31 Hours (23 page)

She was drying her face when the phone rang again. She picked it up. “Did you find her?” she asked.

“Vic? It’s Carol.”

“Who?”

“Jonas’s mom.”

“Oh,” she said. “I’m sorry—my sister—well, anyway, hi.”

“Everything okay? I hope it’s not too early?”

“No, no, everything’s fine.”

“You haven’t heard from Jonas?”

Vic sank right onto the bathroom rug, her legs crossed. “No.”

“I knew you’d call me . . . but I wanted to check. You see, Jonas’s dad and I, we’ve decided to contact the police.”

“Police?” Vic realized she’d stopped breathing.

“We found out he went to Pakistan in September. Do you know about that?”

“Pakistan? Jonas?” Vic said. “No. It was a yoga retreat.”

“The police would like to speak with you,” Jonas’s mother said.

“Police?”

“Since you are one of his closest—well, probably his closest . . .” Her voice faltered for a moment. “And because of the Pakistan trip, I was wondering about friends he might have discussed that with, and I thought of this man he mentioned once or twice. I think he’s from Saudi Arabia. I don’t know if you know him?”

“I do,” Vic said. “Masoud. I know him.”

“Masoud. Good. And his last name? Do you happen to know it?”

“Al-Zufak,” Vic said slowly.

Jonas’s mother exhaled, as though a lakeful of air was coming out of her, and that was how Vic recognized how tightly she was wound. “Masoud al-Zufak,” she repeated, but not directly into the phone receiver, as if she were relaying the name to someone else in the room. “Zu-fak,” she pronounced again, and then, after a pause, “Vic, do you have contact information?”

“No, but he—” Vic was going to mention last night’s odd phone call but stopped herself. Masoud was Jonas’s friend. She didn’t want to see him get in any trouble. These were times of appalling biases, when anyone from an Arab country could be dragged into custody for sneezing.

“What? Vic, anything is helpful,” Jonas’s mother said.

“I . . . I was just going to say . . . I think he lives somewhere in Brooklyn.”

“Brooklyn. Thank you.”

“But you know . . . Masoud really likes Jonas. I’m sure he’d want to do anything he could to help you.”

“Yes, I’m sure you’re right,” Jonas’s mother said, though in a distracted way. “Jonas also liked—likes—Masoud. But this is the way they want to do it.” Vic heard a noise like something dropping in the background
from wherever Jonas’s mother was. “Whatever will help us find Jonas is what I want,” she said. “You understand?”

“Yeah. Sure.”

“And finding this Masoud may help us find Jonas.”

“This Masoud.” It was such a distancing way to express it. There it was again: the “they” that became an “us” and that was separate from this Arab man considered suspicious simply because of his name. That was something Vic did not want to be part of. “Are you . . . are you sure Jonas is missing?” Even as Vic asked it, she knew on some intuitive level that this was it precisely. Jonas was missing. Whatever “missing” meant. Maybe he’d been hit by a car or lost his memory or been kidnapped by criminals. Otherwise he would have called her. He
would
have. How could she have thought anything else for even a second? Jonas would have called Vic by now if he could. A chill swept from the soles of her feet to her stomach. She felt her shoulders clench.

“So. The police will be in touch with you. They say they’ll send someone to interview you.”

Vic felt her heart in her neck. “Okay,” she said softly.

“Thanks, Vic. I’m sorry. We’ll . . . we’ll probably laugh about this someday,” Jonas’s mother said. “I just want to get to that day, you know?” Then the phone line went dead.

Jonas missing. Vic dialed his cell phone one more time and got his voice mail. “Shit, Jonas. You are scaring us all. Call me, damnit. Call me, call me,” she said, like a prayer, and then she hung up.

She was pulling on a pair of jeans when her home phone rang again. “Hello?” she said, thinking,
Jonas, Jonas, Jonas
.

“Vic, it’s okay.” It was her father. Vic had forgotten about Mara being gone.

“Oh, Dad,” she said.

“She and Aaron went to Brooklyn, can you believe that? To try to find me. I don’t know where she got that idea; she doesn’t even know my address. But anyway, I just spoke with her and they promised to hop right back on that subway. She should be here by 9:30, and we’ll have breakfast. I figure she can skip morning classes today, and I’ve let them know at the office that I’ll be late.”

Vic’s father sounded like he wanted her to realize he was making an effort; he wanted her approval. But Vic was thinking of something else. She remembered now Mara’s plan to talk to their father, and she felt ashamed that she hadn’t remembered it earlier, or asked Mara about it on the phone last night. “Oh, God,” she said.

“Okay, baby. Sorry to have alarmed you for nothing,” her father said. “I’ll talk to you before your opening tomorrow night, okay?”

Vic wasn’t listening. “God—Mara. But she’s fine, right?”

“Completely.”

“So that means maybe . . .”

“What?”

“Nothing. Just . . . maybe we’ll find other missing people.”

“Vic. What are you talking about?”

“Jonas,” she said.

“Jonas? Where’s he gotten himself to?” Her father sounded slightly amused now.

“We don’t know, but his parents are freaking.”

Vic’s father laughed. “Well, a young man. That’s a different matter than a little girl.”

“Yes, but—”

“He’ll turn up, Vic.”

Vic closed her eyes and imagined Jonas’s face, his blue eyes, his hair. “Yes. Maybe so.” But her father had already replaced the receiver.

NEW YORK: 8:21 A.M.
MECCA: 4:21 P.M.

Underground at Columbus Circle, three lanky boys wearing do-rags were setting up their “orchestra,” a couple African
djembe
drums along with some homemade cans—a metal sink, a plastic tub overturned, two wide pipes—as Sonny ambled by. Despite a night of evil dreams that had left Sonny queasy, a morning pang of hunger had kicked in, and he’d dragged himself up into the station. The Columbus Circle station was God’s heaven, far as the trash cans went. Everything in the neighborhood, from a cuppa on up, was too costly—so, as proof of the perversity of human nature, folks stopped valuing it. They took a bite or two and then let it go, and the food they tossed aside at Columbus Circle on any given morning was enough to keep Sonny full for half the day; he could eat and not worry for dinner.

He’d finished a successful round of trash-can-hopping: a banana with one little bruise, a quarter of a croissant, almost all of a turkey sandwich on rye with Dijon, even a half-bottle of aspirin he planned to give Mrs. Wu next time he saw her. He ate until he felt refreshed and ready to go to work—just in time for rush hour. Then he spotted the three musicians. They were silent as they prepared to perform but looked rhythmic even without music, the lines of their legs and arms rotating around the curves of the drums as they pulled the instruments
into a half-circle. The sight of them, so out-of-season hopeful, moved him. Despite the late-autumn cold, despite the Monday-morning commuter fog, these boys stood ready to remind their passing audience that even on the saddest, most frigid of days, there was much to relish in this world. They looked lucky, too; some kind of sheen on their cheeks gave them that. Sonny had been seeing so many people who didn’t look lucky lately that the three of them went a ways toward improving his mood. He inched a little closer, feeling better than if it were Christmas. Not that that was any comparison; in this most plentiful of lands, Christmas had become a holiday of failures sorrowful enough to sink all the way down into the subway. Point being, these boys made him feel, as his momma would say, like the dawn of the Second Coming. As though with their music, the only tears from now on would be of gratification.

The musicians were nearly set up when one of them, the largest, put out a hat to collect the handouts. Sonny reached into his pocket and dropped in fifty cents.

The drummer laughed. “We ain’t even started playing yet, old man.”

“Just the same,” Sonny said. “This morning I got it, so I can share it.”

He nodded and began to shuffle away, deciding to try his luck for a while on the D-train. He would head uptown for four or five stops, then reverse his order. Stay central for the morning, maybe head back into Brooklyn after lunchtime.

“Wait, brother,” one of the musicians called. Sonny noticed, when he turned, that the speaker had a small tattoo of an eagle on the right side of his neck. “You paid,” he said. “Now let us play one for you.”

Truth be told, Sonny desired no further extension of his workday break, but another minute or two wouldn’t hurt. “You gonna want
more of my money afterward?” he asked, smiling, and they laughed with him.

“Nah. Just get us an audience started, brother,” the musician said as he took his place between the other two. He seemed to go quiet inside for a second and then began bouncing his chin in time to some internal rhythm. After a few seconds, the center drummer glanced at his band-mates and they began playing, the one on the right using sticks on both the sink and the pipe, the other two with their palms on the drums, hands traveling fast enough to blur, their music a story without words, a new ancient rhythm raising Sonny’s spirit even higher and setting one foot tapping.

A memory rose in him then. Ruby and he, along with their momma, at church on Sunday. He’d never wanted to go; to his way of thinking, Sunday wasn’t intended for church. It was meant for a pancake breakfast or a mean game of street baseball or, later on, recovering from Saturday night. But church, Momma used to tell him, was his Hobson’s choice, meaning it was no choice at all. As long as he lived in her house, to his memory, he’d missed only half-a-dozen church Sundays, and then only when he convinced Momma he felt sick enough that her dragging him out of bed would be a larger sin than him failing to walk through those holy doors.

No matter how many times they changed apartments, Momma kept them going to the same church—a bitty one squeezed between a nail salon and Derrell’s Jerk Chicken Den, nothing from the outside to show it was even a church except for the green sign: Howard Street’s Holy Home of Jesus. Didn’t matter the season, the women all wore dresses the color of Easter eggs. And the music—that was what carried him from this moment back to that one. No drums made of sinks, of course, but there were always drums of some sort, along with a piano, a horn,
sometimes something else if someone brought it. That music was a letting down of all the reservations that kept one body separate from another. The children would begin bouncing in their folding chairs at the first note, and soon enough one grown-up and then another would rise, the women starting to sway, the men beating on their own legs, and at the front of the room there’d be three or four women singing as if it were the last thing they’d ever do. And after that music, so powerful it made your blood beat in time, folks in turn would leap to their feet and begin to exclaim, the details of their week viewed through the prism of God and punctuated with “Save the Lord,” each detail answered with “Yes, brother. Amen,” the Rev. Herbert Watkis calling out, singing out encouragement, “Don’t you run
away
from God if you done something wrong. Run straight
into
his arms and all your sins
are
forgiven,” and everything, the musical confessions and pardons, the undulating hips and jumping feet, was a dance that carried them to some ecstasy beyond themselves. Momma always left those services feeling so much better, but it occurred to Sonny that it wasn’t the Lord so much as the music and the folks that deserved the credit.

In some way, Sonny thought, the subway was his church. A holy, sanctified place of worship. There wasn’t a single preacher; the homily was delivered by a mix of voices, the gospel sung beneath the sermon. And now the congregation was beginning to gather before these three musicians, four or five folks pausing, not too many ’cause most were rushing to day jobs, matters of the flesh, as it were, but it was fine—wherever two or more of us be gathered in His name—and even those hurrying by would on occasion throw a smile over their shoulders or pause long enough to reach into a pocket and drop a couple of coins into the hat. Remembering, for a second, Thine Amazing Grace.

Even as the three were drumming, gospel lyrics began wandering
through Sonny’s head, as though the drumming had unhinged the words from their songs and was mixing them together as randomly as subway commuters themselves are mixed—“Strongest trials, my heavenly spirit. Loudly sings saved a wretch like me. How sweet the infinite sake of the Lord, they fade and decay.”

It occurred to Sonny that if this could be considered his church, then he might say he’d turned out to be just as devout as his momma always was. Which would have surprised her some. He’d explain his way of thinking to Ruby next time he saw her. She’d at least get a laugh out of the idea, and maybe she’d even understand what he meant, somehow.

The musicians flew into a final frenzy as they finished up their first piece, and then Sonny knew it was time to go back to work, no more lazying, even for church. But before he could move on his way, an odd and eerie sensation hit him. A sudden breath of silence seemed to fall over the subway. It was a hush more still than snowfall but not as peaceful. More like the overpowering silence of those moments of staring at the doctor right before he tells you the bad news you already guessed.
It’s spread. You’re not going to make it.

That kind of quiet was impossible here; Sonny knew that. The subway was a place of endless trains pulling in, people calling, “Wait,” humming to themselves, yelling at each other, one activity rolling loudly into the next all the way through the morning’s wee hours and back out the other end. Despite that, it seemed to Sonny that the silence not only existed but grew like a mushroom in humidity, even as a teenage boy dropped coins into the musicians’ hat and a gray-haired woman in a fur-collared jacket stopped and bent over to cough, and a thin man with a day’s growth of beard rolled in a delivery of newspapers for the underground stand, and an officer near the turnstile stood whistling as he twirled his stick. Sonny saw it all and knew there should be sound but
heard nothing, no coins, no cough, no whistling. He felt afraid, like maybe his personal time had arrived, he was in the midst of a stroke or some such. But then he smelled that rank scent that often signaled bad luck coming. A second later, the ceiling began to glitter as though with reflected sunlight, though from where, Sonny couldn’t imagine. Sonny doubted anyone else saw it.