American Lies Read online

  Then he heard other sounds. Other people. Coughing. Weeping.

  He heard a female voice. A mother’s voice. Unmistakable. Calling for her child.

  “I’m coming!” yelled Malik, this time in Arabic, and he took a step in her general direction, and he walked into—a fallen beam or a broken-off door, something, but he walked into it hard, and he jerked away from it, and he lost his balance, and he fell.

  And the carpet here was on fire.

  And now so was Malik.

  Roll! Roll! Roll! Malik rolled to the right, arms tucked, ankles crossed, just like he learned in kindergarten. Roll! Roll! Roll!

  He rolled against a wall. Soft for a wall. He stopped.

  Opened his eyes.

  It wasn’t a wall. It was a pile of bodies. Three pairs of dead brown eyes stared back at him. Identical eyes. A man and two boys.

  A family. A father and two sons.

  In that moment, quite literally staring death in the face, Malik realized that he was going to die today, here in the flaming rubble of the North Buckhead Islamic Center.

  What an arrogant ass he had been! He was no firefighter. What had he been thinking, rushing in here? He should have waited for the professionals. He should have called it in, as per procedure, and waited. And now his mother would have to bury her son. She would probably bury him at the consecrated land by her mosque. She never accepted that he was a nonbeliever. Maybe a few millennia in a Muslim graveyard might do him some good.

  Malik was going to die here. In the North Buckhead Islamic Center. How white was that, Amina?

  Would she attend his funeral? Yes. Especially if it were held at his mother’s mosque. She’d show up and she’d cry and they’d hold each other and she’d feel…what? Regret? Would she kneel beside his coffin and repeat over and over, “I’m so sorry, I’m so sorry, I’m so sorry…”

  Maybe.

  But he’d never know, either way. There might be no atheists in foxholes, but this was not a foxhole and Malik, flames licking near his back, smoke shrouding him above, would be damned before he underwent a deathbed conversion. As he felt his body become weak—why? oh, oxygen deprivation, right—he clutched his convictions steadfast. There was no God. This was all the act of man. And his awareness of the world was about to end.

  Twenty-nine years. Not a bad run. Plenty lived shorter and experienced less. He had been loved. He had been in love. He hadn’t been a clumsy bigot like Ray Queen.

  How funny. Malik’s final thoughts ever were going to be about Ray Queen. What was Ray up to? Probably dead, too. Two dead cops. Death by hubris. Well, at least they tried.

  Maybe Ray was still trying. Maybe Ray wasn’t dead. Maybe Ray was rescuing people left and right. He had that ox-like stubbornness about him, didn’t he? He wouldn’t know he was doomed.

  What if Malik died and Ray lived? What a field day the press would have with that! They’d dub Ray Queen a hero. The commissioner would give him a medal. The mayor would give him a key. He’d attend Malik’s funeral and stand beside Amina and she’d look over at him and—

  Oh, hell no.

  Malik pushed himself onto all fours and crawled over the bodies. The old man’s voice had come from this direction, hadn’t it? Malik slinked a few feet across the smoldering carpet before he found more bodies. Little bodies. Three girls.

  Alive.

  Pinned underneath a beam but alive. And whispering. Praying. Their lips forming the words of a du’a. “O Allah, I am your servant…”

  The three little girls were holding hands. They didn’t know Malik was there.

  They didn’t know Malik was there until the wooden beam began to rise from their thighs, rise up as if by magic. They saw the dark-skinned policeman and they thanked Allah for delivering him, and they followed him with silent obedience as he led them like a panther through the labyrinth of black debris and out, out, out into the sun.

  Chapter 3

  Channel 2 Action News interrupted a hyperactive chef on Good Morning America to bring live on-site footage of the holocaust in Buckhead, and although the TV in her bedroom was on—and loud, so as to compete with the hedge trimmers outside—Sara remained entirely ignorant of its content, being that she was lying in a ball on her cold bathroom floor. Her eyes were squeezed shut as the knife-pain inside her lashed out at her digestive organs.

  Something was wrong with Daniel.

  Something was wrong with her baby.

  She forced her eyes open and pawed for her cellphone. It remained where she’d dropped it when the pain first struck. She had been brushing her teeth and reading the comment thread to her latest YouTube vlog. She had been crying. Crying and brushing and then the blade in her distended belly and then the phone fell and then so did she.

  Daniel wasn’t due for another month.

  Gasping in pain, Sara pulled the cellphone toward herself. Its screen was cracked. But would it still work? Yes! She flipped through her contacts and found Rayyan and pressed the Call icon. As her phone dialed and Sara wiped her sweat-damp bangs from her forehead, she realized that the pain inside her was subsiding. Not gone. Not completely. But an echo of what it had been only moments earlier. Thank God. Thank God.

  After three rings, Rayyan’s voicemail message greeted her. Odd. He usually picked up. Unless he was in a meeting or…

  Oh. Ha. Whatever was happening to her must have affected her memory. What time was it? He wasn’t in a meeting. He would still be at the mosque, celebrating Eid. His cellphone would be off. How could she have forgotten something so obvious?

  Pregnancy brain was a real thing.

  When she felt better, she really needed to vlog about it. Maybe crowdsource for opinions. Post a poll above the comments. Polls didn’t drive new viewers, but they did engage the fans. The fans loved to talk to her, and to each other, and she loved to talk to them. But she had to increase traffic. As of that morning, her three-year-old channel, YourMuslimFriend, had 5,223,366 subscribers, which was a fantastic number compared with 99.9 percent of all YouTube content providers, but it wasn’t much higher than it had been back in January. Her channel was stagnating, and on the Internet, anything slower than light speed might as well be yesterday’s news.

  Too many of her recent vlogs had been low energy. That had to be it. She needed to juice things up. But when the doctors allowed her only one cup of coffee a day, how could she provide groundbreaking new content five days a week while simultaneously editing and keeping up with all the business correspondence this job—and yes, oh yes, it was a job—entailed?

  Even the hate speech on her comment feeds had stagnated. Gone were the days of the creative invectives, the long diatribes against her for daring to be a woman and/or a Muslim. Since cresting 5,000,000 subscribers almost a year ago, she had become lazy and she had drifted away from controversy and this cowardice had to stop.

  Much like the knife-pain in her belly had stopped. She was still on the floor and her phone screen was still cracked, but she felt fine.

  Maybe it had been gas pains. What did they have for dinner last night? Ah yes. Soy lamb. Rayyan had made that joke about a soy shepherd and soy wool, but she’d found it on sale at Fresh Market and it had tasted pretty good, once he’d seasoned and braised it. She felt bad for her husband sometimes. As he loved to opine, he was a carnivore and she was a vegetarian and still they had fallen in love, which was proof enough for him that world peace was indeed possible.

  Soy lamb and couscous and apricot pie for dessert. Nothing Sara had ever had a digestive issue with before, but when before had she been eight months pregnant? She sat up and exhaled. The fine dark hair on her forearms clung to her sweaty flesh. What a mess she must have looked like, sitting here on her bathroom floor. Perspiration-wet. Her shirt was little more than a cotton sack. It was hard to be stylish when one was so incredibly, incredibly fat. Her sweatpants were tight in the wais
t and loose everywhere else. Her slight frame had gained weight only in her midsection, and there it had gained and gained and gained. Her back hurt from the heft of it all, and she was still sitting.

  Standing up was a chore in itself.

  Sara glanced back at her phone. Should she call 911? She felt okay now. Daniel felt okay. In fact, she was certain he was asleep. Did babies snore? She dialed 9 and then hesitated. She really wasn’t in the mood to deal with a pair of paramedics explaining to her in condescending tones that she was fine. And she had promised herself that she wasn’t going to be one of those expectant mothers who overreacted about every little thing. She was educated.

  Maybe she could just sit here. The floor wasn’t that uncomfortable. Her phone’s screen may have been cracked, but the phone itself seemed to function flawlessly. She could watch one of her friends’ latest videos or she could watch one of her old videos, back when her body had been a vertical line rather than a horizontal sphere. Or she could play Tetris. She could text her BFF, Bethany, and learn the latest gossip from campus. Word was that Bethany’s thesis advisor, Dr. Macumba, was having an affair with a professor from the women’s studies department. Which professor? Bethany wasn’t sure, but she had promised to find out. And maybe she had. Sara smiled and clicked on Bethany’s name and typed a few letters—and then the knife returned, just below the right side of her rib cage, and plunged itself in, as long as the devil’s tongue and twice as serrated, spearing her internal organs one by one by one.

  She didn’t remember throwing up, but she must have.

  She didn’t remember dialing 911, but she must have.

  Because suddenly she was in the back of an ambulance and her sack of a shirt was spattered with sick and a blonde in a light blue uniform was shining a penlight in her eyes.

  “…had a fever?” the blonde asked her.

  A fever? Sara frowned. She knew she recognized the word. She was certain of it.

  “Fee-ver,” she mumbled.

  A fee was simple. A fee was a financial penalty attached to a transaction. Why was this paramedic asking her about money? Did she recognize her from YouTube? Was there a fee for riding in an ambulance?

  Why was she riding in an ambulance?

  She tried to sit up. She couldn’t gather the strength. But she did manage to summarize the entirety of her mind with one loud shriek: “Daniel!”

  And then the world melted away, like a Dalí painting, and she melted away with it, drip-drip-drip into blackness.

  When Sara awoke, she was no longer in an ambulance. She also was no longer in her clothes. She was in a patient room in an ER. A purple curtain cordoned off her room from, presumably, the rest of the ER. She couldn’t see through the curtain, but she sure as hell could hear through it, and hell was exactly what she heard.

  Screaming.

  Running.

  So many voices. All of humanity on the other side of that purple curtain.

  “Must be the zombie apocalypse,” she muttered, and then smiled to herself, and then stopped smiling when she remembered that she was in a patient room in an ER and she was the patient, and a catheter had been installed into the top of her left hand. She traced the clear tubing up to a clear bag. Could be saline. Could be vodka. If she had gone to medical school like her parents had wanted, she might know.

  She couldn’t feel Daniel.

  She ran her hands under her gown and along her belly. Her bump was still there, but Daniel wasn’t moving at all, wasn’t doing his regular can-can dance against her insides. Nothing.

  Through a clenched jaw, she shouted out, joining her voice to the noise.

  “Help!” she shouted. “Help!”

  And the purple curtain parted.

  Chapter 4

  “We’re awake!” said the man. He was bald, black, maybe forty-five years old, and his eyes were a matched pair of green grins. Not quite the green of his smock, but close. “My name is Von and I’ll be your PA. How are we feeling?”

  “I can’t feel my baby.”

  “Oh, he’s the smart one.” His voice was melted butter. “He’s still taking his nap. But he’s fine. The doctor checked his stats no more than twenty minutes ago. You were drooling a bit so I wiped your chin. How are we feeling?”

  Von took note of the numbers on her monitor. Sara took note of the fact that she had a monitor. That explained the plastic clothespin attached to her left index finger.

  “Are you sure he’s okay?”

  “Look at you. Mother of the year. What’s your baby’s name, child?”

  “Daniel.”

  “I love Elton John. You know he lives here in Atlanta.”

  Sara didn’t reply. Despite the chaos and hubbub outside the purple curtain, Von was calm. Slow. No, not slow. Measured. He motioned for her to open her mouth and then placed a thermometer underneath her tongue. In ten seconds, it beeped. Ten seconds.

  “Well, your fever’s reduced, so that’s a blessing. You had us worried there.”

  “How high was it?”

  Von tossed away part of the thermometer and then entered some data into the laptop in the corner. “When you arrived? 104.6.”

  104.6? Holy shit. What was wrong with her?

  “What is wrong with me?”

  “Oh, Dr. Pence will be in shortly. You’re in good hands.”

  Somewhere in the ER, somewhere beyond the purple curtain, a woman howled.

  “What’s going on out there?” asked Sara.

  “Look at you with the questions.” Von finished his typing, picked up the remote control from the bed, and clicked on the small TV up near the ceiling.

  The default station was CNN.

  The current images were a horror show.

  EMTs and firefighters were marching through rubble. Soot on their uniforms. Sorrow in their eyes.

  The noise in the hallway drowned out all sound from the TV, but the chyron along the bottom of the screen provided all the information that anyone needed: TERROR ATTACK ON ATLANTA MOSQUE, 4 DEAD, 128 WOUNDED.

  Terror attack.

  Atlanta mosque.

  Rayyan.

  “Where’s my phone?” she asked. “I need my phone.”

  “Sorry. You didn’t have a phone when they brought you in. Your clothes, however, are in a plastic bag by the sink.” Von pointed to a plastic bag by the sink. “Are you thirsty? Can I get you some water?”

  “I need a phone. I need to call my husband. Please.”

  Von reached into the pocket of his pants and took out a small cheap phone, but Sara’s gaze stopped at the pants. They were hospital green, like his tunic. Not quite the green of his friendly eyes. Von had changed his tunic recently, but not his pants. The thighs of his pants were still spattered with fresh blood.

  “Here,” he said, handing her the phone.

  Sara stared at it. A realization flared up in her mind and her heart bowed its head.

  “Thank you,” she replied quietly, “but I don’t have his number memorized.”

  Von nodded and returned the phone to his pocket. “Dr. Pence will be with you soon. I promise.”

  He left her alone in the room. The wet human tragedy in the rest of the ER continued. The images on the TV marched on. Which mosque had been hit? She looked for a familiar tree or a recognizable street sign. Landmarks. Anything.

  4 dead. 128 wounded.

  Sara was a prominent member of the Muslim community. She would know some of the dead.

  One question that did not occur to her at all was why. The why was obvious. Let the commentators and the pundits speculate all they want. Let the GBI and the FBI conduct their investigations. The motive was as obvious as it was grotesque. This was the inevitable conclusion reached by a culture of Islamophobia. Sara had created her online persona specifically to combat this kind of hate. YourMuslimFriend. V
ideo upon video explaining, often with humor, the ins and outs of her religion and the ways it differed from Christianity and the ways it matched Christianity belief for belief and ritual for ritual. Her day to day was almost identical to the day to day of every other twentysomething American woman. Yes, she normally wore a head scarf, but dude, how many Christians wore a cross?

  It was all about love and respect. Love and respect for God. Love and respect for each other.

  4 dead. 128 wounded.

  No, sorry. Breaking news. 5 dead. 127 wounded. No names, though. Not yet. The families needed to be contacted first.

  Someone might be calling her right now.

  She glanced at the laptop on the cart in the corner. Was it connected to the Internet? She could sign in to Twitter and Facebook and Snapchat and Instagram and find out information. She could IM people. Sure, patients probably weren’t allowed to use hospital equipment, but she was already hooked up to one of their machines, and was anyone else using the laptop at the moment? No. This was an emergency room and she was having an emergency. If Rayyan were here, he…

  Maybe he was here.

  Maybe he was in one of these other rooms right now.

  Sara used the metal guards alongside the bed to help hoist herself up. Nothing was easy in the third trimester, and whatever was wrong with her—praise Allah that Daniel was all right—had left her sapped of strength. At least the fire in her side had diminished from a blue-hot conflagration to a solitary candle. Still hot, but sane.

  By the time her bare feet touched the floor, her body was once again sopping with sweat. All this effort. She was surprised Daniel hadn’t woken up. Von had assured her he was okay, and he went to medical school. Did physician assistants go to medical school? At the very least, he had medical training. Sara trusted him. She trusted people until they gave her reason not to trust them, at which point she would turn on them ferociously and forever. Her videos sometimes accrued truly monstrous comments, but she was a Muslim woman on the Internet. She wasn’t naive. One of the other reasons she had created YourMuslimFriend was to create this conversation, and even the best conversations got invaded by assholes. Trolls. The trick was to keep the assholes from hijacking the dialogue. Her fans were excellent at shutting down trolls. Her fans were smart. 5,223,366 smart people had her back.