by Adam Luebke
Nelson Tellecheck laid it on thick with the Middle Eastern couple he kept running into at the park, but he didn’t know why. Standing beneath the spotty shade of the broken down line of American Elm trees, he told them he wanted to visit their land and know more about their culture. Before that, on previous occasions, he’d only smiled and nodded hello. They seemed to cross the same path every weekend since spring had brought warmer weather. All he knew of them was that the wife studied nursing, and had been in the university for a few years.
The husband, Saif, seemed surprised, but he said, “Saudia Arabia is a beautiful but harsh land.”
His wife asked, “Why do you want to visit?”
“For the times gone by of the Arabs, and the saints, and the rich Islamic history. So much in your land. And the people,” he continued, “always the best of people. They are so hospitable. They treat the guest as if he’s the guest of God.” He glanced off into the distance. “I’ve not seen anything like it, really.” And he hadn’t, really. He’d only seen that on a documentary—a special about the Middle East, and their known hospitality. But he wanted to like the couple, and furthermore, he wanted to make sure they didn’t feel any hostility coming from him about their religion. If they’d have asked, he’d have told them their religion was the most peaceful religion on the planet. In reality, deep down, he would’ve wondered if that were true, because some of the images he saw on TV were disturbing, yet he wouldn’t let TV define foreigners for him, and certainly not Saif and his wife, who wore a scarf wrapped multiple times around the crown of her head and her round chin. He kind of wondered what was under there that was so precious. Saif was most likely a lucky man. But then again, there was a chance he wasn’t.
“You must come for dinner,” Saif said.
“I’d love that,” Nelson said, but he stuttered on a few of the letters because his heart was pounding. To make sure they didn’t think he stuttered out of discomfort because of them, he repeated himself and said he’d be honored to have dinner any time.
“You can come tonight?” Saif asked. “We’ll see you tonight?”
Nelson was backing away, heading in the direction to home. Saif’s wife watched him with dark eyes that stirred a hopeful anxiety within him like peering into his black morning coffee. “Tonight?” he said, with a sound more like a whimper than a man’s voice. “I hate to bother you guys.”
“No bother,” Saif said.
“I don’t eat meat—I’m vegetarian—so it’s kind of a burden. I don’t accept dinner offers often.” He understood he was talking too fast, and that the couple’s English was shaky.
“We make something you like,” Saif said. “We see you at our house.” He gave Nelson the address. Thankfully it was simple, and the numbers not easily masked by Saif’s accent.
So it was settled. Nelson walked home with sweaty palms. We make something you like. Had they understood that he was vegetarian? Had that come across? It seemed so, by Saif’s response.
When Nelson entered his apartment, it was already the middle of the afternoon. A grimness set in and he paced restlessly around the living room. His two roommates were gone for the weekend. He’d been looking forward to finishing up his homework that evening—a strange Saturday ritual for a college guy, but to not have any pressure during the dwindling Sunday afternoon was worth it. He preferred his work finished early. The dinner would throw him off. He started suspecting it was the Multicultural Night he’d attended after his Physics teacher had implored the class to go. That was, Nelson later realized, the reason he’d decided to peek his head out of his shell and talk to Saif and his wife. At the multicultural event, the keynote speaker told them to get out there and meet the international students. Get a firsthand experience by connecting with someone whom they’d never interact with normally. Nelson supposed the advice wasn’t bad, but now he was on the hook for an uncomfortable dinner. What would they talk about? He had very few stories to tell, and Saif’s face slackened when he lost track of Nelson’s English when he spoke too fast. One or two words in the park was fine, but more than that, and Nelson was in over his head. The idea of the couple made him happier than actually spending real time with them. He looked up Saudia Arabian cuisine and soon wished he’d gotten Saif’s phone number to cancel the date. The images of food looked too hearty for him, with too much meat and rice. They’d never established a suitable time, either. He didn’t want to show up early, but showing up a little late would be worse. When did regular people have dinner? When did Middle Easterners have dinner? Didn’t they have a prayer to do? He didn’t want to get caught in the middle of that.
Nelson walked to Saif’s home. It was just after five o’clock, and their house was under a mile. He tried to pound his jitters into the pavement with every step. When he knocked at the door, Saif answered with a smile, and wearing the same dark sweat pants with the green stripes that he always wore. From behind him drifted the sound of a man chanting. The words hovered in a way he’d never heard words spoken before. He followed Saif to the couch, where immediately his wife presented him with a glass of water and a dish with dates. Nelson ate one of the dates, but didn’t much care for the crackly dried skin around it. The date looked too much like a smashed cockroach. He sniffed the air for the smell of meat, but he couldn’t decipher anything beyond the strange light spices. In another room he heard gunfire. Saif must have seen him watching the hallway, because he said, “The boys are playing video games. They like to shoot and drive fast.” He laughed. His hair was wet and slicked backward. Nelson smiled and tried to decide what noise he liked better: the old man chanting from a cloud, or the sounds of a violent game.
“What is that singing?” he asked.
“Singing?” Saif did not understand at first. His eyes widened and he leaned forward on the couch. “That is my grandfather,” he said, and pointed to the kitchen. “One of my favorite Qur’an reciters. You like it?”
Nelson kind of did, but he only shrugged his shoulders.
“My grandfather, he is in the grave now,” he said. “Peace be upon him. For many years he would wake up before the sun and climb down the hill to the masjid. When I was little, I used to walk with him. One fox followed him every day from the top of the hill to the bottom. My grandfather called him Achmar for his red fur. He’d feed him any little scrap he had—a chicken bone or some milk and bread. At the masjid he did the call to prayer so that everybody would please come to the prayer.” Saif put his hands up to his ears when he said this. He pointed to the kitchen. “He recited like this and everybody listened.”
Nelson nodded along to remembering Saif’s grandfather. “Very good. Lovely voice.” He saw on the wall a black and white photo he hadn’t noticed until then. The photographer was taking a wide shot of a dull, rocky mountain in the far background. In front of it square white buildings rose up along the crests of two hills like they were carved out of rocks. Behind where the two walls joined was a pointy tower, a minaret, he believed they were called. Closest to the photographer was a large flat lot, lined with walls with tall arches cut into them across their entire lengths. White cones topped the walls, like the kind he’d seen on TV from Middle Eastern countries. In the middle of the lot stood a black box with a line of grayish trim around its middle. Clusters of people stood around, and some sat, giving scale to the massive black box. Overhead a bird soared at the edge of the photo.
“He is reciting now, from the Qur’an, asking, ‘What if the crops did not grow? Who makes the seed they put in the ground able to grow?’”
“I suppose the sun and soil have something to do with it,” Nelson said.
“Sun, soil, and the very DNA in the seed itself,” Saif said. “But from where does it come? That is what he is reciting.”
“I suppose it comes from a long line of processes and developments throughout the history of the earth,” Nelson said. He thought of his biology professor. A tall lanky man who always said life was best spent farting around, and if inclined, to learn something useful.
“You’re very right,” Saif said. He pushed back a loose strand of hair along the side of his head. “A long line of causes and effects that brings us back to what?”
Nelson was about to answer ‘nothing’, and he sensed his host was about to make a religious injunction, when Saif’s wife carried a tangled sheet into the living room. She spread it out on the floor and Saif bent over to help her straighten the corners. Saif got up and left Nelson with his glass of water. Soon, he and his wife lugged out hefty plates of food. Each one carried a steaming platter like they were transporting heavy rocks across a slippery river. The platters were shiny silver with golden handles. Along the reflective silver sides were raised impressions of palm fronds. Saif’s wife tore out a few harsh words in Arabic, and two boys ran into the room. One with the light sprinkling of a mustache above his lip, and the other one not quite developed that far.
The smell of the food was unlike anything Nelson had smelled before. Now that the dishes were at his feet, the graceful smells he’d sensed upon walking in were in his nose as fresh and thick as steam. He tried not to look at what was spread across the dish because he had a sneaking fear that there was meat, and a lot of it, despite what he’d told Saif about being vegetarian.
It was obvious soon enough. The main dish looked like there were jags of meat exploded across the rice platter, and then Saif or his wife had thrown white sauce over it like a mad artist hurled paint onto a canvas. Saif motioned to the floor. “Please, sit.” He christened the spread with a bright smile like a rainbow becoming visible against a dreary horizon of thunderclouds. Nelson wondered if he could force himself to pick around the meat, but knew the meat’s juices corrupted the whole dish.
Instead of sitting, he excused himself to the bathroom. Nelson shut the door and closed his eyes. He washed his hands and face and looked deeply into his own pupils. He sized up the window and wondered if he could hop out without injuring himself. At least, he thought, the delicate moment in which he felt suspended would serve as a potential story to write about, as his backup plan in life was to be a writer, if the pre-med plan his father had set up for him since he was ten years old didn’t work out. When he stepped back into the living room, the family all sat on the floor. The two boys, one overly chubby, the other more athletic and lean, looked him over like he was a sports star.
“Are you dad’s friend?” the chubby one asked.
Nelson towered over them, all hunched together. Five plates had been set out. All overloaded with food. Two salads had been added to the spread. He was determined not to sit, determined to sneak out as gracefully as possible.
“We meet each other in the park,” Saif said. “He say he likes Saudi culture. We’ve become friends.” He glanced up at Nelson. “Have a seat.” He patted the open space beside him.
“Do you play soccer?” the athletic boy asked. “Who’s your favorite team?”
Nelson tried to smile. “I play badminton,” he said, and gave a couple of miniature swings in the air to show he was telling the truth. “I’m really not very hungry,” he said all at once.
Saif’s wife held a warm smile, but behind the wide frames of her glasses, her eyes betrayed a concern that he couldn’t quite place.
“You’ll have to excuse me,” Nelson said. “I’m really not very hungry.”
“Once you taste the food, you’ll be hungrier,” Saif said. “It’s Delilah’s best dish.”
“It’s really good,” the chubby boy said. He was already eating with his fingers, mashing the rice and strips of meat with the white sauce into balls and leaning over to scoop them between his lips.
Nelson felt his face getting hotter. Their grandfather still chanted in the kitchen, his voice the only soothing thing Nelson could focus on. He struggled to find the right way to say it. “I don’t eat meat. I haven’t for many years. I don’t—I can’t—start now,” he said. “I’ll just….” He backed away to the door and bumped up against the wall. He slipped on his shoes. “I’d better get home.” He waved and thanked them, sitting around those giant platters. Halfway down the block, he glanced back twice to make sure Saif wasn’t on the stoop. He knew he’d done something wrong, but didn’t know if he’d had any other options.
The sun was still warm and strong, despite the early evening. The park loomed in front of him. The familiar path through the bushes that opened up to the plots of green grass and rows of old trees. The mound of soil for the flower bed that had just started blooming. The chest high statue with the pointy cement dome that was shaped like the tip of an old fountain pen. Nelson quickened his pace, knowing that he’d feel better once he’d arrived home. He could picture those lumps of grey meat on the rice and his stomach rolled slightly at the thought of shoving down the food. Spending time with foreign families wasn’t his mission in life, anyway, and who said he had to acknowledge other people’s customs and rites? In his culture, he would have been very careful to consider a guest’s eating restrictions. His own mother had asked that a time or two to guests upon inviting them—do you have any dietary restrictions? They shouldn’t have put him in such an uncomfortable position. “Eat, eat,” he heard Saif saying, almost as if he were still there, sitting with them on the floor.
Across the park was a black dog standing in the last few rays of sunlight breaking through the trees. There were no people anywhere that Nelson could see. The park had trails, though, that veered off into grassy nooks, where people could go for privacy. He was halfway across the park when the dog raised its head. Its ears pointed stiff like metal spikes. He thought about hanging a hard left and crashing through the rows of trees and bushes to get near the street. The cobblestones unfolded in front of him in a meandering path that would eventually lead him out.
The dog trotted in Nelson’s direction. He froze, looking behind him to see if there was an owner, or somebody the dog was running to. When the dog broke into a full run, he scrambled back a dozen steps to the cement statue. The dog aimed straight at him—a black shadow across the lawn. Feeling strangely guilty, he hoisted himself onto the statue, and stepped around the edges of the fountain pen’s tip. There wasn’t much room for his big feet. The dog raised his front paws onto the cement and barked. Under the its snout were patches of white. It leaped up, growling, trying to snag Nelson’s shoe. Nelson balanced on shaky knees. He bent over and gripped the statue’s tip, which brought his face closer to the dog’s expectant yellow teeth and flying strings of spit. The barks were accusatory, clamoring claps of thunder. He held himself steady. He could possibly jump off his little cement iceberg and tear across the park as fast as he could, but he knew that would be like out-swimming a shark. If only he’d stayed at Saif’s place and politely ate the salad and picked the cleaner rice kernels from around the meat. Getting to know those boys wouldn’t have been so bad—they were awfully enamored with him, he could tell by the way their eyes lit up when they asked him questions.
The dog backed off a few feet and lowered itself to the grass. It didn’t have a collar. On its belly, in the grass, the dog didn’t look so big. Nelson scanned the park and still saw nobody. Who would leave a rabid dog out on its own to terrorize innocent people?
Maybe you’re not so innocent, he thought.
A cooler wind picked up as the sun was blocked by the tall trees. Nelson’s shins and feet ached. A hot ember burned just above his tailbone from bending to hold the statue. He stood straight awhile, stretching, careful not to topple over.
The dog hefted itself to its feet and trotted a derisive militant circle around the statue, as if he were hooked to a long leash that kept him at a consistent diameter. After two revolutions, the dog sat again, but behind Nelson, forcing him to change his position.
Nelson worried about nightfall. There was still half an hour of daylight left, but the park was getting dusky and there was no way he could camp out in that position. He fought off the urge to weep. His throat tightened. He shouted for help. He thought of how the newspaper headline would read, and that made him want to laugh, to think how pathetic he looked.
The dog faced away from him, quietly observing the rest of the park. It’d lost interest in his captive. Unless it was a ploy. Nelson’s childhood dog had marooned plenty of squirrels up the big maple tree in his family’s yard. Lady hadn’t taken a moment to look away unless she’d given up or become disinterested. The dog’s ears had drooped, and its tongue lolled out of its mouth. Nelson slid his left foot down the cement and held onto the pen’s tip. He’d have to make quite a dash to the street, where there’d be cars at least, and somebody would stop to help him if the dog decided to attack. He slid his other foot down, scraping his knee along the edge. The dog turned its head and sent a sharp glare to Nelson. A low growl sent him back up to his perch. Already the dog’s dark coat was getting shrouded in the dimming light, and he fretted over keeping track of the its whereabouts in the dark.
A light clinking sound floated through the park from the direction in which Nelson had come. He glanced over to see a tall man in a wide straw hat, like the ones farmers wore when they planted rice in their wet fields, with two white dogs on a leash. They looked like nothing more than soft, light outlines in the shadows. He stared at them for a few seconds, not quite believing his good fortune. When he glanced back at the black dog, it had moved. He couldn’t see it anywhere.
The man with the white dogs stopped beside the statue. “You get a good view up there?” he asked. His eyes were hidden by the hat’s brim.
“You wouldn’t believe it,” Nelson said. “I’m so happy you came by.”
The man’s dogs sniffed the air and let their tongues droop out of their mouths.
“Are they friendly?” he asked.
“You couldn’t find friendlier.”
Nelson hopped down. His left foot had gone prickly. He told the man why he’d been up there, how he’d been marooned by some demon dog.
“I didn’t see him,” the man said. “He must have run away at the sight of these two.” He smiled and patted one of the dogs on the rump. “Sometimes you’ll meet a dog with bad manners.”
They took off again across the park. Nelson followed. He breathed in the air of what was suddenly a most wonderful evening. Just before they’d exited through the archway of trees and bushes, he glanced back at the statue, which was cloaked in shadow, and knew he’d have had to face the dog in the dark if the man hadn’t come by.
When he got home he was flooded with a euphoria that felt like drinking an espresso after a week without caffeine. He made the intention to visit Saif and his family the next day, to set things right. Part of him wanted to drive over that very night, but after he’d showered for the evening, he found himself quite drained of energy and exhausted. His body started to ache, and felt like it had fought in a war. Somehow the next day slipped by, and he didn’t drive over to Saif’s. And then the week, so typical of the school year, was gobbled up in classes and studying. That entire month was a build up for the final projects and exams. He stopped strolling through the park the next few weekends. Mostly because he was busier with homework, and also because he didn’t want to run into the dog again.
It was just over a month after that evening that Saif had had him over for dinner that Nelson drove by their home on accident. A FOR RENT sign was poked into the lawn. He double-checked the address. The university had let out for the summer, and he was enjoying the first week of the long vacation. He’d nearly forgotten about his intention to apologize to Saif and his family. Better late than never, is what his father always lectured. Besides, throughout the end of the semester, he’d suffered the occasional bad dream about the black dog. In the dream, it was the same situation every time, but there was no statue in the park to climb, and instead of barking, the dog ran beside him biting at his ankles and, worst of all, it spoke, saying, “I will make you miserable for hurting their hearts.” It was really a mouthful for a dog, but when he woke up, he couldn’t recall the sound of the dog’s voice, only the words that had been conveyed. The dream ended when Nelson, huffing and sucking in air, finally dropped from exhaustion and the dog’s grim teeth filled his vision. He woke up, usually sweating, longing to hear Saif’s grandfather chanting soothingly about the sun, the soil, and seeds. Something told him that if he apologized to Saif, his conscience would be cleared, and the dream would dissolve.
He stopped his car and jogged up the driveway. Old newspapers wrapped in plastic had been swept to the side of the lawn and were baking under the sun. A spiderweb stretching below the handrailing of the porch steps swayed in the slim breeze. He stepped on the rocks of the landscaping and peered inside the living room window. The couches were gone. The place was empty. He saw where they’d set up the food on the floor, where the chubby boy had started eating while Nelson decided how to escape the situation. He could still see the boys’ eyes, staring up at him, wondering if he liked soccer. And above them all, in his mind still sitting there waiting for him to make it right, the black and white photograph, which he thought of from time to time, was replaced by a devastating white wall.
Adam Luebke’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Southampton Review Online, Flyway, Valley Voices, and The Bangalore Review. He lives in South Dakota and teaches online English courses at SDSU and Ashford University. Currently, he’s writing a nonfiction book about being a Muslim in the Upper Midwest.