Ethan Chatagnier - Warnings from the Future

From my window, I counted the shadows in the Maliks’ driveway. I could only see them when they passed in front of the open garage door, backlit by the opener’s dim bulb, but it was easy to make out Dr. Malik’s silhouette. Like many tall doctors, he was gently hunched from leaning close to his patients, and he was a little soft in the back and the belly. Mrs. Malik was not hard to distinguish either. She was taller than both her girls, and though at various times one of the three of them would disappear back inside, she mostly stood behind them with a hand on the shoulder of each, as if they were taking a shadow portrait. In the daylight their hijabs and their family resemblance made them easy to confuse with one another at a quick glance, but these circumstances changed them. In the darkness, Mrs. Malik’s headscarf looked like a trendy bob, whereas the lack of light played a different trick with the girls, somehow turning the smooth fabric of their coverings choppy and angular. It was their posture that distinguished the two girls now. Amina, who was in high school, stood upright and patient like her mother. Safiya, on the other hand, leaned and pulled and made movements toward the house or the vehicle.

The back of their Acura minivan was open, and Dr. Malik made trips in and out of the house to load it. It was October, and my window was cracked open. Their whispers made a hissing sound in the night that I’d first mistaken for a faucet left on in the bathroom. I was curious about what they were saying, but I didn’t want to make a sound by opening the window further. I didn’t want to alarm them.

I had some idea why they were leaving under the cover of night. I’d heard about the executive order during my restaurant shift after school. After the Baitul Hameed Mosque bombing, and the ones of the previous week, not to mention the assorted beatings and killings around the country, the government had said they lacked the resources to shield Muslims from violence, and were asking all practicing Muslims to relocate to designated Protection Villas—some cleared-out apartment blocks—where the National Guard could watch over them. As unappealing as that prospect was, when I heard some of my coworkers cheer the order, and others saying that the last thing Muslims deserved was protection, I could imagine worse things than National Guard protection.

My father had taken a harder tack. He’d been drinking in a kitchen chair when I got home, looking like a bad actor trying on a Eugene O’Neill character. He was playing at a roughness belied by his slender, slouched shoulders, his faded olive button-down, his softly shaven cheeks, his thin-framed glasses. He looked the very picture of The Liberal in Defeat. Had he auditioned for such a role, he’d have been dismissed as too on the nose.

He and I had been close before the last year. Our distaste for one another had not come about in the usual way of an arrogant teenager shoving off from authority. It was more personal, more like a marriage that had soured. He’d started telling me that as I got closer to adulthood, not seeing what was happening in front of me became a personal failing. I would shrug and suggest he was being hysterical. We were in an ugly swing of the political pendulum, but would swing back. After I’d rebuffed him like that a few times, his tone toward me changed. He began speaking about how good a heart I’d had as a child. How open I’d been to the world. How sensitive to other people’s misfortunes. It was his elegy for me, which he delivered in front of me, as if I’d died young. What had happened? he’d ask my mother, who was only a prop in the act for which I was the audience. Now, he said—this was his real mantra—I was “like the ones who had let it happen.” My mother would retreat to her room. I’d roll my eyes and do the same, not without a parting shot about him acting like a frail old maid. I’d started thinking of him as having an illness. A weakness of character, and a degenerative one.

Sitting at the table with his bottle that night, he started telling me about shoes. Rooms had been filled with them. Mountains of old leather husks. Warehouses brimming with them. You wouldn’t believe you could fill a space that big with shoes. And if you imagined a person in each pair? They don’t teach those kind of details anymore, he said. He’d asked some of my history teachers. Jewelry, furs, clothing. Gold teeth. They’d had a whole staff of dentists.

I went upstairs. I actually did share a lot of my dad’s ideas, and probably would have shared them more forcefully had I not associated them with him. He had been raised under a peaceful sign, I thought, and had never developed the fortitude necessary for dark times. But even if that fortitude was a quality I credited myself with, I did have trouble sleeping that night. That’s why I was up to see my neighbors’ hurried departure. They went down the street with their headlights off, and I watched, as I’m sure they did, to see if any bedroom lights would turn on as the van passed. None did. When the vehicle rounded the corner, it occurred to me that I would never see the Maliks again.

I knew so little about them. Dr. Malik had been four when his parents moved to the US from Pakistan. His wife had been a fetus when her family immigrated. Conceived in Lahore, born in Houston. The girls, of course, had lived their whole lives here. If not for my father, one of the only people on the street who spoke with them regularly, I don’t suppose I would have known their names. They were fashionable people, he said. A bit bougie, even. I didn’t see it, but what room did I have to argue? With regret for the blank spaces I’d left behind their cutouts, I stared at their garage door, which Dr. Malik had rolled down manually and left open about six inches, as you would for a cat. I didn’t even know whether they had a cat. If they did, and if they had left it, the house was still a home to something. If not, the place was now purely archeological.

My house was dark as I crept down the stairs. The kitchen light was off, meaning my father was no longer there, but the oscillating fan outside his room was off as well, and he was unable to sleep without it. My mother was working her night shift at the hospital, and it wouldn’t even be her lunch break yet. Streetlight through the kitchen window backlit the rangy arms of houseplants and fuzzed a pile of dishes and cups with gray. With our own house as seemingly abandoned as the one next door, I simply left through the front door.

The Maliks’ garage door rolled up silently and easily. Dr. Malik’s Lexus, resting inside, would be a boon for someone. Inside, I turned on the lights. I wasn’t scared to do so, and realized how surreal it was that in the course of a day it had become safer for me to be in their house than for them to. The laundry room floor was tiled in large, symmetrical diamonds that continued into the kitchen. No sign of a litter box. The lid of the washing machine was open as if waiting for a load. The kitchen was clean and well appointed. There wasn’t much in the way of Islamic decor. A few nicely framed bits of a foreign script, Urdu I presumed, hung on the walls. The turquoise backsplash had a vaguely South Asian flair to it, but overall I felt more like I’d walked into a cover of House Beautiful than a home of the devout. There was something on the island, though, set out in front of the bar stools. It was black velvet embroidered with golden thread and little circular mirrors, and it stood up on the counter like a hat. Thinking it was a hat, I picked it up and found a teapot underneath. I crouched down to look at it more closely. I don’t know that I’d seen a more beautiful artifact. The gleaming brass was laid over with a thick stripe of royal blue, with a careful, complex fretwork of the brass below tracing the outlines of branches, leaves, and flowers. It was as if all of the intricate and detailed Pakistani designs I’d expected to find suffusing the house had been concentrated into the teapot, hidden there under its cozy.