Joseph McElroy - Night Soul and Other Stories

Ali plots out for me the new game LAB another day. The fighters exploding on being hit, bazookazillas trained on them by the players, everything a target, anything. So you seek and find in a labyrinth that is a laboratory a treasure that can become what you need only if you know where to take it. Fighters are exploding, you need to keep yours safe, you can move them in four directions but also, unique with this game, you can shrink them inward so they become some other thing they can be but only if they were about to get hit when you hit the shrink function.

She had a fine little boy in her class, she said. With an imagination. A little isolated, yet totally not. What an ear you would say. (A speaker?) Well, to the point. The boy said he was not afraid in the playground, he would take care of his enemies in a New York minute. Middle-Eastern — Syrian, Iraqi. (You don’t know which he—?) Yes of course, and the family — they’re Muslims — the imam said such things about the boy…

You want to get your guys into the lab and there the treasure can become what you…it’s becoming more than the game. They are fighting for you, I say, but Ali’s a step ahead multiplying force interactively within the exponential poem of it all.

“Fighting for you these fighters?” I try and understand; “and you are?” I ask—“but what if you lose,” I break into my own query. And “Do they ever blow up by themselves?” I ask—“it happens,” I add. I have said too much. I am sick at heart for a second, hearing a secret that’s been withheld but by no one particularly — maybe from me by me. Trips. Parts breaking up. “And you?” the boy asks.

“What am I?” I replied: “…gone / Quite underground” but to make me see again, I mouth another’s words but I mean them. Drawn into his family — at what risk? — do we teach each other some mystery?

We should take a quick trip to the Brooklyn Bridge, maybe tomorrow, I tell him. “Men died building that bridge. I know a man who slept there.” “A man?” “Yes, a man.” “A poet,” I add.

Nomad , the boy adds, his voice curious. And I, wandering no doubt: “Come to think of it, nomads used to be very regular in seasonal movements. Yet now the seasons themselves are moving. Which at first dislodged the old sense of their moving toward us as much as we toward them, yet we adjusted to the change.” The boy won’t admit he doesn’t understand.

Ali describes a photo taken when his father was arrested and released before they left to come here. They said he had Ali’s eyes. “We were safe and sound by pure luck”—the boy’s speech almost poetic—“one whale of a bomb.”

Ali has shown his teacher the camera. (She knew that camera, a good one, she told him, says the boy.) Told her he is going to photograph the Brooklyn Bridge. “She is a good teacher, I gave her a good review,” he tells me, “she gives a hundred and ten percent.”

The camera…what features…Four years old, adrift, the black case gathering dust.

“Say a poem,” Ali commands. “I am: yet what I am none cares or knows,” I quote. “It’s good.” “It’s someone else’s.” “Mister Mo?” He wants to say something to me but doesn’t.

Family would rather home-school Ali but they all work. Uncle had an atlas. An attitude — toward Ali — hopeful, linguistic, American, both of them runners — that this was the place for them. Uncle was funny. Uncle had taken a book from a book store, read it, and returned it. Didn’t get along with Abbod.

Teacher had been home-schooled herself. This Ali confided the day before the two men, certainly not parents of this school, were waiting when school was done and kids were visiting their cubbies before going home but Ali did not and turned a corner into a hall that led to auditorium, cafeteria, and side exit because he had seen the men show their wallets to Mrs. Molesworth and for a moment she looked across at Ali.

So it is she.

But still I ask him what school he attends and what grade. Still I want to protect him. There is too much information on the table already. It’s another job, not poetry.

His teacher is my wife.

She had been home-schooled in California long before she ever came east.

I was waiting for the right job. I told Ali that in 1982 we had achieved the highest unemployment rate since 1940. 10.4 % on November 5th. 10.8 % before the end of November.

With over eleven million unemployed. A dream like numbers odd and plain, and a song of crunching of teeth or a hand squeezing brown paper.

But out of work you can do what you like then, said Ali.

Today we could visit Brooklyn Bridge, he said one day. Big brother Abbod wanted to borrow his camera, so Ali would like to take some pictures first.

She tells me the questions. A kid went home and told about Mrs. Molesworth’s class. Her nomad class. We laughed, my wife and I, and almost loved it but loved each other. This mother has been given enough grief already by the hand she was dealt but her younger son made a nice comeback from lymphoma, and while he keeps an eye on the black kids in his class, picks up their jive and trash, this “dead presidents” stuff meaning folding money — city kids you know — he also hears that some crazy Arab cousin of a Muslim kid is headed for America? Hears Ali guarantee that a cockroach can help track bombs (?). “How do you know this?” the two men will ask Ali, the day after they’ve first questioned his teacher. He had read it.

No you didn’t.

Oh yes: in a magazine on teacher’s desk.

They know where the family lived previously, and that one son was thought to be living with them but has been seen leaving what was thought to be their former apartment house—“In Astoria,” the boy fills in. They’re about to go on but don’t.

Why did Ali come to school, having seen the men the day before?

“Welcome to Paradise,” a Green Day song he—

His family hadn’t yet been visited, I thought.

I found them in my wife’s address book plus lavash, flatbread recipe.

Ali’s teacher is my wife, has submitted to questions. Only then did she think to phone.

I know him, I tell my wife. The cam era, she says. Of course , you gave him that old camera…Their minister said Ali has mouths all over his body. Their imam, I said. One of them, my wife corrects me.

On the Brooklyn side at first, the tiny park with the ducks — from under the Bridge shots of scale itself, pieces of it huge, mobile like history or dream, another piece, another like a ledge or barrier in midair, the Bridge in pieces, Ali an eye for the frame adjusting his aim by an inch or two, unaware of cops and others with the cops observing but not approaching, though aware that the man with Ali knew what was going on. They had us under surveillance when we were walking the Bridge and the boy taking the arch, the cables, the three-lane roadway below on each side coming and going, even the steel support structures one would be able to climb to get to or from the roadways but why? He was lending the camera to Abbod tomorrow and wanted…to…Wait, he murmurs…breathless…Wow — Absorbed, thoughtful of time, too — not of spectators behind us — they didn’t want us (or maybe me)—

My timing excellent. Seasons sometimes like minutes if you’re ready.

— then on the Manhattan side where the downslope bends around toward Chambers, police apparently waiting, a pale mist of rain adding its history to the boy’s. A regular hero? A fighter. For me to save?

Abbod? I said, surveying The Bridge I know pretty damn well.

Tomorrow you’re loaning him your camera…?

“Your big brother,” I say. American flag at top of a cathedral arch. Mmhmm, Ali half-acknowledges me as he focuses — I’m always an authority of some kind, I glance past the police a hundred yards away to a sign down on the roadway and its stream of cars: Dry Standpipe Valve for FD use only — while my boy up here on the pedestrian walkway is framing someone for a shot, or waiting for them to step away from a metal trap door in the stone underfoot for Repair Access. “Only half a brother, if you ask me,” I let fly.