to the side to breathe. Breathe, she told herself. Rest, and soften the shoulders, and stop the mind’s seesawing, at least until dawn. Yes, dawn. And then, young adult or not, she would track him down. She would touch his cheek and hug him tight—mother him until he shrugged her off—so the next time night fell, she could hold assurance close to her like a childhood blanket and rest with the vigor of the innocent and the blessed.
NEW YORK: 1:49 A.M. MECCA: 9:49 A.M.
Tile.
Cool, powder-blue tile, chipped in places and hard against his bare feet.
And a razor with an orange handle. A package of them, actually. Ten in all.
Bathroom tile and drugstore razors.
Bathroom tile and drugstore razors.
Bathroom tile and drugstore razors.
It was a prayer.
That wasn’t such a preposterous idea—anything could be a prayer. Should be, in fact. Every step Jonas took, every idle thought that eased through his head: a holy, ongoing dialogue with God. Or perhaps a plea, because at this moment, he shouldn’t be chatting with God as though they were dinner partners. He needed to be a supplicant. Please. Please give me the brains to remember what I’ve been taught and, please, the speed to do it quickly. And the calm, so that I can avoid undue attention and accomplish what I need to accomplish. Mercy, too. Have mercy, please, oh God, on my soul.
Allah, rather. Allah, for God’s sake. Allah. Get with the program.
Unexpectedly amused by his own private stumblings over his Creator’s proper name—or name in proper context—and pleased that he still had the capacity to be amused, Jonas smiled faintly at himself in the mirror. His skin looked even paler than usual under the fluorescent light, smoky-white and artificial, and it merged seamlessly into the ash-blond hair that stood out on his head in waves of thick curls. Ridiculous hair, really. Locks that little boys have but then outgrow, only he never did. Women loved his Jewfro. Always had. When he was twelve, that friend of his mother’s poked her fingers into his tangle of hair and he’d seen her eyes go foggy and he’d realized even then that she was fantasizing—perhaps not about him, exactly, not about her friend’s little boy, not that—but still some fantasy that was loose and sensual, arising from the way his long hair twisted out from his head and the way her fingers felt, vanished among the silky strands. It had surprised him, scared him, really, and later angered him. He sensed something predatory in it, something that failed to take him into account at all. And when he mentioned it to his mother—his bohemian, touchy-feely, let’stalk-about-it mother—she’d pulled away as if he’d slapped her and said he was wrong; her friend had known him since he was in diapers, since he made “doodies” (that was the way she talked) and she’d had to wipe him clean.
And that was enough, more than enough, to end that conversation forever. As she’d no doubt intended.
Jonas sat on the toilet and stretched his long legs, already stripped of their jeans. He hadn’t been able to sleep, had been sleeping poorly for months, in fact. So he might as well begin the process now. He knew the drill, this part of it, anyway. He had to purify himself. That was step one. Purify by removing all hair except for the curls on his head; they’d told him to leave those for later. Then pray toward Mecca. Then eat if he wanted, or fast if he chose, either option permissible, Masoud had said. Then pray and purify even more. Later, Masoud would bring the clean clothes and the Qur’an, which Jonas would place in his right-hand pocket. How did it go? Something old, something new. Something borrowed . . .
He twisted his torso to pick up his digital camera from the top of the toilet tank. He intended to document each step along the way so the pictures could be there for someone to look at later, and maybe understand. He had an idea, loosely formed, that he would want to be understood, if there was any wanting left on the other side. He hoped candid shots of him preparing might illustrate his foresight as well as his determination, because the news reports would surely flatten him to a two-dimensional zealot. He’d be seen as naive—mad, maybe. Someone might accuse him of being a crackhead, though he never used drugs and rarely drank. Others would be perplexed, especially people who were able to overlook evil and lose themselves in their own narrow lives. They’d find it hard to figure out why he couldn’t just ignore, too. Those who could identify with his anguish over the way things were would probably be unwilling to admit it aloud for fear of being seen as sympathizing with a nut-job. Deirdre might be the only person who would really understand, though he’d lost touch with her long ago. How long?
Jonas snapped a photograph and glanced at his wristwatch. Seven minutes to 2. In seven more minutes, it would be—he used his fingers—thirty-one hours until.
Thirty-one.
The maximum number of days in a month, the length between menstrual cycles. Al-Khabir, the All-Aware, the thirty-first name of Allah. Thirty-one verses in Genesis, Chapter 1. The thirty-first verse: God saw all that he had made, and behold, it was very good. It was evening and it was morning, the sixth day. Thirty-one hours which, given the elasticity of time, could shrink to thirty-one seconds or expand to thirty-one years. Who knew what the next thirty-one hours would feel like to him? And then he snapped a picture of his legs, hairy, with knotty apple-knees. Men’s legs, in general, aren’t very attractive, though they are functional and it’s more important to be useful than attractive.
There it was: another prayer.
More important to be useful than attractive, oh Allah.
Jewish dad, atheist mom, raised faithless, Jonas had, despite that, grown adept at spotting prayers.
He perched on the ledge of the bathtub, swinging his legs around and in as he picked up the can of mint-scented gel. He shook it, and sprayed some on his right ankle, spreading it upward until his leg turned white—almost gleaming under the insistent lighting—and he wondered how it would feel to be made of snow, and to reflect brightness, and to fear nothing except the sun. Then he carefully removed the cover from the first razor. He felt a bit clumsy, taking that initial swipe on the right side of his calf near his ankle. Was it uncontrolled nervousness or simply unfamiliarity? He had the advantage of being pretty hairless to start with. In fact, he shaved his stubble only twice a week. He’d always hated how his smooth cheeks made him look younger than he was.
Jonas turned on the water so he could rinse the razor as he went. The tub’s enamel was chipped, and a streak of rust reached out from the drain like an orange cobweb. In another time and another part of Manhattan, he used to put dirty dishes in his apartment’s bathtub if he knew his mother was dropping by. He would pile them up and close the shower curtain. Later he would have to move the dishes back to the kitchen and, eventually, wash them. So if you thought about it, it was really more work in the end, but still he enjoyed it, fooling his mom. Or so he thought until the day she called to say she’d be stopping by that afternoon and added, a lilt in her voice, “and I’ll be wanting to take a bath.”
He put the blade to his calf and let the sharp metal graze the surface, felling coarse hair as it went, leaving behind naked flesh. Despite his intense concentration, he noticed the subway passing nearby, causing the bathroom wall to vibrate. It was the J, or maybe the M. He wasn’t that familiar with the City Hall district. Jonas had grown up on the Upper West Side and had attended an artsy high school in Midtown and then NYU. He felt surprisingly like a foreigner over here, where the bridges stretched longingly toward Brooklyn and he could buy a pack of disposable razors in a store called Confucius Pharmacy. “Say it again?” he’d asked when Masoud had told him that the studio apartment where he would stay was right off the Avenue of the Finest. A street praising the diligence
