January – May, 2004

January, 2004, was the coldest January in ten years. Ice was inches thick on suburban streets, and in NYC, pedestrians in intersection crosshairs were hit by the cold steel of Arctic blasts. But Opportunity, the second robotic rover, descending upon Mars two weeks earlier, hadn’t hit the strong winds on landing encountered by its earlier twin,Spirit. Poor Spirit was in further trouble, immobilized by a computer crash caused by excessive multitasking. Going on first dates in and around NYC that January was also not for the faint of heart. Some blamed global warming for the cold. Marwa certainly did as she and James-Beekmans moved about the Museum of Natural History from under the shadow of the giant blue whale to the Rose Center for Earth and Space at the Hayden Planetarium.

Marwa said, “Weather is pumped, you see, like blood in our bodies.”

Bodies distracted James-Beekmans from the stony asteroids in the lobby. His sudden complete attention rattled Marwa, but she soldiered on.

“Cold water sinks in the north Atlantic, which pushes warm Gulf Stream water north. But now with the polar ice thawing and heavier rain on the ocean surface, colder waterisn’t sinking as fast. If the warm water stops coming north and the north Atlantic just freezes, we’ve got another Ice Age.”

James-Beekmans was intrigued. “But won’t that happen anyway? Sometime? Why not now?”

Marwa smiled because she knew the answer. “Previous Ice Ages happened because the Earth shifted its tilt toward the Sun. Our climate wasn’t due to have ended any time soon. But since the 1950’s, the deep-water Atlantic Ocean pump, between Iceland and Scotland, has slowed down 20%.”

“Not so hot, huh,” James-Beekmans said, “we’re not even tilting.”

Marwa, however, felt off balance.

“You want to sit down?” James-Beekmans said.

“Where?”

They looked about the groundfloor lobby inside the tall glass cube, crowded with asteroids-on-display and weekend visitors, the space dominated by an apparently suspended giant white sphere and the Heilbrunn Cosmic Pathway curving above them. Nearby, an older lady, visibly fatigued, followed by her grandchildren and exasperated daughter, saw a wire stool and rushed toward it. Before either Marwa, James-Beekmans, or a horrified guard could warn the woman, her wide rump was stuck in a model of a black hole in space. The grandmother’s screams startled the urban crowd (terrorist attack?). Then the mortified daughter and the guard helped the woman out of her predicament, and the grandchildren broke up, along with the relieved crowd, filling the Rose Center’s illuminated glass cube with wild laughter.

Inside the giant white sphere, James-Beekmans kissed Marwa for the first time under the star-filled sky during the planetarium show.

The Bronx Zoo was another good place for a winter date because its 85 acres catty-cornered the University. James-Beekmans’s favorite part, the Gorilla Forest, was closest. In frozen January, the Congo natives were kept indoors where it was warm and humid enough to swell Marwa’s wavy hair, which troubled her but aroused James-Beekmans. They saw a De Brazza’s Monkey. He was loud, white-bearded and fur-“turbaned – like a tyrant imam,” Marwa said, her hands covering her ears against the noise, until the monkey went all “Aristotle under Phyllis,” and inflated his vocal sac and announced his dominance in even louder, booming calls.

“He looks religious to you?” James-Beekmans had said. “Philosophical? Who’s Phyllis?”

It was only then that Marwa registered the monkey’s bright colors: the primate imam’s forehead-crest-turban was flame orange-red, and his scrotum a shocking blue. Scrotum Blue, now that would be a new Crayola color, Marwa emailed Judy Yamaguchi at Columbia. I’d heard boys on campus going on about Monkey Blueballs, but I thought it was just boys being obscene, not DBM’s nickname.

James-Beekmans told Marwa that it was okay that De Brazza’s Monkey colors didn’t affect her as they would havebefore. She sat across the table from him in a restaurant and remembered Valentine’s Day with Prix. This time, she babbled about her summer after graduation, in Alexandria, and how she had been obsessed about where Alexander the Great had been buried. James-Beekmans babbled back, still reassuring her with a story about the fat folksinger, Mama Cass, who “sang better after a lead pipe accidentally knocked her unconscious in the Virgin Islands.”

“Is that anywhere near the Island of Reil, below the fissure of Sylvius in the brain? That sounds so apocryphal, James-Beekmans.” Marwa tapped her head, trying at the same time to smooth down her untamable curls.

“Oh ye of little faith,” he had said.

“You got that right. Religion’s not the opiate of the masses, it’s the steroid that incites war.”

“Swords into ploughshares is my religion,” James-Beekmans said, and Marwa admired him for deflecting her testy tone and teasing her. “Y’know the plough is one of the most ancient and valuable of human inventions, Darwin said, but earthworms have got us beat, hands down, and they don’t even have arms. In one year, a healthy earthworm population can move almost twenty tons of soil per acre. To earthworm scientists, Darwin is a muse.”

In February, when green tips of daffodil bulbs were up an inch in 20 degree cold, the fate of the 40-story Deutsche Bank Building where Marwa’s father had worked, still draped in its black shroud, was announced. “The grim remnant of the attack on the trade center would become the site of a new park… Built in the early 1970’s, the 1.4 million-square-foot tower was known as the Bankers Trust Building until Deutsche Bank merged with Bankers Trust…Today, it is considered uninhabitable… The Deutsche Bank property will now be added to the 16-acre trade center site…”

Fate was a topic Marwa brought up with her psychiatrist, Dr.Homer Rawi. Marwa thought his name was a joke but that the man was not. She liked the long subway ride from the Bronx to his office in the West 30’s near Penn Station/Madison Square Garden. Sometimes she would read on the train, but more often, when the subway doors closed behind her, she escaped into an oasis immediately, if not colorful, then at least palpably different from the campus, as if the air pressure had changed without popping her ears or making her swallow involuntarily. That was the effect Dr. Rawi had on Marwa, even at a distance from his office. He was her father’s age. He was round and short, and waddled like a penguin. At their first meetings in October, after the episode that had sent her to the Emergency Room, Dr. Rawi had introduced himself as originally from Alexandria and no, he didn’t know anyone she was related to, coincidence had brought them together, he specialized in adolescents. His office, wall-papered in green with tall, clean windows, had bookcases in the waiting room and within. Since he was a child-adolescent psychiatrist, there was also a low table with toys and puzzles, and in his inner sanctum (Marwa called it) a top shelf of a bookcase was lined with more toys.

When Marwa went in to see him, Dr. Rawi always stood up from reading, a book open in his hands. He had unhesitatingly lent her a volume he was holding that she asked to borrow, one of a clearly valuable limited 1885 edition of the 1001 ARABIAN NIGHTS. In the Foreword she read the translator’s intention “however prosy and long-drawn out be the formula,” to retain “the scheme of the Nights because they are a prime feature in the original. The Rawi or reciter, to whose wits the task of supplying details is left, well knows their value…”

** ** **

By March, Dr.Rawi had examined many details valuable to Marwa. They had traveled to ancient Alexandria together in his green office, not only through the pages of the fourth book of the ODYSSEY, but also through that bizarre book of Banana’s where a psychic found the location of the tomb of Alexander the Great.

“Did you read Strabo on Alexandria, in Greek?” Dr. Rawi had asked her in an early visit.

“Did you?” Marwa replied.

Dr. Rawi opened a book on his desk. He had a silver bookmark with his initials on it. He read, “‘The shape of the area of the city is like a chlamys…. The city as a whole is intersected by streets practicable for horse riding or chariot driving and by two that are very broad extending to more than a plethrum in breadth which cut one another in two sections at right angles.

And the city contains the most beautiful public precincts and also the royal palaces which constitute a quarter or a third of the whole circuit of the city; for just as each of the kings from loveof splendour wished to add some adornment to the public monuments, so also he would invest himself at his own expense with a residence, in addition to those already built so that now, to quote the poet, ‘there is building on building.’

All, however, are connected with one another and the harbour, even those that lie outside the harbour. The Museum–’ That’s the Library, I think,” Dr. Rawi said, “–‘is also part of the royal palaces; it has a public walk, an exedra with seats and a large house in which is the common mess hall of the men of learning who share the Museum.

This group of men not only hold common property but also have a priest in charge of the Museum, who formerly was appointed by the kings but is now appointed by Caesar. The Sema also, as it is called, is a part of the royal palaces.

This was the enclosure that contained the burial places of the kings and that of Alexander…’ Then Strabo writes about how Alexander’s body came to Alexandria,” Dr. Rawi said. “Chlamys…plethrum…exedra,” He rolled the words around with pleasure. “I had to look those up.”

“Soma, tomb, not Sema, Soma Street it was,” Marwa corrected.

Holding her hands like knives intersecting at right angles, her left, on top, vertically, her right below, horizontally, she moved the left, “Soma,” and the right, “Canopic,” and “here,where they cut each other, that’s where Ptolemy probably built Alexander’s soma, tomb. Tomb Street. Not what they call it now. I did a lot of walking on it. Noise and traffic just like,” Marwa then gestured one hand toward the window, “An’-Why-See.”

“Because we have eyes,” Dr. Rawi answered.

** ** **

“Ptolemy probably assassinated Alexander, y’know,” Marwa said. “Caesar’s Cleo was Ptolemy’s last royal heir. Caesar burned down the Library. ‘This group of men of learning who share the Museum…there was a brilliant woman mathematician who headed the Library in the 4thcentury after the Roman Empire turned Christian.”

“Hypatia,” Dr. Rawi said.

“The Bishop of Alexandria had her skinned alive.”

“Homer sang about ‘Polydamna the wife of Thon,/ a woman of Egypt, land where the teeming soil/ bears the richest yield of herbs in all the world:/ many health itself when mixed in the wine,/ and many a deadly poison./ Every man is a healer there, more skilled/ than any other men on earth – Egyptian born/ of the healing god himself.”

“A goddess of the sea ‘deceives her father’ – Poseidon –‘blind,’” Marwa said, frowning, trying to remember.

“Yes, when Menelaus was becalmed for twenty days in what would become Alexandria. Eidothea, her name was, she helped Menelaus escape,” Dr. Rawi paused, “as did Ariadne when Theseus faced the Minotaur.”

** ** **

He didn’t write things down when they talked. Sometime between October and February, Marwa stopped fighting him. He gave her medicine, and when her dreams became less horrible, she could sleep. She told him how things looked different to her.

“It’s like old black and white movies,” Marwa said, “when they colorize them. It makes me feel — unplugged. I used to be able to, like, smell colors. Not exactly.”

“Synesthesia.”

“I can’t fool you, Dr.Rawi.”

“I had a patient once, an artist, who lost his color vision in a car crash.”

“A teenager?”

“No, I also work with some adults from time to time. On interesting cases.”

“What happened to him?” Marwa asked.

“It was hard for him to drive after the accident because tree shadows on the road looked like pits his car could fall into. Contrast vision is much sharper when you take away color. Animals have much better night vision than humans, so they see contrasts more intensely. They have relatively poor color vision.”

“So I see like a dog now?”

“Maybe you just see within the normal range of human color vision without synesthesia. If you were totally color-blind, which you are not, you would have been very valuable during World War II.”

“How?”

“As a spy. To interpret reconnaissance photos. A color-blind person can spot things like netting draped over a tank to camouflage it that would be invisible to people whose color vision is normal.”

“What happened to colorblind-artist-guy?”

“It changed the way he painted, and he took taxis instead.”

“So his paintings still sold.”

“His later ones actually became more valuable,” Dr. Rawi said.

** ** **

March and April. She began to remember. “In Alexandria,” Marwa told Dr.Rawi, “I lived with my fat Auntie Fatima, my mother’s oldest sister. She was very bossy, but not like my mother, only to my two girl cousins I shared a bedroom with. No one ever let me be alone, awake or asleep. One of my cousins snored louder than the air conditioning. No one said I had to wear hajib. My two cousins did or didn’t as the mood struck them, like a fashion thing. I was glad about the snoring and the air conditioner noise, and when I walked into the living room in the middle of the night, there was no air conditioner, and the night noises of Alexandria, well, nothing like New York, but still, people were outside, moving about. If the dead can’t rest, then neither can the living, that was my irrational logic in Alexandria. I also thought that if I could find where Alexander had been buried by his assassin in a tomb of gold – it got replaced by crystal a few centuries later when the gold got used for politics, what a surprise – where Alexander the Great was buried, if I could find where he was, then,” Marwa stopped and looked past Dr.Rawi out the window at blue? gray?winter sky. “If, then what? What did I think I would know then?”

** ** **

“I kept falling asleep all the time, like on buses, or in the new Library. My brother took me to the Library all the time. I didn’t like the columns in the Reading Room. They made me feel like the base of the Towers. They have a planetarium. My cousins introduced me to their friends, and we all went for walks on the Corniche along the shoreline, like the esplanade at Battery Park City, or uptown where Marcus lives, the walkway along the East River in Carl Shurz Park, do you know it, where the Mayor’s Mansion is, but the current Mayor doesn’t actually live there. But in Alexandria, you’re not so far above it, the water. In Alexandria, I knew the colors were substantially different although I couldn’t see things in focus. I didn’t need glasses, the fuzziness was part of losing my colors. NYC was greens, like your office, and Alexandria was blues & whites, but it was like through a filter, like a theatrical scrim on a stage. I was glad no one made anything of the narcolepsy-thing because then it was no big deal, like Alexandria was the city for narcolepsy –,” Marwa stopped. “My uncle, Auntie Fatima’s husband, he’s a doctor. That’s why I stayed with them, not my grandparents. I can see that now.”

** ** **

“When I got back to New York, it didn’t happen anymore. Nightmares, yes, but I could sleep at night in my own bed. I didn’t feel real in Alexandria.You know how we’re mostly the space inside our atoms, well, that’s how I felt, porous, like a sponge, like you could see right through me. Do I have logorrhea?”

It wasn’t that Dr.Rawi didn’t have any answers, it was that he looked at questions and answers in an altogether different way. The only thing she felt about Dr.Rawi was relaxed.Nothing felt like a risk with Dr.Rawi. When desire for intimacy with James-Beekmans caused nightmares of Alexandria that kept her from sleep with fears of narcolepsy or worse, that horrific October convulsion on the esplanade bench, she retrieved Denim Prix’s letter from the safety deposit box and brought it to the doctor’s office. But she didn’t dare open for a second time the jeweler’s box that held the diamond.

“Do you want me to read this?” Dr. Rawi said.

“No one else has,” Marwa said. “I don’t know what to say to James-Beekmans.”

August 31, 2001

Dear Marwa,

If you are reading this, something bad has happened to me, so don’t be upset. Also, don’t expect too

much from this letter because I’m not one of your Stuy genius friends. I don’t want you to get the wrong

idea about the diamond. It’s not like the movie Titanic or an engagement ring. If you’re reading this

I’m right I can’t see myself getting engaged. But I wanted you to have a diamond big enough to do that

experiment with. And I know you will think of some way to use the diamond better than I could what it

cost. Also, never think it is payment for anything. Except maybe in a good way of your affect on me.

I have the affect of being a drug on people. They get physical around me in different ways. So mostly I

put a wall up around me, like I walk around wearing a mask. But behind the mask, I wasn’t attracted to

anyone for a very long time until you. Not like you were attracted to me, but that was okay. It took me a

long time to figure out what I liked about you. You knew so much stuff and had so many questions about

everything. That was like a drug to me, like someone could know things.

I didn’t think anything could make sense, but with you I saw maybe. Maybe not for me but at

all. But I want to understand more so I am going to California to try something new. I hate

being a model. A model should be an example of something not a puppet. I have always been treated

like a mannequin not a person as if I had no personal feelings or ambitions. Maybe I don’t. But I never

got a chance to learn how to do anything besides walk, pose, take direction. You once said how Muslims

all have to face Meca 5 times a day in the same direction. My whole life I have been facing a camera.

The most dominating camera is someone else’s eye/idea of what you have to do and be, you said.

A real model is like Jesus or Alexander or you for me. When you disobeyed your father to come to my

birthday party, I knew I’d never done anything like that. When you came to my apartment for sex, I knew

it was a big deal for you which I did not think it could be to me anymore but it was because of you.

I don’t know if I can go from being a model to an actor. Someone who acts, not pretends. I don’t know what I can learn to do. I never really went to school. I don’t trust gurus. I don’t know if I could sit in a library. Who knows how soon you’ll be reading this. Not soon, I hope, but I can’t see myself in the future. But if I get there, I will think of you and the diamond. People need things to hang onto.

You make me want to know things I didn’t know I didn’t know. Be yourself. That’s the hardest

thing but I think you can do it. Don’t blush too hard,

love,

Robert (my real name)

** ** **

“He misspelled effect.”

Dr. Rawi looked at Marwa. “And Mecca. What experiment?” he asked.

“So I killed him,” Marwa said. “He was on the plane to LA because I was such a terrific model. And now maybe I’ll get to kill James-Beekmans.”

** ** **

“What do you want to tell James-Beekmans?” Dr.Rawi said.

Marwa counted the beats of the psychiatrist’s silence. “Shouldn’t I tell James-Beekmans about Prix? Is that how it is, every truth with one person gets to be a lie to the next? How can you be true to anything, to anyone? To God? To self? Does either exist?”

** ** **

“I’m afraid to look at the diamond,” Marwa said. “If you put it on your tongue, it’s supposed to cool it. Like ice.”

“Ice costs a lot less, and it melts,” Dr. Rawi observed. “It reminds me of the coal that angel placed on Isaiah’s tongue. What do you dream about Alexandria?”

“I’m in Alexander’s tomb. Like Juliet when she wakes up and sees Tybalt. All her dead. And Romeo. I’m in the plane. I’m in the Tower. I’ve found Alexander, but now I can’t get out. I can’t bear it! But they had to bear it. And they did.”

** ** **

“Why would an angel do that?” Marwa whispered. “Bushes burning, and sending people into a lion’s den and furnaces, and burning diamonds on the tongue?” Her voice rose higher without getting louder, like a taut string. “And who’s responsible? Who’s accountable? Shame on them!‘Shame!’ that woman said, and she was right — ”

“What woman?” Dr. Rawi asked.

Marwa waved his question away impatiently, “when Rice just testified about the August 6th warning — the woman’s mother died in the North Tower — where Prix – she went to the hearings — they had way too much information not to do something, so by going to the hearing, she was saying to her mother, ‘All right, I’m swinging back for you now,’ and, ‘It changes the rest of my life to know they had this level of information! And she couldn’t help it, she yelled out,SHAME!’”

Marwa erupted from her seat, screaming, “I AM FURIOUS,” and moved manically around the room, touching the desk, the chaise, grabbing a toy from the top of the bookcase, then turning fiercely, saying quietly, “Joey’s going to kill himself with his friend Osit one of these days with literal bouncing off walls – they’re imitating those stupid teenagers, they run up walls and backflip from ledges,traysers, Joey says. My mother lives in fear,” Marwa paused, then began tossing the small stuffed animal from one hand to the other.

“Parkourists,” Dr. Rawi said. “I have seen them catapulting in Central Park.”

“They climb up alcoves in Battery Park City.”

“Very gymnastic.”

“They – think – they – can – defy – gravity,” Marwa said, falling heavily back into her chair. She covered her face with her hands. “I can’t – breathe,” she said, but she was breathing, very hard, and she felt so hot, “- fire -”

When she came to, she was lying on the chaise. She felt cool and wet. There was a cold compress on her forehead, and Dr. Rawi sat nearby.

“Coal, not diamond,” Marwa whispered.

** ** **

“Will I ever be better?” Marwa asked Dr. Rawi. “Will I get well? Will I get over it?”

“Like a mountain?”

So it was not a mountain. Marwa, the doctor, and Time, they were moving together in fractal ways and waves beyond her current understanding.

“Was it all ever Whole and One?” Marwa asked.

“Do you mean golf, or before the Big Bang?” Dr. Rawi said. He gave her the birth control prescription she requested.

In James-Beekmans’s dorm room, Marwa told him, “When those planes hit the Twin Towers, for me, they crashed into arkan al-Islam, the 5 Pillars of Islam, and when the Towers fell, the Pillars fell. I was on the Hudson in a Fire Department boat, holding Joey’s hand. They were evacuating children from the City. The Towers fell. Black clouds, many shades of white and gray. I didn’t know Prix was inside one of the planes. Inside those clouds.”

It was late April, and the window was open to a wet breeze that carried lilac fragrance like a bouquet into the room. James-Beekmans sat at a plastic desk chair, and Marwa sat cross-legged on his neatly made bed. He had listened to her talk for some time. He stood up and walked to the window, turning his back to Marwa.

“I had two classes that Tuesday, September 11th. I didn’t go. There were sirens all day, but no jets overhead. We could see the billows of black smoke rising all the way up here. ‘Pillars of cloud by day, fire by night,’ someone said, but I never saw anything at night. I just started walking, west, off campus when we heard. I just kept walking. It’s not an easy walk to the Hudson. Girls always worry about rape, but if you’re black, you learn to be wary when you learn to walk. ‘You’re a neighborhood of one,’ my uncle once told me. When I first saw those blurry videos of Atta and the rest of them going to the planes, you know what I thought? I thought how easy it had been for them to pass through because they didn’t have African faces, how any of us are routinely stopped anywhere, even by ourselves, brothers and sisters who are screeners at airports, cops, wherever. No one stopped me that day, though. I got all the way to Hudson, well, this side of the train tracks. Nothing was running that day. Everything stopped. Except the sirens. I had to sit down on a curb. Other people did that, like we just ran out of steam. All the hurt done in this world, from the monstermicroorganisms I looked at under a microscope — to us.”

“Lex Talionis,” Marwa said.

“Law of Tooth and Claw. Exactly.”

James-Beekmans turned to face Marwa. He looked very tall and dark with the window at his back. She could feel herself squinting.

“Y’know, when you first started going out with me and told me about the color blindness thing, I thought maybe that was it, that was why, because you couldn’t see what color I really am.”

“Oh, James-Beekmans,” Marwa said, rising to her knees on the bed and reaching out for him.

She awakened late in the April afternoon. There was the sound of rain and the dorm and the campus in a city. She turned her head and watched his sleeping face. He shifted slightly, and she thought, “We are, each of us, the one who wakens first,/ who stirs first and sees, there in the first dawn,/ the stranger.” That was from Louise Gluck, a poet Mr. Haddam had liked. When Marwa had first read the poem, the only part that connected had been, “The riddle was: why couldn’t we live in the mind./ The answer was: the barrier of the earth/ intervened.”

But now, lying beside the sleeping James-Beekmans, Marwa thought that Louise Gluck and she didn’t see eye to eye. He was the one who had stirred first, and he felt nothing like a stranger to Marwa. She could still feel him inside her although their bodies were separate. The smell of him was in her lungs, the taste of him in her mouth, the milk of him inside herself.

“Hmmm,” James-Beekmans hummed as he awakened. He smiled at her. “Whatcha thinking, Beauty?”

Marwa whispered, “Do you have your three Gates letters of recommendation all lined up?”

James-Beekmans sat up and looked at her. “Yes, in fact, I do,” he said. “Why,” he added, “do you want to write me one?”

After completing their original 3-month mission on Mars, both robot rovers continued to operate smoothly en route to new destinations in search of more clues to the planet’s watery past. Opportunity was headed for a 430-foot-wide crater nicknamed Endurance. Along its way, Opportunity had made a more interesting discovery of a volcanic rock that looked like nothing else previously seen on Mars, but resembled a rock found in India in 1865. The unusual rock, about the size of a football and called Bounce Rock because Opportunity had struck it during its airbag-cushioned landing, contained large amounts of the mineral pyroxene. The rock in India, a meteorite that crashed into Earth, was also rich in pyroxene and contained bubbles of gas very similar to Martian air. The discovery of life on Mars was a popular topic, its past and present influences in particular. The lovers speculated as often in bed as out.

“You think maybe the meteorite in Mecca’s Cube came from Mars?” James-Beekmans ventured with Marwa.

“No one can get close enough to study it,” Marwa answered.

“The journal Nature reported there’s bacteria that seem to live off electrons directly obtained from metallic iron,” James-Beekmans said. “In heaven as it is on Earth?”

“They better be careful about what the rovers carry home,” Marwa worried. “It’s not like passing through the fiery Admissions Office of Earth’s atmosphere. Wouldn’t it be ironic, if ‘way in the future, the only thing of interest to them about our entire era was what happened when the Mars material arrived in a modern Trojan Horse? If they will have any memory of Troy then at all.”

Do you remember me? Desiree wrote on the note she attached to a spring poem titled Atmosphere.

The air is everywhere here

the thing we cannot see.

The wind’s so slim it fits

between the new green leaves

and moves them so we also see

them separate and again as one.

Without this invisibility, the words

we speak would be utterly still.

Marwa showed the poem to James-Beekmans, but she didn’t answer Desiree.

“What are the Pillars of Islam?” James-Beekmans asked Marwa.

A soft wind was blowing her long hair in his face as they walked down the cobbled hill from the Cloisters where they had just wandered about in the medieval rooms of icons and unicorns. Marwa stopped and turned to face him; his hands were still up from swatting away her curls. He looked like he was surrendering.

“The five Pillars are the five official acts all Muslims have to perform.”

Marwa gestured for James-Beekmans to lower his hands, and she raised her right one, pointing to each finger with her left hand: “One, shahadah, witnessing the oneness of Allah & the prophethood of Muhammad; two, salat, 5 daily prayers; three, zakah, alms-giving; four, sawm, fasting during Ramadan; and five, hajj, the pilgrimage to Mecca.”

Marwa closed her five fingers into a fist and looked at it. Then she opened her hand and raised it to cup James-Beekmans’ cheek. When they walked down the winding hill to Fort Tryon Park, he picked lily of the valley bells for her that the wind made chime with perfume.