"Howard."
"..."
"HOWard."
"Hm?"
"I'm leaving now. José's out front. Will you be...?"
"Mm, yeah. I'll see you tomorrow."
"My phone's dead and José's coverage is shitty, so if you need to talk, promise me you'll call Dad, ok?"
"..."
"HOWard."
"Mm, yeah. I'll see you tomorrow."
She leaned her upper body in to peck his cheek, jolting forward from an unbent left leg, right leg shot back like a kickstand. She always came in too hard and fast -- fingers digging into his forearm to catch her balance, enormous Target-chic bag swinging wildly off her shoulder and thwacking him hard far-too-close to the groin, her perpetually freezing nose boring into his cheek like a fleshy bullet.
She hadn't always been so fast, hard, and cold. He blamed Sonic Burger. He clearly remembered the day she had called Dad, driving 14-year-old Howard home from school, to tell him that she had been promoted to manager, a lofty achievement for a 17-year-old. By the time she had returned home after her shift, she had been transformed into a Newton's Cradle perpetual motion device -- every movement like those silver balls, some inexorable momentum flinging her to her bedroom, to the bathroom, to work, to class, to student union events, to Habitat builds, to thesis reviews, to Haiti, to dissertation defenses, to South Sudan, to U.N. humanitarian sub-committees, to a freezing November memorial service for her kid brother's partner.
He turned towards the front door, "Remember when you got your promotion at...."
The door was already shut. He hadn't heard it close. The apartment was empty. He moved to the window and looked down to the street below. No José, no cars, no movement at all. How long ago had she left? He stared uncomprehendingly at his watch until the numbers finally coalesced into meaningful information in his mind. 10:12 PM. He had to have been standing there for at least half-an-hour after she'd left.
He lowered himself slowly into his reading chair. F. had dubbed it "the Twilight Zone," stating that every time Howard sat in it his eyes would glaze over and F. could hear Rod Serling's hypnotic monotone emitting from somewhere behind Howard's head. Howard could never understand quite how a Syrian kid raised in a conservative Muslim home in Aleppo, the "capital of Islamic culture," who hadn't set foot in an infidel country until he laid-over in Frankfurt whilst flying to Los Angeles at age 25, could not only have a seamless Californian accent immediately upon arrival, but also be a walking pop culture encyclopedia -- a feat that Howard, though being of extremely white and middle-class American heritage, could not come near competing with. Shortly after beginning his internship at Semel, F.'s fellow interns began referring to him by his initials, F.M., because of his preternatural recall of pop radio tunes. F.M. quickly became renowned throughout UCLA's School of Medicine for taking and belting out requests during menial lab work and to entertain the smokers on smoke breaks. He was considered a force to be reckoned with at the "Six Degrees To Kevin Bacon" game, even by one of his Sunday Night Shisha buddies who was a film studies professor at Santa Monica College. In an infamous (amongst Sunday Night Shisha attendees, that is) final round of some film trivia game, F. took the flummoxed film prof down with an unexpected reference to "the Never-Ending Story II."
Howard ran his index finger methodically up and down each ridge of the corduroy-fitted arm of the Twilight Zone, his eyes fixed unwaveringly on the side of the refrigerator. That was the position that F. would inevitably take up when awaiting some news or eavesdropping on Howard's phone conversations. What percentage of their time living in that apartment had been spent in that formation -- Howard seated stiffly in the Twilight Zone, F. leaning against the refrigerator, letting his mouth hang open lewdly as he rubbed the crown of his incorrigibly curly head against the upper hinge of the freezer door, hands clasped precociously behind his back like a schoolboy awaiting sentencing for some playground hijinx?
F. was so unexpected, a flash flood sweeping Howard away, and yet gave Howard the sense that F. had been there all along somehow, like the twist at the end of a crime novel -- there in your hands the whole time but unknown. Howard recalled the way he'd been so caught off-guard by hearing Dad refer to Howard as gay when Howard had called to tell him about F.
"I met someone. We're going to move in together. His name is Farid."
"Wow, well son, I am happy for you. Mm, well, hm, I guess I'm just a little surprised. I didn't even realize that you were gay, Howard. Why didn't you tell me before?"
"Gay? Mm, what do you mean?"
"..."
"...Mm..."
"Oh, I'm sorry. I thought you said 'he'."
"Mm, I did. No no, you're right. Sorry. I hadn't thought about it."
He hadn't thought of himself as gay or straight or anything before that moment. He had never been interested in anyone or anything romantically before F. He couldn't really identify with the idea of romance at all. It brought to mind movies he refused to watch, songs he preferred to skip, paintings with too much color, grand gestures of passion, grand betrayals of fidelity, and ever grander gestures of reconciliation. He had no interest in romance. What he felt with F. was belonging -- an instant knowledge that he could not possibly exist elsewhere.
His finger must have been working on its twentieth comprehensive lap of the Twilight Zone's ridges and valleys when the phone rang. His eyes darted to the receiver in the kitchen, yet his finger didn't digress from its course for a second. He eyed the phone's flashing red light suspiciously like a cat carefully watching a dog pass until the answering machine finally kicked in. He instantly recognized Dad's characteristic loud, preparatory inhalation.
"Hey son, hopefully you're asleep already and you'll just get this in the morning. I just wanted to check in and see how...see if you need anything. You know, the offer still stands. Me and Maureen would surely love to have you stay with us for a little while."
His eyes drifted slowly away from the receiver, drawn back to F.'s spot by the fridge. His finger trekked right along on its path.
"So you just think about it and you can let me know tomorrow. I...I thought the service was really beautiful. Everyone from the Semel Institute just had such wonderful things to say about him. And that big picture of him. Well, he just would have loved all of it, Howard. Oh my sweet boy, I do love you and I'm so...I'm so...."
The machine made the intermittent crackles of electrostatic interference or of a father's choked attempts to subdue sobs.
"I love you, son, and I'll see you tomorrow." A final plosive beep.
"I'll see you tomorrow," Howard said to the silently pulsating red '1' on the machine.
He sprang up out of the Twilight Zone, suddenly remembering something, and went straight to F.'s spot by the fridge, inspecting the head-massaging hinge closely, desperately. He stopped. He'd found it. He carefully removed a long, curly strand of black hair caught in the plastic casing of the hinge. He moved slowly back to the chair, not taking his eyes off of the black hair between his thumb and forefinger.
It had been the night before F.'s flight. They were in formation as usual, battle lines drawn over religion -- atheism vs. Islam, Twilight Zone vs. refrigerator. Howard had started it, he knew, but it was a constant itch on his brain that the brilliant young neuroscientist that he loved could identify himself with what Howard believed to be the patently ridiculous and unconscionably unscientific. Howard had sat in the Twilight Zone watching F. on his prayer mat laid perpendicularly to the East-facing living room windows. He traced the corduroy ridges and valleys silently as F. ceremoniously rolled up the mat, emptied and dried the hand-washing bowl, wrapped the book in a cloth, and replaced them all in their drawer in the kitchen. F. took up his position by the fridge, obviously aware that something was boiling its way to the surface of Howard's tongue.
"What is it, Zoner? I can hear the gears grinding in your head from here."
"How can you still be a Muslim? I don't understand it. After all of this," he waved his arm vaguely about the apartment, "After...me. Setting aside all of the problems reconciling your faith to the science that you study, Islam cannot accept you how you are. This god that you're praying to, if he does exist, hates you and thinks you're an abomination. There seems to be some looseness in interpretation of HOW to punish gays, but it's pretty widely accepted that homosexuality is more than worthy of severe punishment. You can just choose which school of thought you prefer -- whether you want to be stoned to death or thrown off a building."
F. rubbed his head against the hinge thoughtfully and smiled, "Listen, I don't buy into every little thing in the Quran and Sunnah. Fundamentalists and extremists will do crazy and evil and fucked-up shit no matter what. You could hand them a pamphlet of Weight Watchers' corporate principles and they'd find a way to subjugate nonbelievers, mistreat women, and demonize gays from it. You just have to focus on the core, the heart of the message."
"Killing infidels?"
"Don't be a dick."
He grimaced just for a second. A slight momentary pain. That must have been when the hair got caught in the hinge and was plucked out.
"Love," he said, rubbing the top of his head, "The core message of Islam is Allah's overwhelming love for mankind. Allahu muhibba. All of the hate that people twist out of Islam is a sick and tragic perversion."
Howard thought F. was naive and wrong, but he didn't say anything more. He liked the way F. talked about his faith, even though it made no sense and didn't remotely resemble anything Howard knew to be in the Quran, Hadith, Sunnah, or any of the major schools of Islamic thought and interpretation. Howard thought it was all just sincere, illogical, uninformed and lovely bullshit. He loved the way that F. reinvented his god to fit his own gigantic and beautiful heart. By watching F., Howard learned that one can be tremendously good and tremendously wrong at the same time. Tremendously and terribly wrong.
Howard began pressing the hair into a valley in the corduroy, trying to flatten the hopelessly uncooperative curl. He held the root end firmly with his left thumb and forefinger, his right pulling the hair taut from the other end. It looked as if he were about to floss with a short bit of black thread. He briefly considered attempting to sew the hair into the chair, but quickly realized the fruitlessness and oddity of the task. He wanted to somehow conjoin the last remaining pieces of that feeling of belonging that, a mere fifty-six hours ago, had seemed so impenetrable. What was left?
A hair and a chair.
He began winding the hair around each of his fingers in turn, carefully inspecting each fit as if trying on engagement rings. This hyper-manual tic of his was perpetual fodder for F.'s teasing. F.'s most recurring and most requested anecdote was of "that one time with Richard Gere."
"F.M.! F.M.! Manuel hasn't heard about Richard Gere yet."
Howard was already blushing at the mere mention of the actor, fingers hard at work exploring every crest and trough of his corduroy sea, eyes on F.'s tattered Converse to avoid the knowing looks of his Semel colleagues. He wasn't so much uncomfortable with being the butt of a joke as he was simply mortified of receiving attention from more than, say, zero people.
"Ah, dear Richard," F.'s eyes would light up at the name in, it seemed, direct proportion to Howard's reddening, "So, Howard's got this thing, right? His fingers cannot stay still or out of ANYthing. EVer."
F. would always glance sideways at Howard at this point in any embarrassing anecdote, expectantly biting his lip while grinning mischievously. Howard wobbled his head slightly, rolling his eyes -- his silent sign of sporting assent. Despite the fact that F. wouldn't do it until he had already laid the groundwork for the story, making it nearly impossible for Howard to object graciously, he loved that F. would seek his permission first.
"So I brought very little with me from Syria. One of the things that I brought over was that lovely little tea set," he pointed to the porcelain and brass Arabian-style tea pot on the side table next to Howard with its two matching tea cups, chipped beyond functionality, "Now, as most of you know, I am a shisha-phile beyond compare and, I'm sorry, but you have not had shisha until you have had arghile, some real Syrian shit. So I didn't know what the immigration policies were regarding shisha and, well, I just couldn't be bothered. So I decided that I had better bring my own stash, you know, just in case. But how to smuggle ten ounces of Aleppo's finest? Well, being the genius that I am, I decided to stick it inside the teapot. Mind you, the highly-breakable porcelain teapot you see before you. Anyways, by some miracle, the teapot made it to LAX safely, shisha and all, and Carrie, my first roommate, and I had made some joke about the teapot being a drug mule which eventually evolved into a Richard Gere / gerbil joke and finally secured the teapot's being named Richard Gere."
When nearing the juicy conclusion of a story or the punchline of a joke, F. would reflexively lick his lips.
"So shortly after Howard and I move in together, we're having some mildly important and serious discussion about, I don't know, carpooling or whatever. So Howard-of-the-Wandering-Phalanges starts toying with Richard Gere unconsciously while we're talking, doesn't even break eye contact. So I'm in the middle of some rousing argument for buying a vespa or whatever and suddenly his eyes widen, his face goes white, he reaches over, picks up the teapot, and cradles it in his lap, trying to cover it up by crossing his arms. I'm like, 'Um, Howard? Is something wrong?' His cheeks go bright red, kinda like now, he uncovers the teapot and sighs. And there he is, stuck knuckle-deep inside Richard Gere! I kid you not, it took two hours, an entire bottle of Palmolive, and finally, a trip to the emergency room to get him out of poor old Richard! I mean, the little guy'd already been through so much, I wasn't about to let them break him just to free my over-exploratory boyfriend!"
Howard honestly didn't see why the anecdote was funny to people. He asserted (to himself mostly) that F. was just infectiously likable and could command an auditorium's attention with a dramatic reading of IKEA assembly instructions. Of course, Howard was hardly the best judge of comedy. One of the three things he knew about his mother was that his grandmother would regularly compare him to his mother saying he was "always so direly serious just like her." Besides her solemnity, he knew only that she was strawberry blonde like him and that she had disappeared without a trace the night she had given birth to him. His sister had been only two at the time.
The way Dad recounted it: Howard's mother gave birth at 10:12 PM, held Howard, smiled in photographs, and told Dad that she was tired. Dad ushered everyone out and assured her that he'd be right down the hall in the waiting room if she needed anything. She smiled, closed her eyes, and said, "I'll see you tomorrow."
He never saw her again. He had dozed off in the waiting room, awoke just past three, went to check on her, and she was gone. The night nurse hadn't seen a thing. When the CCTV was reviewed to see if she'd been kidnapped, there she was --- 2:01 AM, calmly and determinedly walking right out of the hospital and right out of their lives. Howard had asked himself innumerable times what it was she had seen in his infant face that she was simply unable to live with.
F.'s hair suddenly snapped in half in Howard's hands as he was trying once again to stretch it straight. His left hand jerked away from his body with the rooted half of the hair still pinched between his fingers and swept Richard Gere off the side table, sending the tea pot careening into the wall and smashing its porcelain body into a dozen pieces of assorted sizes and shapes. It was at that moment, tears beginning to blur the image of Richard Gere's porcelain pieces strewn around its brass spout and handle like bits of airplane wreckage around a fuselage, that he knew exactly where everything belonged. Richard Gere belonged there in pieces on the floor. F.'s hair belonged here, one half clutched in each fist. Howard belonged right here in the Twilight Zone. His mother belonged to the blackness of a universe of things that he knew nothing about. F. belonged in a grave in Syria. And Howard belonged with F.
He had learned two things: from his mother, that there are some things you cannot live with, and from F., that there are some things you cannot live without.
"I...can...not live without it."
"F., come on."
"You have no idea how serious I am," F.'s face on the video chat screen turned mock-grave.
"F., I'm sure that you will survive five days without Reddit. Just think of your favorite means and-"
"Memes."
"What?"
"They're called 'memes,' Barney Fife."
"Whatever. It seems like the wifi is really good there, so maybe just get your fill now while you're laying over."
"Yeah, but I had to pay for it though. Fucking Berlin, man. Germany doesn't believe in free wifi, a sure sign that Nazism is alive and well. At least in regards to wifi."
Howard leaned forward in the Twilight Zone and rubbed his ankles, a position that F. knew meant he was ready to leave a party or end an uncomfortable conversation.
"OK technophobe, I release you. I'm sure you've got things to do today."
"I'm sorry, I wanted to talk to you. I just--"
"No, I know you hate Skype-ing and everything. Don't worry about it."
"Enjoy your time with your family. Don't try to smuggle any more hookah tobacco."
He laughed. F. was always the funny one, so Howard felt particularly proud when he was able to make him laugh.
"Well if you can stand to video chat with me for a little while tomorrow, my uncle said that he can get WeChat to work on my phone when he picks me up in Damascus."
"That sounds good. I'll see you tomorrow."
WeChat didn't work. That had been their last conversation. The civil war had the Syrian government scurrying around, haphazardly blocking whatever social media posed the most imminent threat that day. F. had called it "Censure Whack-A-Mole." By the time F. touched down in Damascus, the government had imposed an indefinite suspension of internet access. Howard had assumed that F. would just Skype him after he touched back down in Berlin for his return lay-over. But F. would never make his flight. The internet blackout lasted for another three days after F.'s memorial service was held in Los Angeles. It was the day after F. had been expected home that F.'s cousin in Edinburgh received the news of F.'s death and notified the HR director at the Semel Institute, a good friend of F.'s and Howard's. She dialed Howard within seconds to break the news. When she had told Howard, F. had already been buried in the ground for twelve hours, investigation summarily truncated by what the Aleppo police force deemed greater local concerns.
Howard wiped tears from his eyes, blinking quickly, eyes refocusing on the pieces of porcelain on the floor. He slid out of the chair and landed jarringly on his knees. He placed both halves of F.'s torn hair securely in the palm of his left hand and gingerly picked up one of the largest shards of Richard Gere between his right thumb and middle finger. He raised it up to eye level, elbow awkwardly high, level with his ears, like a detective carefully extracting an important and fragile piece of evidence from some cranny of a crime scene. It was an almost perfect 75º-75º-30º isosceles triangle, two-and-a-half inches long. It looked like a miniature, slightly convex pizza slice. He ran his index finger along its edge, instantly marring its cream and oxblood pattern with his own blood -- a very sharp miniature pizza slice. He imagined a slice of New York-style pizza being used as a murder weapon. He envisioned a darkly-hooded killer awaiting his hapless victim in a labyrinthine alleyway, raising an oil-dripping, floppy piece of pepperoni-and-cheese aloft, then bringing it down forcefully, malevolently, on his victim's innocent outstretched neck, hacking the victim's unaware head right off.
F. had brought home pizza for the second dinner in a row despite Howard's impassioned protests ('impassioned' being for Howard a half-hearted request with an uncharacteristic 'please' added to it). F.'s flight was one week away and they were revisiting the resident elephant of whether and what to share about F.'s infidel life of the past three years. Howard, being the avid proponent of reservation and non-disclosure, had quietly but firmly maintained the opinion that it would be unwise and quite explosive to speak of one iota of his deviation from the stringent Muslim lifestyle of his parents. Beautiful, big-hearted F. passionately clung to a picturesque portrait of humanity's supposed innate gravitational pull towards goodness, magnanimity, truth, and love.
"I cannot live a lie. I just can't do it."
"You're not living a lie. You are living your life. Withholding potentially combustible information from highly-combustible persons is hardly lying," The fork Howard had been unconsciously see-sawing back and forth with his middle finger clattered to the ground. In spite of the awkward position of reaching for the fallen utensil under the table, he tried to maintain a wise and instructional tone to avoid subverting his credibility, "It's...(grunt) diplomacy."
Whether he was being gracious or was simply distracted by his own thoughts, F. did not seem to notice Howard's maladroit cutlery management, "You don't have to lie blatantly to someone's face to be deceitful. I don't know. I just can't live that way. Americans can live disconnected from family and I guess it's no big deal, but in Syria -- in Islam -- that's just not possible. Silat ar-rahim. They're my family, you know? I have to be honest with them whether it hurts or not. They may not like it. It may be difficult for them, but eventually they have to accept me for who I am -- not for who they expect me to be or want me to be, but for who," he jabbed a fore- and middle finger emphatically at his left breast, "I am. They may hold some deluded beliefs, but, at heart, we love each other and try our best to serve Allah. I have to believe that the truth is more powerful than opinions and ignorance. I have to believe that they love me more than their fanaticism."
"But that is exactly what makes you different from them! That is precisely why you are NOT a fundamentalist! If they believed those things as you do, if they felt the way that you do, if they were capable of setting aside their backwards and poisonous dogmas to accept and love you for who you are, then they wouldn't hold them in the first place! You are wrong, F.! You are tremendously and terribly wrong, Farid Mahmoud, my life and my breath! Please seal your lips to their impossibly-sealed ears! Please don't go!" Howard felt he should have shouted, screamed, tied F. to the Twilight Zone, made a bomb threat to LAX to keep his flight grounded, anything, anything, anything....
He didn't. How could he? To do so would have been utterly contrary to his nature. It would have been a wholly antipodal personality that would have launched into those exclamations. Some romantic -- not Howard. He stopped the warnings threatening to spill out of his mouth with cheese, pepperoni, tomato sauce, and overcooked crust. He swallowed his misgivings one mouthful at a time until his plate was but a Brice Marden of grease. He didn't bring it up again and then F. was dead. Had he killed him with his silence? Murdered him with a slice of pizza?
He turned the Richard Gere shard over and over in his hand, streaking his blood this way and that across its slick outer surface to keep it from dripping onto the carpet. The pad of his thumb fit perfectly into the concavity of its inner side, almost, Howard thought, as if it belonged there. The coarse, unglazed ceramic of the teapot's interior lent his thumb a sturdy grip on the miniature pizza slice. He held it as one might proffer a business card, letting his blood finally collect at the triangle's sharp pinnacle and drip to the floor. The thin, venous trails of bright scarlet blood accented Richard Gere's oxblood-on-cream pattern so vividly, Howard considered that he may have, in fact, vastly improved the tea pot's aesthetic appeal by breaking and bleeding upon it. Surely, this was how it was always meant to be.
Richard Gere belonged in this perfect arrangement of pieces on the carpet. This beautiful, bloody little pizza slice belonged custom-fitted comfortably in his right hand. F.'s sundered black curl belonged tenderly in his left. Howard belonged seated in the Twilight Zone in that comfortable position that appeared to most people as militarily stiff and bordering on rigor-mortic.
He returned to his chair, to his sentry-like position, keeping watch over F.'s favorite spot by the fridge.
As he firmly pressed the porcelain triangle deep into his left wrist, being sure to thoroughly sever the ulnar artery, he realized with mild surprise that he was committing suicide. He hadn't really thought about killing himself, but as the first rhythmic waves of blood, darker and thicker than the small amount he'd initially stained the pizza-shaped shard with, poured out of his arm and onto the Twilight Zone and the first rhythmic waves of pain ran up to his brain, he knew with calm certainty that this was always going to happen -- the crime novel twist, always there in his hands.
As he watched the initial gush subside into a steady tidal flow, he began to worry that the wound might not kill him. He wracked his brain's long-archived memories of Anatomy 101 until he felt moderately sure of the location and then carefully drove the porcelain shard into his left upper thigh, twisting slightly clockwise then counterclockwise until the femoral artery finally spurted a long arc right by his ear. His head lolled back, resting on the dark brown corduroy headrest, a more relaxed and comfortable-looking position than he'd ever allowed himself to adopt before. His eyes remained locked on the upper hinge of the freezer door. They would not stray from F.'s spot until they finally and eternally closed.
As he had been removing his watch to make room for his primary incision, he had looked one last time at its digital face before setting it in Richard Gere's former station on the side table -- 2:01 AM. He imagined that sometime after three, Dad would wake up and premonitorily realize that his son had left him just like his wife -- she, because she couldn't live with certain things; he, because he couldn't live without certain things.
He had never given much thought to the moral implications of suicide -- even in the midst of the act, he hadn't paid it much more than a brief, passive acknowledgement -- but he had always balked at some people's indictment of the supposed selfishness of killing oneself. Our lives are involuntarily and unceremoniously commenced, he thought, what follows is our grand prerogative, to be executed as we desire.
Or, he added as his well-traversed corduroy ridges and valleys became saturated and irrigated dryer portions with his blood, to be abstained from altogether.
It was always a question of "those left behind" with condemnatory critics of felo de se. So whom, challenged Howard to his imagined judges, exactly was he leaving behind? Everything was where it belonged. Dad belonged with Maureen. His sister belonged with José -- or rather the world, considering her tireless humanitarian endeavors. He belonged with F. Everything was right where it belonged.
Everything in its right place.
His brain was beginning to feel heavy and sluggish, like walking in water up to your neck, but he was slowly able to call up the memory. It was a song -- one of F.'s favorites. Some band Howard couldn't recall. Howard hated the song, as he did most of F.'s musical collection. He thought the singer's voice was grating and the music nauseating and disorientating, but the verse had lodged itself into his memory.
Everything in its right place.
He wished he could play it now, but he wouldn't know where to begin to look for it, let alone be able to pick himself up from the Twilight Zone now. He couldn't see how much he'd bled, but he could feel that the chair was soaked through. It was difficult to tell what was him and what was Twilight Zone. He imagined that he was cellularly fusing with the chair -- reverse mitosis.
He was certain that this was right where he belonged, and if there was a god waiting in his seat of judgment in the clouds, ready to punish Howard after all of the blood had drained from his veins, well, he had some judgments of his own. Like, where was it exactly, the proof of this supposed perfect love and justice? Not in the world Howard knew. He wanted to know how -
How a just god could damn his so-loved children for ticking the wrong box on the ballot of eternity, as if giving a choice were more than fairness enough? How a perfect revelation could give birth to a history book-ful of hate, violence, perversion, and death?
How an upright and godly father could take a cleaver to his own son's neck, cursing him for shaming his family and chopping at him until his head was barely attached to his shoulders by a few remaining ligaments because he had loved another man?
Because he had loved Howard.
But if it was F.'s fantastical god of love up there, well, then Howard was sure He would understand.
But if it was F.'s fantastical god of love up there, well, then Howard was sure He would understand.
