The Thread (9 page)

Inside, we ignore the elevator and take the stairs, the way we’ve started doing ever since we found Ayana. “Good exercise,” Kirin usually says, but I always suspect he wants a few more minutes together, the same way I do. This time, he says instead, “So what was that?”

I glance at Kirin. He’s looking at me, and I see that monkey-word—curiosity—written across his face.

“What do you mean?” I ask, just to keep him there with me longer.

He leans against the wall on the landing. “You ever heard of Carl Jung?”

“I guess. Some psychologist. Why?”

Kirin looks down at his ragged Converse and frowns. “Jung talked about what he called synchronicity. When the same thing happens, in different ways that are connected somehow—but they’re not causing each other. Like Safira and the street guy both saying ‘Jesus bless you.’”

Like Richard talking about a wheel that never stops spinning.

I remember something then, the question Kirin asked Safira. “Why’d you ask Safira if the boy she saw had an umbrella?”

Kirin stops on the landing between the second and third floors, stands there gazing out the window at the dark gray sky. “My mom says Richard was there too that day,” he says after a minute. “The day my brother disappeared. He was just a kid, but she says he was already weird, even then, and he already had that umbrella of his.”

I step closer to the window, so close that my shoulder brushes Kirin’s, and I stare out the window too, peering down into the street at the open black umbrella that’s all I can see of the homeless guy. “Do you think it was Richard?” I whisper.

He shakes his head. “My mom says the police cleared him.”

But he was there. More synchronicity.

Kirin turns to me. “What’s going on, Callie?”

I shrug. “I don’t know any more than you do.”

I’m telling the truth, but he squints at me, as though he’s seeing something in my face that puzzles or worries him. I look away, shift my weight back and forth, reach in my pocket for my key. He catches my arm before I can turn away from him.

“There’s
something
, isn’t there, Callie?” he asks. “Something you’re not telling me.”

But what can I tell him? The thing Dad does has nothing to do with what happened to Ayana, nothing to do with the thread, nothing to do with all the weirdness that’s happening. I look back at him, my face hot and ashamed, and there’s nothing I can say to answer the question in his eyes.

But then I tip my head to one side and I’m squinting right back at him, because I’ve seen something else in his face, something I hadn’t expected.

There’s something Kirin’s not telling me either.

11

Kirin

Callie Broadstreet worried Kirin. In one way, being friends with her was even better than he had hoped. But in another way, it scared him.

You’re going to have to trust each other,
Safira had said. But he couldn’t tell Callie what Amir had told him, what he had shown him. He couldn’t tell her that he dreamed his dead brother talked to him—or that sometimes he half-believed he was really getting messages from Amir. Those were things you didn’t tell anyone, the sort of things you kept hidden away inside your own head. And as for what Amir had said—well, it was just a dream. It didn’t matter because it wasn’t real.

But what was Callie hiding from him?

And what did all the coincidences and connections
mean
?

“Nani?” he asked.

His grandmother was pushing her wire cart full of grocery bags, while he followed behind with more bags. As usual on their weekly shopping trip together, her feet twinkled so fast beneath her silk pajamas he could barely keep up with her. She twisted around as she walked, one hand on the cart handle, and asked over her shoulder, “What?”

“Do you know about synchronicity, Nani?”

She brought the cart to a stop, and her little brown face wrinkled. “What’s that?”

When he had explained, she nodded and continued walking. “Indra’s net.” She slowed down enough that he could walk beside her on the snowy sidewalk. “In heaven, the god Indra spread out his net so that it went forever in all directions. You know the story,
lal
.”

He had heard her tell the story, but now he found himself thinking about it in connection to Carl Jung’s synchronicity, and something tingled at the back of his neck, something that felt as thought a star had tiptoed across his skin. “Tell me again, Nani.”

She leaned on her cart and looked up at him. “In heaven,
lal
, there is said to be a great network of pearls. At each place where the strings connect, there hangs a pearl . . . and the pearls are arranged in such a way, that if you look at one, you will see all the others reflected. Pearl after pearl after pearl forever, all connected, all reflecting one another.”

“Like the man on the Quaker Oats box,” Kirin said.

“Just so. But unlike the Quaker Oats gentleman, with his oh-so fat and smug face, each pearl in Indra’s net is different, and yet all reflect the same endless net.”

Kirin shifted the bags in his arms. “But why, Nani? What does it mean?”

She shot a look up at him, blinking at the snowflakes that fell against her glasses, and then her little round head was bobbing ahead of him again. “Every thing in the world is not merely itself,
lal
,” she said as he caught up with her. “Each and every thing—you, me, that car there, the oranges here in my cart, poor Richard up ahead there on the sidewalk—we are all connected. And we all have a meaning, but our meaning is connected to one another’s, and so we can never know our own meaning if we do not see we are tied together by the thread of God.”

“
Thread
, Nani?” Kirin stopped walking, but his grandmother was still trotting along, and he ran to catch up with her again. “Nani! What did you say about a thread?”

“The thread that connects the countless pearls of Indra’s net.” She paused and waved her hand in the snowy air. “In the each and the every—each snowflake, each speck of dust—there God’s face shines. I am reflected there, just as you are . . . just as I too reflect God’s face, just as you do, just as we reflect each other. All things in Indra’s net are connected by the thread that runs through all life. And there is nothing not in this net.” She smiled over her shoulder at him. “And that,
lal
, that’s your Mr. Young’s sink-ro-city.”

She stopped then and looked down at the homeless man sprawled on the grate in the sidewalk. “The night is cold, Richard. Are you warm enough there?”

He tipped back his head and sucked on a bottle that was wadded inside a paper bag. “This here will keep my blood from freezing, ma’am. Thank you for asking.”

Kirin shifted his load so he could help his grandmother with her cart as they climbed the steps to their building. She shook her head and said softly, “I worry for him. It’s too cold to be out there all night.”

“He’s always there, Nani.”

“And does that make it less cold tonight,
lal
?”

• • •

Kirin helped Nani put away her groceries, and then he climbed the stairs to his own apartment. On the third-floor landing, he hesitated, wondering what Callie was doing. His hand reached for his cell phone, but he had nothing to text her, nothing that wouldn’t sound silly.
Hi. How’s your night going? My grandmother was talking about thread. Anything weird happening in YOUR life?
He shoved his phone back in his pocket and continued up the stairs to the fifth floor.

Inside the apartment, Poppy was watching television, flicking between the channels, never watching one thing for more than a few minutes.

“Where’s Mum?”

His father shrugged. “Who knows where she goes lately? Somewhere. She doesn’t tell me.” His voice was bitter.

Kirin dropped down next to him on the sofa. His father glanced at him, and his face softened. “How’s it going, Kirin?”

“Fine.”

Poppy grunted, turned back toward the television.

And there you have it. Meaningful father-and-son communication in the Ahmed family.
Kirin made a face, and leaned a little closer to his father, unwilling to let Poppy get away with it tonight.

“So, Poppy, what do you believe?”

His father flicked a glance at him, then looked back at the television. He sighed. “I believe your brother was murdered twenty-one years ago. I don’t believe he is somewhere miraculously alive. In fact—” He sighed, then finished his sentence: “I
know
this to be true.”

Looking into Poppy’s face, Kirin was suddenly certain his dreams were only dreams, not true at all—and his father’s words made him laugh out loud. Poppy looked startled, and Kirin wiped the smile off his face. “Sorry, Poppy, it’s just that I was asking what you believe about God—you know, about religion. I wasn’t asking about Amir.” But even as he said the words, it struck him that Amir
was
his parents’ religion, the only religion they had. And then he remembered again his dream, the thing that Amir had said about Poppy, the thing that wasn’t true because it was only a dream . . .

Poppy was fiddling with the remote, tossing it from hand to hand. He clicked it, stared for a few minutes at a home makeover show, then clicked the remote again. “Sorry,” he said finally. “I was thinking about your brother.”

Kirin rolled his eyes.
What else do you ever think about,
he wanted to say,
you and Mum? Don’t you get bored? Twenty-one years thinking about the same thing? You could have been a world-famous physicist or something, come up with some great theory, if you hadn’t always been thinking the same thing. Who knows? Instead of teaching high school physics classes, you might have done something—anything. Mum too. Maybe she would have been a concert pianist or something instead of being a secretary in a stupid office. What a waste of all your thinking!

His father was watching some reality show now where people caught enormous fish with their bare hands.
Click
. Now CNN news was on the screen. “I have failed as a father to give you any sort of faith,” Poppy said, his eyes still on the television. “I know that, Kirin.”
Click
. Now they were staring at the Weather Channel.

And what could Kirin say now?
That’s the least of your failures, Poppy?
But maybe if his father had cared enough to share his religion with him, other things would have been different too.

Click
. Some guy on C-Span was droning on about the economy. Kirin tried to think of a question to pull his father’s attention away from the TV. “But what about physics, Poppy?”

Click
. A different reality show this time. “What do you mean,” his father asked, “what about physics?”

“Well, how do you put physics—science—together with Allah, with Islam?”

His father leaned forward and set the remote control on the coffee table. Then he turned on the sofa and looked full at Kirin. Startled, Kirin felt his face grow hot. His father was smiling, though, just a little. “What is this, Kirin? Do you have some school assignment that requires you to interview your father about his beliefs?”

“No. I . . . was just curious. I just wanted to know.”

Poppy was still looking at him, his eyes searching Kirin’s face. Kirin squirmed, feeling both pleasure and embarrassment mixed together.

“Your mother and I,” his father said, “we’re not much use to you, are we?” The corner of Poppy’s mouth quirked upward, but the rest of his face was sad and lined, as though he were a tired, old man. Then he clapped his hand on Kirin’s knee, and the weariness faded from his expression. “So—physics. With all that reading you do, you probably know as much as I do. But you know physics has come a long way since Newton, right?”

Kirin nodded. “Einstein. Relativity. Quantum mechanics.”

His father gave one of his small, rare laughs and waved his hand. “There you go, in a nutshell. Grasped them all, have you?”

“Well, no.” Kirin grinned at his father. “But it’s interesting reading.”

Poppy nodded. “Very interesting. I don’t teach much of that to my classes. It’s still mostly classical physics in high school, which works just fine in the world where we live, where we use our machines and do our work. But some very interesting ideas are out there these days. Other dimensions. Multiverses—parallel universes. Very interesting stuff.”

He leaned back on the sofa, his eyes on the television screen where two women were fighting over something, screaming into each other’s faces. Kirin wondered if Poppy’s attention had drifted away again, and he found his own attention slipping too . . . but then his father said, “It sounds like make-believe, a dream—but it’s actually a scientific theory. The idea that given an infinite number of universes, anything is possible somewhere. That theory for me is like a bridge I can cross, a very, very narrow bridge, that leads me to the thought that someday, somehow, all this, this whole mess, everything—.” He waved his hand at the living room, the television screen, at Mum’s empty chair. “It will all make sense. All of it.”

He looked blindly at the television screen for a moment, and then he said, “I’m not a particularly good Muslim, you know that, Kirin. I pray, though. I read the Qur’an. And when I try to put my science and my faith together, what I keep coming back to is a verse—I think it’s in The Table Spread—that says, ‘If God had so willed, He would have made you a single people, but’—I’m leaving out some words here—‘but the goal of you all is God.’ For me that means that God is what pulls all of us together, despite our differences.”

He turned and looked at Kirin. “You still interested in hearing more?”

Kirin nodded.

“Really?” His father cocked a skeptical eyebrow.

Kirin grinned and nodded again.

“Well, here’s what I believe. I don’t think of God as a person. For me God is—well, everything, absolutely everything. Using the vocabulary of physics, God is the force, the particle, the field, whatever—” He spread his fingers wide. “Whatever it is that holds the world together, that is God. And we can only surrender to it. The meaning of the word
islam
—I’m sure you’ve heard Imam Basir say this—is choosing to submit to the will of God. Inshallah. Saying yes to what is, no matter how awful.” He sighed. “I try to do that.”

“But Mum can’t, can she?”

“No. Your mother can’t.” Poppy sighed again, but then he smiled a little. “But thinking that the universe is bigger than I can ever understand, Kirin? That gives me hope. If you believe the mathematicians, huge swaths of reality are beyond our reach. The world is a very odd place, Kirin. Far odder than we ever suspected. Maybe . . . sometimes I wonder if somewhere there’s another universe, a place where your mother and I get along, a place where your brother was never taken from us, a place where we’re all happy.” He shrugged. “It gives me hope.”

Nani said Kali gave her hope. Now Poppy was getting hope from quantum physics. Kirin wondered if anything gave Mum hope. What
was
hope anyway? His grandmother’s faith in a mysterious God, his father’s belief in alternate universes—none of them seemed all that useful, not here and now in the world where they had to live out their lives, regardless of whether there was some other, better reality hidden away somewhere.

But his father was still talking, and Kirin didn’t want to miss this rare moment. “Maybe not particles after all,” Poppy said, and Kirin realized he had missed a big chunk of whatever his father was saying.

“What did you say, Poppy? Sorry.”

His father smiled. “No, I’m sorry, it’s pretty abstract stuff. Just that when I was in university, they were teaching us that the world is made up of particles, little discrete dots of reality. But now they’re talking about strings instead of particles. Tiny vibrating filaments. I know it sounds strange. You could probably care less. Most of the time,
I
could care less. But every now and then, I read something, and I still get excited. Each of those infinitesimal strings vibrating at a different frequency. They make sense—mathematically—out of all the big questions that even Einstein couldn’t work his way through.” Poppy spread his hands wide, then shrugged, smiled a little sheepishly. “And you end up with multiple dimensions, all sorts of weird stuff. But the mathematics
works
. Kirin, do you know how nice it is to have something in the world actually make sense?” He let out a small bark of laughter. “Something besides the sweet engine of a 1990 Corvette ZR-1?”

His father was looking in Kirin’s face; he had just spoken Kirin’s name. Heat swept from Kirin’s face through his entire body, a wave of blood flowing into his muscles, into each of his cells, as though the force of his father’s attention gave his flesh a strange new strength. His knees jiggled, doing a little nervous dance all their own; he wanted to jump up and leap around the living room. Instead, he struggled to understand his father’s words.
Filaments. Strings.