Joseph McElroy - Night Soul and Other Stories

“I’m Mo,” I said, putting out my hand to shake.

Extreme caution marked Ali’s father’s late-night business meetings featuring a risk-benefit analysis for the new partnership, green-card immigrants ever vigilant, uncle so well-informed but irritable and hurried, on the run. Tax preparation, travel of course, maybe real estate though you need a license.

At breakfast my wife would want the best for me. She had taken a moonlighting job, mostly middleman home-based. From her day job, she brought work home too but was not a martyr, though she misses nothing that goes on, children alive, comparing notes, yak-king who likes who, an idea a second, my beauty.

Walk where another has walked to see what he has seen, would be a way of putting it.

“That game,” I began, “that Ali’s friends had bough—” “LAB!” “Labyrinth and laboratory?” Ali shook his head in awe meaning Yes. “—linked up (?),” I continue — with this other game he now outlines for me, enthusiastic about theft on a big, even regional scale—

“Friends?” I ask.

— thefts by agents of one caliph expanding until an entire city is stolen by another caliph towed away along with the weather by his agents and held for ransom down to parks and fish ponds and secret curving lanes with passerelles above like bridges or balconies looking north and south, borders shrunk, streams straightened, the price either a whole nation or inside a dusty vessel a minute horse that has swallowed a ring that brings genie-like military figure named da Vinci if the wearer unconsciously rubs the ring by bringing his hands suppliantly together, and so on, the trick being to find all the ways back “homeward,” to “get back home.”

Your family? I asked. Mother, father, uncle, big brother, Ali listed them, little sister Sharah, “me.” She is lucky, I find myself flattering Ali. “I am supposed to read to her but…” “What?” “At bedtime sometimes I tell her the story.” “Even better.” “Some nights we open a picture book we have and I make it up. Sometimes it is just words, no picture (?).” I’m nodding eagerly. Sometimes Sharah drew a picture for the story. “She is…” Ali shakes his head, grinning. “Sometimes I tell about the fisherman and the genie. My parents do not like them—” “They—?” “—those stories.” “They’re too…(?)” “I don’t think they mind,” says Ali, was he reversing himself? (I nod wisely.) Big brother Abbod he just came from Canada, Ali’s eyes wide and black, daring me to be with him. “What are you?” he asks.

Ali was calling me by my name another day when we returned to the record store window. He wished to be a drummer and his family would not hear of it. I might surprise him.

To go from thing to thing, unafraid — knowing the truth has a better chance sudden and unforeseen, than settled and…

What was the poem, who was the poet? Ali asked—“my unfortunate land”?

This kid.

“Mandelstam,” I said. (Should I buy Ali a used Green Day CD if they had one?)

A saying can be shared, Ali and I put together the thought — a name, a photo, a dispute, a war, but maybe not a special friend — as a cop on horseback stopped at the curb writing a ticket for a medium-size orange and brown RV. Some nomads drank horse milk, I said. Ali laughed, the cop knew him from Prospect Park.

Da Vinci those call him who think that was his name, said uncle, who confirmed that Leonardo had set out to move a river. Nomads would not do that. They would cross it.

Your father’s family, Ali was thinking — was I a spy, was I an agent ? “Who are you?” They were good Christians, I told him. We saw a fat man almost get hit by a car. We laughed and Ali spoke further about games. Ali knew he could help his friends play and beat them too, though not a “gamer” himself — though only if they could call him a friend — because he had understood the game. He even told his Sharah bedtime stories out of that game (or truthfully that the designer had stolen).

How did Abbod make it down from Canada? Abbod has had adventures. A traveler, he told Ali. Say your prayers, you are always facing the desert. Was Abbod really and truly a praying man? How far is Canada? — wait…I know from the map in class — Quite a hike, said Abbod.

Winter had turned out unseasonably mild, the weather seemed to cling to you yourself. You wanted to know what was what. The heavens were pretty much a constant.

We have passed on down the block speaking of real bats, not those animation stills slick and inaccurate shown in the game store window, and Ali is reminded of the record store we’ve ignored, deep in conversation, when he himself, witness first and last, reported high-tweeter tones heard in the basement of a project on Foster Avenue the other side of Nostrand where his uncle had looked at an apartment (wanting his own place at last, having lived with the family in Astoria, where he had lost his dog, then in Greenpoint over a deli, now in Newkirk). Ali knew they were bats, bats find bugs by echoes he told me yet did I know that their fossil ancestors had ears too simple to do it like that? Though, wait, we had passed the record store and did I know Green Day?

A white Toyota with a sign like a file tab along its roof darted past a bus and a truck with antlers tied to the grill, and Ali said it was the automobile driving school. Was it near where he lived? He thought a moment. Did I know those cars had dual controls? Hey, my wife was in the business of selling dual-control used cars to driving schools part-time, I said (her second job, I did not say). That car had only one driver, I think, said Ali, again ignoring what I’d said, I thought. I want to get a camera, he said.

Proprietor of a moving company, Irish father of a classmate, heard from his son the story of Ali’s cousin the anti-American nomad coming here and wasn’t sure he liked it. And the big brother?

Genie, his head in the clouds, feet deep in the center of the earth, but he can become small enough to fit into a little lamp, said Sharah when Abbod came into the room to turn out the lights. What was he mad about? A phone call. Always on the phone. A dreamer, father said, when Ali brought in the red-blotched naan hot from the broiler. “Nomads drink horse milk,” said Ali.

But Abbod had dreams going on.

The record store window next to the game store seemed to remind Ali: telling me with a secret generosity in his eyebrows thick and blackly frowning that the imam when he had visited New York had said, “Walk where another has walked to see what he has seen.”

Astonished to hear these very words from my wife this morning over my coffee and oatmeal with raisins now repeated to me by some kid, I believe words circulate in our city like thoughts, contagiously. Though this boy would add his own.

And I — having heard those words spoken by my wife before she had to leave for work — was dumbfounded now, or as I looked into the record store window, destined, hearing words added on to hers by this foreign kid: Walk where another has walked…see what he has seen…but find… him.

Words of a nine-year-old more acute than trusting (though already calling me Mr. Mo). In himself, his fall-back plan (since he would not be accompanying the schoolmates home who had just cut him by noticing him) more trusting than in me, more a remarkable person or child in his own right than any stop-gap employment job I was to find even in this neighborhood that had been randomly clued for me at breakfast by a woman in her underwear.

Surprising or not, to learn as we found our way back to the game store window that Ali had never been here before today.

Another day Ali wanted a camera. He would take real pictures, I knew.