After they made love, she fell fast asleep. He saw her scrunched down into the covers, with her head off the pillow. She always ended up the night like that, as if she were trying to fit herself to the foot of the bed. Sometimes he tried to pull her up. Rest your head on the pillow, he would say. That night he lay down beside her and let her sleep.

Chapter 22

22

The heat baked Atlantic Avenue. Aziz had gone there, a good way from Newkirk and Coney Island, to find a man just back from Montreal. This man had no phone, but he knew an Algerian named Ghazi in Montreal. Waheb swore this. A chance at Ghazi’s phone number dangled before Aziz like a high tree blossom. It had been months since he had told a single human being a completely truthful sentence. Loneliness was choking him.

On the street, people were easily insulted. He made the mistake of not stopping quickly enough when a boy came around a corner, just tapped this boy really, and the boy turned out to be someone who screamed obscenities, ceaselessly, until Aziz fled into a dry cleaner. There, a woman told him, “No clothes, no stay,” and poked her finger in the air at a poster of a cross-armed police officer. As he tried to move quickly out the door, he ran into a man with an arm-load of wedding gowns in plastic sheeting, who threatened, seemingly out of nowhere, to charge him two thousand dollars because Aziz had tripped him, splaying the bustles and chiffon where someone had tossed half a hamburger on the sidewalk. In his first days in America, Aziz would have emptied his pockets to make amends. He gave the guy the finger.

He had pretty much decided that no matter what this man just back from Montreal said, he was going to go back to Boston. There were all kinds of ways to disguise yourself. He could sneak into Brooks Street wearing a wig. There was a wig store not far from the Haha Smoke Shop. Or he could dress up as a nun. Or a cop. It was October. They had Halloween costumes for sale on the street.

He looked at the piece of paper with the name and address of the Montreal guy. He craned to see a street sign. It was nowhere. There was a street, but no sign. He walked up to the next block, but again no sign. How did people know where to go? It was ridiculous. It angered him out of proportion to the harm. Everything was impossibly impossible. He decided. Fuck this Montreal guy. He spotted a pay phone. He would dial Mourad’s work number.