Streams of Babel (18 page)

I sat up, my heart banging. Aleese turned her gaze and stooped over something—a dead body. I caught the dark silhouette of a man's head beside Aleese but slightly closer somehow. As Rain tossed her hair, I realized I was watching Aleese on television, and Rain must have helped herself to the videotapes in the box.

Aleese was squatting over a dead body lying in some sort of narrow alley.
Had she murdered someone?
My fears of the afternoon came back from when I'd first brought out that box. I'd fought off notions that she had filmed many dark things—she had done it almost compulsively. Her dying words, "
Take a picture of me,
" still haunted me. The camera cut closer to her, and
the shot was trembling, as if the cameraman were nervous or disgusted and forgot to be steady.

Aleese looked up again after closing the corpse's eyes with her finger and thumb. "Unfortunately, we can't film a smell, Jeremy. But we're here to report to Georgie: Cyanogen stinks worse than death itself. Jesus Christ..."

A man's voice behind the camera had a British accent. "Well, maybe we shouldn't be in here yet, Aleese. Maybe we shouldn't be breathing this nonsense."
What on earth had they done?
So, I had finally heard Jeremy's voice.
My father?
His formal British overtones would have been lovely without the corpse.

But I was appalled—at Rain for having helped herself to the tapes, at my mother for touching a dead body, at my mother for having been so secretive that I wasn't even prepared to defend her to Rain.

"What's cyanogen?" Rain asked, like I would have a clue.

Owen stirred from the couch, and I realized she was talking to him.

He mumbled, "Remember after 9/11, the history teachers switched things, so we studied terrorism instead of World War II?"

She nodded.

"Cyanogen is total poison. If you breathe in even a drop, you're ... no more," he said.

I stumbled to my feet, staring at Rain. I had never told off a person in my life except Aleese, but out of my mouth came a wheezing "Stop it!"

Rain misread both my tone and command. She hit pause. I
was left to see an unmoving shot of Aleese staring at Jeremy's camera—staring at me again—angrily.

Rain and Owen couldn't see my reaction in the dark, which probably allowed the conversation to play out so strangely. Neither of them gasped or jumped up or looked the least bit ashamed that I had caught them.

Rain said, "Gosh. Sure wish we had more footage of Mrs. E. I've been looking at photo albums at their house for three days. I would so love to see Mrs. E moving sometimes ... in some of her lawyer adventures, though I wouldn't guess they were
this
good."

I realized they felt that I had left the box on the floor for a show of respect to Aleese. And it was perfectly normal, even polite, for them to reach in and patronize it. I was still thunderstruck, but Owen picked up the conversation, as if my "stop it" remark was to pause and reflect on Aleese's "adventure"

"Cyanogen ... that's some of the stuff that Saddam Hussein supposedly used to kill all those thousands of Kurdish families in northern Iraq." He pointed at the screen.

"Your mom was in Iraq, Cora?" Rain's eyes glowed as they turned to me.

The two posters from the church service today were now in front of the mantel. I glanced at them before shutting my eyes. I could imagine this better in darkness. I hadn't had the time or the good health to consider how these posters changed things. I'd always known my mother had been as far as Beirut, but the knowledge had come with some images of her lying on a couch over there, high on drugs, and telling people to bug off in colorful terms. I opened my eyes to make sure the footage was real. Aleese still stared, frozen in that horribly searing gaze, and the corpse was faded in the background.

Owen said, "They're definitely Kurds. Didn't you see that footage in your history class, too, Rain?"

She shrugged, rambling on about Owen and me and the other "honors geeks ... No offense, Cora."

"Look at the head coverings" Owen ignored her. "Roll it, Rain. Those dead people, they're Kurds. Right, Cora?"

I drifted up closer to the TV and as I sat on the floor Aleese stood up, and Jeremy moved along behind her, panning the camera as they walked past a dozen or so dead bodies littering a narrow street.

Aleese pointed at a truck as she scanned the high walls. "If we get shot at, we'll dive under that truck over there."

"If we get shot at, I am on my way home." Jeremy's camera jerked and darted. "I cannot believe you dragged me across the border to do this. This isn't the, um, finance-the-orphanage type of stuff we're paid for, Aleese. Who's going to buy this disgusting footage on which we've spent our last dollar?"

I felt my chest loosening up, my spine relaxing somewhat, to the point where I had to put one hand on the floor to keep my balance. The other hand I brought to wipe away tears—and then cover my mouth, as Aleese exploded in her usual syntax.

"You can go the fuck home and shoot weddings if you're going to be a pin dick, Jeremy. We'll give it to ... Human Rights Watch, maybe. As for helping the children?" She went right up to a dead person hanging off the side of the truck she had pointed at earlier and picked the guy's head up. "How old do you think this one is? Fourteen? Fifteen? Bring the camera
closer, Jeremy. I got a message for Georgie." The camera zoomed, and the dead boy's blank face did look younger than ours.

"Hey, George. It's me again. Me and my dead friend, here. When inhaled, cyanogens disrupt the transfer of blood to bodily tissue. Symptoms include headache, nausea, chills, vomiting, and labored breathing. But that's all a moot point, because you're dead in three minutes. This ... this
boy
is obviously with his family, and they are obviously in this truck because they smelled something weird like apples and garlic, and decided last Wednesday's attack wasn't the usual gift of conventional explosives from Saddam. They decided they better get out of town as quickly as possible, and they may have gotten an eighth of a mile. His family took about as many breaths as the people in the gas chambers at Auschwitz."

She waved her hand in the air, and thirty flies left the boy's head. "Welcome to Halabja, Iraq, Georgie. Today is March 19, 1988, eighth year of the Iran-Iraq War. Let this footage profess:
More Kurds should be brought to America. They need asylum or they will end up like this. Give us their tired, their poor...
"

The screen faded to sand.

The part about Kurds needing asylum seemed new to me. It was not something we studied in history class—not that I could remember. Rain hit the pause button again. Then she slowly turned her head to stare at me.

"Damn, Cora," Owen breathed in awe. "Why didn't you ever bring this footage into school? Do you know how cool that is?" In spite of his illness, he chuckled over each word. "Your mother. Sneaked into Iraq. To film the Kurdish massacre. To help bring Kurds to America..." And he laughed some more.

"Who's Georgie?" Rain added.

"Boss?" I muttered, though I hadn't a clue.

Rain patted my arm for quite some time. My vision turned hazy with what must have appeared to be tears of grief. Maybe they were. I felt grievously ignorant of the world's problems. I also felt a strange calming, a coming together of a confusing universe.

I don't know why I had never dreamed my mother capable of anything heroic. I don't know why Oma had never told me stories of things like this, or why Aleese had hidden them from me. I would have wanted to be proud of her. I couldn't get past my stirring question.
Why didn't she love me?

I reached into Rain's hand and took the remote. Fever chills had returned, but I just let my jaw chatter. I rolled the tape backward to the beginning and watched it through again, watched my mother's passions run hot for the poor Kurdish teenager and cold for Jeremy's fearfulness, and hot for her little speech about getting Kurds to safety in America.

Rain rooted through the box, announcing the bad news that all the other tapes were beta or "newsroom" format and that we couldn't watch them on VHS. I didn't care. I could suddenly watch a tape four times and not care that two high school legends were watching me do it. I could let my teeth chatter out of control and not want to excuse myself to my room to be alone. I could slouch.

I could feel people coming into my house and not get all agog and unable to breathe. I could feel the floor rumbling under the weight of heavy footsteps, but I merely turned to look. Even when I saw Adrian Moran, Tannis Halib, and Jon
Dempsey staring down at me, I figured this could be a dream, and if it wasn't, it didn't matter so much. I gripped the remote tightly but didn't jump up.

Adrian said awkwardly to Owen, "Hi. We, um, found you."

And before he could think of better words, Jon Dempsey blurted, "So ... what are you guys doing
here?
"

I only flinched a little, but then turned my eyes back to the screen, and I enjoyed strange rushes from catching Aleese's eye every now and then as I tried to figure out what every little detail could possibly mean about my mother.

SHAHZAD HAMDANI
TUESDAY, MARCH 5, 2002
5:55
A.M.
KARACHI TIME

I WALK ALONG the shore at dawn, watching a few red rays break through the Karachi skyline far ahead. I struggle to remember some of my father's melodious words, which I tried so hard over the winter to forget. Often, he attempted to be funny while not losing his intensity.

"Shahzad, America is the country where one plus one equals nine! There, riches have been created via an influx of the tired and poor! How do they do that?"

His giggly speeches begin to return, though they are a poison to my chest. "
...and it is the land where the rights of the individual take precedence over the needs of the whole—and voilà! A miracle! Individuals don't selfishly beat each other all day long!
"

I trudge along kicking at little crystalline sea pebbles, and I pose to myself some difficult questions: Is America the tired and poor? Or is America the rich and haughty? Who is correct? My father or the extremists? The extremists don't think of
Americans as individuals, as my father did. They think of Americans collectively, and as something threatening, though the nature of the threat changes, depending on the group of extremists. But so many people try to get to America—from my country and every other country. What is the goal of the immigrants? To become corrupt and selfish?

Shortly after my father went to Six Flags Great Adventure and taped his ridiculous screams on the roller coaster, he visited Miss Liberty, the great statue. He uploaded with the photo his meager attempts to sing in tune: "
Give me your tired, your poooooor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe freeeeeeeeeeeee...
" My ears almost bled with pain and embarrassment.

Hodji had laughed with me. "Ha ha
ha ha ha.
That is terrible!"

But my father's tone was so sincere. He was trying to sing on key for once, for all these tired, poor people who took the Great Dare.

I was quite small when he made up that terminology. He often said there was no more terrifying experience common to man than daring to change
everything
—to leave all your belongings, your family, your house, your neighborhood, your habits, your family's thousands of years of sameness—to go halfway around the world for things you don't know.

"Shahzad, some people break down in grief and panic while boarding the plane to Kennedy, and some who are weak run off, go directly home again."

So, I wonder why people do not stay put. Why not be content with your neighbors and friends and family?

"
Shahzad, it's as if every person on earth is born with a statement in his heart: I am meant to be great. I am the child of some
king. The common man yearns to regain his royalty, and thus, he takes the Great Dare—
"

I hear heavy breathing behind me and I turn, thinking I will see ghosts. It is Hodji. I suppose he does not trust me to walk the beach and not end up hiding in the bowels of this village until the dreaded flight has left.

He is quite winded. He enjoys to borrow a Pall Mall from my uncle all too often these days.

"Do you know what America is to me?" I turn my eyes to the sea as the realization strikes me. "It is a blob on this map of the world my father used to download when we first tried the Internet, back in '96. I was ten years old. He would point out America, after this blurred map took six minutes to download. That's what it is. A bad smudge in some ridiculously low dpi."

I hear Hodji's breath run out in a way that sounds tired. He says with a yawn and exaggerated patience, "It can be dangerous down here this time of day."

Considering the work we do, his comment leaves me awestruck. I do not dwell on it. My father's philosophies always "rang" to me, like they should have lutes and cellos playing behind them. "Father said it is a great irony that a union built on trust should succeed, where so many iron-fisted rules had failed." I turn to Hodji again. "It all sounded so very majestic and romantic. Until he failed to wake up one day."

Hodji blinks tiredly at the sea. "So, we're blaming the Declaration of Independence for a broken gas line? Is that it?"

"Don't condescend to me, please." My uncle is not here to smack my hair to the other side of my head. It gives me a sense of power—a freedom to think about what is actually true. "I have had very little time in the past six months to think about
precisely why my father is dead. I just know that he is, and I'm feeling it right now."

"Maybe you
should
think about it," he mutters. "I've barely heard you mention your father these past six months. That's not normal. And as hard as you've been working for the Americans, it's a little odd that you can't dredge up one good feeling about going there. You're forgetting the whole point of this. Your aunt Alika called late last night. She's meeting us at Beth Israel Medical Center tomorrow, first thing. Well, in her mind it's first thing. She doesn't know about your meeting with USIC. She thinks you're coming to comply with your father's wishes about your education and that I helped you get a job. But anyway, you have an appointment with the best asthma specialist there. You'll be feeling much, much better from there on in. USIC will pay for the whole thing—"