The graffiti got worse each time. The first one said LEAVE in sloppy, tentative lettering. The second said GO BACK PAKIS—though they’re Arab—and the third, the worst, was a single word, pomegranate red: Terrorists.
Adnan went to the Home Depot downtown, where a young white man spoke enthusiastically about solvents and paint thinners.
“Where’d the vandalizing happen?”
“Beaumont.”
“Ah!” The man nodded. “All hooligans and druggies down there. Couple years ago, some drunk asshole rammed through the church, busted the front up. Killed some kid.”
Adnan nodded. He had heard about the accident. There was still a memorial near the church, decayed peonies and ribbons.
“You should move, bud. It’s bad down there.”
Adnan didn’t say that he and Fatima and their two girls didn’t live in Beaumont; they lived near the university, in a dingy but quiet apartment complex. It was the beauty salon that was in Beaumont; Fatima’s beauty salon, the one she’d opened last year with money her father left her. This is the open wound of their marriage—the salon, the money Fatima refused to give him to mortgage one of the small houses near the train tracks.
“You decided to bring us here,” she’d said. Fatima always spoke gently, even in anger. “For ten years I have sat at home, doing nothing.”
“And aren’t Mala and Aya happy here,” Adnan said, “born in American hospitals, the envy of everyone back home?”
“Home,” Fatima echoed, the only rebuttal she needed.
She never wanted to come to America. Their village, an hour from Baghdad—safe enough, even during the invasion. It was Adnan who longed for America, Adnan who’d spent dozens of hours filling in I-589 visa and affidavit forms. America respected perseverance, mulishness. After the fourth application, a year after Adnan and Fatima’s wedding, they received the embossed envelope. He had an uncle who’d died in Abu Ghraib—a second uncle, really; a man he’d barely ever met, but in the end, it was this Macbethian spot of national shame that worked. The envelope was white and crisp, like a Victorian dance card inviting them to the floor.
The paint thinner works well. It only takes a few scrubs and the storefront glass sparkles. Fatima asked him to go early, before the customers. She wanted to tell the police, but Adnan convinced her to wait.
“It’s just some hooligans,” he said, trying the word out for the first time.
“Bah! Shoo hal hooligans? This is criminal. It will drive customers away.”
Fatima’s Beauty Salon is doing surprisingly well. It’s in a small strip mall called All Seasons, near a bakery and maternity store. She’s taken the exact archetype of salons in Baghdad, Beirut, Damascus, and replicated them, down to the mawwal music, the smoky incense and turquoise evil eyes above the bathrooms. The walls are painted an appealing mustardy yellow, and there’s always a pot of tea brewing, with sage and lavender. Each salon chair has an ashtray, and the white women, scandalized, giggling, light cigarettes, talking about how bad they’re being. Sometimes the Mexican girls from their apartment complex—Fatima had flyers in the elevators—come get their hair straightened for quinceañeras. Fatima did an entire wedding party over the summer, for a Mexican woman and her aunts and sisters, and Adnan had to help, lifting foils to check dye, washing head after head of long, black hair. Aya and Mala had held blow-dryers to the women’s frostily tipped nails.
Adnan is confused by the salon, its femaleness, its glow of success. In Iraq, he’d graduated with an engineering degree, helping renovate the main bridge in his town. Sometimes he thinks of America as a stack of poker chips, painstakingly slow to stockpile. It has only taken her a year, and Fatima, suddenly, has more chips than he does.
Adnan doesn’t tell any of the guys at the gymnastics center about the graffiti. He has been working here long enough. It’s a good job, with a pension, and they treat him well now.
They’re good men, all white and gangly, except for Que, who is barrel-chested and Black and likes to talk. He calls Adnan brother and sometimes complains about the white men to him, which was confusing to Adnan at first, because he was frightened by Que himself, flinching at his booming voice, the do-rag he wore on his head.
Gus, the manager, makes them wear the same navy uniforms. Each one has a name embroidered above the left breast. Adnan’s says Aidan. Gus said it was easier for “the girls,” although the girls never really look at them, much less ask their names. Their tax returns say Operational Managers, but Jay says they’re glorified janitors, responsible for cleaning the locker rooms, chalking the balance beam and bars, picking up tampon wrappers from the bathroom after closing.
It is impossible not to watch the gymnasts. Their bodies. There is one who used to train at this gym and went on to win a silver medal at the Olympics. An enormous photograph of her overlooks the equipment, triumphantly grinning out at them all. Blond ponytail, red and blue leotard, hands planted on narrow hips. The gym is built around her, like a shrine. Whenever anyone mentions her name, their voice drops into a whisper, awestruck.
Adnan won’t let his daughters do gymnastics, though they could get a discount, and though the older one, Aya, wants to. They are nine and six, still more interested in the bodies of their Barbies than their own. Mala, he can tell, will resemble his sisters, the baby fat resolving into girth. Aya is tall, skinny, but her features are too large for her face, the eyes disquieting in their roundness, her ears slightly monkeyish.
Sometimes he thinks of the mirrors in their apartment as little detonators. His daughters walk past them blithely now, but that will change. He dreads the coming impact, the day they will lean in, inspect. He worries about what they will hate.
They didn’t know Fatima was pregnant when they received their resettlement papers. NORMAN, OK, the form read. There was a university, a sprawling campus in the center of town. They had eight thousand dollars in savings. Enough for plane tickets; three months’ rent; some furniture, food, and the fees for Adnan’s engineering credentials exam. He bought used textbooks from the university bookstore, the cute salesgirl wishing him luck. Their resettlement officer had assured them: once Adnan passed, he could apply to one of the city’s firms, or even the university itself, as an adjunct.
But something strange happened when Adnan sat down at the table in their new American home to practice, Fatima’s cooking hissing in the kitchen: his mind blanked. He started to sweat. His heart seemed like its own animal, loud, restless. The words blurred in front of his eyes, English mangling all the things he understood: differential pulley, parity, stoichiometry.
After weeks of this, he started burying the books under his side of the mattress, and spent his days watching American sitcoms about baristas and their roommates. In the afternoons, he walked through the town for hours.
Back in Iraq, he’d expected to find mountains or beaches in America, but here there were neither, just flatness, strip malls, the orange signs of burger stands.
When Fatima asked, he said he was at the library. Every night he had nightmares: the bridge he’d helped design in his hometown collapsing, showering the road below with concrete.
The day of the exam arrived. It was a charmless room in one of the university buildings, overlooking the parking lot. The proctor was young and bored, reciting rules about bathroom breaks and No. 2 pencils as he handed out Scantron paper. The hours trickled by like molasses. Adnan filled one bubble after the other. His stomach felt leaden.
When the thin envelope arrived in the mail weeks later, Adnan knew. He’d known for months.
The letter informed him he’d scored 67 percent. The applicant may retake the exam no sooner than thirty days and no later than 180 days from now. Adnan took the exam again and failed. Fatima gave birth. He was already a father 180 days after that. There was $632 left in their bank account. He got the job at the gymnastics center.
There is no more graffiti for a few weeks. It is September, back-to-school banners all around town, the bittersweetness of late summer. His daughters get matching haircuts—little bobs, to their chins—at the Supercuts in the mall. Adnan feels resentful peeling the two twenties from his wallet; Fatima refuses to cut the girls’ hair.
“It’s bad luck,” Fatima says, shrugging off Adnan’s annoyance. “The khaltos at the mosque said so.”
“God forbid we disobey those old ladies.”
Back home, Adnan drank beer and skipped prayers. Here, they go to a makeshift mosque on Crabapple Street, a congregation of mostly Pakistani Sunnis, meeting once a week for sermons. Fatima said they should go for Aya and Mala—their daughters were American. They used words like awesome and y’all. They ate toxically orange chips. The mosque was just one evening, Fatima reasoned.
Disney for six days, Allah for one, she liked to say.
That evening, Fatima comes home from the salon. The girls are asleep, Adnan washing the dishes. Fatima bursts into the kitchen, panting.
“I almost catch him!”
When she is excited, her English lapses.
“Caught,” Adnan corrects automatically.
“Oh, who cares.” She switches to Arabic. “That son of a dog, he ran too fast for me.”
“You chased him?” Adnan’s head swims with images of white fists, guns pointed at his wife’s head. “Fatima, are you out of your mind? He could have killed you.”
“Bah, killed me. He’s skinny like a twig. Remember how skinny you used to be? Even skinnier than that. But fast. I lost him after a few minutes.”
Adnan frowns. His wife sounds wistful. “I think it’s time to call the police.”
“And what will we tell them? He is maybe one of their sons, their neighbor.”
Fatima has no faith in the police.
“What was he writing, anyway?”
“Some numbers or something.” Fatima waved her hand. “Who knows what it means? These Americans are crazy.”
Fatima is right. The numbers are 17:5 and 13:9, and the vandal had begun to write something next to it. Deutr.
After he has soaped the spray paint off later that evening, Adnan types the numbers and letters into his phone and the search bar autocompletes it, hundreds of hits springing up.
They are Bible verses from Deuteronomy. You must certainly put them to death. Your hand must be the first in putting them to death, and then the hands of all the people. Adnan kicks the wall when he finishes reading it. “Fuck,” he says aloud, the English curse word crackling in his mouth.
“Sweet tea racists,” Que says when Adnan finally tells him a few days later. “It’s probably, like, your mailman or something.”
“Our mailman is Chinese.”
“Fine.” Que stretches his arms out. He could’ve been a gymnast himself, well-built and graceful. “Then your kid’s homeroom teacher, the laundromat owner. Shit, one of the other guys from the gym. Your wife is right. The cops will wring their hands, then leave. Weeks, two months from now, they’ll find some code violation in her salon. This town, it likes its coloreds to behave.”
Adnan tries to imagine their boss Gus bent over an open Bible, underlining sections. Absurd. Gus is too lazy. But he knows that Que is right. Oklahoma is a maze of social snares, friendly diner waitresses and shop clerks, a brittle affability easily turned cold. The same chummy neighbors are the ones whose eyes darken at Fatima’s chattering in Arabic or his own beard. It feels like a defeat, like admitting some alikeness between the two of them that Adnan doesn’t want to.
Jay approaches them with a stack of fresh towels, filling Adnan with relief. Jay nods at Que. The two men always seem wary of each other. Jay has classic Okie looks—pale skin, pale hair, cornflower eyes. In the early years here, Fatima used to tell him to invite the men from the gym over. She was bred on such male gatherings, continuing late into the night, women clearing dinner plates and setting out bowls of pistachios and dried apricots. But Adnan could never picture it, Jay spitting his chewing tobacco in Fatima’s fancy teacups, or Que knocking over a water glass in his excitement about racial politics. Their friendships are ones of circumstance.
September turns into a sulky October. Aya and Mala bring home art projects, paper plate pumpkins and skeletons made of glittering pumpkin sticks. The gym is both busier and emptier again, after the summer—the school year weeds out the amateurs, and the girls that line up at the uneven bars during the darkening afternoons are laser-focused, performing for invisible judges.
The vault spring breaks on a Tuesday afternoon. One of the girls runs toward it and, expecting the obedient bounce, nearly twists her ankle instead. Outside, the afternoon sky gathers with heavy clouds and, within an hour, there is a low wail. The tornado protocol is gymnasts first, and so Adnan and Que wait until they—and the coaches and handful of parents—are inside, then make their own way toward the smaller staff bathroom.
Adnan’s first tornado, they’d been in America for only a few months. It was at Target, buying things for their new home, when the siren began. Fatima dropped the lightbulb she’d been looking at. People around them began to file past them, one woman complaining to her husband they were going to be late to dinner. Adnan remembers how his throat had suddenly felt dry, how the cashier barked at them to follow him to the back room. He remembers Fatima trembling next to him, the supply room filled with shoppers between storage boxes. A fat woman kept threatening to spank her rowdy kids. He took Fatima’s hand, but she left it slack, not curling her fingers through his, and Adnan had wondered for the first time if he’d made a mistake, coming to America.
“Here we go,” Jay says as the toilets suck the water back into their pipes, a sound like kissing. The wind roars louder. Adnan thinks vaguely of death. The wind rattles the windows and the lights flicker off, defeated. Through the wall, Adnan can hear screams from the gymnasts, followed by soothing from the coaches. The girls stay huddled by the sinks, rolling leg warmers over their ankles, responding to frantic text messages from their mothers. In Baghdad, there were sometimes toz, the air suddenly thick as fog, a layer of reddish dust caking the roads and buildings. But nothing like this.
Don’t forget to shut the windows and bring the flashlight, he writes to Fatima. Put the girls in the bathtub.
Fatima hates tornadoes—when she talks about hating this country, tornadoes are at the top of her list—but storms have always comforted him, the only American thing he had expected when he moved to Oklahoma. The crackling lightning; entire highways flooded with rain—they are the great equalizers. Schools close. Post offices shut down. Right now, somewhere in Norman, the man who vandalized the salon—Adnan knows it is a man—is cowering in a bathroom somewhere, with his grandmother or his dog or all alone.
God is trying to drown this hellhole.
His phone lights up, Fatima’s words incandescent in the dark. He smiles.
The siren continues its ululating for twenty, thirty minutes, until it stops abruptly, a noise more palpable in its absence. The lights unceremoniously flicker back on, and the bathrooms next door fill with laughter, the girls teasing each other about who was more afraid. The men peel themselves off the floor, ushering everybody back out to the gym. The girls resume their chatter. They drift toward the equipment like magnets.
Back home, the living room is dark, a light from the bedroom. Fatima puts her finger to her lips when he enters the bathroom.
“I didn’t know if the siren would come back,” she whispers. “So I left them.”
The girls are asleep in the bathtub, curled foot to head like cats. Fatima has padded the tub with an old comforter, a bottle of water between them.
Aya wakes first. She blinks sleepily, her eyes dark as her mother’s. Of the two girls, she is the smarter one, the one who will succeed. In his mind, he sees the scarlet numbers 17:5, the words stone them.
“Baba, I dreamt the roof flew off,” Aya tells him, her voice husky from sleep. “Is the storm done?”
“Yes,” he promises. He kisses the top of her head. Her scalp is sweaty and smells like popcorn. “You can get up now. It’s over.”
Norman is mostly unscathed by the storm; a little disheveled, a couple of downed trees, a lawn chair thrown across the yard. After any storm, a letdown. Unless a city is submerged, destroyed, telephone wires tangled around cars and houses like bow ties, there is a secret, nihilistic disappointment, that the end isn’t yet here.
The storm brings a cold front and the evenings that week turn icy. On the streets, people curse under their breath, wrap their jackets closer to their bodies. They grumble about wishing winter was over, and it hasn’t even started. But Adnan decides it’s a sign. He waits until the weekend is over, until the end of his shift on Monday, then drives to the address on his GPS.
Precinct 29. The building is worn down and dingy, a flock of white and blue cars lined up out front. Adnan enters. A bleakly lit entrance with two officers behind wire mesh glass. The larger one nods distractedly at Adnan. Every wall is covered in corkboards, photocopied faces of dangerous men on the loose. There is a massive, bluntly placed security camera peering at him that makes Adnan shiver. He sees the red numbers he’d scrubbed away—17:5, 13:9—and realizes he never took any photos. There is no security camera outside Fatima’s salon, no snapshots saved on his phone. He has no idea if the man’s eyes are blue or brown, what age he is.
A massive American flag hangs on the wall in front of him under the words duty, integrity, honor. A smaller flag in blue and yellow hangs next to it. Something about the room reminds Adnan of Jay, the way he hooks his thumbs in his jeans and spits tobacco, the way he’s always drawling, Don’t borrow trouble. Adnan appreciates American sayings that say what they are, which many don’t.
“Help you with anything, bud?” The thinner officer gestures to catch his eye.
The man smiles at Adnan, but for the briefest of instants, something flashes across his face, cagey and dark and threatening, a near-imperceptible narrowing of his eyes.
Adnan understands. He holds his empty palms out and shakes his head. He asks for directions to a supermarket he could find in his sleep.
Halloween falls on a Tuesday. Their apartment is humming with the holiday for days. The girls have painted faces on small pumpkins, lined the kitchen window with them. There are sheets of tiny ghost stickers strewn on the dining table—decals, Fatima corrects him—for her clients’ fingernails. Aya will be a tabby cat, Mala some character from a cartoon they watch. Aya practices outlining her eyes with an old kohl pencil of her mother’s.
“The best treats are on Pine Street, those fancy houses,” he overhears Aya confiding to her sister. “Last year, they were giving out Oreos and 3 Musketeers!”
Adnan marvels at the ease with which his daughter pronounces musketeers, how confidently she whispers on about which houses have Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups and Snickers. Both daughters speak with little drawls, can barely spell their names in Arabic. The other day, Mala had told Fatima she wanted to marry a cowboy. By all measures, this was victory, his daughters’ effortless English, the American cartoons blaring from the television in the morning. But it unsettles Adnan, in a way he can’t explain.
After Fatima takes the girls out, the house is too empty. He wishes he’d gone with them. Instead, he takes the car downtown. There is a little parade near campus and he stops at a red light, a group of costumed teenagers crossing by. A couple are dressed as clowns. Beer bottles glitter in their hands. Their faces are painted white, with grotesquely red smiles.
“Time for triiiiiiiicks,” one of the clowns howls.
The hair on Adnan’s forearms stands up.
He tightens his grip on the steering wheel. The light turns green and he speeds for the first time since moving to America. His daughters are on Orchard Lane or Pine Street right now, conspiring about which houses to visit first, Fatima insisting they hold her hand, though Aya will wriggle away. He can imagine his wife smiling politely at the other parents, pretending to understand when the other children explain their Ariana Grande or superhero costumes.
When he pulls into the All Seasons parking lot, it is empty, all the stores shuttered for the evening. One of the streetlamps is broken and Adnan has to squint, but his instinct is right, there is a figure in front of the salon, dark save for a single, glowing light.
The vandal is near the storefront window, which Adnan’s wife has decorated with posters of coiffed models and perfectly manicured nails. The car headlights scatter onto the sidewalk, contrasting against the man’s silhouette. His heart hammers. The vandal freezes then turns, his hands instinctively going up.
For the past two months, Adnan has harbored a secret belief that he knows the vandal, that Que is actually right, and the man is their cashier at Walmart or the apartment superintendent. But the face that turns to him is unfamiliar, of a man with narrow eyes, a man who is so young he is in fact a teenager, in flannel and a U of O baseball cap. The boy seems to look directly at Adnan through the glare of the headlights. His eyes are as blue as Aya’s favorite flower.
Two things happen at the same time: The boy smiles. The boy steps back.
Adnan leans forward in perverse anticipation. He wants to know what the boy has written this time, and hates himself for that wanting. But there is no writing.
There is the storefront, the one that he’d scrubbed, gleaming but cracked, a splintering moving through the glass like a spiderweb, a hole in the center, and somewhere on the other side, Adnan understands, is a brick or hammer, something they will find later, but right now the boy is stepping back, his head cocked toward the glass with an almost boyish pride, and for a second they forget themselves, just a young man showing an older one what he has done.
Then the boy turns and starts to run.
Behind the windshield, Adnan is frozen. His wife would chase after the man. Gentle Fatima, bearing a bat; he can see it clear as day. But Adnan’s hands are motionless on the steering wheel. The glass shimmers. He wants to weep. That day at the precinct, the police officer had given him directions in stupid-slow English. He wonders if he threw the brick himself, wonders if someone tried to find his fingerprints on it, they would. Adnan turns the car engine off, but cannot bring himself to get out. He sits there for a moment, two, ten.
Adnan turns the car back on, sets it in reverse, and drives away. The roads are emptier now, some straggling trick-or-treaters going from house to house. He flexes his hand against the steering wheel, feels the old rubber against his palm. He will let his daughters do gymnastics after all. Baba, look! Aya had called out last week, doing a headstand in the living room. When did she learn to do that? There were so many hours he wasn’t with her, so many hours she has spent in this country without him by her side.
It won’t rain again for a month. November will be too cold. In five years Aya will win regionals and wear a pretty yellow dress with a white ribbon around her waist. His daughters will marry American boys, no zaffe or henna dyeing at the weddings. His sons-in-law will be boys with monosyllabic names, boys whose families are buried in the same cemeteries for generations, whose parents and grandparents grew up in the same houses they did. The girls will become bound to this land, make small talk about college drafts and droughts. His grandchildren will be fair, have names like Annabelle and Jude, and sometimes he will feel a twinge of regret, but mostly he will be happy. Every July the family will meet in Tulsa to watch fireworks by the river. Each burst of light will be mirrored in the water below, red and red and red, and Adnan will learn to hear the sound as Americans do—as relaxation, as joy. He’ll leave trouble where he finds it.
Hala Alyan is an award winning writer of fiction and poetry. She is the author of the novels Salt Houses, The Arsonist’s City, and most recently, the poetry collection, The Moon That Turns You Back. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, Guernica, among many other publications.
