Streams of Babel

  I stumbled to my feet, staring at Rain. I had never told off a person in my life except Aleese, but out of my mouth came a wheezing "Stop it!"

  Rain misread both my tone and command. She hit pause. I was left to see an unmoving shot of Aleese staring at Jeremy's camera—staring at me again—angrily.

  Rain and Owen couldn't see my reaction in the dark, which probably allowed the conversation to play out so strangely. Neither of them gasped or jumped up or looked the least bit ashamed that I had caught them.

  Rain said, "Gosh. Sure wish we had more footage of Mrs. E. I've been looking at photo albums at their house for three days. I would so love to see Mrs. E moving sometimes ... in some of her lawyer adventures, though I wouldn't guess they were this good."

  I realized they felt that I had left the box on the floor for a show of respect to Aleese. And it was perfectly normal, even polite, for them to reach in and patronize it. I was still thunderstruck, but Owen picked up the conversation, as if my "stop it" remark was to pause and reflect on Aleese's "adventure"

  "Cyanogen ... that's some of the stuff that Saddam Hussein supposedly used to kill all those thousands of Kurdish families in northern Iraq." He pointed at the screen.

  "Your mom was in Iraq, Cora?" Rain's eyes glowed as they turned to me.

  The two posters from the church service today were now in front of the mantel. I glanced at them before shutting my eyes. I could imagine this better in darkness. I hadn't had the time or the good health to consider how these posters changed things. I'd always known my mother had been as far as Beirut, but the knowledge had come with some images of her lying on a couch over there, high on drugs, and telling people to bug off in colorful terms. I opened my eyes to make sure the footage was real. Aleese still stared, frozen in that horribly searing gaze, and the corpse was faded in the background.

  Owen said, "They're definitely Kurds. Didn't you see that footage in your history class, too, Rain?"

  She shrugged, rambling on about Owen and me and the other "honors geeks ... No offense, Cora."

  "Look at the head coverings" Owen ignored her. "Roll it, Rain. Those dead people, they're Kurds. Right, Cora?"

  I drifted up closer to the TV and as I sat on the floor Aleese stood up, and Jeremy moved along behind her, panning the camera as they walked past a dozen or so dead bodies littering a narrow street.

  Aleese pointed at a truck as she scanned the high walls. "If we get shot at, we'll dive under that truck over there."

  "If we get shot at, I am on my way home." Jeremy's camera jerked and darted. "I cannot believe you dragged me across the border to do this. This isn't the, um, finance-the-orphanage type of stuff we're paid for, Aleese. Who's going to buy this disgusting footage on which we've spent our last dollar?"

  I felt my chest loosening up, my spine relaxing somewhat, to the point where I had to put one hand on the floor to keep my balance. The other hand I brought to wipe away tears—and then cover my mouth, as Aleese exploded in her usual syntax.

  "You can go the fuck home and shoot weddings if you're going to be a pin dick, Jeremy. We'll give it to ... Human Rights Watch, maybe. As for helping the children?" She went right up to a dead person hanging off the side of the truck she had pointed at earlier and picked the guy's head up. "How old do you think this one is? Fourteen? Fifteen? Bring the camera closer, Jeremy. I got a message for Georgie." The camera zoomed, and the dead boy's blank face did look younger than ours.

  "Hey, George. It's me again. Me and my dead friend, here. When inhaled, cyanogens disrupt the transfer of blood to bodily tissue. Symptoms include headache, nausea, chills, vomiting, and labored breathing. But that's all a moot point, because you're dead in three minutes. This ... this boy is obviously with his family, and they are obviously in this truck because they smelled something weird like apples and garlic, and decided last Wednesday's attack wasn't the usual gift of conventional explosives from Saddam. They decided they better get out of town as quickly as possible, and they may have gotten an eighth of a mile. His family took about as many breaths as the people in the gas chambers at Auschwitz."

  She waved her hand in the air, and thirty flies left the boy's head. "Welcome to Halabja, Iraq, Georgie. Today is March 19, 1988, eighth year of the Iran-Iraq War. Let this footage profess: More Kurds should be brought to America. They need asylum or they will end up like this. Give us their tired, their poor..."

  The screen faded to sand.

  The part about Kurds needing asylum seemed new to me. It was not something we studied in history class—not that I could remember. Rain hit the pause button again. Then she slowly turned her head to stare at me.

  "Damn, Cora," Owen breathed in awe. "Why didn't you ever bring this footage into school? Do you know how cool that is?" In spite of his illness, he chuckled over each word. "Your mother. Sneaked into Iraq. To film the Kurdish massacre. To help bring Kurds to America..." And he laughed some more.

  "Who's Georgie?" Rain added.

  "Boss?" I muttered, though I hadn't a clue.

  Rain patted my arm for quite some time. My vision turned hazy with what must have appeared to be tears of grief. Maybe they were. I felt grievously ignorant of the world's problems. I also felt a strange calming, a coming together of a confusing universe.

  I don't know why I had never dreamed my mother capable of anything heroic. I don't know why Oma had never told me stories of things like this, or why Aleese had hidden them from me. I would have wanted to be proud of her. I couldn't get past my stirring question. Why didn't she love me?

  I reached into Rain's hand and took the remote. Fever chills had returned, but I just let my jaw chatter. I rolled the tape backward to the beginning and watched it through again, watched my mother's passions run hot for the poor Kurdish teenager and cold for Jeremy's fearfulness, and hot for her little speech about getting Kurds to safety in America.

  Rain rooted through the box, announcing the bad news that all the other tapes were beta or "newsroom" format and that we couldn't watch them on VHS. I didn't care. I could suddenly watch a tape four times and not care that two high school legends were watching me do it. I could let my teeth chatter out of control and not want to excuse myself to my room to be alone. I could slouch.

  I could feel people coming into my house and not get all agog and unable to breathe. I could feel the floor rumbling under the weight of heavy footsteps, but I merely turned to look. Even when I saw Adrian Moran, Tannis Halib, and Jon Dempsey staring down at me, I figured this could be a dream, and if it wasn't, it didn't matter so much. I gripped the remote tightly but didn't jump up.

  Adrian said awkwardly to Owen, "Hi. We, um, found you."

  And before he could think of better words, Jon Dempsey blurted, "So ... what are you guys doing here?"

  I only flinched a little, but then turned my eyes back to the screen, and I enjoyed strange rushes from catching Aleese's eye every now and then as I tried to figure out what every little detail could possibly mean about my mother.

  TWENTY

  SHAHZAD HAMDANI

  TUESDAY, MARCH 5, 2002

  5:55 A.M. KARACHI TIME

  I WALK ALONG the shore at dawn, watching a few red rays break through the Karachi skyline far ahead. I struggle to remember some of my father's melodious words, which I tried so hard over the winter to forget. Often, he attempted to be funny while not losing his intensity.

  "Shahzad, America is the country where one plus one equals nine! There, riches have been created via an influx of the tired and poor! How do they do that?"

  His giggly speeches begin to return, though they are a poison to my chest. "...and it is the land where the rights of the individual take precedence over the needs of the whole—and voilà! A miracle! Individuals don't selfishly beat each other all day long!"

  I trudge along kicking at little crystalline sea pebbles, and I pose to myself some difficult questions: Is America the tired and poor? Or is America the rich and haughty? Who is correct? My father or the extremists? The
extremists don't think of Americans as individuals, as my father did. They think of Americans collectively, and as something threatening, though the nature of the threat changes, depending on the group of extremists. But so many people try to get to America—from my country and every other country. What is the goal of the immigrants? To become corrupt and selfish?

  Shortly after my father went to Six Flags Great Adventure and taped his ridiculous screams on the roller coaster, he visited Miss Liberty, the great statue. He uploaded with the photo his meager attempts to sing in tune: "Give me your tired, your poooooor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe freeeeeeeeeeeee..." My ears almost bled with pain and embarrassment.

  Hodji had laughed with me. "Ha ha ha ha ha. That is terrible!"

  But my father's tone was so sincere. He was trying to sing on key for once, for all these tired, poor people who took the Great Dare.

  I was quite small when he made up that terminology. He often said there was no more terrifying experience common to man than daring to change everything—to leave all your belongings, your family, your house, your neighborhood, your habits, your family's thousands of years of sameness—to go halfway around the world for things you don't know.

  "Shahzad, some people break down in grief and panic while boarding the plane to Kennedy, and some who are weak run off, go directly home again."

  So, I wonder why people do not stay put. Why not be content with your neighbors and friends and family?

  "Shahzad, it's as if every person on earth is born with a statement in his heart: I am meant to be great. I am the child of some king. The common man yearns to regain his royalty, and thus, he takes the Great Dare—"

  I hear heavy breathing behind me and I turn, thinking I will see ghosts. It is Hodji. I suppose he does not trust me to walk the beach and not end up hiding in the bowels of this village until the dreaded flight has left.

  He is quite winded. He enjoys to borrow a Pall Mall from my uncle all too often these days.

  "Do you know what America is to me?" I turn my eyes to the sea as the realization strikes me. "It is a blob on this map of the world my father used to download when we first tried the Internet, back in '96. I was ten years old. He would point out America, after this blurred map took six minutes to download. That's what it is. A bad smudge in some ridiculously low dpi."

  I hear Hodji's breath run out in a way that sounds tired. He says with a yawn and exaggerated patience, "It can be dangerous down here this time of day."

  Considering the work we do, his comment leaves me awestruck. I do not dwell on it. My father's philosophies always "rang" to me, like they should have lutes and cellos playing behind them. "Father said it is a great irony that a union built on trust should succeed, where so many iron-fisted rules had failed." I turn to Hodji again. "It all sounded so very majestic and romantic. Until he failed to wake up one day."

  Hodji blinks tiredly at the sea. "So, we're blaming the Declaration of Independence for a broken gas line? Is that it?"

  "Don't condescend to me, please." My uncle is not here to smack my hair to the other side of my head. It gives me a sense of power—a freedom to think about what is actually true. "I have had very little time in the past six months to think about precisely why my father is dead. I just know that he is, and I'm feeling it right now."

  "Maybe you should think about it," he mutters. "I've barely heard you mention your father these past six months. That's not normal. And as hard as you've been working for the Americans, it's a little odd that you can't dredge up one good feeling about going there. You're forgetting the whole point of this. Your aunt Alika called late last night. She's meeting us at Beth Israel Medical Center tomorrow, first thing. Well, in her mind it's first thing. She doesn't know about your meeting with USIC. She thinks you're coming to comply with your father's wishes about your education and that I helped you get a job. But anyway, you have an appointment with the best asthma specialist there. You'll be feeling much, much better from there on in. USIC will pay for the whole thing—"

  "Beth Israel? It is a Jew hospital," I breathe in confusion.

  "It's a great hospital. You have to stop thinking like that. We're all mongrels in America. The Jews will not poison your medicine. Everyone will give you good care. Your health insurance as an intern will pay the bills ... It's all good. Okay?"

  I had not intended to make a negative comment about Jews—only a curious one. I had never met one to my knowledge, and it had been on the top of "My List" to do so when my father left Pakistan. He and I each had a "My List" that I had entirely forgotten about, until Hodji just brought up a Jew hospital.

  It makes my lips smile a little more as I remember hazily some things: Visit Disney, see Miss Liberty, and see Yankees were at the top. But there were smaller things we had much fun thinking up: Buy Gap jeans, eat Kentucky Fry, stick our heads in a cathedral and see if the incense really can make you dizzy, walk up beside a Jew and see if they really do stink. This could be my chance to see if some rumors that circulate in my village have any basis in fact. I am curious, not meaning to harm.

  But I can't help asking Hodji: "Those doctors ... will they smell?"

  It is our joke sometimes that Americans, the white ones especially, can smell of something I cannot find words for. Perhaps it is ... yogurt.

  "They might not think that you smell so hot." He lifts his freshly showered armpit and sticks it in my face with his vulgar, American laughter. "Smells like a rose, you see?"

  He smells of strawberry, plastic, and yogurt, that is what I think. "They stink like this?" I ask.

  "Only it doesn't stink. You'll get used to it"

  I don't know. Our village is clean. Our home is ceremoniously clean for the sake of my asthma. I think of my aunt Hamera and her two sisters, and how they fold their garments beneath their knees for pads as they scrub and scrub. But for us, ammonia is enough, and bar soap is enough. We are more simple than what I see on the Internet and what Hodji and Father often described. In America, there is a different soap for everything—one for your hair, one for your skin, one for your shaving, one for your clothes. There is one paper to blow with, one to make with in your toilet, one to put to your mouth while eating. In our village, we have only the toilet roll. Hodji has told me I can use the toilet roll to blow with, but if I bring said roll to the table and wipe my mouth, that is very bad manners. I don't see why I can put roll paper to my nose but not my mouth. I don't see why I should be forced to eat with wiping paper in my hands, as if I were a small child. It is very confusing, and with all these soaps Hodji uses every day, I will stink like a nasty bouquet.

  I turn only my eyes sideways to glare at him. He is a big and powerful American who can write his own definitions of normal. A revelation rises up slowly from my feet.

  "You say I have been working hard for the Americans lately? I have always worked hard. I worked hard for my father. Not for America."

  If my father's Internet business with Uncle were to continue operating successfully after my father went to New York, it required my staying. I did not protest. I didn't like the situation, but there was never an e-mail request from my father in New York that I didn't fulfill. If he wanted programs or hacking or v-spying or technical advice, I completed all. He would send me some of his pay for helping him or teaching him. Programming—and hacking—came as naturally to me as breathing and scratching and learning the languages of others.

  "I worked for him. Even after he died. I just think of that. That and how ... I really feel nothing about this place."

  Hodji doesn't take it as badly as I think he might. "Well, it's good you're finally thinking about it. You've got nothing to do for a long transatlantic flight but think, and if you want my honest opinion, it's about time. You can't hide behind work forever."

  He looks at the rising sun over the red roofs of Karachi. He is Catholic but polite. "Did you come to speak to Allah?"

  I feel I would like very much to speak to Allah, and I say yes quickly.

&n
bsp; I watch him trudge cautiously across the sand, knowing he will be half watching me. He is probably hoping I will think of the many pictures my father sent me by e-mail that I used to treasure, plus the fun we had looking at the world on our screen before he left the Karachi police force. Our early trips across the Internet were more than just America; my father wanted to see the whole world. Of that, I am triply sad.

  Computer screens in 1996 were slow moving. But to us, each download was like a page of a gigantic magazine, filled with all the adventures he wanted to take: Experience our Italy ... stay in our Viennese golden hotel ... climb our majestic Swiss mountains ... swim in our Mediterranean seas ... run with our Australian kangaroos ... frolic with our Polynesian fish ... taste our rich Dutch chocolate ... see Disney!

  "So, what do you have now, Father?" The beach becomes blurry as my eyes fill. I have rarely spoken directly to my father since his death. But I see the truth about my father plainly for once. "Father, you got to see one country! You fell victim to the men you chased."

  The sun bobs ahead in its red richness, but I do not play up to him.

  "And you ... you used to belong only to me, and now you are quite selfish!" I don't know quite to whom I am speaking—my father, or this enormous sun of early morning, to which I used to say, "You are all mine; you belong only to me."

  I stop seeing my father's favorite downloads of Vienna and Polynesia and Brazil and I see something plainer. Once he got to America, my father's most beloved view—even more than Miss Liberty—was of the busy streets of midtown, the multiplicity of souls who had come to seize back their royalty. People in the photos he e-mailed me of Union Square were "speckled," like many litters of puppies. Brown, yellow, bronze, freckled, red, white ... They were tall, squat, pale, dark, bald, bearded, skinny, fat, tired, scared—

  "—and great, Shahzad. They came to the universities, the community colleges, the job placement programs, the classified advertisements. They worked with sweat, strength, grunts, and groans, and always, Shahzad, with their dignity. To be paid fairly for your effort is a magical force, a declaration of your self-worth to a world that tends to shred and devour."