Joseph McElroy: Night Soul and Other Stories

Canada nothing like Syria, Abbod told Ali. Mom told him to go to bed, Abbod can tell you all about it tomorrow, Sharah is waiting for you to read her a story. Abbod slept on the living room couch, gone early in the morning before Ali was up. Ali must have understood something. Was it the job that brother Abbod was looking for? Why did Ali feel he had found it? Abbod wouldn’t take the messenger job because he didn’t have a bike. That’s right, you don’t take a job you don’t want.

The bedtime story was his job, though only a boy, helping care for a female child in the family. Ali was interrupted three nights running — Mom, Dad, and, strangely, the third night big brother Abbod, angry after a phone call — and each time Ali got back into the story though he skipped a step or two of the tale but added some bits. Same fisherman pulled up in his net: first, a parcel holding a princess’s body all cut up into pieces that seemed more than pieces; second, a great talking stone which asked to be dragged onto dry land, a fallow field, and then heavily lifted to discover beneath it amazingly a hole that hadn’t been there and a narrow door; third, a jar and a genie plus interactive adventures to enlist the genie’s help or escape him and — and little sister Sharah, eyelids trembling with sleep, thought the genie was going to kill the fisherman, had he done so?

Nomads. A considerable tent dipping in the wind with a great flat oblong top. The teacher pointing, Anyone know what a nomad is? Ali spoke without putting up his hand, he had a cousin who was a nomad. He used to keep sheep, you know, but was herding also larger beasts now until he could come to America. Oh? said the teacher. The class laughed with relief, as if they didn’t believe in that cousin living out there on the borderland of Syria, Turkey, Iraq, but they did, for this cousin Zam-ma’jid often on the move who didn’t speak a word of English to his goats and even camels that might lie down exhausted — and why would he anyway? — he didn’t like America and that was final. So why come here? He had a horse to ride, too — the class became quiet at this — but it might be taken from him. Teacher more than sort of liked Ali and she looked at him and said, We’re all nomads.

Two boys jeered at the Muslim kid. Get Shorty. An airplane passed low overhead. Was it coming out of JFK? Was it bound for Atlanta, Washington D.C.? Ali might well know. His uncle would. And then a second plane.

Big brother Abbod with the camo fatigues you envied was supposed by the family to have come here by way of Istanbul, Warsaw, and then Quebec, where he had arrived with two Polish jazz players he knew from Lodz who had scholarships to McGill, and it was true. But Abbod had soon left Quebec to come here.

What is my job? To see what a child is seeing. However long it takes? Time pounds the pavements and dissolves into a field of chances.

Teacher had two Band-Aids for Ali, he liked them. She heard the boys talking. What was this store on Coney Island Avenue near Foster Ave. the boys went to? she asked Ali. In Flatbush, she said. He shrugged, but she felt he had not known the location of the store.

The Catholic girls’ school near the projects the far side of Flatbush, of Newkirk — Sharah might go there next year. They had asked many questions and had been almost too friendly. It was better than a school where she would be singled out. And homeschooling was not possible, though when they came home every afternoon they studied Qur’an. (Ali’s teacher asked him what difference between Qur’an and other faiths — too much to ask.) Some echo here for me.

Air Canada to JFK? Apparently not. Over the border, then drive? Don’t ask. Abbod knows the city. Ali wants to know what his brother knows.

One day Ali was late getting home.

All but strangers to each other, the tall and the short, a child peering through the store window at video games, behind him like single file a man. We stand before the wares of the West, does he see me in the plate glass? — sees much that is not immediately visible very likely. What is my job? Above his olive-skinned neck a Low Dark Fade they call it at the barber’s school where I go for a $4.99 cut and an experience, the boy small for his age I’d guess, but in the Ocean Avenue game store’s plate glass unmistakable, somehow found — viewing a domain he must often have visited — seeing what is in front of him like a prince, subtle, mighty, and, hearing Green Day from the record store next door, he need not turn yet.

What is one’s job?

That I should have found myself here, to relearn a stretch of neighborhood once my father’s family’s never quite mine you know, but my memory’s, my city’s — and pavements and intersections guessed that morning from words of my wife implicitly like love locating it like a clue a couple of city miles at least from the brownstones of our Rutland Road, those long, turn-of-the-former-century’s blocks of evolving borderland though no stranger to great Flatbush Avenue, the Prospect Park lake/horses/grackles like iridescent crows owning the territory/lilacs on the way — to find myself here might prove worthwhile — a nomad thought more mine than hers, to a virtually unemployed male at 7:00 A.M.

Ali would do anything for Abbod. Ali was up against it in the playground when teacher came out and he was telling his enemies he had a big brother who had come to the U.S. to do a job and Abbod would chill them in a New York minute. “ Half -brother,” Ali’s uncle said.

Green Day Ali hears like a message, a life, a promise — because he would like to learn to play bass like…

(Never misses school, never home sick, “like a chip off your old block” he will say two, three days later when I recited a Russian poet — in English—“But I love my unfortunate land / Because I’ve not seen any other.”)

And would like to be invited to play video games after school with…two kids, for it is them he now turns to see. Not yet the man standing behind him, in the corner of his eye in the store window reflection, but his classmates, one pale, strong, bald, the other a “carrot-top,” Ali will later call him (his given name Terry), who come sauntering forth jointly holding a single, targeted purchase. Engrossed in the picture on the small packaged game and maybe the fine print, they look up and see Ali and turn away laughing over their collective shoulder at the nerd whose cousin nomad was coming to America, he’d claimed. Knowing nothing of this as yet, the gentleman behind him — as if the Band-Aid on the cheek proves it — assumes Ali is a regular here.

That this proved to be not so seemed later at least as strange as what this boy, small for his age but of a certain stature, turning from the game store window to see two kids leaving the store turning down the block, then said surprisingly to the man standing behind him: “What they came for”—meaning (I realized) the LAB game postered in the window — though meaning to make the best of things by striking up a conversation.

So we’re walking down the block, not knowing quite what we’re doing — walking is a parallel support for secret hope, man and boy, the talk, the questions somewhere in there like the walking/waiting intersection. Each taking the other as of the neighborhood. Ali not quite answering the unsaid question, whatever it is. The black man we pass, and his hand—“been through the mill,” Ali says, finding in his pocket only a leaky ballpoint, so I find a quarter. “Money can be shared,” the boy says. “Hit the street, that’s what can happen,” I said. “Are you real estate?” “No, this is my father’s old neighborhood, his family.” “Gone away?” Ali asks, out of some depth his own. “Gone,” I find the word to answer him, a nine-year-old. He suddenly becomes my friend.