A soundless shape glides by over my head. Pricks of cold air rise on my skin. You were the one who first showed me, when we found that disembodied snowy owl wing hiking upstate one winter, how owls’ feathers make no sound when they cut the air.
I pack my paints and follow the bird back around the building and out to the street. A whisper of feathers, and the owl lands on the lintel above the community house door, its arrival ruffling scraps of posted paper. There’s no mistaking: it’s the scarred owl that visits Teta’s windowsill each day—there are the shorn feathers on the left wing, the white brow. The owl gives a slow blink to the streetlight and peers down at the door, the dull green of a neon bar sign reflected on its talons. There are new notices posted on the front door today. I finger the corner of one stapled page, the illegible signature of some inspector at the bottom, and for a second, the presence of the owl gives me a strange sort of courage. Up the stairs to the fifth floor—what harm could it do to have a look? I touch the door.
It’s unlocked.
It swings inward when I press on it, revealing nothing but dark. There is a chaos of wings at my cheek, and I duck to cover my face as the owl dives inside.
I fumble in my pocket for my phone and use it as a light. Scraps of old paper and crumbs of ceiling tiles litter the floor inside the foyer, and my feet scuff stained tile. This community house has been empty for years, but at one time it was a rich resource with a health center, space for musical productions and plays, classrooms, a food pantry. Now, it’s hard to imagine the life these rooms once held. I sweep the light of my phone toward the back and discover a narrow staircase leading up into the belly of the second floor.
The owl has disappeared into the darkness. I tiptoe toward the stairs. The floorboards groan and sag under my feet, but they hold. The stairwell stinks of ancient wallpaper paste and lead paint. The rooms on the second, third, and fourth floors hold overturned desks and rusted bedframes, wallpaper slashed from corner to corner, old filing cabinets with their drawers pulled out by looters or squatters. On the fifth floor, the empty socket of a light bulb greets me in what was once a living room, the plaster now flaked down to bare brick.
The old bedroom walls are covered with peeling wallpaper that probably used to be orange, now a rusted, water-stained goldenrod. A lace doily that must have once covered the upended desk lies wrinkled on the floor, decorated by the red carapace of a dead cockroach. The matching curtains have all but disintegrated, as though they’d turn to dust if I touched them. The desk’s single drawer has been jammed shut by years of Manhattan humidity, and a candle burned down to a stump has slid off the surface of the desk onto the floor, leaving a ring of wax on the wood. The wallpaper bulges and sags on one wall of the room, near the carcass of a twin bedframe. I peer closer—the peeling corner of the wallpaper is trembling. A puff of air escapes a slot in the wall formed by two missing bricks that must have been papered over at one time, revealing a rectangular cavity, a hidden shelf.
I brush my fingers along the inside of the opening, and they come away filmy with cobwebs. I squeeze my eyes shut and reach in. My fingers brush something firm and soft, and when I open my eyes, I’ve slid a leather-bound notebook out of the hidden compartment.
The spine creaks as I open it to a sketch of a little yellow bird, a woman’s shaky handwriting on the facing page. It must be some artist’s old nature journal, each illustration accompanied by a diary entry. A black-and-white photo slips out of a young woman, her black hair in braids. Behind the photo is a watercolor painting of a bird with a frill of white feathers at his chin—a white-throated sparrow.
I slip the notebook into my backpack and shut the papered door on my way out. On my subway ride back to Teta’s, I study the photograph inside the front cover of the notebook. In the light of the subway car, the subject looks a bit like Teta when she was a girl. The young painter has her black hair over each shoulder, her strong chin raised, her eyes dark and hooded, her eyebrows thick with a soft unibrow. She and Teta could be sisters.
I turn back to that first sketch. It’s signed in Arabic, bold and rising to the left: Laila. The ink is blotched on the final curve of the last letter, the alif maqsurah, leaving a smudged black mark. Later on, the signatures switch to English, and the handwriting gets smoother and smaller. When I was young, I, too, used to hoard my Arabic name like a treasure, trying to convince myself that this name, too, existed.
On the page that faces the watercolor sparrow, Laila Z’s notebook begins: The day I began to bleed was the day I met the woman who built the flying machine—
TWO / LAILA
DEAREST B,
The day I began to bleed was the day I met the woman who built the flying machine. My mother would say this isn’t a seemly way to begin a journal—she would prefer a list of mundane tasks, I’m sure, or news of visiting friends, or gratitude for the fact that our family has survived the hunger that has overtaken the city since the stock market crash. But Khalto Tala told me I should use these pages to write down the truest things I know of myself, and anyway, since no one else will ever read them—and I can’t imagine why anyone would—then I suppose I’m free to say what I really feel, which means I can write to any audience I please, real or imaginary. That’s why I’m addressing this diary to you, B. You’re the only one I can imagine reading my secret thoughts over my shoulder. No matter that it’s too late now to tell you all this; never mind the thousands of miles of ocean between us. Here, in this notebook, I can call you back into my mind and write the words I’d never dare to say.
Until I met you, I had few friends. Back in the days when I knew you in Syria, my mother was beloved by everyone. Both the village midwife and dresser of the dead, she walked hand in hand with the shadow world, and the otherworldly became my constant companion. I played by myself in the fields, tracing the golden line of the steppe. Beyond were the ancient pillars and temples of Tadmor, the Bride of the Desert. It was on this desert road that the Bedouins sometimes approached our village to sell wool or livestock, though they came less often in those days than when I was small. On the day I began to bleed, I thought I’d grown beyond the age when magic approaches from the corner of one’s eye.
There, at the edge of the world I knew, I met a woman from my village who loved winged creatures more than people. To my mind there wasn’t anything strange about this, though our neighbors regarded her as quite the oddity. I came to learn her name was Hawa, like the first woman, and that she was building a flying machine.
Amongst themselves, our neighbors whispered about her and called her Majnouna. My mother’s friends gossiped about her flying machine as they picked pebbles from the freekeh one afternoon. I began to watch her while my mother was out delivering babies. Those who saw me returning to the village laughed and warned me away, but day after day, I went out into the fields to watch Hawa gather her materials. She built the double wings and the body of the machine first, then added the two wheels and the two rows of fabric draped across its back.
I never spoke to her until after her fateful flight. That was the day of the blood. Though my mother would have been ecstatic, I hid it. I didn’t want to tell her, maybe for fear she’d keep me home that day; or maybe it was the fear of what else it would mean, the new things I’d have to learn as a woman, the vague fear I had of marriage, the feeling that something was ending and would never come again.