Asmahan tangles herself between my ankles, the walls tighten with grief, and your memory threatens like rain. That burning stench begins to rise from the nails, from the carpets, from the floorboards, summoning the one moment I refuse to remember. I drag my fingers over the worktable, and the black scars of fire spring up across the burls in the wood, as though even the lightest touch of the living is enough to scorch the dead.
I throw on my canvas jacket and my Converse. “Yalla bye, cutie.” I rub Asmahan’s chin, trying to make my voice upbeat. “Back in a few.”
On the way out, Teta’s gentle snoring follows me from her bedroom. As I shut the front door, I turn the knob so it doesn’t click.
* * *
It’s because of your textbooks that I know so many birds by their Arabic names. Sometimes it takes a minute for the English to come, and other times it doesn’t come at all. There is no nightingale among my index of birds, only the bulbul; in Farid ad-Din Attar’s Sufi poems, Solomon’s confidante is called not the hoopoe but the hudhud, crowned by the other birds to lead them to the legendary Simorgh. Many of these birds I grew up naming without seeing. The cinnamon-colored hudhud with its crown of feathers, for example, isn’t typically found in North America, but the books you left behind taught me that the European and north Asian subspecies migrate across the Mediterranean to breed, and once, after reading about the hudhud’s migratory flights over the Himalayas, I dreamed of a flock of thirty birds emerging from a cloud bank, the gold of them as real as any photograph.
I walk down to the Barclays Center and take the R toward Manhattan to Rector Street, then walk down to the tenement building at 109 Washington, where I’ve been working on a mural of a hudhud of my own. I avoid the gauntlet of catcallers near the subway exit, crossing the street to avoid a man who shouts repeatedly for my name, then my tits. The main thing, I have learned after more than a quarter century in this body and this city, is to keep moving.
The lower West Side, especially near the 9/11 Memorial Museum and One World Trade Center, is crowded with souvenir shops, cafés, and bars these days. A couple blocks down from the new bone-white Oculus transportation hub, the new hotels stop and old brick buildings begin. The transition feels stark and surreal. What used to be a neighborhood of tenements inhabited mostly by Syrian immigrants is now nearly obliterated, much of it lost to eminent domain and the demolition that cleared the way for the Brooklyn–Battery Tunnel in the forties. The rest was brought down for the construction of the World Trade Center two decades later. Most of the inhabitants were forced out to Brooklyn’s Atlantic Avenue, others to New Jersey, Ohio, Michigan, and beyond. The only exceptions are this five-story tenement, still occupied and sporting a new restaurant on the ground level, and the community house connected to it, empty for years and recently condemned. The local historical society has been trying to get them declared landmark sites or a historic district for years, but with the exception of St. George’s Syrian Catholic Church, the white terra-cotta chapel next to the community house, they haven’t been successful, and the inside of the church is now home to an Irish pub. Eventually, these buildings, too, will probably be swallowed by the pace of development in Lower Manhattan. Despite all the work you did to try to save them, the history they represent has never been deemed worthy of protecting.
The bars around the corner are filling with twentysomething finance-sector employees beginning loud rounds of beer pong. I leave the sidewalk and stalk through the empty lot next to the tenement and around to the back of the building. Back in the thirties and forties, this empty lot held a front and back tenement separated by a sliver of courtyard that functioned as an airshaft, providing ventilation and light to the two cramped buildings. The back building had already been demolished for years by the time you tried to save the front one, the older and more beautiful of the two tenements on the block; what a waste it seems now. That second tenement, too, was pulled down just a year after you died. The scarred brick of the building next door and a weed-infested lot are all that’s left of your fight, a flattened piece of earth awaiting the construction of another high-rise hotel.
You’d laugh at the way I look everywhere for reminders of you—even in the old community house, I still check the locks and try to get up the courage to slip inside. I haven’t succeeded yet. Maybe it’s for the best; though I’ve scoured newspapers and art history books about the painter you loved who used to live here, Laila Z has always remained obscure, reduced to a line I once found in an article about how she lived for a while on the fifth floor of the community house doing social work and providing “cultural activities” for recent immigrants, one of the few decent jobs a woman could get in those days.
I’ve never dared to break in and look for signs of Laila Z’s presence. Tonight, like all the other nights I’ve come down here, I settle for the satisfaction of paint on brick. I pull out my chalk and sketch the next area of the mural I want to get done, the hudhud’s black-and-orange crown. I wind my bird around old spray-painted tags and crumbling, gouged wall. I know the risks, but it’s the only way I can paint anymore, the only time I’m not blocked. It’s my way of reminding this neighborhood of its past.
I miss the city I knew as a child: the subway cars graffitied down to the last inch of wall or door, the rank phone booths, cigarette butts at the sidewalk edges, kids running through the fountains in Central Park in the summertime or dancing in the rainbows of busted fire hydrants. That Manhattan is invisible now, a city that lives only in the memories of those of us who were there.
Time slows down when I’m painting. I read that article you gave me back when I still said I wanted to go to MIT and major in physics—trying to be a good first-generation child—on the state of flow, how a person is supposed to know what they love to do by how time blurs when they’re doing it. The problem, I guess, is that time has always been blurry for me. Maybe that’s why I made such a lousy physics student. I learned a long time ago that things that happened years ago never really go away. They live in the body, secreted away inside liver and fingernail and bone, alive on street corners and in wallpaper glue and the yellowed water in Brooklyn basements.
I stroke my brush against the brick, and its memories rise to meet me: years of car exhaust, and beneath the soot, decades of chicken fat and frying onions, the clang of a cracked cast-iron pan being flung out a window, a girl’s happy shriek, the purple-black curl of a scab being tugged off a knee.
You were the one who first brought me down here as a child and told me there was a whole community here years ago, a Syrian enclave that doesn’t exist anymore, scattered across the country from Brooklyn to LA when Little Syria was demolished to build the entrance ramps for the Brooklyn–Battery Tunnel. I used to think there was some secret here, something that drew you to these buildings, some collective memory I could include myself in. That’s why I chose Washington Street to paint on, even though you and Teta came to the States twenty years after it had been leveled. I’m addicted to the memories that live on in the mind of New York, the flood that comes when I place my hand on a wall or a window or a stoop, the knowledge that death and time are both illusions because we and every stone are made of the same ever-shifting particles. If we live, it’s only because some distant galaxy lent us its dust for a while. Ghosts are more honest than the rest of us: they can’t help but be what they are. You taught me that revelation has its price in a world that prefers the comfort of closed eyes. Maybe that’s why I’m still convinced that the painter you loved left an echo of herself behind here, waiting to be heard.