Greg Hrbek - Not on Fire, but Burning

“Don’t say that to her,” Dorian says.

“What if I do.”

“He might do a slide tackle,” Tarriq says.

Dorian (attempting to keep his voice steady): “I just told you—”

“Yeah, yeah,” Omar says. “We know. It wasn’t you. It was some other Aryan. Sorry, you all look the same to us.”

Karim walks into the kitchen where, set out on an arabesque tablecloth acquired by the old guy in the days of the third war, is the kind of thing he would’ve wished for back in the camp had he ever found a magic lamp occupied by a solicitous djinn. There are two giant serving dishes piled high with shaved lamb and chicken; a stockpile of pita bread; a bowl of hummus the size of a wash basin; and a pitcher of tea crammed full of ice cubes. But he can’t eat. He picks at the food while the others stuff their faces and chug the sweet minty tea. The old guy is looking at him, as he looked at him earlier when he walked in the door and found him sitting at the table crying. Don’t cry now. God, please don’t let me cry . The reason for tearfulness is: in his mind, he is still talking to the sheikh. Saying: No, don’t leave me here . Which are the very words his mind spoke and re-spoke to his mother and father in the days and months after the drone strike; not the first or second day and night, when he had wandered the streets of the camp in a state comparable to that of a computer after the crashing of its systems, but in the days and weeks beyond, when, having been identified as “displaced” (as if this hadn’t been his condition already), he was appended to a new household unit with a woman and a man whose presence only confirmed more fully the unbelievable absence of his real family, until at last — putting some food and a blanket in a backpack, and carrying his mother’s cracked eyeglasses in the pocket of his filthy blue jeans — he left like a runaway. He went to where the street grid of the old city ended. There was a last gasp of forsaken warehouses and factories; and alongside a sewer of a creek, a shantytown, like the settlement of some sad band of pioneers. Then farmland. Sterile and flat. Karim walked across it for hours. By midday, he could see the reservation fence. By sunset, he had reached it. Ten-foot electrified barrier of interwoven wire stretching like time in two directions and bending (as perhaps time bends) to form a closed loop all around him. He wrapped himself in the blanket — and while he slept, a surveillance drone must have heat-sensed him because he came shocked out of a dream in which his parents were not dead into a whirl of rotor dust and a darkness slashed by lines of green light that seemed to impale and hold him fast to the cold ground until a vehicle braked a few yards away: in all, four soldiers (not counting the helicopter pilot) armed with laser-sighted assault rifles to apprehend an eleven-year-old boy carrying a pair of broken eyeglasses. When one of the soldiers patted him down and found the glasses, Karim was afraid they’d be tossed away or ground into the dirt with a boot heel. But the man just handed them back. On the return trip, Karim held them in his trembling fingers, his mind saying, No, don’t leave me here , as if he had expected mother and father to appear on the other side of the fence and they had not come — as if beyond the fence is where they were: another world, but how do you get there from here?

In approximately half an hour, when the sun is paused directly overhead as if balancing on a pinnacle of sky, the party will fail like a ceasefire. Only one of them can feel it coming. That one is not Will Banfelder, in whose opinion the whole affair is going off without a hitch. After noon prayer, he’ll break out the croquet mallets; he set the wickets up last night on the other side of the pool. It’s not Tarriq Malick, who hasn’t had such a wicked good shwarma since that restaurant in the capital closed after someone threw a concrete block through the front window and torched it. Not Zebedee (born Plaxico) Hightower, who is wondering what that phone call was all about and why Karim Hassan-Banfelder all of a sudden has the nervous shrinking look of a dog just kicked by its master. Not Dorian Wakefield, in whose head the voice of Khaleela Kingsley won’t stop echoing: I need mouth to mouth! And not Khaleela Kingsley, who is catching Dorian Wakefield stealing a glance at her over his shwarma. And finally not Omar Mahfouz. Who never did think that Dorian Wakefield was the slide-tackler from last summer but does intend after lunch to see how the little shit will react to further provocation. None of these know. Only Karim. He alone. Knows though not what. Perhaps when our hearts emit a pulse of commitment, then an echo of an action not yet taken and yet to be devised by the imagination can return to us. As Karim is feeling the echo, the phones of the faithful are awakened from sleep mode by their salat reminder applications. “ Come to prayer ,” the muezzins chant, one, then another, then another. “ The time is here for the best of deeds .”

Dorian knows about this from the Islam chapter in Social Studies. Five times a day. And that’s not counting weekly services at the mosque. Doesn’t know how they do it. His own family, when they first moved from California, had tried religion. They couldn’t even manage once on Sunday. Dorian can’t really remember, but the experiment and its failure has stayed with him — and the sight of the church sometimes gives him a guilty feeling, as when passing the home of a friend made and then forsaken. He can hear them now. By standing in the doorway of the bathroom. Their voices rising up the short staircase from the basement. Her voice in prayer. Sweet and serious. Check your breath. It smells like shwarma. On the sink lies a tube of Mentafresh. Squeeze some onto your finger. Suck it off, mix with saliva, swish, and spit.

One o’clock or so.

That hour of a summer day when anyone can start to feel a little crazy. Even in long lost times, before the planet’s dangerous warming, it was so; but with this dizzying heat and the noise of cicadas like schizophrenic voices in the head and a feeling in the heart that you are betraying your family and your god …

The partygoers are in the yard. Karim holding in his hands something usable as a weapon. The game is called croquet. The other day, the old guy had taken him to play mini-golf and Karim used a metal stick to tap a little ball over fake grass in the direction of a tin cup. Now he is using a wooden hammer to hit a bigger ball over real grass through metal hoops. Games for spoiled and lazy apostates. How could I have imagined, even for a few short days, that maybe I could live like this? As he holds the mallet and watches the kid from across the street (the one set apart from the rest by white skin and light hair) clubbing his red-striped ball, Karim feels a correction in course. You can do it. You can do the thing you have been called to do. Though you must admit: What the sheikh said is not unwarranted. There have been moments when you’ve doubted your resolve— (Like the other evening, waiting your turn at the ninth hole of the mini-golf course at that place called Oasis Family Funplex, where the sails of a miniature windmill were turning and turning, and there was a baby secured in a sort of vest to its father’s chest as if the infant were a type of explosive, which made you ask: what if I was wearing the belt now, what if this was the appointed time and place )—

“Nice shot, what’s your name again?”

“Dorian.”

“Oh, yeah. Aryan. Aryan, how come you’re not in soccer camp this summer?”

“Don’t call me that.”

“Because they suspended you is what I heard.”

“I’m not that kid.”

You would , Karim answers himself now, pull the cord. You will. Wherever, whenever. So prove it. Prove it to the sheikh .