So it took its toll. It did.
When Pam balked at adoption—“We’ll end up with our own crazy Annie Day”—he had been troubled. When she balked at insemination from a donor, he was troubled further. The relentlessness of the situation seemed to finally loosen the weave of their marital fabric. And when he met Ted, two years after Pam moved out (two years during which she had often called him in tears about stupid dates with stupid men), he saw that Pam, with her strong mind and splintering anxieties, had meant what she said: “I just want to start over.”
Pam was twirling a strand of hair around her finger. “So what happened with Sarah? Do you ever see her anymore? Are you guys broken up broken up? Or just taking a break?”
“Broken up.” Bob drank his whiskey, looked around. “I guess she’s okay, I don’t hear from her.”
“She never liked me.”
Bob gave a small shrug to indicate she shouldn’t worry about it. In fact Sarah, who in the beginning thought it was so pleasing and civilized that Bob and Pam (and Ted and the boys) all stayed connected—since her own ex-husband was evil—had come to resent Pam tremendously. Even if weeks went by when Bob and Pam didn’t speak, Sarah said, “She picks up the phone whenever she wants to be really understood. She rejected you, Bob, for a whole new life. But she still depends on you because she thinks you know her so well.”
“I do know her so well. And she knows me.”
The ultimatum was finally presented. No marriage to Sarah unless Pam was out of the picture for good. The arguments, the talks, the endless distress—but Bob, finally, could not do that.
Helen had said, “Bob, are you crazy? If you love Sarah, stop talking to Pam. Jim, tell him he’s crazy to do this.”
Jim surprisingly would not tell him that. He said, “Pam is Bob’s family, Helen.”
Pam nudged him now with her elbow. “What was it? What happened?”
“Strident,” Bob said, his eyes going over the people pressed up to the bar. “Sarah became strident. It ended, that’s all.”
“I told my friend Toni about you and she’d love to have dinner.” Pam snapped down a business card she had taken from her bag.
Bob squinted, pulled out his glasses. “Did she seriously dot the i with a little smiley face? I don’t think so.” He slid the card back to Pam.
“Fair.” She dropped the card back into her bag.
“I have friends always trying to fix me up, don’t worry.”
“Dating’s awful,” Pam said, and Bob shrugged and said it pretty much was.
It was wintry dark by the time they left, Pam stumbling once or twice as they crossed the park to Fifth Avenue; she’d had three glasses of wine. Her shoes were low-heeled and pointy-toed, he noticed. She was skinnier than the last time he’d seen her. “This dinner party I showed up too early for,” she was saying, steadying herself on his arm while she shook something from her shoe. “People at the party started talking about another couple who weren’t there, saying they had no taste. Meaning bad artwork. I think. I’m not sure. It made me really nervous, Bobby. People could be saying I’m socially eager and have no taste.”
He couldn’t help it, his laughter burst out. “Pam. Who cares?”
She looked at him and suddenly laughed deeply, her laugh familiar to him from long ago. “Really. Who the fucking fuck cares?”
“Maybe people say Pam Carlson is really smart and used to work with a great parasitologist.”
“Bobby, nobody even knows what a parasitologist is. You should hear them. A what? Oh, that. My mother went to India and got a parasite and was sick for two years, that’s what they say. Fuck it.” She stopped walking and looked at him. “Have you ever noticed how Asians just go ahead and bump into you, how they don’t seem to have any sense of personal space? Boy, that pisses me off.”
He took her elbow lightly. “Mention that at your next dinner party. Let me get you a taxi.”
“I’ll walk you to the subway station, oh, okay.” He had already hailed one, and he opened the door now and helped her get in. “Goodbye, Bobby, that was fun.”
“You say hi to all the boys.” He stood in the street and waved as the taxi sped off into traffic, the busyness of neon lights around him. She turned and waved from the back window, and he kept waving until the taxi drove out of sight.
When Bob had returned from Maine, he’d found the apartment below his with its door open, and he’d stopped to look at the place where Adriana and Preppy Boy had lived out their marriage. The landlord was fixing a faucet and he nodded to Bob, but the glimpse Bob had—a space empty of curtains, couches, rugs, whatever it is that people make a life around—struck him with its gone-ness. Dust bunnies had been swept into the center of the living room, and the twilight that showed through the windows was indifferent, stark. The blank walls seemed to say wearily to Bob: Sorry. You thought this was a home. But it was just this, all along.
Tonight as Bob climbed the stairs, he saw that the door of the apartment was again partly open, as though emptiness was not worth concealing or protecting. The landlord was not there, and Bob closed the door quietly, then continued up the stairs. His phone machine was blinking. Susan’s voice said, “Call me, please.”
Bob poured wine into a juice glass and settled himself onto his couch.
Gerry O’Hare had surprised everyone—certainly surprised Susan, who felt personally betrayed—by holding a press conference that morning in the City Chambers of Shirley Falls. An FBI agent stood by his side. “Big old fat thing,” Susan said on the phone to Bob. “Standing there all puffed up, loving how important he looks as chief of police.” She had not intended to speak to Bob again—she made this clear at the start of the call, but she couldn’t figure out how to dial Jim’s cell number overseas, didn’t have the name of his hotel—
Bob supplied her with both.
She kept right on. “I wanted to turn the TV off, but I couldn’t, it was like I was frozen. And now it’ll be in the morning papers. You know Gerry doesn’t give a doughnut’s damn about the Somalians, but there he stood going blabby blab—‘This is very serious. This will not be tolerated.’ He hopes his response shows the Somalian community they can feel safe and confident. Oh, please. And then one reporter said there’d been incidents of tire slashing and window scratching against the Somalians and what did he have to say about that, and Gerry gets all pompous and says the police can’t respond to anything if the Somalians don’t come forward with their complaints. So you can just see that he kind of can’t stand them, he’s just doing this because the whole friggin’ thing’s gone out of control—”
“Susan. Have Zach give Charlie Tibbetts permission to talk to me. I’ll call him tomorrow.” He pictured her, upset in her cold house. It saddened him, but it seemed far away. But he knew very soon it would not feel far away; the murkiness of Susan and Zachary and Shirley Falls would seep into his apartment the way the emptiness below waited to remind him that his neighbors were no more, that nothing lasts forever, there is nothing to be counted on. “It’s going to be all right,” Bob told Susan, before hanging up.
Later, sitting by the window, he saw the young girl across the street moving about her cozy apartment in her underwear, and nearby the couple in their white kitchen were doing the dishes together. He thought of all the people in the world who felt they’d been saved by a city. He was one of them. Whatever darkness leaked its way in, there were always lights on in different windows here, each light like a gentle touch on his shoulder saying, Whatever is happening, Bob Burgess, you are never alone.
2
It was the laugh. The policemen’s casual laugh when they spotted the pig’s head on the rug. Abdikarim could not stop hearing it, seeing it. He would wake in the night picturing the two uniformed men, the short one especially, with his small eyes and unintelligent face, the sound of mirth he made before he straightened up and asked sternly, looking around, “Who speaks English? Somebody better speak English.” As though they had done something wrong. This tho
ught went repeatedly through Abdikarim’s head: But we have done nothing wrong! This is what he murmured now as he sat at a table in his café on the corner of Gratham Street. To have women gaze right at him as they walked by, to have children tugging on the hand of their parent, turning their small heads to stare when they were safely past, to have the thick-armed tattooed men screech their trucks past his café, or high school girls whisper and giggle and cross the street to yell a name—None of these things bothered Abdikarim so much as the memory of the policemen’s laughter did. In the mosque one block away—which was only a dark room, rain-stained and unlovely (but theirs and holy)—he and the others had been treated as mere schoolboys complaining of a bully.
Abdikarim had walked this morning through the dawn’s gray light to his café after morning prayer. The mosque held within it the presence of fear; the smell of the cleaning foam used many times in the last few days seemed itself to be the smell of fear. It had not been easy to pray, and some men hurried through it to stand watch by the door. The adano was back at work at Walmart as though nothing had happened—news of this kept going around the village, and there was more trouble than ever with sleep. The police chief’s press conference was baffling too. A reporter had come to the café yesterday. “Why weren’t there any Somalis at the press conference?”
Because no one had told them about it.
Abdikarim wiped down the counter, swept the floor. The sun rose yellow between the buildings across the street. With the fast, only Ahmed Hussein would be in later to eat. He worked nearby in the paper factory and was allowed to drink tea and eat bites of stewed goat meat because of his diabetes. At the back of the café behind stringed beads was a small area where scarves and earrings and spices and teas and nuts and figs and dates were sold. Throughout the day women would come in together and buy what they might need for Maghrib tonight, and Abdikarim went and ran a duster over packages of basmati rice. He arranged the packages so the counter wouldn’t look too barren, then went back to the front of the café and sat in a chair by the window. The phone in his pocket vibrated. “Again?” he asked, for it was his sister calling from Somaliland.
“Yes, again,” she said. “Why are you still there, Abdi? You’re in more danger than here! No one is throwing pigs’ heads here.”
“I can’t put the shop on my back and walk away,” he said with affection.
“The man is out of jail. Zachary Olson— They let him out! How do you know he’s not coming right now to your café?”
Her questions pricked alarm in him. But he said gently, “News travels fast.” He added, “I will think about it.”
For an hour he sat by the window watching Gratham Street. Two Bantu men, their skin as black as winter night sky, walked past the window and did not look in. Abdikarim rose and moved through his store, touching the scarves, the few packages of bedsheets, some towels. Last night there had been another meeting of the elders, and their voices circled around Abdikarim’s head as he made his way to the front of the café.
“He’s not in jail. Where is he? Back at work. Home with his mother.”
“And his father.”
“He has no father.”
“A man was with him when he came out of jail. A big man. The man who tried to run over Ayanna, after he bought a bottle of wine in the morning for breakfast.”
“I heard women talking in the library. They think there’s overreaction to this. They said, ‘It’s rude to throw a pig’s head, yes, but that’s all it is.’ ”
“Forget them, they’ve not run through Mogadishu with machine guns pointed at them.”
“Mogadishu! What about Atlanta? People there would kill us for a dollar.”
“Minister Estaver said Zachary Olson’s not like that. She said he’s a lonely boy—”
“We know what she said.”
A headache arrived now for Abdikarim. He went to the door and stood looking out at the sidewalk and the buildings across the street. He did not know how he could ever get used to living here. There was little color anywhere, except the trees in the park in the fall. The streets were gray and plain and many stores were empty, their big windows blank. He thought of the colorfulness of the Al Barakaat open market, the brilliance of the silks and colorful guntiino robes, the smells of gingerroot and garlic and cumin seed.
The thought of returning to Mogadishu was like a stick that poked at him with each heartbeat. It was possible peace had come; earlier this year there had been great hope. There was the Transitional Federal Government, unsteady, but there in Somaliland. In Mogadishu was the Islamic Courts Union, and it was possible they could rule with peace. But there were rumors, and who knew what to believe? Rumors that the United States was urging Ethiopia to invade Somalia, to get rid of the Islamic Courts. It did not seem true, but it also seemed it could be true. Only two weeks ago came reports that Ethiopian troops had seized Burhakaba. But then other reports: No, it was government troops who had come to the town. All of it, and all that came before it, caused a heaviness inside Abdikarim. It was a heaviness that grew with each passing month, so that to go or to stay—he could not make the decision. He saw how some of the young people here managed; they laughed, joked, talked with excitement. His eldest daughter had arrived half-starved and knowing no English, and already when she called him from Nashville these days he heard excitement in her voice. He felt too old for the spring of excitement to return to him again.
And he felt too old to learn English. Without that, he lived with the constancy of incomprehension. In the post office last month he had mimed and pointed to a square white box, the woman in her blue shirt repeating and repeating and he did not know and everyone in the post office knew and finally a man came to him and crossed his arms quickly toward the floor, saying, “Fini!” And so Abdikarim thought the post office was finished with him and he must go and he did go. Later he found out the post office was out of the boxes they had sitting on the shelf with price tags on them. Why did they show them if they did not have them to sell? Again, the incomprehension. He came to understand this had a danger altogether different from the dangers in the camp. Living in a world where constantly one turned and touched incomprehension—they did not comprehend, he did not comprehend—gave the air the lift of uncertainty and this seemed to wear away something in him, always he felt unsure of what he wanted, what he thought, even what he felt.
His phone vibrated, startling him. “Yes?” It was Nahadin Ahmed, Ayanna’s brother.
“Did you hear? A white supremacy group in Montana heard about the demonstration. They’re writing about it on their website.”
“What does Imam say?”
“He’s gone to the police and asked them not to have the demonstration. The police ignored him, the demonstration excites the police.”
Abdikarim unplugged the heater, closed up his café, locked the door, and hurried through the streets back to the apartment where he lived. No one was there. The children were in school, Haweeya was at work, assisting a social service group, Omad was at the hospital in his job as translator. Abdikarim stayed all morning in his room, missing prayers at the mosque, keeping the shades drawn as always. He lay on the bed, and there was darkness inside him and darkness in the room.
Susan drove to work wearing sunglasses even when the mornings were overcast. Right after Zachary’s picture appeared in the paper, she had pulled up at the traffic light by the overpass that would take her to the mall when a woman she had known casually for years pulled up in the lane beside her and—Susan was certain of this—pretended not to see her, fiddling with her radio until the light changed. Susan had the physical sensation of water draining straight down through her. It was not unlike the feeling she’d had when Steve came home and told her he was leaving.
Now, pulled up at the intersection, looking straight ahead through her sunglasses, thinking of her early morning dream of sleeping in the backyard of Charlie Tibbetts’s house, Susan suddenly remembered this: that in the weeks after Zach was born she’d se
cretly, briefly, fallen in love with her gynecologist. The doctor lived in the Oyster Point section of town in a big house with four children and a wife who didn’t work. They were not from Maine, Susan remembered that, and they had seemed—filing into a pew each Christmas Sunday service—as exquisite as a flock of foreign birds. With Zachary strapped into his safety seat, Susan would drive by their house slowly, that was how deep her longing had been for the man who had delivered her baby.
Remembering, Susan felt no embarrassment. It seemed long ago—it was; the doctor would be old by now—and as though it was the behavior of someone other than herself. Perhaps if she was still young she would be driving by the home of Charlie Tibbetts, but there was no sap left in her. The thick sugary pull of life had gone. And yet in her nighttime dream she had been camping out on Charlie Tibbetts’s back lawn, and this made sense to her, the desire to be near him. He was fighting for her son, which meant he was fighting for her. For Susan, this was a feeling altogether new, and it added to her respect for Jim. Wally Packer, it seemed to Susan, must have practically fallen in love with him. She had no idea if the two stayed in touch after all these years.
“No,” Bob said, when Susan called him from work. There were no customers in the store.
“But don’t you think Jim misses him?”
“I don’t think it’s like that,” Bob said. Susan felt ripples of humiliation spread through her. She didn’t want to think that she and Zach were just a job.
She said, “Jim hasn’t called me at all.”
“Ah, Susie, he’s tied up playing golf. You should see him at those places. One time Pam and I went with them to Aruba. Sheesh. Poor Helen sits there, soaking up melanomas, and Jim walks around with his mirrored sunglasses, standing by the pool like he’s Mr. Cool. He’s busy, is what I’m saying. Don’t you worry, Charlie Tibbetts is great. I talked to him yesterday. He’s asking for a gag order and a change in bail conditions—”