NO MAN’S LAND

The little brother Ali was little enough but you didn’t know what he would come up with, and they laughed when he told what his teacher had said, that we are all nomads.

 

His little sister laid the table, the mother from the kitchen calling Ali, the bread was waiting and the bowl of meat, and the very big brother Abbod tapped in a phone number, while Ali’s father and uncle, aware of Abbod because he’s only just unexpectedly blown in from Canada, to say nothing of sleeping on the couch, were plotting a new business venture, eased by aromas of lamb and onion, herbs and crusty, paper-thin lavash just out of the oven—so no one asked at first why the fourth-grade teacher at a Brooklyn public school had said what she did about nomad to Ali.

 

What is your job? I ask myself, on the move.

 

In the small shopping plaza above the B & Q train stop, they posted a news photo of a patrolman killed in line of duty. This not far from Ali’s family’s apartment, which in turn is a walk from his morning bus stop on the way to school with a walk at the other end.

 

Nomad? Nomad?—just like that? What does she know? the uncle said at dinner.

 

In geography Ali had the answers and then some. Original was the only word for it. And when the teacher said a river takes us where we want to go and he put up his hand, the class became quiet. “Sometimes they take the river and they move the river,” Ali said. Class quietly laughs at the nerd terrorist, yet waiting for teacher. But Ali proves his point. “Once they moved a river to try and win a war, I think.” In the yard later someone would trip him up and he would fall and skin his cheek on the hard, black rubber surface by the jungle gym, but fall lightly.

The family wanted to know a little more about it, this “nomad” point because…because Ali’s an original boy, in need even of monitoring, of serious questioning—for what could happen? Unafraid, called “terrorist” and “Arab” by the boys in the school yard, what was he? A nine-year-old, a terrible asker of questions, small for his age.

Where is Mexico, where is Canada? asked the teacher, wondering at her own map hanging over the blackboard, where is California, the Arctic, the ice fields and polar bears, Brazil? Atlantic Ocean, Mediterranean Sea! What is the mouth of a river? Tigris River where they used to fish—no more. Where is Turkey? OK, where is Syria? See what country they have borders with. Borders? See the lines—one line is mostly river. “Sometimes—” she begins, but one question can interrupt another, the teacher was so quick with a question she interrupted herself, a happy person (and to have this Muslim child in her class who picks up her turns of speech), she and her map routes, a river is a moving road, she said, and was off. Caves, said Ali, the bell rang, he raised his hand too late.

 

Nomad can wait, we know. Because he moves in season. He and his people. Everyone busy. Nomad knows his job. Children quite safe. He may return next fall to where he was, even when things fall apart.

One day the boy would have to make a living, he would have a job to do, said the father. A dreamer, Ali’s head was in the clouds, you didn’t know what he was thinking—and then he told you. Imam passing through had said that the boy had mouths all over his body.

All over? she asked Ali (his teacher, one lunchtime, one-on-one, for she said he was better at math than even she…). Well, this imam was from Mosul, visited New York, got followed but not before he had trained his camera on the evil billboards and the great bridges, Ali told her. Did she know an entire bridge had been moved part by part from England to Arizona? His uncle had told him.

His uncle knew. His uncle got mad, not at him, stood up for him. (“Ali can crunch the numbers.”)

Who all were these nomads? We know roughly where they are. In olden times the Scythians would surprise the enemy, make some trouble and retreat. Let’s make a map of nomads, the teacher said. What is a map? she said. Anything that came into her mind, she would say it. The bald kid at the back who’d been sick but wasn’t anymore showed his notebook to the kid next to him.

 

Abbod wore a hunting jacket he’d picked up in Canada. He was bent on obtaining a New York driver’s license hopefully. What matter if it’s stamped third class not valid for U.S. government purposes? He’d always known, from birth, how to drive—what’s the problem? He had driven a white taxi from Beirut to Dimashq and when his uncle’s cousin had shown up to collect the fare at the post office by the train station, it was how things worked, which always came first. Didn’t he get paid? Ali asked. Post office next to a theater where you are too young to go, Abbod jigged his eyebrows.

Abbod knew how to take orders. It was how you learned to give them. Ali, age nine, thought if he didn’t ask for a camera he wouldn’t get one. But who could he ask?

 

What is my job? Ask no one but yourself, things falling apart some days like a song high above the street or in the distance.

 

Photos on the living room wall—a dark man, his eyes bugged at some awful thing about to happen. Next to it a picture of a gold-and-silver-threaded pharaonic tapestry with a band around it showing ducks flying and their wings like crowns, very pretty Islamic thing. And a tinted photo of, you’d guess, a rug and leaves growing all the way around it, and Ali would look at the leaves. Of what tree? A fruit tree, maybe existing someplace. Look, too, at their California calendar peeling the months up and back, with a hang glider or backpacking trail above each month of days, or high, bellying waves of surf, or a quake-proofed bridge.

 

Nomads, said Ali’s father, the way he said things. The big brother had left the table to make a phone call and Ali recounted only that teacher had a picture of a tent in the desert and had asked what a nomad was, and Ali had told about their sheepherder cousin. “Maybe a cousin, maybe not a cousin. A singer, we heard he was a singer,” said the father who had an attitude because big brother on the phone again or because Ali storytelling.

 

Forsythia, the surprise along Newkirk, its early yellow bearing in its very light a suspicion of green in a front yard next to Ali’s building. Late winter, early spring, seasons in question, a matter for the authorities.

And now big brother couldn’t drive legally without at least the third-class license Albany had promised if Governor would only stop changing his mind every other week on the three-tiered plan, what’s the matter with him? (Didn’t you get paid in Dimashq? said Ali remembering from two nights ago.) Cops see it, maybe they stop you maybe they don’t. Third category license was for driving, not I.D. except if you’re stopped with it you’re an immigrant in limbo, you could be on the BQE or Coney Island Avenue. Abbod had just arrived in New York Limbo? asked Ali. It means trouble, said Abbod. Did he fly from Canada in an airplane? How else you gonna fly? (Did Abbod answer Ali’s question?) Ali hopes he will stay. “What the dickens is the BQE?” “What’s the BQE?” laughs big brother. “The Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, man—what did you say, Ali, what the what?”

Father and uncle were looking into a storefront at the lower, better end of Foster Avenue across from the NYPD security camera mounted above the street and nice older brick and wood houses, and seeking a private source of financial backing which would save their violating Sharia by applying to a bank in Greenpoint where they had once lived and had a dog.

Canada nothing like Syria, Abbod told Ali. Mom told him to go to bed, Abbod can tell you all about it tomorrow, Sharah is waiting for you to read her a story. Abbod slept on the living room couch, gone early in the morning before Ali was up. Ali must have understood something. Was it the job that brother Abbod was looking for? Why did Ali feel he had found it? Abbod wouldn’t take the messenger job because he didn’t have a bike. That’s right, you don’t take a job you don’t want.

The bedtime story was his job, though only a boy, helping care for a female child in the family. Ali was interrupted three nights running—Mom, Dad, and, strangely, the third night big brother Abbod, angry after a phone call—and each time Ali got back into the story though he skipped a step or two of the tale but added some bits. Same fisherman pulled up in his net: first, a parcel holding a princess’s body all cut up into pieces that seemed more than pieces; second, a great talking stone which asked to be dragged onto dry land, a fallow field, and then heavily lifted to discover beneath it amazingly a hole that hadn’t been there and a narrow door; third, a jar and a genie plus interactive adventures to enlist the genie’s help or escape him and—and little sister Sharah, eyelids trembling with sleep, thought the genie was going to kill the fisherman, had he done so?

Nomads. A considerable tent dipping in the wind with a great flat oblong top. The teacher pointing, Anyone know what a nomad is? Ali spoke without putting up his hand, he had a cousin who was a nomad. He used to keep sheep, you know, but was herding also larger beasts now until he could come to America. Oh? said the teacher. The class laughed with relief, as if they didn’t believe in that cousin living out there on the borderland of Syria, Turkey, Iraq, but they did, for this cousin Zam-ma’jid often on the move who didn’t speak a word of English to his goats and even camels that might lie down exhausted—and why would he anyway?—he didn’t like America and that was final. So why come here? He had a horse to ride, too—the class became quiet at this—but it might be taken from him. Teacher more than sort of liked Ali and she looked at him and said, We’re all nomads.

Two boys jeered at the Muslim kid. Get Shorty. An airplane passed low overhead. Was it coming out of JFK? Was it bound for Atlanta, Washington D.C.? Ali might well know. His uncle would. And then a second plane.

Big brother Abbod with the camo fatigues you envied was supposed by the family to have come here by way of Istanbul, Warsaw, and then Quebec, where he had arrived with two Polish jazz players he knew from Lodz who had scholarships to McGill, and it was true. But Abbod had soon left Quebec to come here.

 

What is my job? To see what a child is seeing. However long it takes? Time pounds the pavements and dissolves into a field of chances.

 

Teacher had two Band-Aids for Ali, he liked them. She heard the boys talking. What was this store on Coney Island Avenue near Foster Ave. the boys went to? she asked Ali. In Flatbush, she said. He shrugged, but she felt he had not known the location of the store.

The Catholic girls’ school near the projects the far side of Flatbush, of Newkirk—Sharah might go there next year. They had asked many questions and had been almost too friendly. It was better than a school where she would be singled out. And homeschooling was not possible, though when they came home every afternoon they studied Qur’an. (Ali’s teacher asked him what difference between Qur’an and other faiths—too much to ask.) Some echo here for me.

Air Canada to JFK? Apparently not. Over the border, then drive? Don’t ask. Abbod knows the city. Ali wants to know what his brother knows.

One day Ali was late getting home.

 

All but strangers to each other, the tall and the short, a child peering through the store window at video games, behind him like single file a man. We stand before the wares of the West, does he see me in the plate glass?—sees much that is not immediately visible very likely. What is my job? Above his olive-skinned neck a Low Dark Fade they call it at the barber’s school where I go for a $4.99 cut and an experience, the boy small for his age I’d guess, but in the Ocean Avenue game store’s plate glass unmistakable, somehow found—viewing a domain he must often have visited—seeing what is in front of him like a prince, subtle, mighty, and, hearing Green Day from the record store next door, he need not turn yet.

What is one’s job?

That I should have found myself here, to relearn a stretch of neighborhood once my father’s family’s never quite mine you know, but my memory’s, my city’s—and pavements and intersections guessed that morning from words of my wife implicitly like love locating it like a clue a couple of city miles at least from the brownstones of our Rutland Road, those long, turn-of-the-former-century’s blocks of evolving borderland though no stranger to great Flatbush Avenue, the Prospect Park lake/horses/grackles like iridescent crows owning the territory/lilacs on the way—to find myself here might prove worthwhile—a nomad thought more mine than hers, to a virtually unemployed male at 7:00 A.M.

 

Ali would do anything for Abbod. Ali was up against it in the playground when teacher came out and he was telling his enemies he had a big brother who had come to the U.S. to do a job and Abbod would chill them in a New York minute. “Half-brother,” Ali’s uncle said.

Green Day Ali hears like a message, a life, a promise—because he would like to learn to play bass like…

(Never misses school, never home sick, “like a chip off your old block” he will say two, three days later when I recited a Russian poet—in English—“But I love my unfortunate land / Because I’ve not seen any other.”)

And would like to be invited to play video games after school with…two kids, for it is them he now turns to see. Not yet the man standing behind him, in the corner of his eye in the store window reflection, but his classmates, one pale, strong, bald, the other a “carrot-top,” Ali will later call him (his given name Terry), who come sauntering forth jointly holding a single, targeted purchase. Engrossed in the picture on the small packaged game and maybe the fine print, they look up and see Ali and turn away laughing over their collective shoulder at the nerd whose cousin nomad was coming to America, he’d claimed. Knowing nothing of this as yet, the gentleman behind him—as if the Band-Aid on the cheek proves it—assumes Ali is a regular here.

That this proved to be not so seemed later at least as strange as what this boy, small for his age but of a certain stature, turning from the game store window to see two kids leaving the store turning down the block, then said surprisingly to the man standing behind him: “What they came for”—meaning (I realized) the LAB game postered in the window—though meaning to make the best of things by striking up a conversation.

So we’re walking down the block, not knowing quite what we’re doing—walking is a parallel support for secret hope, man and boy, the talk, the questions somewhere in there like the walking/waiting intersection. Each taking the other as of the neighborhood. Ali not quite answering the unsaid question, whatever it is. The black man we pass, and his hand—“been through the mill,” Ali says, finding in his pocket only a leaky ballpoint, so I find a quarter. “Money can be shared,” the boy says. “Hit the street, that’s what can happen,” I said. “Are you real estate?” “No, this is my father’s old neighborhood, his family.” “Gone away?” Ali asks, out of some depth his own. “Gone,” I find the word to answer him, a nine-year-old. He suddenly becomes my friend.

“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.

My wife turned a tidy profit dealing second-hand dual-pedal automobiles to driving schools. How could this be?

The times. A statement. We would go camping, my wife said. We? I said.

“I need a camera.” Two afternoons ago it was “want.” A clarity in the voice, a mission.

 

Where was the $3? Mom said, who’d given it to him on a morning forgetting that he had a student bus pass. She never forgets, so what is it? Her grown son Abbod hadn’t slept there last night. She had cooked special lamb with mint stalks that were Ali’s assignment.

 

What was my job?

 

The $3? Ali gave it away. To a poor person? she asked “a faquir?” No, a friend in his class.

“What is your job? You don’t work in the afternoon?” Ali asked. “I am a poet,” I said. We’re in a large deli with a small haul of apples, orange, bananas in a basket, bag of SunChips. “You are a poet!” He is interested and we will meet again. “I write poems—sometimes,” I caution, appreciating his verdict on what I am. And I add, “Either you are one or you’re not.” “I am one then,” he plucks a Balance Bar from a candy rack near the register and looks at it, as I weigh my sort-of lie. “I write advertising copy but I don’t have a job right now.” “My big brother—he has a job to do and he also does not have a job.” Showing a card at the checkout I address the girl by her tag, “Shakira,” adding, “You people have the greatest names.” “Debit or credit?” is the reply I deserve. “You ladies here at the register.”

I found the words to every thought I never had, but I wanted the person to speak them to. My wife half hears me, the other half knows me, she thinks.

What’s that name mean? I ask Ali aside, thinking, What is my job? I’ll be clocking in somewhere soon, hearing a man at the back call her, “Hey Shak.”

Outside something hit the pavement from two or three stories up. I laughed. What was it? asked Ali. Two men race past the deli. Three others gather. “Something my wife said.” What? said Ali, a dark flash of the eye. (News of another family?) “‘Pounding the pavements’ is what I said to her.” Ali pointed out the window, I shook my head. “No, looking for work is what it means.” “That’s what I told her I was doing today.” “Looking for work?”

“Yes, what she said was, when she left for work, ‘Try pavements that intersect. With the old, your father’s, with father neighborhood’—she’ll say anything—you have to listen, put it in context. ‘Coney Island,’ she said, but I thought Coney Island Avenue.” “Where you met me,” said the boy, delighted.

The rest I kept to myself, I could smell her, the jasmine and behind it some green tea and witch hazel message, “map your day, Mister Mo,” says my wife, “you ahead of someone else, someone there ahead of you.”

He knows percents. I will try him on decimals. He went to the store for his mother. He could “crunch the numbers” in his head, his pride, his old algebra.

I find in the leather-and-stacked-bath-towel-smelling closet one night the digital camera I’d been thinking about. I think that he should have it. I give it to him Monday. “This cost a whale of a lot of money,” he says, his face glowing darkly. “It’s yours.” Ali leafs through the little dog-eared pages, “In…structions in four languages.” My cell phone goes and I let it ring and Ali is cool with it. “Everything must go,” I say.

Kids didn’t invite Ali home.

I will save Ali, it comes to me. From what?

The game’s the thing, it’s another day, crossing against the red: Did he know the stories from his part of the world actually, like Noureddin and the beautiful Persian and the caliph who disguised himself as a fisherman, did he know Ali Baba and—“Forty Thieves,” Ali breaks in—“Ancient and interlocked—?” I went on but “Ah!” says the boy, a friend from some olden time. The two dreams of treasure? I said—and I’m explaining that the first dreamer follows his to Isfahan, is arrested among thieves by a man who dismisses the dream and tells his own, disbelieving it too, freeing the first dreamer, sending him back home to Cairo where amazingly he finds the second dreamer’s dream true—a treasure in your own backyard. The Arabian—? I began, or did Ali know The Thousand and One—?—looking over his shoulder at something behind us—tales broken off to be continued—“You bugging?” he interrupts—meaning Of course I know The Thousand and One Nights—that go on and on, always interrupted—Not always (Is the boy…? Had I gone too far?)…“They are not true,” said the boy. “Well they’re what could happen,” I said. “And bad things in them, I think,” Ali added. “Who said?”

Ali’s father. The imam, too, Ali thought. Your family, I said.

Not everyone. “Maybe not me,” the boy says huskily. “My big brother, he says I got to pray but—” “For what?” “He don’t say his prayers all the time.” “But sometimes he does, Ali.”

 

Mom asked why had Ali walked home. Abbod had spotted him on the sidewalk halfway from school waving to someone. The game store, was the answer. He knew she looked in his backpack.

 

Pray for what? again I ask. “America,” Ali chuckles. (Can he be nine?)

Abbod seems to have a license. Got it pretty quick.

“If you’d never visited our game store…”—Ali heh-hehs (Is it my our?)—“how come you were there?” “Oh I heard guys would be there that I knew.” “You heard?”

A tough young Arab never a day sick. My wife had a call, a guy wanting to know what driving schools she’d sold cars to but she thought quickly and answered she was only a middleman on the phone, and it was dual-control. Not quite true, she had a list.

That game store: the day we met was the first time, did he mean? Could it be true?

Ever been to the Brooklyn Bridge? “What do you take me for?” the boy replies, to say the words. “Ever walked across, I mean?”

When he saw Ali halfway home on the sidewalk, why didn’t big brother Abbod stop? Abbod was in a car. Questions came to me, like I’m being asked.

Seen it? Yeah. (You crossed the Manhattan. I think so, said Ali. Right onto Flatbush, I confirmed.) “Mister Mo? I like you like I like my uncle. He is tall. We go out for a run. Music helps you remember. You said that.” “I did?” We’re standing in front of the record store and, hearing a siren, turn to see a squad car racing north the wrong way. Ali’s life is not mine. “I hear a song, I remember where I listened to it,” I turn back to the window. “Or this store,” says the boy, “you hear Rap coming out of the speaker you recall Green Day bass, nothing like.” “Come here not knowing why, you could find a record you wanted,” I add. “I always know why,” I catch the child’s eye. Did he know Ska? Ska? The music…I will learn how he thinks.

What we might know between us. Our depth together.

He’s describing a game, a bus passes. Up the block another, the B8, crosses along Foster Avenue bound for Bay Ridge where I could gladly escape some intelligence that’s questioning mine, my city, my job (what is it?)—with a view there at the end of the bus line of the Narrows, the entrance to the harbor, a tanker, a huge, rusted hull at anchor, the winds across the water, the Verrazano Bridge, some responsibility to this boy at risk for whom I have begun to want what (?), some everything that he deserves, doesn’t care for the oranges here.

Ska? I explain—white California reggae, horns and a super drummer, well Jamaica to UK to Calif, the wife’s favorite sometimes. Ali is on his way. “White? I am late. I remember what you say.”

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 camera, 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.

“Know what he said? ‘You didn’t call on me when I was going to tell about caves along the river.’ He’s mad at me, my wife said. Next day he wasn’t in class. He knows how to cook. We should take him camping.”

Arriving at their block in Newkirk as if I didn’t know what else to do the day after he didn’t come to school—was he at large, was I?—before a guy in a windbreaker saw me down the street and spoke into his phone as the street door popped open like a lid and a man I felt I should know broke free of another and another and the cop phoning moved to intercept him like a strong safety between him and the goal line.

What is my job? To see what a child is seeing.

Ali—I thought of him, if I could save him, but from what? And there he is in the doorway when his uncle—for how did I know it was that irritable, nephew-loving atlas of learning long-legged, a fugitive back home where life at noon like mission accomplished might cost nothing to cancel—swerving off the cement path toward a lone forsythia bush fell headlong tripped up it seemed by a pistol shot’s synchrony and slow-legged into silence as natural as anything?

 

Police officer killed in line of duty, a news photo of him posted near the B and Q trains, near Ali’s apartment house, near the bus stop. Ali took the bus home.

 

I waited at the game store.

 

Once he said, “What do you advertise, Mister Mo?”

MasterCard Glueguns, Digestive Bombs, little yellow plastic teardrop containers of lemon juice. A driving school concern with agencies in Jersey and Maryland.

 

Asked about his home-study Qur’an, “Jesus didn’t have a father,” Ali replied as if I had asked. Would I have saved him from running to his uncle? From his mother’s scream? From looking up from his uncle shot down to see me near and have to decide what to do even about me? Which was nothing but to ignore me, his friend who doubted Abbod was a good half-brother. When neither the officer who shot his uncle, nor the other with him, nor the plainclothes with the cell, tried to question me.

 

Abbod had ID in case he had to show it but never had to until he volunteered it at the driving school and was given training even before they checked him out.

 

Routinely suspect, these people work almost as hard as our Koreans.

“Faquir” (?) a poor person. I waited at the game store.

 

I had known this neighborhood as a child, a grandchild. Things you know, all over the place. I told you I wanted a poet, she replies, meaning me.

 

Who were these nomads? These Scythians and other ancient minds. A dual-control driver training car found parked in Astoria sniffed stem to stern by a police dog, a half-empty red Classic Coke can in back with a half-smoked cigarillo awash in it, but certain grains of unburnt powder evidently cleaned from nook and cranny of firearm with compressed-air spray gun commonly used to clean computer keyboards.

 

Rendezvous though with a wife who likes the things you know and half-know (mostly half)—the ocean weathers, the laughter of Herodotus at map makers who would make Ocean a river running round a circular earth—yet his praise for Solon’s rule that every man once a year should declare the source of his livelihood at risk of death if he can’t prove the source an honest one.

 

Winds across the water, which hardly gives way…the Narrows…the Verrazano…My head adrift with bridges, we dream along a reach to converge far out at sea where on station a Coast Guard weather ship will plunge onward in a twelve-mile-by-twelve-mile square…

 

To go from thing to thing, not too afraid—knowing truth has a better chance to trespass sudden and interrupting…

 

The Bridge in pieces and angles of itself—adrift like our seasons.

 

“Mister Mo.”

 

Mo thinks of what it is his wife wants. To travel. More than anything. She pores over a map of Asia. We make decisions together, don’t we? What is a map? I think I actually asked her. We’re still young, she not yet thirty-seven. (Home-schooled in California, when she grew up she had understandably come east.)

 

I must read only children’s books (Mandelstam writes),

Cherish only children’s thoughts,

Scatter all big things far and wide,

Rise up from the deep-rooted sadness.

I know what he means, but…

 

Employment: that’s number one right now…

What is my job? The future. Helping this boy…

 

“I know who you are,” Ali said, standing at such a distance that I stopped trying to close it, his uncle bleeding at his feet, arms fallen apart, his mother joining Ali distraught and then seeing me, seeing me retreat.

 

…a poet who died in prison: to be scattered through this history.

 

To go from thing to thing unafraid, that’s all: knowing the truth has a better chance sudden and interrupting or may come round again.

 

…pasturing your life…

 

New nomad waiting for it to come to me…

 

For nomad is the movement of others from me as if it made little difference who was the mover.

 

I did not need to die in my own country; and then I did not die at all.

 

Close, she said. She and I, she meant. She said Ali would speak without raising his hand—like you, my wife said. Has it come to that?—and once she failed to recognize him when he did raise his hand. She understood that I missed him.

 

He knows Ska, she informs me fondly.

 

Nomaderie nowadays. Did she get that from me? You could get into a state about it. You didn’t need to go anywhere anymore: it came to you, though nomaderie…A writer pausing at a village in Crete: “total absence of anything approaching a communal existence. We have become spiritual nomads; whatever pertains to the soul is derelict, tossed about by the winds like…”

 

A woman to whom I confessed comes back for more, having half-heard. For nomad is the movement of others from you as if it made little difference, if I could ever tell Ali this, who’s gone now.

Salat, five-times-a-day prayer.

 

We serviced the sites on a seasonal basis until the seasons began to come to us which would have made the job easier but the seasons changed in nature, pushing out from within: we were on the move but much more regular than our friends who stayed put; and the sites were everything you would have expected of a site, manned, unmanned.

 

Time we break into seasons briefer and briefer now like space where we are restless and think ourselves on the move. Until, having pulled the seasons along with us we turn to one long season its length no longer long or relative, no longer even length.

 

Seasons don’t wait for us but come along in us now and also speed away from us. I try, clocking in on my own (timeless, I hoped) job, to build on others’ work, John Clare’s “I Am”—“the vast shipwreck of my life’s esteems; / Even the dearest, that I love the best, / Are strange—nay, rather stranger than the rest.”

 

The nomad state: nomad nation.

 

Nomaderie, the form of “pieces.”

 

I believe the boy was in the end blamed for telling about his shepherd cousin.

 

I recalled my lost father largely self-taught reciting Emily Dickinson years before I knew who that was and as if she—for me now a foundling spirit, Founding Mother—were a card-carrying Christian: my father, a job printer on Vanderbilt Avenue near Grand Central, urging me to close the Arabian Nights, a tale of two unexpectedly linked dreams, as it happened, and open a book of fact, yet speaking to me as I to Ali like an equal.

 

Your God as a nomad.

 

I did not need to die in my own country; and then I did not die at all.

 

A woman who knows what to overlook yet seems to have overlooked nothing, was my thought about my wife, her map of world foods she discussed with her children.

 

I thought I would move on. And the boy. Abbod’s photos of the Bridge may as well have been the American dream left in New York when he slipped back over the border into the Notre Dame mountains by canoe, the long, eastward slanting lac a minute flattened ellipse in uncle’s atlas. “Abbod,” the mother said. “Abbod.” Strapping specimen with a hernia needing attention and some overdue dental work.

 

I know you, don’t I? the proprietor greets the boy who appears in his store one day in May or early June—used to go to school around here. You’re Ali? The boy squints, uncertain. You’ve come for your…Here, your friend ordered this for you. Green Day? What friend? asks the man with him, his arm in a sling, a Band-Aid on his nose.

 

The boy had accepted his gift. What was mine? About music, he had said, “Go for the Gold…lots of dead presidents, man.”

 

And so as season tried to follow season, severaling a various year to leave us breathless with travel excitement, sinus tumors in the healthiest and temperamentally richest of our loose group, with a late-developing sixth-sense problem and far away Down Under cancer cells proving contagious in an animal the name of which we will recall…war ongoing, a shepherd arriving…