pass through. Troy is orderly but allows things to be. Dust collects. Smudges remain.
If the apartment was messy, if it was what she expected, she could feel comfortable. But something about the order of it, the perfection, makes her anxious. Or, it’s the circumstances of her being there. She doesn’t know which. All she knows is that standing there in the middle of the kitchen, Troy's back to her getting two glasses of water, she feels like she is being squeezed. Like she is being compressed. Compacted. All the little bits of her forced into a small square of garbage. A damaged book.
Troy said she could come over, maybe spend the night if she needed to. To calm down. To relax. He said she could have the bed. She insisted on the couch, assuming he had a couch. But she agreed to come. To be with someone. Someone who wasn’t afraid or angry or both, at her.
In the kitchen, water filling the glasses, reality hits her and she realizes she’s standing in a coworker’s kitchen.
“I’m. God. I’m sorry,” she says.
Troy turns around and hands one of the glasses to her while sipping on his. After he swallows, he asks “Why?”
“I’m sorry. I mean. I don’t know why I came here. Why I said those things. I’m just being paranoid. It’s been hard. Lately, things have been hard.”
Troy stands a good distance from her, a distance he would consider comfortable. He is at the divide between the living room and the kitchen, the invisible barrier that separates the two wall colors, and Roya is at the opposite end of the kitchen, up against the refrigerator. They look at each other.
“Look,” he says. “It’s okay. I don’t mind really. Listen, do you want anything to eat? I don’t mind you being here. I mean, if you don’t want to be alone, that’s understandable.”
“They were just so serious.”
“Who?”
“The men who questioned me. I thought it was a joke. I mean, how could they think. . .I don’t know.”
“I still don’t think they’re going to deport you Roya. It really doesn’t make any sense.” He moves over to the refrigerator and she gets out of the way as he reaches for the freezer door and opens it. The cold air that comes out of it chills the kitchen a bit and she shivers still in her jacket. He pulls out a box of pizza and closes the freezer door, tugging at the end of the box.
He goes over to the microwave and sets it. Pulls the pizza out of the box and places it inside the oven. “I hope you like cheese.”
She smiles.
They wait for the ding.
“Well look. I have sweat pants. They’ll be big on you. You can borrow a T-
“Thank you.”
“It’s no worry really.”
“We just don’t know each other very well.”
“It’s not a rule that we have to.”
“Yes.”
“So there’s the couch. Obviously.”
He takes the pizza out of the microwave and transitions it to the counter. He cuts it in two and divides it onto two plates. He gives one to her.
She is grateful.
They eat their halves of cheese pizza.
He brings out one of his pillows and a blanket for her to use and puts them at the end of the couch. Roya stands by the bookshelf, perusing the titles. “Are these. . .?”
“Yeah.”
“All from the warehouse?”
“All damaged.”
“Hmph.” Roya runs her hands over the titles on the shelves like she is back at work, checking for distortions. They exist on every one and there is a nostalgia in the movement of her hand. It stops on every book and is tempted to withdraw it from the shelf and throw it in a pile destined for the compactor. Her hand remembers a time when this was its job, and that is all it had to worry about. But she is not at work; she is in Troy's living room, looking at his bookshelf.
“I haven’t read any of them,” Troy says.
“What?”
“I haven’t read any of them.”
He walks over to join her at the bookshelf. Looking up at the titles, he remembers each theft vividly, each damage. Torn covers.
Bent pages.
Smeared ink.
Upside down cover.
The occasional misspelled word that stopped production entirely.
“You haven’t read them?”
“No. Not any.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know really. I want to read them. I always wanted to be a reader. I just can’t.”
“Oh. I see.”
“No. It’s not that. I can read. I mean, I’m literate. I just can’t sit down and read a book.”
“Why can’t you?”
He withdraws a book from the shelf and flips through the pages, feeling the smooth finish. He lifts the book to his face and smells it; she doesn’t think this strange. Book smell. That library smell. Bookstore smell. Brand new book warm off the press smell. She knows. “I don’t know. When I start reading. Immediately, I mean. Whenever I start to read a book,” he shakes his head and lifts his shoulders simultaneously, “I get distracted.”
“By what?”
“Anything. Just whenever I start to read, my mind wanders to other things. I begin thinking about work, or what I’m doing with my life. Or what I’m having for dinner. Or, you know, things like that. Whenever I sit down to read, whenever I open up a book, I just start thinking of everything other than the words. So I end up closing the book and never reading it at all.”
“That’s strange.”
“Thanks,” he says sarcastically, smiling.
“No. I don’t mean. I’m not saying you’re strange. It’s the phenomenon that’s strange. That you can’t clear your mind and just read the pages.”
“I know. I haven’t quit. I’ve tried.” He gestures at the bookshelf in front of them, the hundred damaged books. “I plan to read them all one day. One day.”
“I love to read. That’s why I wanted to work in the warehouse.”
“You said it was romantic to be where books are made.”
“It is, in a way. Just in the sense that they are there. That the books are there, and people will read them. And in some way, I’m part responsible for that.”
“I wish you’d be responsible for getting me to read.”
“Hmph. Well, you never know.” She takes the book from his hands and flips through the pages. In the middle of the book, there is a series of blank pages that were bound into the book by accident. “Maybe, instead of things distracting you from reading, reading should distract you from things.”
“Maybe,” he says.
And they were talking about reading damaged books, but Roya was no longer crying. The images had momentarily gone. Their coworkers, the restaurant in her neighborhood, the side streets, the hanging shoes, the vacant lot gardens, the images images images, were gone.
And she slept on the sofa and he slept under the covers of his daily kempt bed.
After bad storms, in the times of calm, of inventory, of checking to see what was lost and what remains, of sifting through rubble for valuables (a photograph of a person, a person), there isn’t a lot of action. It’s as if everyone’s plot lines pause momentarily to allow for the comprehension and resolution of the storm’s damage and what it means that nature could, at any given moment, if it so chose, blow us away. Most bad storms have a calming effect on a place. When they’re raging, the sky grey yellow, people retreat indoors and stare dramatically at the violence of it. Respectfully, people admire the beauty of its destructive force. When the storm has passed, people go outside and smell the remnants of rain, the moist ground waterlogged smell, and sift around for things the storm took.
This is after most storms.
In some cases, when things are lost, when rubble has to be sifted through, there
isn’t a calm respect. Plot lines move violently forward, their own self-
But storms are never caught.
They may be chased endlessly, but they are never caught.
They are nature. Perhaps human nature.
Troy and Roya didn’t speak about it the next morning, or the next, but she didn’t leave. Troy expected her to go to work with him the next morning, but she didn’t. He went alone. When he came home after, he expected her to be gone, but she wasn’t. She was there. Reading. And so like unpredictable weather patterns, Roya was there the day after and the day after, camping out, hiding out, in Troy's apartment, without ever discussing it or knowing it was what she was doing.
She didn’t feel it was hiding, she didn’t know if she was being sought. Troy didn’t feel like he was doing anything wrong. It was a strange happenstance, surely, but neither thought to question it. She became a constant at his apartment, and it was fine all around.
They didn’t watch the news. If they had, they’d have seen reports of deportations. Suspicions.
Profiling.
Security.
Neighborhood violence.
High school kids getting beat up by high school kids.
Accusations.
Shock and awe.
War.
Bumper stickers.
After a storm, the water saturating the ground evaporates and rises back into clouds, collecting together to be strong and united, but when the rain gets to heavy for the clouds, it begins to fall independently again.
What they would do is sit in his living room after dinner, and read. On the couch that was Roya’s bed, they would read damaged books. It occurred to Troy about halfway through a book, that he was reading. For the first time that he could remember, he was reading a whole book. A distraction in itself, he let himself realize this for a moment before turning his attention back to the words, not before looking over at Roya, whose face was in the indulged reading position, her eyes almost concerned. Her jaw a bit slack. Her fingers rubbing her chin with tactile intellectualism. They read, every night, as if nothing was going on in the world.
One day when he came home from work, there was a unique smell that met him from the front door.
“Quab. . .?” he asked.
“Qabili palau. I thought you’d like to try it without having to eat from my lunch.”
“So that means you went out?”
“Yes.”
“Okay?”
“Yes. I went to a specialized market. The kind that has these spices,” she gestured to the counter where many neatly ordered spices stood in a line, “and vegetables and stuff. Most of the people that shop there and work there really wouldn’t think anything of me.”
They ate Roya’s dinner and another the next night. She began teaching him. Frozen cheese pizzas were freezer burned sitting idle for so long. Troy and Roya were on an evening schedule. He’d come home from work, they’d cook something he’d never seen, smelled, or tasted before; and they’d read until it was time to go to sleep. Roya on her couch and Troy on his bed.
It was the most natural unnatural situation of both of their lives, but Troy found himself thinking about it while at work. Running his fingers over damages in the conveyor belt, he thought of the unique smells that lingered on his clothes. He thought of the adventures he was taking in the books he was reading, connecting the words to the book smells.
One evening, Roya said, over her book, “If my parents came to America a couple months earlier, I would have been born here, and none of this would have mattered.”
Troy didn’t take this as an insult. He knew she was reflecting on her situation, not their time together.
He took her keys and went to her apartment. He collected a large selection of her clothes and brought it back to his.
At work, he’d watch the muted TV in the lunch area where some of the workers banged on the table at the repeated images images images and he ate his inconspicuous sandwich with something of guilt and pride mixing within him.
Roya and he would talk about borders over dinner. Imaginary lines drawn on maps that dictated more than origin, that dictated personhood. Allegiance. Self. Boundaries of separation.
The illusion of separation.
Like oceans.
Nationality. Like genetics, something you were born into.
If they needed something, Troy would go out and get it. Roya was just fine in the apartment and nowhere else, to the point where she almost forgot why she was staying there; she knew little of the cobbled side streets outside. She didn’t want to think of herself as a fugitive, as someone hiding from something larger than her, and after her. Together they lived simply, without acknowledging that what they were really doing, was ignoring what the side streets outside were ignoring, everything. But their world was enough for them. There was no system, no organization. It was their plot lines running parallel, the storm hammering on and on outside.
Troy walks passed the security desk and nods at the rented guard sitting lazily
and glaring over the heads of those walking in an out, the illusion of observation.
The lunch area is especially full, hundreds of orange-
Troy takes his seat among some coworkers from shipping that he is now familiar with. The bald man is one. “Hey Troy,” he says, looking straight ahead at the stage, “least it’s an hour off, right?”
Troy nods.
The warehouse manager had called a meeting with everyone to be held for the first hour of work. It was paid. Nobody really knew what the meeting was about, but everyone knew. Kind of. It was some sort of address, duplicated by warehouse managers, school principals, politicians, and parents all over the country: this is what is, this is what we’re doing, this is what you can do.
The bald man leans over and whispers in Troy’s ear despite the fact that the meeting hasn’t yet started and the crowd’s united voice is rumbling the snack machines set on the adjacent wall. “You know what Troy, I’ve been meaning to ask you. That girl, that Roya girl. You remember? She used to work here. What do you think happened to her?”
Troy doesn’t know what to say. He wonders how pungent his clothes are. Before he has to answer, the warehouse manager walks onto the stage and toward the microphone, quickly hushing the crowd.
“Hello everyone. Times like these make for interesting decisions. . .”
And then there were sixty minutes of expected words jerkily moving around an analogue clock.
After, when the workers get up to start work, the bald man turns to Troy again, “So anyway. Waste of time. Anyway, yeah I heard something. I mean, first, it’s kind of strange that she just didn’t show up for work right? I mean, I know you were friendly with her, but one day she’s here, and the next,” he makes a backhand swipe with his hand, “gone.”
“Yeah,” says Troy, “I don’t know.”
“It was weird right? So I was talking to Nick over in production at lunch the other day and you know what he tells me?” The bald man talks sideways at Troy, glancing around like he’s in a mobster movie. Like he has covert information.
Troy shakes his head even though he knows it is completely unnecessary.
The bald man continues, “He tells me that he knows one of the soldiers down at the Navy Yard who was questioning people, right. And he mentioned that Roya was brought in for questioning. Turns out, get this, she doesn’t even have papers. You know? She’s not here legally.”
“Oh,” Troy says, attempting to feign surprise, knowing full well that he’s not succeeding. Workers slip by them in steady file, aware of nothing but their destinations. Still, the bald man isn’t finished, so in the way people talk not for conversation but to say whatever they’re thinking, he continues.
“But that’s not everything. I mean, there are a lot of illegals here. That’s no big deal really, let’s be honest. But I thought it was still a little telling that she just stopped showing up. Right? Well, Nick tells me it’s true. A, that’s she’s from Afghanistan, and B, that her father had been linked to insurgent activities back there and that’s why they came to the US, to get away from it. Apparently they changed their name and. . .”
But Troy doesn’t hear the rest of the sentence. He looks at the spot just above the eyes of the bald man, where he can feign looking at him without the bald man knowing he’s not looking at him at all, and factors everything he has just heard. Roya’s father linked to insurgency? What did that mean? He thinks of her sitting on his couch reading a book and wonders. Her father died, but if he was somehow related to what happened, then Roya would know about it.
And she certainly didn’t tell him about it.
She was sitting at home, perhaps reading. Perhaps making calls. Hiding.
“Wait,” Troy says, “he was what?”
“I don’t have any details,” the bald man says, still looking around suspiciously, “but Nick said he was somehow related in some of the stuff that goes on over there. You know what I mean. That he had something to do with the stuff they do. The training, or something. It’s in the Army records or something. I don’t know. He’s dead now apparently, but still. Roya. I mean, it figures out right?”
“Come on man. Seriously. You don’t believe that.”
“Why not? Why wouldn’t I believe it?” The bald man arches his back and looks up into Troy’s eyes for the first time since they rose from the meeting. “There’s a lot of things I wouldn’t have believed before. I’m not saying nothing. I’m just saying that it’s something to think about. To look at. That’s all. I mean, she’s gone anyways right?”
It stunned Troy, standing there talked to the bald man. Nick knew a soldier. Any thought that the information was wrong was trumped by this. Roya said it herself: “Now they have a reason to know.”
“Yeah,” Troy said to the man.
“Anyway.”
A terrible pang of guilt was rising in Troy’s stomach. Right now, in his apartment, he was hiding an Afghani woman without papers who was a fugitive from the United States government and whose father had something to do with insurgency. There were too many coincidences to ignore. Too many signs that he was ignoring.
The images repeat over and over in his head.
A news reel.
Image.
Image.
Image.
And he thinks, for a second, that he could be involved. He could be hiding someone involved. Part of him could be responsible. And at this moment, there is nothing more important than finding out who is responsible. Than punishing those responsible.
“I’m just saying,” says the bald man, “it’s fucking crazy. And I’m not too sure she’s not out there hiding somewhere. Nick says they haven’t been able to locate her. I’ll bet anything, anything Troy, that she knows something. I’m not saying she did something, but she knows something.” The inflections in his voice are so sharp that for a moment, Troy thinks the bald man is suggesting something. Suspecting something. Maybe that this lunch break conversations with Roya led to something else.
“I’m just saying Troy, it’s crazy to think about.”
And Troy agrees. He heads back to work with a searing heat in his stomach, a kind that would not allow him to eat his sandwich at lunch that day.
The cobbled side streets have worn since the first feet put pressure on them years
ago, but their general look is the same. Polished from years and years of footsteps.
Snows and heat waves. Bicycle tires. Scraped children’s palms. The spinning tumble
of the Earth moving round and round. Some are loose, but they are not taken. Out
of respect for the dead, revelry for the past; out of an unknown and unspoken agreement,
laid stone is left alone. Untouched but for boot soles, strode upon in the middle
of the night or afternoon. To test the cold weather in the morning. To hug a friend
goodbye. The stones remain, firm or loose in the ground. Polished. Together making
a side street, a street illuminated at times by the sun, and at times shadowed in
the early-
Troy walks the side streets slower than he ever has before. It’s dark, as dark as it gets. Winter dark. He upturns the collar of his jacket and shoves his fists deep into the pockets of his jacket. Some of his steps totter on loose cobblestones, but he is otherwise unimpeded in his progress down the street. Down another street. The old European streets, with ivy growing up brick fronts and potted plants letting their leaves down from window ledges. Troy walks the side streets of Queen Village, all except the one that features his front door.
In the wind, sneakers swing from an archaic telephone wire. A relic from the past hanging from a relic from the past. It’s cold enough for snow but there is none.
He knows, eventually, soon, he’ll have to go home. To return to his apartment and talk and eat and read. But that’s not all. There’s more. More he must do.
He must look into brown eyes and wonder.
He must question.
Her.
Himself.
Her name, so like his own, but born from somewhere else. And it could be. It may not but it could be, and that is enough to worry. The planted seed sprouting its taillike and frightening vegetation, rising through soil to sky. Right now, the way things are, even the idea that it could be true is too much.
He contemplates calling someone. The government. The police. The Navy Yard. Someone. What he wants is for someone else to discover the truth, someone else to figure out if she had anything to do with it. He knows her; knows her food, knows her conversation. He’s seen the difference in his apartment. The dust gone. The toothpaste specs cleaned from the bathroom mirror. Papers ordered. Troy feels like he knows Roya well, but why wouldn’t he? Is it so hard to believe that she’s fooled him? That she needed a place to stay, to hide? That he wasn’t vulnerable enough to take the bait?
He shakes his head as if to remove the thoughts from it. No. She is fine. She is okay. Whatever Nick said. Wherever she’s from. It’s coincidence. He knows her.
But there’s a chance.
And that is enough.
His inserted key doesn’t turn in the cylinder. He twists it back and forth and it doesn’t move. In the cold, sometimes, it does this, and for minutes he’ll turn it back and forth as if creating friction to warm the lock. The mechanism clicks from the inside. The door pulls back and Roya stands there with a wide smile on her face, the smell of something from the kitchen filling the apartment like gas and presenting him with what would normally bring him immediately to the kitchen. But even though he couldn’t eat lunch, it does not make him hungry.
“Come in. You’re late. You okay?” Roya asks.
“Yeah. Okay. Yeah.” Troy responds as he steps over the threshold and begins to unzipper his jacket.
“I’ve kept it warm.”
“Oh. I’m not hungry really.”
“Not hungry? Troy, you’re always hungry after work. Where. . .”
“I’m not hungry,” Troy says again more fervently, his voice rising just enough to silence her.
“Oh. I’m sorry. It’s okay. I mean, well, it’s warm if you get hungry.” She pulls one of her long bangs back behind her ear and adds, “I waited.”
He doesn’t respond. Troy turns to the door and shuts it, turns the lock and fashions the chain.
“Okay. Well. I’m going to go eat Troy. I’m hungry. I’m sorry.”
“Why?”
“Why?”
“Why are you sorry?”
“I. Oh, I don’t know. I’m sorry. I feel like I irritated you.”
“No. I mean. I’m sorry. Too, I guess. I didn’t mean to be mean. It was a long day at work, you know.”
“I see. Yes.”
She gives him a closed mouthed smile and retreats into the kitchen to fix herself a plate.
Troy goes into his room and sits down on the bed. In a neat pile are clothes that she’d laundered. The pile in a precise square, the edges of the shirts sharp and aligned, a perfect book that would glide by his critical hand unnoticed, undetected.
He gets up and walks out of his bedroom and straight into the kitchen. He sits down across from Roya at the kitchen table and when she looks up at him from her steaming plate, he just stares back at her eyes.
“Hi,” she says, but she knows. She knows because the look on his face is a look she’s seen before. Roya puts down her fork and says, “No.”
She shakes her head back and forth very slowly. Film slowed down over a projector. Seconds lasting more than seconds. “What happened at work?”
Troy doesn’t answer her question. He shakes his head in rapid little jerks, the opposite of her long and slow oscillations. “Is it true?”
“What? Is what true?” Roya begins to feel nervous. She’s heard it before. And at the table there are two people shaking their heads, the question of truth between them repelling them like repulsed magnets hovering apart.
“Your father.”
“My father?”
“Your father.”
“What about him?”
“Don’t Roya.”
“Don’t what Troy? Don’t? Troy I don’t understand. What happened at work?” Her voice is more concerned. Panicky. Louder. Higher in pitch. She places both of her hands flat on the table, a sign of submission, earnestness, and leans forward across the table. “What happened?”
“What happened? Roya? What happened? What do you mean what happened?” Images
images images. “You know what happened. Everyone knows what happened.” Despite
the incendiary nature of his words, Troy’s voice is low. It is calm. He is lie
detector flat-
“The stone?”
“The stone. They were supposed to leave the stone alone. But they moved it. And I want to know. Roya, I want to know. Did you know?”
“Did I know? Troy.”
“I want to know if you knew Roya. Tell me. Please.”
“Know? Are you asking me if I knew it was going to happen?”
“Did you?”
“No. Of course not. Troy, please.” Her eyes began to shine in the light. “No Troy.”
“You didn’t?”
“I didn’t.”
“Tell me about your father.”
“What do you mean Troy?”
“Your father. What was he involved in?”
“Troy stop it. My father is dead.”
“When he was alive. Back there.”
“I was a baby there. You know that.”
“You told me that.”
“What?”
“That’s what you told me.”
Roya draws her hands from the table to her mouth and covers it with a fingered cross, her hands like the shadow puppet of a bird. Her eyebrows squeeze together and angle down.
“Troy, I’m alone.”
“Is that why you’re here? Because you have nowhere else to go? Because you’re hiding?”
Roya hesitates. She looks back into his eyes. Her brown eyes at his blue eyes.
Her brown skin at his white skin. Her black hair at his blond hair. Worlds away
across a kitchen table. Imaginary borders. The illusion of distance. Geography.
She emits a sound that sounds half like a sob and half like a startled drawn-
“Did you know Roya?”
“What do you think of me?”
“Did you know?”
“Do you think I knew Troy?”
“I don’t know what to think. Tell me you didn’t know and I’ll believe you.”
“No you won’t Troy.”
“Please.”
“I already answered you. Do you think I knew? Do you think I had something. . .that I did something? Troy? Do you think that of me? Do you really think that of me?” As she speaks her head cocks to the side, the black hair falling from the side of her face. “Do you?” she whispers.
“Yes. I do.”
And Roya stands up. Looking at Troy, she stands and calmly pushes her chair back under the table. She goes into the living room and puts a few articles of clothing into a bag. She walks to the front door, removes the chain, and for the second time this evening, unlocks the front door. She turns to Troy. Still sitting at the kitchen table, he looks at her. Watches her. Not suspicious, just aware. Aware of what he’s done. What he’s said. Doubt is planted again. This time, it’s doubt in what he’s said. But what he’s said he has to live with, because some things can’t be taken back. So he looks at her. She opens the door, slowly leaves, and shuts it behind her. Troy looks down at the table top, Roya’s dinner still steaming peacefully from the plate across the table from him.
They moved the stone.
Troy passes the aisle where white bread is stacked. He passes the deli counter, the cheese and salami still blocks of cheese and salami. He walks passed the condiments, the mustard rowed with other mustard.
He walks to the spice aisle, roots around, and picks out what he needs.
Spices he is running low on.
Names he could not pronounce a few months ago.
An aisle he’d never been in.
Like landing in a foreign country for the first time, and realizing how like home it really is. That, despite oceans, people do the same things. React the same ways.
In the little grey basket hanging from his arm are small dispensers of spices that the market very seldom has to place reorders for, as they are so seldom bought. He makes his way to the cashier and stops for a moment to look at a tangle of strings that are pulled taught against gravity by balloons that hang upside down. He untangles a plain blue balloon and walks with it and his grey basket to the cashier.
He pays and walks through the automatic doors outside.
It is snowing.
White, unifying, equalizing snow. Covering everything with the same depth of ordinary white. The breath of his lungs warmer than the air outside becomes visible when he exhales, streams of it curving in on itself as it escapes his mouth.
Damaged books. Torn covers and folded pages.
Unread.
Compacted.
Valueless.
Different. Flawed.
Troy stands just outside of the entrance and exit and slowly walking through the snow from the parking lot to the market are a little girl and her mother, hand in hand. The little girl has such dark familiar hair. Dark skin. Deep brown eyes that have seen images images images. The mother and daughter enter the overhang of the market and stomp their boots on the sidewalk to get the snow off. They look at each other and smile.
As they approach the entrance, Troy moves a bit to let them pass, but before they do, he bends down and holds out the string to the little girl. Tentative, the little girl looks up at her mother. Troy also looks up at her, silently asking if this is okay. The mother nods once at Troy, once at her daughter.
The little girl reaches out and takes the balloon.
“What do you say?” the little girl’s mother asks.
“Thank you.”
Troy stands up and smiles down at her. “You’re welcome.”
The mother and daughter enter the market and Troy faces the falling snow, takes a deep breath, makes the mouth of shhhh, and exhales.
