I Have Lost My Way(4)

As the men stream into the mosque, taking their places, on the rugs around Harun and his father, he tries to make his intention known to God. But for the life of him, he can’t. He doesn’t know what his intentions are anymore.

He will make for him a way out, his cousin had texted. But what is Harun’s way out?

I have lost my way, Harun thinks as the prayer begins.

“Allahu Akbar,” he hears his father chant beside him.

And again, the thought: I have lost my way. Harun tries to focus. But he can’t. He can think of nothing but James.

Forgive me, Harun had texted this morning.

No response.

Not even a Get the fuck out my life, which was the last thing James had said to him.

There wouldn’t be a response. James never said things he didn’t mean.

Unlike Harun.

When the zuhr concludes, Harun and his father go outside to collect their shoes and exchange pleasantries with the other men. All around, there is talk of Hassan Bahara, who died last week while fueling his car at the gas station.

“It was his heart,” Nasir Janjua tells Abu.

Clucking of tongues ensues. Confessions of high cholesterol levels. Wifely naggings to get more exercise.

“No, no,” Nasir Janjua says. “It was a heart defect, silent until now.”

A defect of the heart. Harun knows a thing or two about those. But unlike Hassan Bahara, his defect isn’t silent. He’s known about it for years.

Abu clasps an arm on Harun’s shoulder. “Everything okay?”

I have lost my way. He imagines telling Abu this.

But that would only break his father’s heart. It was always a choice of whose to break. As for his own, a foregone conclusion. Broken either way. It’s what happens with defective hearts.

“Yeah, Abu, I’m fine,” he says.

“You sure?” he asks. “You don’t often come to mosque.” There’s no reproach in his voice. His older brother Saif started middle school on the day 9/11 happened, and after that he began calling himself Steve and refusing to attend mosque. By the time Harun stopped going, the battle had already been lost. Or won. Depending on how you looked at it.

“I figured since I’m going . . .” he trails off. “Amir goes every day.”

“Yes, your cousin is very devout.” Abu ruffles his hair. “You are a good boy. You have made Ammi very happy.”

“And you?”

“Always.”

It is for the always he’s doing this. To continue the always. To never lose the always.

They reach the intersection of Sip and Westside. Harun turns left, in the opposite direction from his house and Abu’s store.

“I thought no school today,” Abu says, assuming that is where Harun is going.

There’s never school on Thursdays. Thursdays are the invisible day added to the weekly schedule last year. Thursdays are their day to be together in Manhattan, where they can slip through the streets like ghosts.

In winter, they meet at Chelsea Market, waltzing through the restaurants they can’t afford to eat at while James, who wants to be a chef one day, ogles the fresh pasta, the buttery croissants, the sausages drying from the rafters, and describes all the meals he will cook for them one day. When the weather is warm, they meet under a little arched bridge in Central Park.

They have not missed a single Thursday. Not when a blizzard shut down the aboveground trains, not when James was sick with bronchitis and all Harun wanted to do was get him somewhere warm and dry but for the life of him could not imagine where such a place might be. They’d wound up in a Panera, drinking tea, watching YouTube videos, pretending it was their apartment.

“I’m just going to tie up some loose ends,” he tells Abu.

“Don’t be late for dinner,” Abu says. “Your mother has taken the last two days off work to cook. Your brother is coming. With his wife.” His father tries not to frown at the mention of Saif’s wife but is not entirely successful.

“I won’t be late,” Harun says, even though before he left the house, he took his passport and the five hundred dollars cash meant for tomorrow’s trip and tucked them into his pocket. It was a rash, last-minute thing to do, but it opened up the possibility of not getting on that plane, of running away for good, in which case he would be very late for dinner.

Coward.

I have lost my way.

He hugs his father goodbye, which isn’t something he often does, and he worries that it’ll arouse suspicion, but it doesn’t, because Abu says only: “Be home in time. You know how your mother gets.”

As soon as Abu is safely out of sight, he texts: Going to our place @ park. Meet me there.

At Journal Square, he enters the PATH station. The smell of the tunnels—musty, moldy, redolent of old garages—makes him ache for James.

Everything does.

He takes the train to the terminus at Thirty-Third Street and walks out past the neon signs of the chain clothing stores. In the early days, before they’d learned the secret public spaces in the city, they’d sometimes stopped in one of these shops, trying on all manner of sweaters and trousers neither had any intention of buying, because they could sneak into the same dressing room and, behind those slatted doors, the discarded sweaters at their feet like a camouflage, steal a kiss. Every so often they’d buy something, like the socks Harun is wearing today. They called it rent.