"This Weight, This Warmth" by Zak Salih
This is a selection from our Fall/Winter 2020 issue, featuring prose, poetry, and art from over 20 contributors.
Daddy Sami stands outside the circle and waits for the traffic light to turn red, the pedestrian light to flash white. When they do, he lets the college boys in front of him go first, watches them leap off the curb in their boat shoes and sandals, with their blankets and lunch sacks. He follows behind, guiding the stroller toward the curb cut and keeping his eyes on the stopped cars. Beneath the stroller’s teal canopy, Caleb babbles and kicks his heels against the aluminum frame as if to say, “Mush, Daddy Sami! Mush!”
Inside the circle, they pass through tree shade and picnic laughter, past chess players and buskers, panhandlers and protestors. The boys cut left onto the lawn, and Daddy Sami continues toward the center, where streams of water spill from a massive marble bowl buttressed by allegorical figures of Sea, Wind, and Stars spotted green with summer algae. Spying an empty patch of marble on the lip of the fountain’s pool, Daddy Sami hoists the stroller up two short steps. He’s shocked at how heavy his son has become in the past several months. He wonders how chubby is too chubby for an eighteen-month-old. Setting Caleb down facing the water, Daddy Sami dips a hand into the pool and flings droplets into his son’s squealing face. Immediately, fearing he’s just infected his child with some fecal-borne illness that will rot off his little black nose, he scrubs Caleb’s face with the hem of his shirt.
On his phone, Daddy Sami pulls up the gallery’s website to make sure he has the right cross streets. He taps Current Shows. He taps Miguel Placenda: Undraped. He scrolls through several black-and-white gelatin portraits: men in suits, men in drag, men in nothing at all. He reaches for the fat marker in the leg pocket of his cargo shorts to make sure it’s still there, next to his keys.
Daddy Sami searches for the college boys on the surrounding green, but they’re lost, so he goes back to watching Caleb’s warm, wormy little body. Droplets of fountain water peck Daddy Sami’s back through his sweat-damp shirt. He adjusts the stroller to keep the sun out of Caleb’s eyes.
“This is where Daddy Sami used to live,” he says to Caleb. “Long-long before you were born. He used to come here all the time to read. See that bookstore over there? No, over there. No. There. Anyway. That’s where Daddy Sami used to work.”
Indifferent to his father’s history, Caleb strains for invisible fish tumbling into the marble basin. Daddy Sami waits for Caleb to stretch his arms, then takes a photo and sends it to Daddy Brian in New Orleans. Almost immediately, as if he’s been waiting in limbo instead of managing a trade show for the American Truckers Association, Daddy Brian responds with a row of fat red hearts.
The commandment—“Don’t move. Not one inch.”—came on a blistering afternoon in July of 2001. Sami sat along the southern curve of benches facing the fountain, on break from the bookstore where he’d started working as an excuse to avoid going back home to Ohio for three summer months of alpaca farm drudgery with his family. The bookstore let its employees borrow what they wanted off the shelves for two weeks at a time, so he’d been using his lunch hours to read the books he couldn’t at home. Before Night Falls. Faggots. Junkie. Close to the Knives. A Boy’s Own Story, which he’d just started and was holding up to his face to block out the sun.
Assuming the voice was directed at someone else, Sami ignored it. Then came a noise he couldn’t ignore: the shutter of a camera. At the edge of his vision, Sami watched a shadow shift along the concrete. Another shutter snap. Another. Perplexed, Sami sat with his book and tried to focus on the words in front of him.
“You can move again.”
Sami turned to see an old Leica like his father’s dangling from a black strap. The man attached to it sat next to Sami smelling of dried sweat and clove cigarettes. He wore black sneakers, black baggy pants, a black shirt with a line of white buttons leading up to the sharp wedge of his Adam’s apple. “The angle was just too good to ignore,” he said. “Your arms, your legs. They’re very long and slender.”
Sami, still unable to harden his Ohio heart to strangers after two years in Washington, put down the book carefully (if the books were damaged, they couldn’t be sold), and gave the man his complete attention.
“It’s a compliment,” the man continued. “What I mean is they’re like architecture.”
Sami looked at his arms, his legs, and frowned. “They called me Captain Marfan in high school.”
“Why?”
“Marfan Syndrome?”
The man shook his head.
“It’s this illness that makes your arms and legs really, really long,” Sami said. “Anyway, I don’t have it or anything.”
“Captain Marfan. That’s what I’ll call this photo.”
“How about something else? Boy with Book?”
“Beautiful Boy with Book.”
“Beautiful Boy with Book Whose Lunch Break is Almost Over.”
The man smiled and extended a damp hand. “Miguel,” he said.
“Sami.” He spelled it, explaining the missing second m, the concluding i—middle fingers, both, to his parents’ conventionality; both alterations they refused to acknowledge.
Miguel sat and stretched his legs, crossed them at the ankles. A runner with shoulder blades like folded wings sprinted into the circle and stopped to stretch by the fountain. He cupped his hand under the streaming water and sprinkled it down his bare gleaming back. Sami watched Miguel aim the camera and take several shots. “Good day to be a photographer,” Miguel said.
The sun slipped behind a cloud and Sami could see Miguel’s eyes more clearly. There was something unnerving about his gaze. Flattering as well. The stare of someone who knew what beauty was. Not just classical beauty. Haphazard beauty, everyday beauty. Sami’s own ill-proportioned limbs, the sinewy perfection of the jogger still catching his breath in front of them. Miguel’s gaze, his camera, made it all oddly, equally beautiful.
“Well,” Sami said. “I have to get going.”
“So soon.”
“I’d say take a picture, it’ll last longer, but—”
“I’d like to take more. My studio is right up the street.”
Sami laughed. He couldn’t help himself. He was used to drunken fumblings on club couches, shower-stall hand jobs with closet cases. He couldn’t recall ever having been propositioned so effortlessly, no less in open daylight. It was impossible to ignore, the lure of being desired by a stranger. For a moment Sami considered it. He saw himself, as if through a computer screen, getting up and following Miguel to his studio for more photographs and everything that came after.
“I really should get back,” Sami said. He stood, to avoid looking as deflated as he felt.
“Another time.” Miguel dug into the pocket of his slacks, held out a card. Miguel Placenda, Male Photography. A phone number. A Q Street address east of the circle.
Sami took the card. “Thanks.”
“Hope to see you,” Miguel said.
They raised their palms to one another, then Sami walked away, following the curve of benches north around the circle and turning up the concrete spoke that led to the bookstore. Behind the safety of other summer bodies, he caught a last look at Miguel: narrow face angled up to the trees, camera dangling in disappointment between his legs by its long black strap.
Daddy Sami sets Caleb on the low brick wall outside the small gallery. Daddy Brian would be furious, but Daddy Sami needs both hands to collapse the stroller into its slim column of aluminum and canvas. When he goes to pick Caleb up again, he sees the boy’s small face knotted in concentration, as if he were solving a complex algebraic equation. In Caleb’s case, such an expression always signals something much baser. Of all the times, Daddy Sami thinks. Of all the places. He lifts Caleb and presses his face to the boy’s padded butt. No mistaking it.
Daddy Sami adjusts the backpack on his shoulders, the stroller under his left arm, Caleb in his right, and wedges his way into the gallery. He sees polished blond wood floors and thinks, Walk carefully. He sees delicate strands of wire and metal and glass and thinks, Watch Caleb’s hands.
A young man at the front desk pokes his head like a prairie dog up over an enormous computer screen. He asks Daddy Sami if he’s lost.
“I’m here for the Miguel Placenda show,” Daddy Sami says.
“Upstairs,” the man says. “No photos, please. No touching.” This last note seems directed at Caleb, who’s transfixed by the walls, the floor, the low-hanging mobiles by someone named Strapelli.
Daddy Sami leans the stroller against the front desk, readjusts Caleb’s weight, and asks if there’s a bathroom—not for his son’s sake (he’s been changed in places much more public than this), but for his own. To make sure he’s ready.
“No public restrooms, sir.”
“I understand. But this guy needs to be changed. It’s bad.”
The man looks at Caleb, sniffs the air.
“If there’s any way we could use your private bathroom,” Daddy Sami nods at the small door behind the front desk, “we’d both be grateful.” He feels a vibration against his forearm, feels something shift in Caleb’s pants. “I don’t need a changing station or anything. Everything’s in my bag.”
The man purses his lips, deep in thought over something that, to Daddy Sami and his smelly little boy, seems pretty fucking simple. Then he gets up, walks to the door, unlocks it, and beckons Daddy Sami inside.
“Please hurry,” he says.
“Of course,” Daddy Sami says, disgusted at how deferential he sounds. “We’ll be quick, I promise.”
It’s no bigger than a closet, the bathroom. A sink, a toilet, several mops and buckets haphazardly stacked against the far wall. Daddy Brian would have an aneurysm. Daddy Sami slips the backpack off, pulls out the changing pad, unfolds it on the tile, places Caleb on it, hastily arranges the mis-en-place of wet wipes, fresh diaper, fresh shorts on the tile under the small sink. He crouches over his writhing son, wincing at the familiar ache in his right foot, which is always worse in the summer. The magic marker he stole from Daddy Brian’s home office slips out of his pocket and rolls along the tile. Daddy Sami reaches for it and puts it back.
Now the revelation: the epic mess in Caleb’s diaper, in his shorts, on his fat thighs and the underside of his tiny testicles. The smell, unleashed, suffuses the room like mustard gas. With it rises the toxic, shameful thought about what Daddy Sami’s going to do, and whether it will finally be enough.
Whenever Cale wanted to discuss something serious with Sami, he would suggest Willie’s on Eighteenth Street. It was never crowded, they never played loud music, you could always find a place to sit. It was more meeting place than meat market, which Sami always suspected made the space comfortable for Cale and his insecurities.
That night, barely a week into the fall semester of their junior year, Cale was running Sami through the new regime of SSRIs he’d started over the summer. He was concerned, specifically, about the weight gain he’d noticed: a terrifying softening around the face and above the hips that he saw as counterproductive to fighting the depression that dripped like black rain down the leaves of his family tree. What use was happiness when you were gay and single and trapped in a permanent state of bloat? As he complained, Cale plucked at the center of his t-shirt, pulling it away from his body to keep the fabric from clinging to the spaces underneath his chest and around his waist. Several times Sami had to lean over and swat Cale’s hand.
“Stop doing that.”
“Sorry.” Cale frowned. “I think I’ve gone up a size. I’m a mutant now. An X-man.”
The bill arrived. As always, Sami reached for it. He was the one with the part-time job, the scholarship that covered on-campus room and board. He took out his wallet and searched for cash among the Post-it reminders of old class assignments, the student credit cards he’d signed up for but never used, the list of book titles to borrow from the store written on blank receipt tape.
“Think I saw a twenty in there,” Cale said. “Behind the Dead Sea Scrolls.”
Sami displayed his middle finger. As he did, a business card slipped from his wallet into the wicker basket of stale popcorn Cale had been struggling not to eat. Cale reached for it.
“Miguel Placenda, Male Photography. You told me your summer was quiet.”
Sami slipped a pair of twenties under a glass of ice and lime. “That guy was taking pictures of me in the park.”
Cale grinned.
“During the day. I was reading. He wanted me to come back to his studio.” Sami used his fingers to trap this last word in scare quotes.
“And?”
“I had work.”
“Sami.”
“I did. But it was flattering. Seriously. He said I had good angles. And this while we’re sitting across from a god with no shirt and tiny running shorts.”
“Ugly?”
“Oh, no. Handsome. European, I think. He did that Spanish thing with his c’s.” Sami pushed air through his lips. “You know, that lisping thing.”
Cale fanned himself. He made no secret of his fascination with the Old World. He had fallen victim to that particularly European sex appeal years earlier, when his older sister swapped places for a summer with a blond, blue-eyed cliché from northern Germany. He’d told Sami he’d been too afraid to do anything with the German back then, though, and Sami suspected with some shame that, were the opportunity to present itself with the Spaniard right now, he still wouldn’t. He’d be too busy plucking at his shirt.
“Ready?”
“Sí,” Cale said with a Castilian lisp.
Outside, the late August evening had gone surprisingly cool. They crossed the circle and headed south toward campus, parting ways, as always, by the hospital, where Cale would continue south to his basement apartment and Sami would head east to the high-rise residence hall across from the medical school. They made plans to meet up on Thursday when Sami had another evening away from the bookstore.
Cale flashed the business card, which he’d been holding the entire walk, and asked if he should make an appointment for his own glamour shots.
“Good luck with that,” Sami said.
“You’re probably right.” Cale puffed out his cheeks and belly as if he’d been inflated by a bicycle pump.
“I’m sorry.” Sami shook Cale playfully until he deflated. “That’s not what I meant. I’m sure he’d take your picture. He took mine, and I’m just bones.” Sami closed Cale’s hand around the business card. “Do it. Seriously. Maybe it’ll make you feel good about yourself. Tell him Captain Marfan sent you.”
“What?”
Sami blew Cale a kiss, said goodnight, and walked away.
DeeDee (No. 1) rears her drag-queen talons and scrunches her face as if she, too, notices the peaty smell still hovering around Daddy Sami and his son. Did he not thoroughly clean the boy? It’s happened before. Pulling Caleb’s diaper open with an index finger, Daddy Sami peeks in, careful not to disturb his son’s delicate, post-changing doze. Clean. He checks the backs of his arms, his legs, for errant drizzles. Clean.
Gently bouncing Caleb in his arms, Daddy Sami goes back to the block of stenciled text on the wall next to DeeDee.
MIGUEL PLACENDA: UNDRAPED
The Spanish photographer Miguel Placenda (b.1968), renowned for his fashionable portraits of the pop culture demimonde, started his career as a street photographer in Washington, DC, between 1998 and 2001, practicing his craft with casual portraits of everyday men, many of them living on the margins of society. Exhibited with the artist’s permission, these 25 photographs from our private collection offer a peek into Placenda’s ability to transform any situation—a hermit outside his Rock Creek Park enclave, party boys waiting in line to dance—into revelatory moments of startling intimacy.
Daddy Sami checks the corners of the room, notes the absence of cameras. He follows the perambulations of a straw-haired woman in slacks, the only other visitor. He feels for the marker in the pocket of his shorts.
Slipping around the woman, who smiles at unconscious Caleb, Daddy Sami spends a minute in front of Frank (No. 7). Massive man, massive cigar, massive leather coat. Massive snowdrift abutting a massive pile of alley trash. The same photograph that appeared with the small, one-paragraph write-up in the paper last week. The write-up, as the show itself, would have been easy enough to overlook. But the name of the artist crawling out of the paper, out of the past, digging its claws into Daddy Sami’s chest. How to explain to Daddy Brian, at the dinner table, or later, in bed, what that name meant? It was as impossible as explaining it to their son. So Daddy Sami waited until Daddy Brian’s New Orleans conference to drive into the city. He would take Caleb to visit the mountain wolves at the zoo, yes, but there was something Daddy Sami needed to do first, a quick errand, they hardly came into the city anymore these days, it wouldn’t take long.
The gallery assistant glides up the stairs and does a brief circuit of the exhibit. Rocking Caleb, Daddy Sami catches the man’s frown. The gall, Daddy Sami thinks, of people who act as if they themselves were never crying, shitting, sleeping babies. A willful superiority Daddy Sami finds so appalling he breathes in relief when the man goes back downstairs.
A minute later, the woman in slacks follows.
Now, Daddy Sami thinks. But his hand is hardly in the leg pocket of his shorts before Caleb strains and opens his eyes. To see him wake up is always both beautiful and unnerving. Daddy Sami prepares the pacifier clipped to Caleb’s shirt collar and waits for Caleb to protest, but instead his son just blinks and turns his head to scan the gallery.
Daddy Sami points at Nike (No. 22). “Look,” he says into Caleb’s warm little ear. “Look. What’s that?”
Does Caleb recognize the slight curve of the marble fountain they’d sat on just a short while earlier? Does he care about the architecture of the jogger’s toned legs and arms, the incredible bas-relief of his back muscles? What about the delicate arc of fountain water dropping from cupped hands onto an exhausted face? Daddy Sami kisses the curls on Caleb’s head. He tries to imagine just how enchanting this must seem to the boy’s still-developing eyes. The white walls, the smooth floor, the squares of thin glass trapping faces and bodies. All of it sharp and neat and clean. All of it, Daddy Sami thinks, begging to be destroyed.
At first, Sami blamed it—as everyone did everything, back then—on the terrorists. Cale’s growing distance, his forgetfulness, his frequent fugue states. The shock was total; it encompassed the school, the city, the country, the world. Perhaps Cale was just more sensitive to trauma than the rest of them, who, at the President’s request, were already getting back to business as usual. Sami began to regret dragging Cale to the roof of his residence hall that afternoon so they could watch the Pentagon smoke across the river.
For weeks, Cale walked around like he was trapped under tons of rubble. Sami pestered him. Had he stopped taking his medication? Would his parents not help him pay for it? Was he worried about dirty bombs in Foggy Bottom? I’m fine, Cale always said. I’m fine. I’m. Fine. Then came the evening at Willie’s when he snapped at Sami and asked if he was writing a report for the college paper. After that, Sami stopped asking questions.
Resentful, Sami stopped paying attention to Cale, too. He picked up extra hours at the bookstore. When someone started sending anthrax spores in the mail and the student union plastered its walls with cautionary notes about reporting unexpected letters and packages, Sami stopped borrowing novels from the bookstore. He started reading essays and reportage written by the same people he saw on television. The world no longer felt like a world built for fiction.
Was it the anthrax that sent Cale through the rain and back to Sami, that October evening? The television was on, and they were showing a copy of another letter—YOU CAN NOT STOP US. WE HAVE THIS ANTHRAX. YOU DIE NOW. ARE YOU AFRAID?—when Cale, unexpected, unannounced, came into Sami’s dorm room without knocking. He said nothing, simply curled himself on Sami’s unmade bed. From his desk, Sami smelled alcohol. He noticed Cale’s sneakers were wet with mud but didn’t protest. This was as close as Cale had come to him in weeks. Now wasn’t the time to bring up dirt on discounted sheets.
Five minutes passed. Then Cale nodded at the television. “Shut that?”
Sami rolled his desk chair across the room, turned off the television, then rolled over to the bed where Cale, curled like a pill bug, started huffing and trembling.
“I know the news is distressing,” Sami said. “I just can’t stop watching.”
“It’s not the news.”
“We’re all scared, you know. Even if we’re not showing it.”
“Fuck you, it’s not the news.”
“Okay.” Trying not to sound indignant, Sami asked Cale if he wanted some tea. It was stupid, but it was the only thing Sami could think of doing. He’d opened the bottom drawer of his desk, where he kept boxes of Lipton, when Cale reached over, passed Sami a worn business card, and said, “This man is dangerous.”
Sami read the name. He read it again.
Then Cale started talking, not so much to Sami as to the ceiling. About how, two days after Sami had shown him the card, he’d called the number. Thinking the medication was working, he should try new things, he should put himself in uncomfortable positions. Announcing himself as a friend of someone who’d recently had his picture taken. Inquiring about how it all worked, did he have to make an appointment, he was a poor college student, so was it expensive? Visiting the Q Street apartment two days later for a chat, incredulous he was actually doing this, pleasantly surprised at how handsome—how European!—the photographer was. Flirting at the door for several minutes. Marveling at his own bravery. Being invited upstairs to see the studio: an apartment littered with black plastic film containers, with developed photographs hanging on wires around the room like Tibetan prayer flags. Accepting a heavily poured glass of red wine to calm his nerves. Looking at samples of the photographer’s work. Laughing at Sami on the bench, hidden behind a book. Sharing clove cigarettes, even though Cale never smoked. Asking through a smirk if that closed door over there was a sex dungeon, being told that no, it was just the makeshift darkroom, nothing exciting. Feeling a hand on his knee. Going to the bathroom, coming back to another generous glass. Drinking fast, picking at his t-shirt whenever the photographer wasn’t looking. Nodding while the photographer described how artists worked with their subjects to find the right angle—and perhaps his was reclined on this very sofa? Feeling oddly compliant. Feeling draped in sleep. Feeling the weight on top of him. Hearing that accent say the trick was learning to be comfortable in one’s own body, to think of yourself the way you wanted to look. Revolving through moments of sleep, wakefulness. Feeling a fire in his stomach. Seeing the crooks of his knees. Tasting a thumb wedged in his mouth. Remembering, as if calling out for someone who’s just turned a corner, that he was a virgin.
Cale stopped talking.
Sami’s stomach folded over on itself, as if kneaded by massive fists. He slipped the business card under his keyboard. He climbed onto the bed and held Cale from behind, more for his sake than his friend’s. He couldn’t believe how heavy, how warm Cale felt. He told Cale he had to tell someone about this. His parents, the police.
“I can’t.”
“You can.”
“I can’t.”
“You have to. Tomorrow morning. I’ll skip work. We’ll do it together.”
“I was a virgin,” Cale said.
“You’re so brave,” Sami said. “You’re so brave for telling me.”
At some point, Cale stopped crying. At some point, they fell asleep. At some point, Sami’s arms relaxed and when he woke it was dawn and he was facing the wall and he could feel the emptiness next to him on the bed.
Sami showered, stripped off the muddy sheets, called work to cancel his shift. Then he called Cale’s apartment. As he waited for Cale to pick up, he looked out the window, six stories down, at a tangle of red and blue lights, the long red hide of a fire truck. The phone continued to ring. Sami turned around, noticed the muddy tracks leading toward his bedroom door, and felt a strange compulsion to sit on the floor. The phone picked up; Cale’s recorded voice asked Sami to leave a message. In his mind, Sami followed the tracks down the hallway to the last door on the right, the one leading up three flights of service stairs to the roof. The answering machine beeped, waited for its message. Sami thought back to that Tuesday in September, when he’d taken Cale up to the roof so they could watch the smoke from the Pentagon, like dust kicked up from a dry field. When he’d told Cale how the building staff were lazy about keeping the roof access door locked, how people in the residence hall came up here all the time to study, to drink, to smoke, to hook up. Whatever they felt like doing.
Something, it could be anything in the entire universe, sets Caleb off. The boy has few words with which to express himself, none of them adequate, so he uses his body. He squirms, desperate to impart some dire message. Daddy Sami knows they’re fast approaching the tipping point, after which Caleb will start crying and the gallery assistant will come back upstairs and Daddy Sami will have to leave before doing what he came here to do.
Daddy Sami offers the pacifier. Caleb smacks it away as if to say, “How dare you, Daddy Sami!” Daddy Sami tries the phone, hoping the screensaver will convince Caleb Daddy Brian is right here with them. Caleb hits the screen with the flat of his palm, burrows his head into the crook of Daddy Sami’s neck, and whines.
“Alright,” Daddy Sami says. “Alright, I hear you. Alright.”
He looks around. The gallery is still empty. The assistant is downstairs; Daddy Sami hears him on the phone.
Father and son go back to the start of the exhibit. In front of the stenciled introduction, Daddy Sami takes the marker from his pocket, uncaps it with his thumb. Working quickly, he can’t blot the letters as neatly as he’s fantasized about doing ever since that vulpine name lunged out at him from the Style section. He has to settle for ragged black squares, over the U, the N, the two Ds. He smells marker stink, thinks of Daddy Brian brainstorming on a smartboard in some hotel conference room. He hears the assistant hang up the phone. Quickly, he puts the marker back in his pocket. He readjusts Caleb—that weight, that warmth—against his chest. Daddy Sami should hurry, but he can’t resist trying to turn Caleb’s head so the boy can acknowledge his father’s vandalism, his impossibly small act of vengeance. He knows Caleb is clueless, has nothing but food and sleep on his mind. Still. Just one second, Caleb. Look for just one second. Maybe five. I want you to see this. You have to see this. You have to remember it, this pitiful little gallery show, which I’ve now rightfully named in your honor. MIGUEL PLACENDA: RAPE.
Cale’s parents, traditional in all the wrong ways, refused to acknowledge the truth. It was horrible enough for the family, they said when Sami called to tell them why he believed their son had killed himself. They didn’t want the attention. They didn’t want Cale remembered that way, a victim of his own lifestyle. They appreciated Sami’s concern. They thanked him for the flowers. They asked he never call again.
In early November, after a morning shift at the bookstore, instead of heading south for his afternoon War and Society seminar, Sami walked east until he found the Victorian townhome whose address matched that on the business card he still kept in his wallet, an awful aide-mémoire of his own culpability.
He climbed the stairs, found Unit 2 on the call box, rang the buzzer. He rang again. He held down the buzzer.
A crackle. A voice, muffled, as if rising from the bottom of the sea. “Yes.”
“Miguel,” Sami said.
“Who is this?”
“It’s me. Sami with an i.”
Silence.
“Captain Marfan,” Sami said, the name sounding like the worst comic book hero in the world, his powers just discovered, come to seek truth and justice.
“He’s dead,” Sami said. His fists throbbed like hard-working hearts. “Cale.”
“Cale?”
“Because of you. I know it, even if no one else does.”
Silence. Then: “I think you have the wrong house.”
Sami crumpled the business card and pitched it as high as he could at the second-floor window. He reached through the wrought-iron fence around the front garden and threw a handful of cold, dry mulch. He looked for something harder, something that would crack and smash. Nothing seemed suitable, so he kept throwing black mulch at the glass and brick, attacking the silence, the stillness of the window drapes. He stalked over to a sidewalk cutout to gather mulch from around a naked hackberry tree and noticed a loose paving brick. He picked it up, tested its weight in his blackened hand, looked up at the window. When no face appeared, when the looks of passersby became too much, Sami took the paver in two hands, raised it over his head, and threw it down on his right foot.
Sami started clutching his pillow at night, practiced sleeping with it against his chest, trying to see if he could wake up with his arms still locked around it. Ignoring the awkward cast on his foot, that reminder of his many great failures: not just that he’d delivered Cale to his attacker’s doorstep, but that he hadn’t held on tight enough to protect Cale from the shame of his own confession.
Six weeks later, the cast was off, and Sami once again started sleeping with men against his chest. He never held them long; their limbs always found a way to untangle during the night. For years, Sami tried to hold men in his dorm room, in the group house he shared with five other graduate students, in the studio apartment he could barely afford on his salary as an editor for a medical nonprofit. Then came an unexceptional evening in March of 2009 when Sami brought home a man he’d met through a co-worker, and awoke the next morning to discover, with surprise and relief, his arms still locked around Brian’s hot, heavy waist.
Caleb won’t stop. He screams, he kicks his legs, he bangs his fists the entire ten blocks to the car. Daddy Sami moves as fast as the foot traffic and streetlights allow. Once he clears the circle, he stops looking over his shoulder to see if the gallery assistant is chasing him. He takes the marker from his pocket and drops it into the next trashcan he sees, followed by Caleb’s soiled diaper in its plastic grocery bag.
By the time they arrive at the car, Caleb is a mess of tears and snot. Is he hungry? Has he messed himself again? If only his son had the right words. “You’re so patient,” Daddy Sami says, releasing Caleb from his stroller. “I’m so proud of you.”
The car seat is a nightmare, a medieval torture device that came highly rated by consumers and thus, Daddy Brian said, was worth the price. Daddy Sami straps and buckles, impressed with his ability to ignore Caleb’s piercing shrieks and, more than that, the stares of people walking by. This, he supposes, is part of fatherhood: a hardening of one’s self against the opinions of others. Still, he wants to curse everyone watching him load Caleb into the car. Fuck you. And fuck you. Fuck you, too.
Halfway across the Fourteenth Street Bridge, the pacifier falls from Caleb’s mouth and, because Daddy Sami forgot to re-clip it to the boy’s collar, onto the floor. The familiar tell-tale whine begins. Daddy Sami, trapped in traffic, is powerless to stop it. “Caleb,” he says to distract his son, drawing the name out like a lullaby, then a chant, then a cheer. “Caleb. Caleb. Caleb.” The name he’d been adamant about giving their son from the beginning, back when he was no more than a topic of conversation. The name with which he’d parried each of Daddy Brian’s suggestions. The name that had been decided, ultimately, shamefully, with a coin toss. But whatever power Daddy Sami thought the name would have fades now under the force of Caleb’s cries.
“Caleb. Caleb, baby. Shh.” One hand on the wheel, Daddy Sami reaches back and strains to place his fingertips on the crown of Caleb’s head. Someone honks, and he brakes hard. The car seat shakes with the force of its passenger’s frustration. Thirty minutes until they’re home, Daddy Sami thinks. At best. The toes of his right foot ache from the constant acceleration and deceleration. He thinks of the tiny bones of Caleb’s feet, ready to grow, safe under Daddy Sami’s care. Still. There will be so many other ways for him to betray the boy, so many opportunities to leave him at the doorsteps of wolves. He wonders how long he can keep this going: eyes on the road, fingers reaching backward for his son.
“I know, Cale. I know.”
Daddy Sami’s fingers finally touch the soft black curls, the hot scalp underneath.
“I know. I’m sorry, I know. I know. I’m sorry.”
Zak Salih lives in Washington, DC. His writing has appeared in Crazyhorse, Foglifter, The Chattahoochee Review, The Millions, The Rumpus, and other publications. His debut novel, Let’s Get Back to the Party, is forthcoming in February 2021 from Algonquin Books.
