Homeland Elegies(63)

“There used to be a hospital on Twelfth Street and Seventh Avenue called Saint Vincent’s. Believe it or not, my dad actually worked there for a few months when he first came to this country. I saw a line in front of it, twisting around the block. I asked an older woman what the line was for. ‘To give blood,’ she said. Someone else asked what my type was. I told her O negative, and I heard a few people say I should get in line. I’d been told before my blood was good for transfusions. If I couldn’t get farther downtown, at least giving blood was something I could do.

“The guy in front of me was, I don’t know, maybe late fifties? With a blue shirt and thick lips, muttonchops down his cheeks. He kept staring at me. I finally asked him if everything was all right. ‘Well, I think the answer to that’s pretty fucking obvious.’ ‘Yeah, well, I was just wondering why you keep looking at me.’ ‘Where are you from?’ he asked, making no effort to hide his aggression. ‘Uptown?’ I said. I knew what he was asking. By that point, I knew word was spreading that Muslims were behind the mayhem. I’d felt it from the woman back on Fourteenth Street, and I could feel it in the way some people were looking at me now. The guy in muttonchops asked me again where I was from, and I told him again I was from uptown. ‘You a Moslem?’ he asked. Whatever he saw on my face as I hesitated was the answer he needed. ‘You are, aren’t you?’ ‘Is there a problem, sir?’ ‘Fucking Arab Einstein over here wondering if we got a problem,’ he said now for the others. Someone told him to leave me alone. ‘I don’t know what you’re doing here. We don’t want your Arab blood.’ I laughed without intending to, and that made him angrier. ‘You think that’s funny? You think that’s funny, you fucking Arab?’ ‘Would you please shut up, sir?!’ I shouted suddenly. I could hear I sounded weak, which only made things worse. ‘Don’t you tell me what to do, you fucking terrorist.’ And then he said something I still don’t understand: ‘We should have killed you all when we had a chance.’

“There were a lot of people watching us now. Some of them were pressing in. It seemed like some of them felt the way he did, though I could hear the ones who were trying to get him to leave me alone. The guy kept shouting: ‘We don’t need your Arab blood! Nobody wants your fucking Arab blood!’

“I remember him making a movement toward me and a large black man in an army cap stopping him. That’s when I felt the warm wetness along the inside of my leg and looked down to see a dark stain creeping down the inside of my jeans. Everyone watching saw me notice I’d urinated on myself. Suddenly, I was shaking. ‘Leave him alone,’ a woman said. The guy in muttonchops was doubled over, his laugh like a witch’s cackle. ‘Look at the fucking Arab tough guy,’ he shouted, pointing. ‘Fucking peed himself!’

“I didn’t say anything. Some feeling was caught in my throat—I couldn’t tell you if it was anger or fear—and it mixed with the odor of smoke and dust. I couldn’t have made a sound if I tried. I wanted to cough, but instead I turned and walked away. I heard the guy behind me still yelling. I walked as fast as I could. I wanted to run, but my knees were too weak, and I was worried I would fall and look even weaker. At the first corner I got to, I went left so none of them could see me anymore.

“I walked and walked. My leg itched along the damp inside seam with a terrible bristle. Tears were coming up now, suffocating like snot. I heaved and coughed. My breath went in and out of me, and I couldn’t control it. I started to sob, so I stopped and covered my face even though I saw no one watching.

“When I finally looked up from my palms, I noticed I was in front of a Salvation Army thrift shop. Standing in the doorway was a balding man in a pastor’s collar. He had a double chin and circular glasses frames, and he approached me with a tender look. I started crying again. He handed me a handkerchief—one of those old hemmed pocket squares. I wiped my eyes. I blew my nose. He put his hand on my shoulder and asked me if I wanted some water.

“Once we were inside, he disappeared in the back. I could hear people listening to a radio. The narrow entry of the storefront was filled with racks of clothes pressed too tightly together, I thought, for anyone to browse—the rows and rows of fading dresses and blouses, the sweaters and suit jackets and winter coats, and strewn everywhere below them, the heaps of worn shoes. I remember thinking that no one in those towers would ever be wearing clothes now, these or others, a thought that made some sort of poignant sense to me then but never would again. I’d been overhearing from people in the street that more than fifty thousand had probably died that day.

“On a wire rack next to the cash register, I saw dozens of necklaces for sale. There was a whole row of them with crucifix pendants. Without thinking, I reached out and took one. I heard the pastor coming back, and I slipped it into my pocket.

“I drank his water and thanked him. I pulled out my wallet to give him money, but he wouldn’t take it. I tried to insist, but he stopped me. I wanted to tell him about the necklace, but I was embarrassed. I didn’t want him to think I needed Christ. ‘God be with you. God be with us all,’ he said as I walked out.

“I started to walk back uptown. Somewhere around Thirty-Fourth Street, I stopped and put the necklace on, and I didn’t take it off again for three months.”

I’d thought about it all countless times since that day, about how I would write it, what form it would take, how to shape the details of my peregrinations on 9/11 into a dramatic speech someone could someday speak on a stage. But I never did write it. I’d never even spoken of it to another person before that morning.