*
He is blinded by fluorescent lights reflecting off linoleum floors. A woman hands him a card lettered “C” and directs him towards neatly ordered rows of seats. Machinery circulates temperate air with the stinging whiff of rubbing alcohol, and a camera in the corner of the ceiling notes muted gesticulations. Sitting beside “D” he is relieved they arose before the sky shattered in brilliance, beating the throngs of twitching bodies that lined up behind them. Grasping a pencil tightly in his slippery hand, he surveys several check boxes and his eye rests on one that reads “SORES, ‘CUTS’ OR LESIONS.” He scrawls most of the answers but refuses to write his name.
A saccharine smile in a sea of curls calls “C” and he follows her towards a small room down the corridor. She adjusts her glasses and taps her cherry nails, examining the card. “I see you left your name and address blank. I want you to know our conversation will remain confidential. Can I ask you a couple of questions?” He nods. “What is your country of origin?”
“Bangladesh.” He stares at the punctuation of a black spot on his foot. When relatives from the old country visit, their suitcase bears mangos and chilies in syrup, olives pickled in spiced oil, and the stench of salted fish, which inevitably stains the saris and shawls tucked underneath. On the trip back their suitcase is packed with soaps, shampoos, moisturizers, and hair products to scour their muddied hides—a deodorant commercial: Charles Barkley in a pith helmet remarking, “Anything less would be uncivilized.”
“Have you ever shared needles, syringes, or works?”
“Needles?” He stares at his beauty spot. He has a nascent memory: a sickly tree offering chalky fruit that made his face squint. Once he looked up “guava” in an encyclopedia to discover that it originated in South America. Had a seed caught on the wings of a bird in migration?
“You came here with ‘D,’ right? This is good. We always suggest that partners come together.”
The walls of the room are covered with posters: “My boyfriend gave me HIV. I was only worried about getting pregnant”; “‘HIV is not just a white man’s disease”; “No glove, no love”; and copious reminders to know yourself. The counselor prostrates his right arm and ties the rubber tubes tightly. She coaxes him with reassuring pats from her plastic hands, and asks him to look at the white wall to his left. She locates the lifeline, punctures the skin, and liberates a bloom of blood.
His mind drifts along the alabaster edges of the wall. The scar on his left arm had healed nicely, a wound from the thorns of Acacia Cemetery. Acacia witnesses few visitors besides the chance anthropologist. He stole in through a chink in the rusted gate, stirring wreathes of milkweed and the furled slumber of cicadas. Tracing his fingers on coarse slabs of slate, he divines antique engravings. Sophie of old Ozone Park spent her days toiling in tin and copper. She proffered her dowry for a plot of broken beer bottles and vines. Calcified angels are all that remain. Yet old Sophie roams the freeways and stripmalls of Levittown, in the attic of a big box with cobwebs and stale cake. Her call to arms mediates a quiet violence upon her old haunts. He inherits this soil after the exodus to Long Island.
Blood circulates through tubes, collecting into a vial in the counselor’s hands, and “C” quickly turns away to stare at the white wall. There is an intersection in Ozone Park where a mosque of brick and wire stands mid-construction, the dome beginning to take shape. Its cement minarets stand across an iglesia adorned with the star of David. The street is called “Mizanor Rahman Way.” Years ago he had followed the development of Mizanor’s mythology. “Gang War Blamed in Brawl Slay.” A man was pummeled by an angry mob of 20 men with baseball bats, hockey sticks, and iron rods. “2 Confess in Killing Bangladeshi.” A 12 year old Bangladeshi rode over the foot of a Latino teenager with his bike. The teenager stole his bike and ran away. A crowd of Bangladeshis recovered the bike and started a brawl with the Latinos. “Bangladeshi Fatally Beaten in Mistaken Identity.” There was drinking due to the Dominican Day Parade, said the police. Rahman was on his way home from work. Mistaken as one of the men who retrieved the bike, he was clubbed to death with a wooden chair leg.
“United for Slain Victim.” The counterwoman from El Castillo de Jagua places dollar bills in a makeshift memorial on “Mizanor Rahman Way.” The money will be sent to his wife and child back home. Moonlighting as a busboy in a restaurant downtown, Rahman was a photojournalist who had come to New York to report on the 2000 presidential election. Three weeks before he was ready to go home, his clothes and books packed into a suitcase. Now his blood christens the soil of Ozone Park. When the counselor extracts the needle “C” imagines a shattered camera lens, mirrors and gears strewn on the ground like a gutted clock.
“Now it’s time to wait.”
*
Light gleams through the window revealing a silken strand swaying in front of his eyes. Pursuing the thread to its zenith, Pradip studies the machinations of a solitary hunter. “The Roman emperor Domitian had a hobby of pinning down flies. He would needle the seams that prop its paper wings to better scrutinize its exquisite expiration.” Pradip examines the lineaments of his partner’s face, wondering what the worm imagines while arrested in chrysalis. “Want to hear a freaky story?”
“In Japan there’s a restaurant where the suits and ties take a break from their control tower to savor rustic eats. From outside the place looks typical, lukewarm décor like a bootleg Venice. You step through a wooden door, then a metal vault, and are conducted down spiral staircases to a dimly-lit basement with a scarlet carpet.”
“Cut to the chase.”
“Have you ever been to the Palm? It’s kind of twisted. Before they serve your lobster steaming red on a platter with drawn butter, they’ll show its clamped claws for your grinning approval. Here, they’ll fetch a plump sow for you to stuff, before it’s roasted whole with an apple in its maw.”
“What do you mean?”
“Pork your pig and eat it too.”
“That’s not kosher.”
“They also offer chickens, goats, even elephants.”
“That can’t be true.”
“The Japanese are crazy; the Atom bomb fucked ‘em up.” He scoffs. “Have you read about the German cannibal?”
“Jeez, Pradip, you’re like Columbus sometimes.”
“—My Montezuma in a wreath of coca leaves—” He kisses Jacob’s hand.
Jacob raises his chin from his chest to view a shrieking baby, taut red with pouting. The mother pauses from her rosary beads to direct the husband, firmly clasping a stone sphere between her fingers. The father breaks off corn bread to feed the raucous child, who ogles Jacob through a cotton cocoon. “You know who’s missing in your account, Pradip?”
“Who’s that?”
“La Malinche.”
“I’m not familiar.”
“And you call yourself a scholar. Look her up, you prick.”
Satiated, Pradip reclines in his plastic throne and views a litany of putrid images transmitted from a TV on the ceiling. “Burning blisters, bloody discharge, sores erupting—are they describing a fucking volcano? Yuck, Jacob, that one looks like a cauliflower!”
“I need some air.”
*
They exit the cramped room, descending a staircase of laconic steel. They sit outside on the steps of the edifice. Elm and oak trees stir in the gust releasing blonde leaves. Acorns plummet, roll, and rest on cemented earth, while a squirrel skitters forth to collect its booty. Women in ermine furs saunter past, weighed by their harvest of paper or plastic. “Your trucker hat’s quite hip, Jacob.”
“My ancestors were truckers. This is my grandpa’s cap.”
“I thought your ancestors were barbarians.”
“Bar-bar-bar-bar.”
Pradip chuckles. “You know, I tried to look up your hometown, Jacob. I couldn’t find it.”
“My dad called me a couple of days ago to say he sold our house in Ohio. A mess of stucco caked with soot, cold chimney, hardwood floors. When me and my brother played hide and seek we’d always get splinters. Out back we had a field of milkweed, where I’d sleep sometimes in the company of cicadas. Indian summers: the nymphs unearth from tree trunks to rest on feather-veined leaves. Fat with sap, they ditch their cramped skins for wings of parchment and leave their calcified selves clinging on bark.”
“Sounds bucolic.”
“The Ohio River Valley’s a trip, Pradip. We should bust out the raft sometime. We can see the world and you don’t need a passport. Cairo, Jerusalem, Rome—ancient towns strung across old River Jordan.”
Pradip ponders the fact. “Can you see stars in Ohio?”
“On breezy days maybe."
“Where’d your dad move?”
“Cincinnati. He gets angry when he hears telemarketers fake an American accent. But the old dog’s teeth are worn down.”
Pradip stares at a couple of pigeons scavenging a mound of muffin on the sidewalk. “I hear your tummy rumbling, Jacob.” Pradip approaches a glinting cart on the curb, and waves to a stocky fellow cloistered within. “Hola amigo. Como estas?” the figure exclaims with a wide grin. Pradip squints with a smile and a nod and offers a fistful of quarters. He procures a large cup of coffee and a chocolate chip muffin, breaking off pieces for Jacob.
“How’s the DUMBO general store?”
“Plumage plucked upon structures of styrofoam; astrakhan tufts of beaver sorry fleece; tanned-tinted cowbell boots; varnished snakeskin coiled to release: another glass behemoth along the waterfront.” Jacob sips coffee to moisten his lips.
“Did you have a busy shift yesterday?”
“Cappuccino, Moccaccino, I made foam and froth and frap all fucking day. I came home stinking of burnt sugar.”
“The smell of your sweat gets me hard.”
“They must be spiking those bottles of water, Pradip; the matrons of DUMBO are spawning broods. The women chat up a storm on their cells, while the maggots crawl over everything, poking their fingers in electric sockets."
“C’mon, you love kids, Jacob.”
"A bizarre fag couple comes in hauling a new-born like a Louis Vuiton bag. After mollycoddling for a minute, they hand her off to a Caribbean lady while they sit at the bar sucking on a bottle of wine. What a sterile creation, Pradip. The milk and honey’s nursed through a plastic nipple.” A burst of gale unfastens prickly thistles, tufts of cotton, and spherical seeds. An acorn plunges into their coffee cup. “I’d rather fling my shit on the wall.”
*
A flight of stairs leads to fluorescent lights and linoleum floors. They reclaim their seats among the furrowed bodies. The saccharine smile tiptoes with a folder clasped between her nails. She surveys the room and calls the letter “C.” Pradip kisses Jacob and walks down the corridor, the door shut behind him. Jacob stares at the blank TV screen on the ceiling as the tape rewinds.
In the stucco confines of their house in Ohio the television was ritually set to the image of a field circumscribed by chalk and seats. Timpani drums of brass band fanfare fueled the throbbing crowd as tiny figures inched back and forth on the green lawn. Or the padded coliseum of American Gladiators: bronzed figures swathed in red and blue lycra repelling an enemy incursion with foam shields and nerf balls. He and his brother would fashion walls and towers out of sofa pillows.
Over years of holidays and good report cards Jacob had acquired a sizable collection of action figures. He would subject the miniature men to rigorous physical examination: flexing their joints in awkward ways, gripping their hands round gunmetal aimed at invisible foes. And when no one was watching, he undressed the dolls to inspect their incomplete manufacture. One year Jacob’s family went to Florida for Christmas. The place felt alien; they never put their scarves and sweaters to use. The football game on TV was the sole continuity with their holiday ritual. When the Steelers scored their second touchdown, the phone rang with alarming urgency, the receiver handed to his mother. Her face grew grave with creases as she shrieked and wailed.
They returned abruptly to find the precarious structure caked with soot, wood panels splintered. The sofas were soaked with moldy moisture, water dripping carpet-puddles. His mother needled old articles—a disfigured Jesus black with carbon, the spine of a charred cookbook, a chiffon wedding dress scorched to embers. The neighbors reported a lightning bolt struck the second floor, starting a consuming blaze. Jacob ventured upstairs to his room and opened the door, smacked by the caustic stench of burnt plastic. He found a mosaic of red, blue, and black molded and melted where his chest of toys once stood.
The TV finishes rewinding the tape and begins to replay its fetid imagery. The door down the corridor opens, and Jacob sees Pradip solemnly walking with a letter in his hand. Pradip carefully produces a scrap of paper from the envelope and hands it to his lover. His name is inscribed in ink. “We keep trying to make babies, but they come out like shit,” he cries, breaking into laughter.
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