Exit West(9)

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SAEED’S PHONE HAD DIED and he charged it in his family’s car from a backup battery source he kept in the glove compartment, and as his phone turned on it beeped and chirped with his parents’ panic, their missed calls, their messages, their mounting terror at a child not returned safely that night, a night when many children of many parents did not return at all.

Upon Saeed’s arrival his father went to bed and in his bedside mirror glimpsed a suddenly much older man, and his mother was so relieved to see her son that she thought, for a moment, she should slap him.

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NADIA DID NOT FEEL like sleeping, and so she took a shower, the water chilly because of the intermittent gas supply to her boiler. She stood naked, as she had been born, and put on her jeans and T-shirt and sweater, as she did when alone at home, and then put on her robe, ready to resist the claims and expectations of the world, and stepped outside to go for a walk in a nearby park that would by now be emptying of its early-morning junkies and of the gay lovers who had departed their houses with more time than they needed for the errands they had said they were heading out to accomplish.

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LATER THAT DAY, in the evening, Nadia’s time, the sun having slipped below her horizon, it was morning in the San Diego, California, locality of La Jolla, where an old man lived by the sea, or rather on a bluff overlooking the Pacific Ocean. The fittings in his house were worn but painstakingly repaired, as was his garden: home to mesquite trees and desert willows and succulent plants that had seen better years, but were still alive and mostly free of blight.

The old man had served in the navy during one of the larger wars and he had respect for the uniform, and for these young men who had established a perimeter around his property, as he watched, standing on the street with their commanding officer. They reminded him of when he was their age and had their strength and their suppleness of movement and their certainty of purpose and their bond with one another, that bond he and his friends used to say was like that of brothers, but was in some ways stronger than that of brothers, or at least than his bond with his own brother, his kid brother, who had passed last spring from cancer of the throat that had withered him to the weight of a young girl, and who had not spoken to the old man for years, and when the old man had gone to see him in the hospital could no longer speak, could only look, and in his eyes was exhaustion but not so much fear, brave eyes, on a kid brother the old man had never before thought of as brave.

The officer didn’t have time for the old man but he had time for his age and for his service record, and so he allowed the old man to linger nearby for a while before saying with a polite dip of his head that it would be best if he now moved on.

The old man asked the officer whether it was Mexicans that had been coming through, or was it Muslims, because he couldn’t be sure, and the officer said he couldn’t answer, sir. So the old man stood silent for a bit and the officer let him, as cars were diverted and told to go some other way, and as rich neighbors who had bought their properties more recently sat at their front windows and stared, and in the end the old man asked how he could help.

The old man felt like a child suddenly, asking this. The officer was young enough to be his grandson.

The officer said they’d let him know, sir.

I’ll let you know: that’s what the old man’s father used to say to him when he was pestering. And in some ways the officer did look like his father, more like his father than like the old man anyway, like his father when the old man was just a boy.

The officer offered to arrange for the old man to be dropped off if he wanted, with kin maybe, or friends.

It was a warm early winter’s day, clear and sunny. Far below, the surfers were paddling out in their wetsuits. Above the ocean, in the distance, the gray transport planes were lining up to land at Coronado.

The old man wondered where he should go, and thinking about it, realized he couldn’t come up with a single place.

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AFTER THE ASSAULT on the stock exchange of Saeed and Nadia’s city, it seemed the militants had changed strategy, and grown in confidence, and instead of merely detonating a bomb here or orchestrating a shooting there, they began taking over and holding territory throughout the city, sometimes a building, sometimes an entire neighborhood, for hours usually, but on occasion for days. How so many of them were arriving so quickly from their bastions in the hills remained a mystery, but the city was vast and sprawling and impossible to disconnect from the surrounding countryside. Besides, the militants were well known to have sympathizers within.

The curfew Saeed’s parents had been waiting for was duly imposed, and enforced with hair-trigger zeal, not just sandbagged checkpoints and razor wire proliferating but also howitzers and infantry fighting vehicles and tanks with their turrets clad in the rectangular barnacles of explosive reactive armor. Saeed went with his father to pray on the first Friday after the curfew’s commencement, and Saeed prayed for peace and Saeed’s father prayed for Saeed and the preacher in his sermon urged all the congregants to pray for the righteous to emerge victorious in the war but carefully refrained from specifying on which side of the conflict he thought the righteous to be.

Saeed’s father felt as he walked back to campus and his son drove back to work that he had made a mistake with his career, that he should have done something else with his life, because then he might have had the money to send Saeed abroad. Perhaps he had been selfish, his notion of helping the youth and the country through teaching and research merely an expression of vanity, and the far more decent path would have been to pursue wealth at all costs.