Yasmin Adele Majeed
The gallery was across the street from Seward Park, on a corner of Canal Street that once housed a Chinese bakery Reyaz used to go to on afternoons in high school after his weekly game of pick-up. Now, the block had been taken over by dive bars and small, fashionable shops that catered to the L-train crowd, who treated this corner of Chinatown like it was an extension of Bushwick. His high school was only a few train stops south, by Battery Park, an underfunded magnet school he had commuted to from Ditmars. His parents had been so proud of him when he got in, a pride that was its own type of suffocation. He nearly killed himself to sustain it, stuffing down every feeling that went against what they wanted from him.
This was what he thought about as he walked around these parts of the city that formed the landscape of his teenage years: how angry he used to be. How at pick-up, what Reyaz really liked was trying to start fights, trying to get anyone to knock him down. He had stayed up late the night before talking to Sana about this anger.
“It’s funny,” she had said. “I was angry too when I was a teenager, but I would just keep it all in and hurt myself. But you externalized your anger, brought other people into it.”
“Hurt yourself?”
She mimed punching herself in the head and he flinched.
“You’d do that?” He was shocked by how plainly she was speaking. But that was how she spoke lately: she wanted to shock him.
“My head, my legs, my arms. Usually enough to bruise, but sometimes not. So, it would just be the pain and no evidence of it.”
They were in his bed, whispering beneath the noise of the air conditioner. He moved toward her and tucked his head into her shoulder. “I’m sorry, Sana.” But she didn’t want his touch. She patted his head before pulling away. “It’s just the way it was,” she said. “There’s nothing to be sorry for.”
“Why were you so angry?”
“All teenagers are angry.”
“Maybe. But not like that.”
“I just was.”
“Was it your parents?”
“I already have a therapist, Reyaz.”
Usually, she was the one to pry, to ask, to reach for him. Last night, though, she pulled away and he felt a compulsive response to grab her. Instead, he quieted, and when he woke up morning and she was already gone, leaving only a note reminding him of the opening that night, he knew she had won whatever unsaid battle they had been fighting.
Inside the gallery, he found Sana in a side room watching David Wojnarowicz’s footage of Peter Hujar’s last days. She did not acknowledge him when he sat down beside her. He watched the projector light shift across her face: bright white, then shadowed, then black. He felt sick, sitting there in silence. She was holding back tears. When he turned back to the screen, Peter Hujar in the hospital had been replaced by the ruins of a pre-Columbian pyramid.
“I didn’t think you’d come,” Sana said.
He knew what he should do: hold her close, wipe her tears. Ask her where it hurt. But if you knew how these things go, why bother doing them at all?
“I can’t wait anymore,” she said. “I thought I could but I can’t.”
“Wait for what?”
She swallowed. The light flickered and turned her face gray.
Then, he understood. “You mean for me. You can’t wait for me.”
“Yes. For you.”
Outside, he was a stranger again. The sun hung low, and the men were in the basketball courts, running their familiar game. He did not want to go home just yet, where Sana said she would no longer be. One of the players wore a John Starks jersey and Reyaz nodded at him in appreciation. “Can I play?” he asked. The guy passed him the ball in response, called up the rest so they could go three-on-three in the half-court. They were good, better than him. There was a surprising, sudden fluidity between himself and his new teammates, one in the Starks jersey, the other sweating through his white tank. He played; he let go of everything else. He took on his old role as point guard, running the ball up into the paint and then kicking it out to another player waiting for him at the three-point line. It was Starks. Reyaz held his breath as the shot curved down to the net—missing it completely. “Aiiirbaaaall,” someone on the other team sang out. Starks looked irritated. Closer up, Reyaz realized that the kid was slightly older than he thought, no longer a teenager. He was brown, too, introduced himself with a fist-bump and his actual name: Nasim, but apart from the affinity for the nineties Knicks, he was different from Reyaz at that same age. Beneath the jersey, a creeping floral tattoo wound up his right shoulder. He walked, Reyaz thought, like he was ready to start a fight. Maybe in this way they were similar.
The first player, the one who had initiated the game, grabbed the rebound, and dribbled it back outside of the key. He did not even bother passing, just leapt into a jump shot that slid like water down the net. “Three-oh,” he said, his shooting hand hanging in the air, relishing the quick, easy beauty of his shot. When the player jogged past, Nasim turned around and spat on the ground.
They played on, and it became clear that the player could make it from any spot on the court. His teammates called him Steph for the miracle of his game. His team was always up by two or three. The more shots Steph sank, the clumsier Nasim got. “Why don’t you focus on D and I can shoot some more,” Reyaz said when Nasim lost Steph in a pick and pop, and Steph ended up hitting his third three of the game. But Nasim scowled at him. “Why don’t you focus on you?”
Reyaz held his tongue, but Nasim only floundered more. He signaled for the ball on each play and missed it almost every time. Reyaz knew it was only a pick-up game, but he could not help himself. He wanted to win. Just this one thing. He grabbed the ball, and Steph came up to guard him. They danced around the key, stutter-stepping along the blacktop, and Reyaz focused solely on the ball moving between his palm and the concrete, and the net swinging ragged before him. Nasim was a blur at the edge of his vision. Reyaz brought his elbow up, ready to shoot. He could feel Nasim waving at him to pass the ball. He ignored him and made the shot himself. “Nine-twelve,” someone announced. But when Reyaz went in to high-five, Nasim gave him a cold look, and jogged away to guard Steph.
Sana’s voice played in his head. Just the pain and no evidence of it. What was this, then? It was not funny, but he laughed to himself anyway, which Nasim caught. “We’re losing and he’s laughing,” Nasim said. They were down, twelve to eighteen. He stayed quiet through the next few plays, except when he demanded the ball from Reyaz on each possession. Each time, Nasim missed, and missed, and when he lost Steph again, the score was twelve-twenty. It was almost too dark to play now, but with each miss Reyaz felt sick again. One point til twenty-one, and the game would be over. He saw Nasim running up to grab the rebound, and leapt to grab the ball from him, but Nasim swung his arms wildly, hitting Reyaz in the face with his elbow.
Nasim’s face before him was spliced by white stars, and for a moment, Reyaz was lifted into the air. He could see the whole city, all the way down Canal. From that height, the Hudson and the East River and were just streams trickling out to sea, and Manhattan was a ship aloft in their waters. But when he looked down, there was just the asphalt, and the other players circled around him. He wiped his nose, and his hand returned red and wet.
“Fuck,” he said. “What the fuck.”
Nasim was standing to the side, cradling the ball in his arms. Without thinking, Reyaz stood up too quickly. He stumbled, and someone behind him grabbed his shoulder, steadying him. He looked down at the concrete. All was still and flat again.
“I’m sorry, man, I—” Nasim was saying but Reyaz hit him mid-sentence, running his fist into his jaw. The ball fell from Nasim’s hands and rolled away toward the handball courts. As he staggered back, Reyaz swung his hand uselessly into the air once more, before the other men on the court pulled him away. Nasim was on his knees, hocking spit and blood onto the concrete. He stepped forward, but Steph spotted him and pushed him back.
“Just go,” he said. “Asshole.” A minor absolution.
On the M train home, Reyaz watched his reflection in the window. His left eye swelled and darkened at each stop, but by the time the train crossed the East River into Queens, he no longer bothered looking. He knew what he would see.
Yasmin Adele Majeed is a writer living in New York. A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, her fiction appears or is forthcoming in Narrative, American Short Fiction, Joyland, and the Asian American Literary Review.