A Life in Men: A Novel (55 page)

The body remembers violence. The shoe in his ribs is no different from the trainers that kicked him in primary school, only larger, as his body itself is larger to accommodate the greater violence now, the greater malice. There is no question of getting to his feet and fighting back the way he tried to as a boy; since he is already on his knees, face to the ground, his assailants do not need to topple him but only, quite literally, to kick him while he’s down. Hasnain’s arms have gone up round his head, though it takes all his will to keep them there—to shield his face, his skull, rather than allow his hands to fly to the areas being attacked. If he leaves his head unprotected, it could be the end of him: one sharp jab, even accidentally misplaced, could be all it takes. He hears grunting noises coming from his throat, feels the jacket under his shoulder sliding on the slippery tiles with each blow. His vision is blocked by his arms, so that he cannot see his attackers, caught only the briefest glimpse when he tried to rise at the door’s squeaking, before the first kick landed in his stomach and he doubled over, gone.

Camel-fucking murderer!

String you up and let the families cut off your dick and shove it down your throat!

Other voices, too. The din of a crowd forming: curious and unsure. If he were in Brooklyn he would say to Leslie,
Well, of course they didn’t know what to think. A dark-skinned man performing a secret Islamic prayer in a toilet, versus two middle-aged white men in business suits—given the events of the day before, the crowd would not know whose defense to rush to, would they?
Still, some
are
rushing to his—he hears them through the tinny tunnel that has become his consciousness, everything drifting from afar, flickering weakly like Morse code.

Get off him—stop it!

Somebody call security!

I know this man—I know him—leave him alone!

His assailants are being restrained now, restrained not by men who look anything like he does but by other white Americans, by a hefty African American man who, in Brooklyn, Hasnain would probably cross the street to avoid. A gaggle of women led by Rebecca have pushed their way into the bathroom and help him to his feet. The white tile beneath him is stained with splotches of blood that he realizes—to his horror and surprise—he has coughed up. One of the restrained men screams at the others, “Yeah, pat yourselves on the back for your liberal delusions when he slits your throat in your sleep or blows this place sky-high!” and another man shouts at him, “Shut up, asshole, you think this is any way to honor the dead?” Hasnain blinks rapidly at the blackness closing around him, coughs a mouthful of blood onto the floor.

He thinks,
Are there even camels in Kashmir, or only nuclear weapons?

And then the blackness is everything.

T
HE DAY HE
took Nicole to Heathrow, they had slept not at all. In his brand-new flat, the first he had ever paid for on his own in twenty-four years, they’d stayed up all night, talking, making love. It was a shabby place, cheap, all the way in North Islington, a mainly Afro-Caribbean neighborhood. Nicole had arrived with all her belongings, most of which she would now bring back to Ohio for two weeks before returning to him here, in London, where they would await the baby’s birth in early June. After that, who knew? They spoke sometimes of going to India or Morocco, where he had relatives, of finding some kind of humanitarian work, of taking the baby and just disappearing, but even such a plan took money they didn’t have.

He was waiting tables at another restaurant, the only work he knew. His parents had never paid him wages—there was no need, since they always bought him everything he needed. Now his mother was not speaking to him at all. His father expressed sympathy, but as in all things, he toed Hasnain’s mother’s line. She had come to London at sixteen to marry a friend of her uncle’s, nearly fifteen years her senior but an educated man of ambition. Though she herself had little formal education and had been brought up merely to serve her man, her upbringing, as is the case with certain irrevocably strong women, simply hadn’t
taken
—she had always ruled her husband, their restaurants, and their home with an iron fist wrapped in a silk glove. She was still lovely, often taken for his older sister. She had grown up persecuted among a Hindu majority, so London had paradoxically strengthened her Muslim pride. She had no use for Baba’s interest in Western pastimes and predilections—no use for an American girl or, it seemed, for Hasnain now. He had never mentioned Nicole’s pregnancy: not their fabricated tale much less the truth. He had been written off even
without
it, dismissed as a fool who was throwing his future away—and who could argue? Here they were in North Islington, among new immigrants, preparing to bring a child he could only barely support into the world. They would marry as soon as possible so that Nicole could work legally, but really, what could she do? And they would have to pay for the baby’s care. It was an insurmountable situation, one that he knew rarely ended well in practice.

He had never been happier in his entire life.

They had stayed up all night, talking, making plans, making love, which her doctor insisted was perfectly safe. Nicole was drowsy on the ride to Heathrow but fought to keep her eyes open, clutching his hand so that he drove with only one. “I feel,” she said softly, “like when I get home no one will recognize me. I feel like I’m another person now, like all those years I was there I was wearing a mask and it’s finally off, but they won’t understand that—they’ll think this is a mask, now.”

It frightened him when she spoke that way. What if what she wore
was
a mask, born of trauma and heady expatriatism and pregnancy hormones and youth? What if she landed on US soil and woke up like one who had been sleepwalking? What if she never came back to him?

“I’m worried about you,” he said, kissing her hand. “I shouldn’t have let you stay up so long at a stretch—it isn’t good for the baby.”

“You’re good for the baby,” she said, and in her smile he saw truth, the only truth he had ever recognized, and knew she would come back—come home to him. “I’ll sleep on the plane.”

F
OR ONE MOMENT
then, like students hiding out in the hallway in the middle of a church dance, these two not-friends, not-lovers, in-New-York-merely-acquaintances will kiss. Hasnain and Rebecca, he just barely conscious again and wandering back from having had his injuries checked out; she waiting for him so as to tell him that the men who jumped him have been relocated and he doesn’t need to worry about them now. For one moment, this is all there is: the dark night of a small town invaded by shell-shocked foreigners; the pain in his ribs, his groin, his back; the hunger in her to feel something life-affirming, to remember desire; the crumpled bulk of Nicole’s letters stuffed deep into his pocket, and this—this kiss. It doesn’t last long. In Hasnain’s broken condition it escalates to nothing else, though maybe it would not have anyway: he has never cheated on Leslie and suspects, though he is not sure why, that Rebecca has never cheated on Alan. Still, for the moment there is the taste of her in his mouth intermingled with his blood: her blond hair—streaks of white gray at the temples—inside his hands. Her Jewish American blood as devoid of the history of her people as he is removed from the nuclear stalemate between India and Pakistan, playing itself out on the soil of his father’s kin. Yet for that moment he savors in her the taste of another exile for the first time in many years—the taste of another woman who has known irrevocable loss.

Then it is over, and Rebecca turns and walks back into the church basement, where she has a cot, and Hasnain heads back upstairs to his pew and sleeping bag.

H
AD
SHE SLEPT
on the plane? Had she been, then, asleep when it happened—blown to oblivion while under the deep cloak of dreams? He has heard the stories: tornado winds tearing the clothes right off passengers’ bodies; lungs expanding to four times their normal size; passengers still alive as they fell from the sky; mothers found clutching their babies’ corpses. He has spent the nights writhing in his bed imagining her eyes—her hands reaching out for him, only to come back empty, then rushing to her stomach to shield the child she loved already, the baby she could never possibly protect from this world.
Please, please, let her have been sleeping, let it have been fast
. Let the dream of their improbable, magical future have been the last thing ever to float through her head.

And for lack of anything else left to give him, let us agree that we will leave it at that.

F
OR A FEW
brief hours, he plans how he will finally send the letters to her mother. He will find out, somehow, if she still lives at that address and deliver these last remains of her daughter, maybe even in person. He will finally explain. He rehearses conversations in his head all day, waiting in the crowded solitude of the church basement or gazing out at the isolated vastness from the town’s rocky shore. The baby he planned to raise shared the same blood as that bereaved woman, and only now, thinking of his sons, can he bring himself to face his youthful arrogance in resenting her. Only now can he see that they are partners on an eternal journey: his boys, himself, and the grandmother of his child who never was, the woman whose womb ferried Nicole to life’s shores. But by nightfall, already, he has abandoned his plan. He was right, all those years ago—if for the wrong reasons. Nicole’s mother is better off unaware. If he could somehow find the Mary of the letters without notifying anyone else first, that would be one thing, but he has no surname or address and the task seems impossible. He was right to bear the burden and the treasure alone all these years. It is too late to find Nicole’s long-gone girlhood friend now.

On September 11, 2001, all over the world people went about their ordinary business of being born and dying. Time waits for no media loop. Mere hours before the towers fell, before Hasnain’s flight was grounded, in a Johannesburg hospital Joshua’s wife, Kaya, gave birth to their third child. At daybreak in Columbus, Eli woke stiff on a plastic couch in Diane’s room on the oncology ward, her breasts now part of a long past they shared and would never see again. In the twilight of peacetime America, Kenneth stood on the manicured lawn of an affluent northern Atlanta suburb and summoned the courage to ring a doorbell, unaware that by November his son would be deployed to Afghanistan. In Querétaro, Gabriella raced to help her aging mother to the toilet, while in their new home in Santa Fe, Daniel and Esther slept through a ringing phone, having debated in hushed tones late into the night about whether to comply with Esther’s sister’s wishes and send their thirteen-year-old son to live with her in Spain. So it happened then that their son was the one to take the call from his middle-aged not quite brother Leo’s boyfriend, Sandor, phoning from Marrakech to report that Daniel’s biological daughter, Mary Rebecca Grace, had died in the arms of her husband, her mother and brother gathered bedside.

But of course, Hasnain knows nothing of this.

O
N THE FLIGHT
back to New York, the airline crew will stay out of their way. All the passengers will know one another’s names by then, will walk up and down the aisles boldly, drinking and laughing as if on a charter flight to a tropical island. On the flight back to New York, Hasnain will see neither his bathroom assailants nor the three Muslim women, but the two fellows in their Islamic dress and long beards will still be present, smiling through their language barrier, friendlier than before. Over the next days and months, tales will continue to filter in from Gander: how one American family arrived at their Canadian host’s home to find a full Thanksgiving dinner prepared for them; how others arrived at an evacuated school to find the high school band playing “God Bless America”; how countless residents of Newfoundland approached the “plane people,” as they were called that week, thanking them for—despite anything Leslie believes—all America has “done for the world.” Though Hasnain and Rebecca will have seen each other over their remaining days in Gander, they will not have shared another kiss, and now Rebecca is on a different flight entirely. Once they land separately, Hasnain knows that, New York not being Gander, it is entirely possible—probable, even—that they will not cross paths again. Susan’s lessons are on a day he no longer teaches, and soon enough she will be a teenager, consumed no doubt by other less beautiful, more urgent pursuits than studying piano. On the flight, Hasnain does not drink the champagne the other passengers have brought on board and dispensed with the help of the crew, but he will meet the eyes of the two men with their long beards and say to them, “Assalamu alaikum,” and they will respond in kind without taking him for an imposter or even registering surprise. And in New York, Leslie will be waiting for him with open arms, into which he will all but collapse as she gasps over his limping and his injuries, and his boys will try to hang on to his arms and Leslie will admonish, “No, careful, Baba is hurt, can’t you see?” but he will hold his arms out to them and let them swing from them like from the branches of a tree, resolving fruitlessly, pointlessly in a world such as this, never to lose them, never to let them scatter as he did from his parents, his brother, even though if he had it to do over again he would do exactly the same thing. And so here, at last, he is home: my beloved Hasnain standing in the middle of JFK Airport, thirty-seven and twenty-four years old at once, remembering me with the echo of Rebecca still on his lips, and with all the faith and hope he once believed irrevocably stolen from him, holding on to his family and looking ahead.

I’m so sorry I didn’t tell you about the baby sooner. But within only a matter of hours you’ll see me for yourself and then you will know. Then your hand will touch my stomach, touch her life inside me, and I will begin, if you’ll let me, to explain how the worst of all possible fortunes can somehow turn into something beautiful. I will start my campaign to get you to come back here with me and find a beauty of your own—to where these letters are waiting for you, to where the world is scary and huge and without limits. I hope so badly you will come. I can’t wait to tell you everything.