Pete Hamill - Tabloid City

Under his watery canvas jacket, Malik hugs the plastic bag from the Korean store, lowers his head, moves through black shadows. He needs to vanish. After tonight, after the holy mission of redemption, he must disappear. To make the final cleansing on Friday night. Holy night. With Glorious, or without her. With the child, when all is over. Yes. Above all, with the child. A boy, they told Glorious at the clinic. A son of Islam. Inshallah. Me and the boy. To the sacred places. Now he sees sleeping bodies under spread blankets, scrunched up against ugly girders that support the expressway. Shoe-covered feet jut from packing crates. Some mixture of rain and piss finds channels between fractured cobblestones. He sees garbage in black plastic bags, and a banana peel turned brown. A patrol car hurries by, dome light turning, and Malik flattens himself on the dark side of a girder. When the police car is gone, he gazes at the vacant side of the avenue, the one that carries traffic to Manhattan.

And runs.

In the rubbled street leading up the hill, there are three parked cars, each one alone, separate, two on one side, a solitary on Malik’s side. Just a few, as always. In summer, hornboys from New Jersey come here for twenty-dollar blow jobs from the filthy infidel women. Jizm in the throat, junk in the veins. On this night, the parked cars seem empty but Malik cannot be certain. He slides into the front yard of a condemned corner house, windows boarded up, and hunches behind the remains of a battered stoop. He peers at the dark parked cars, looking for steam on the windows, or a match lighting a cigarette. Nothing. The Lots are part of a vast project organized by some developer: housing for yuppies, or for NYU students to share, or for Jersey types who wanted a place to get laid before driving home; an office building too, and an Italian hotel where tourists could pay in euros. The sell: Wall Street just fifteen minutes away through the Battery Tunnel. It was all set to go, until Allah punished America, punished the crusaders, punished the Jews, punished the filthy infidel women with their polluted cunts and sucked-out tits. Allah gazed down upon them and broke their fucking economy, exposed their filth and usury and greed. The project stopped dead.

Now all is gone except a few lonesome old-time tenements, somehow missed by the bulldozers, including the tenement used by Malik and Glorious. The whole area weeps now. It looks like a wet Baghdad. The one he sees in newspapers. On TV. That ruined city. Baghdad without the Muslim dead.

He says out loud: Be there soon, Glorious. We got things to do. Hey: the rain is lighter now. All of a sudden. A message, for shit sure. Gotta go home. Gotta get dry. Gotta bundle these clothes. Gotta chop this beard. Gotta sleep. Can’t sleep, then hold the tits of Glorious, bursting with God’s milk. Oh. And enter her. As you have willed it, my beloved Allah. No papers from any authority. Just your will. You created women for us, didn’t you? Glorious doesn’t believe it, doesn’t believe anything, not Yahweh, not Jesus, not Buddha, not Allah. She’s not into it, she says. Won’t even wear a hijab out in the street, to cover her hair, to hide it from the lusting eyes of strangers. Why not? He didn’t ask her to wear a chador, covering her face, even her eyes. Just the hair. She says no. He keeps telling her that belief will come, that she will accept, will submit. Thinking: She’s a puppy, that’s all. One morning she’ll wake up and understand everything and accept Allah. But now she says something like What’s all this shit about submitting? Submitting to what? To who? And Malik always says: Submitting to Allah’s order, Allah’s rules. Told in al-Quran and the Hadith. And she says, You mean, submitting to you, right? And laughs.

That’s the way she is. An example of jahiliyah. Ignorance of God. She knows as much as any puppy. She should be nasty but she isn’t. She’s got a good heart, Glorious, but she’s her mother’s daughter. The mother that named her. A filthy woman for sure, who lived with a Muslim, some asshole who pledged allegiance to Elijah Muhammad and his Lost-Found bullshit Nation street hustle. She left him because she loved junk more than the creed passed to us by the Prophet. Malik remembered talking about such traitors as heroinfidels. The mother went on the stroll, Glorious told Malik. Probably fucked a thousand guys, at least. Poor Glorious doesn’t even know who her father is. Some dude threw a load into her mother’s belly and moved on. Maybe even a white dude, ’cause Glorious is tan, not black.

Later, after Glorious was born, some other dude threw the mother the virus. The usual shit started after that: moving around, shelters, different dudes moving in with the mother and trying to fuck Glorious, foster care, one school after another, until finally Allah put the mother out of her misery. Just last year. Around the time Malik met Glorious in Newark. Even now, Glorious wakes up calling for her mother. Imagine. Not Allah. Her filthy mother. Malik thinks: I never cry for mine.

Then Malik starts to run through the Lots, staying low in the black emptiness, avoiding the open spaces, the deep gouges in the dirt, the sudden drops into basements where the houses are gone, one mound of rubble following another, one three-story house with only one roofless story left, an abandoned car without wheels or windows, a fuel drum on its side with charred wood from a dead fire spilling out. Up ahead: the tenement. No lights burning, even on the fourth floor, where Glorious is waiting. Nobody else lives in the tenement. The buried power line comes from the far side of the site, where an abandoned construction trailer awaits workers who went away when the money ran out and may never come back. Malik laid the power line himself. Stole it off a pole. Learned how to do all that when he worked a summer job upstate, near Canada. Malik and Jamal. He was into computers, Malik was a student, just starting at CUNY. But he was Jamal’s student too. A student of Islam. The true Islam. More and more they moved from the banalities of the mosque to the thinking of Sayyid Qutb. To Hassan al-Banna. To the true children of the Prophet. To the brotherhood. To jihad.

Now he reaches the back side of the tenement. He faces the side wall, pale, jagged, broken into rectangles of old paint, the colors of rooms that are now gone, slowly washing away in the wind and weather. In the daytime, the walls are weird and beautiful: baby blue, bright red, one wall all black. The people who painted them are all gone now. Now Malik reminds himself: Be careful. He goes to the back door, facing the rubble where the yard used to be. He grips the big key for that door, a small one for the apartment on the top floor. He is jittery. You can never know if some crackheads made it into the building.

Malik inserts the large key, pauses, leans gently on the door, listening, while wondering where Jamal is now. He is sure his old friend, his instructor, is still in the house he bought in the lower part of Park Slope. Bought with money he started making as a designer, after the friendship broke, after Jamal made the haj, with some help from his father, the X-ray guy. And came home a different man. Calling himself a lover of Islam, a hater of jihad. It must have been Jamal’s wife that changed him. Another American bitch. And her having a kid. Or maybe it’s a cover story, a way to exist here as if he were another dumb American nigger, working away, but keeping jihad in the most secret place in his mind. Malik wants to believe that. But he simply doesn’t know. He will have to find out. When this night of red rain ends.

Now Malik inhales, turns the key, leans close, listens. Then exhales. No sound. He looks behind him across the Lots through the rain. Nobody. He slips inside.