I AM STARTLED awake. A dim light comes from the hall beneath the curtain that wraps around my bed. The medicine they give me here makes my mind fuzzy. My memories come to me sharply or not at all. I have woken uneasy. Am I afraid? The room is silent in answer. The TVs turned off all throughout the hall. The rectangular window a sheet of black. The flowers blue in their vases. WE LOVE YOU NANA faces me in gray text. My life has taken on a look I do not recognize as immediately mine.
I am not dizzy, and so, I step from my bed. My legs are chilly, I slip my feet into socks, then slippers, grab my sweater. What a decision you made over a decade ago when you first ran away. Even now, during the last stretch of my life, I cannot fathom walking willfully away. The nurses on duty are in the center of the floor. They sit behind desks and computer screens and I can hear them chatting. If I walk along the wall to the staircase to my right, I can be out unseen, and soon the door echoes shut behind me. My head does not hurt tonight. My legs move without telling me they are tired. I will step down the flight of stairs until it takes me to floor one, where I will exit out into the parking lot.
If I do not count the events of the past week, I would say I am in fairly good health. I have outlived both of my parents by decades. I thought I was just prone to headaches. I thought the weakness of my arms and legs was a symptom of aging. The railing is cold as I step down toward the bottom of the stairwell. I stop in my tracks as a nurse turns the corner and her eyes widen from surprise at the sight of me.
“What are you doing?” she asks. Her voice echoes. She glances at my gown peeking from my sweater and my silver bracelet on my wrist. “It’s five A.M.”
“My surgery is tomorrow.” I do not know why I say it.
She does not work on my floor. I have never seen her before. I can see her trying to figure out if I am dangerous or if I am delusional, a danger to myself.
“Sir, you can’t leave your room. Can you tell me what your room number is?”
“Every day of my life I’ve taken a walk outside. I have been in here for a week. I haven’t seen the sky in days. I wanted to see it, before.”
It is clear that the woman does not know what to do. I feel bad for startling her. For asking her to break code.
“I am on the fourth floor,” I tell her. “Room four-oh-five.”
I turn around and begin climbing the stairs. She steps next to me at my pace. She is quiet. One floor up she whispers, “Will a balcony do?”
She holds a finger to her lips and shushes. I follow her. I feel a dizziness I take for excitement. She unlocks a door and tells me it is a break room where no one will be at this hour. A couch, a coffee table, a kitchenette, and a sliding glass door. I thank her. I ask her name. Ida, she says, opening the sliding door. I step out into the cold.
“We can’t stay long,” she says. She looks around nervously.
She stands a little behind me. No clouds but some wisps. A clear night. A few stars. The best we can do when we are so close to the city. I think, God, if this is my last time looking at the night sky, I thank You, for having given me so many nights like this one. I cannot help it. I blink rapidly, not wanting to make her any more uncomfortable.
“When my children were very little, if I did not know how to make them stop crying or make them happy, I would take them outside, show them this.”
“Oh,” she says softly, “that is very nice. I am sure they will remember that.”
I shrug. I hoped so.
“My daughters were quick to feel better, they would begin talking to me instead. Or would ask to walk around. But my son, he would look for a long time. Until we had to go back, no need for talking.”
The wisps of clouds are making their way across the far sky. Ida waits until it is appropriate to take me back. Hadia said there were no guarantees. I am not ready. There are things I need you to know. I stare at the white glow of the moon until something in me calms.
“Do you really think they will remember it?” I ask.
My voice feels as weak as my hands, and I hold them together behind my back to keep from feeling it. She reaches out to rest her hand on my arm. I do not pull away. I think of how kind strangers are to me and how maybe I have not been kind enough to other strangers to deserve it. I think of Dawn when you were sleeping in your clear crib in the hospital and how generously she reassured me you would be all right. Years later, I wander down a different hospital hallway with a different cause for the heaviness of my heart, and it is as though we live until we become other people entirely, keeping only that same need for hope, for comfort. And how miraculous it is to me that we receive in this world the very things we need from it, how tonight it is another stranger who has stepped forward to play that same part, help me get through this night until morning.
“It’s a part of them,” Ida says, drawing her hand away, “even if they don’t know it. It will be there every time they look up.”
* * *
MY FATHER DIED unexpectedly late on a Thursday night and was buried early Friday. I wore black. I did not cry—I think now because my mother was crying so much, it seemed like her energy was being drained from her. My love for my father felt small compared to my mother’s. I wondered if onlookers thought I felt nothing. And of course, after that thought entered I could not cry in front of anyone, fearing I would be a hypocrite if I gave expression to my pain only after considering another’s interpretation of it.
The call for prayer sounded after the funeral. It was a beautiful and soothing recitation, even on that day, or perhaps especially on that day. For as long as it was heard it was the only sound; even the birds quieted, even the shopkeepers had closed their gates. My father would often look at the animals during times of prayer and he would say—look how every creature knows what time it is. He would point up and say, for Him, even the birds and the sheep and the stray cats hush; a calm blankets everything. My father was gone. I was a kind of lonely I did not think anyone could understand. We had not been close in life. I hardly knew him. We had little in common. But every Friday for jummah we walked together the short distance to the mosque and I stood by him in prayer. After, I was in charge of finding our shoes. What else connected us, if not that, and the blood in our veins? That when we heard the adhaan, we went together, the two of us.
I walked that Friday alone. I tucked my shoes away in a corner by themselves. The men I did not know gathering like a flock about to still, finding a spot in line. Here, everyone had a place. We stood side by side. One man passed me a sajdagah. My father was gone. I was thirteen. Looking back, I was just a boy. And then the second call to prayer, the time to rise. I stood. No one around me knew I had buried my father that day. I lifted my hands, readying myself to focus on the prayer. I could not recall what it had been like to have had a father. I had already forgotten. Then the Arabic verses began, the murmuring of moving lips, the entire hall filling with whisper. We lifted our palms up together, we bent together, and we lowered our heads to the ground together. We were one unit composed of a hundred, all of us moving and trying to think only of God. My lips moved. I was among brothers, I was home.
* * *