No, the dying part wasn’t beautiful but Sarah was adamant about keeping him here longer, stuffing that pink sponge of water into his mouth to keep him hydrated when he could no longer swallow, and not just water, but drugs and more drugs, and the drugs made him feel heavier than the dying.

  It didn’t come in waves, like a woman’s labor. This pain was an apocalypse. His body was preparing for doomsday. Everything was shutting down, splintering, giving way. The entire infrastructure which had been built in his mother’s womb, in Palestine, was now buckling under the wind of its last storm.

  And Sufien wanted a fucking cigarette. If someone could read his deepest thoughts, they would come back with this message: Just give me one last cigarette. And no one knew it except James. At last, having won a tireless argument with Sarah, James brought a joint mixed with tobacco to Sufien’s lips while Sarah cried, You’ll kill him, you’ll kill him.

  James whispered, There, there.

  For a second, Sufien understood he was still here, on planet Earth, where nicotine and his cure could calm his mad, trapped soul. And he smiled.

  At least he doesn’t know how bad it is this time, Layla said.

  I told you not to talk about it in front of him, Sarah said. He can still hear you.

  He didn’t want to hear them.

  Sufien fell asleep after that joint, James guiding the sheet over his bare legs. There it was, death, taking everything that made a man a man. Sufien’s limbs were shriveled within his baggy boxers. Looking at Sufien like that, James felt an insane urge, the urge to run away, never return to this dying life. He withstood it. Stared death in the face. Death without war, death without glory. Death laid plain.

  They were all looking at Sufien’s death for weeks, and it was gruesome and it took too long. There was nothing to be said about it. And then there was the fact that when they left his room, no one of them could tear their eyes away from the news. Earlier in the month, there had been an attack in Israel, and in retribution, there were already nearly 10,000 Palestinians dead. By the end of it, that number would multiply to horrific proportions. This last war, Sufien would never see.

  * * *

  *

  They had almost utterly given up on Sufien, feared his room, his jagged breathing, until the day James tore Layla up from her dreams, saying, Your father, your father. And she believed he was dead.

  No, James said, he’s talking again.

  Layla felt something in her deflate. Did she want her father to die? What was this? Why did she want to get it over with? The “it” was him, was Sufien. Didn’t she know how much she would miss him? How so soon her grief would feel to her not like she was on a sinking ship, but that she was the ship, sinking?

  Bowlegged and pregnant, she walked to Sufien’s room. There he was, her father, almost, almost, except there was drool falling down his chin. And if she really looked, if she looked not with her eyes and rather with her soul, she would understand, what was upright there in the bed was already a corpse.

  He was talking about a woman, the woman in the red dress, and the dress was all around her, like the leaves.

  Did you have a dream? Layla asked. Was this a dream?

  The most beautiful dance I’ve ever seen, he said. Molto bella.

  What dance? Layla asked.

  No one can go down to the valley. That’s what Sufien said.

  Layla felt as if she were slipping into unformed space. She closed her eyes in the chair beside her father, and asked whomever, whatever, to see what Sufien was seeing. A golden ocean formed above her, there where the ceiling had been.

  The baby kicked, and from the living room her daughter squealed, Mommy, where are you? And then the vision was gone.

  Baba, she said, I have to go to my family.

  Sufien looked at her. He looked as if he might cry.

  I have to go be with my family, she said again.

  Layla realized that he wasn’t actually looking at her, but through her. Then his eyes blinked upward, toward the ceiling, racing around as eyes do when shut, and dreaming. When he looked at her again it was like he was seeing something which hurt, which amazed. He pointed to the ceiling, to his right.

  There it was again, the road. And he wanted to join the others, they were shining, so he was performing the Shahada, with his finger pointed toward the heavens, the way Um Khalid had all those years before, the day they arrived in Damascus.

  Layla was falling down. She was falling back, and he was up here, the journey was almost upon him, his journey into the valley.

  66

  Per Sempre

  One last time, Sufien awoke to this world, the one he had lived in with you and me, as Sufien, and sometimes as Frank Leone.

  It was a Saturday morning in October, Sufien’s final day, when he shot up in bed, chattering away like a madman, asking for an espresso, the way he liked it, with two sugars. He wanted to go outside, he said. It was a beautiful day, and by the way, where were his cigarettes?

  I want soup, he said emphatically.

  Yes, he wanted soup, the kind he loved as a child, and he wanted bombolini! awame! knafeh! and he wanted spaghetti bolognese, and most of all he wanted to smoke. He was ravenous. This was his last chance of tasting the things of this place, the place he had lived in for seventy-some years, and he wanted everything it had to offer.

  These people, no, he had no idea who they were. He understood that there should be people among him, that he lived in a realm full of faces, but it was as if already he was living in a dream. What were their names and what did they mean to him? They told him over and over again. Layla, Sarah, your daughter, your wife.

  Take me outside, he said. They’re waiting for me.

  Who’s waiting, baba? Layla asked.

  Sarah tried to explain that he couldn’t walk. Sufien kicked off the sheets anyway and tried to put his feet down onto the floor. Why was it so hard? He felt like going on a jog. (He hadn’t run in fifty years, since the last time he played soccer on a field outside of Florence.)

  Why can’t I walk? What have you done to me? he asked these people.

  One of them was very loud and she was shouting at them all to turn off the news, turn it off! Do you wanna break his heart? Do you? He can’t see this now! And then she was on the phone to the hospice nurses, and they told her something, they told Sarah something she couldn’t bear, they told her he wasn’t actually getting better, so she began shouting at them too, calling them idiots, incompetent, she was invoking her rights, and searching for lawyers on the internet to defend her case, and the more she fought with them, the less loud death was, the less true their pronouncement was, that this was the rally, the rally before the end.

  Eventually after much negotiation, James got Sufien into his wheelchair, while Sufien pleaded that he could most certainly walk. Whereas Sufien could hardly hold his head up, like a newborn baby. The color of his skin was already wrong. What was animating him? It wasn’t life, not blood coursing through his veins, or the synapses of his brain firing, not his heart pumping healthily. It was something else.

  Who are you? Sufien asked James again once they were out on the balcony of the apartment. Yes, this place was the dream. Then she was with them, the one he had met before. It was Layla. She had given him his cup of soup and he took a sip of it with the greatest pleasure, and said mmm. This, his last bite.

  When did we get a pool? he asked.

  Sufien was slipping out of the time in which he lived, and also the space. Now he was returned to 1740.

  Where did they go? he asked, when no one answered him about the pool.

  Who, baba? Layla asked.

  Lila and Nefisa, he said.

  Lila and Nefisa? Layla repeated. Who are Lila and Nefisa?

  Sufien looked at her, his eyes crossed and confused. Non lo sei?

  And because Layla scarcely understood Italian, she just said, I don’t know, baba. Where did you see them?

  By the pool, he said, pointing toward the lake beyond the trees in Prospect Park. And he was still looking their way, to where they had been. Lila and Nefisa. The moon was drifting through the clouds and it was dusk, no it was dawn. It was day. These people, these people all around him were swimming against a heavy air, and he was so light, his limbs were beams, and so were Lila’s and Nefisa’s. He had to find them, he had to get to them. Where had they gone? The Sea of Galilee was a very large pool, and it was translucent, made of pure water, the kind of water which is alive and in its fingertips are fireflies, it was still there just down the hill from the old stone house, they could always see it from the courtyard where they washed their hands to pray, and from the roof…Lila and Nefisa had been waving, waiting for him to go and swim with them.

  Nefisa, he said, distraught. Where did she go?

  And then they were all around him, hugging him, trying to get him back somewhere, these beings made of mud. They were so heavy. He was suffocating.

  His head was in his lap, he had fallen forward, but he didn’t know it. Didn’t know where he was, when he was, who he was.

  Now he was back in the bed, how had he gotten back in the bed?, and he was trying to get up again, kick off the sheets, and put his feet on the floor. He had to go, he had to walk out there, back to the pool, the one in the yard of 1740, it was down in the valley where the lake always was…He could hear the bells ringing, the singing of the stars.

  Baba, do you know who I am? Layla asked.

  He was back, they had pulled him back, and it felt like he had been slammed into something very hard. He said the one name which came to his lips. He said Sarah.

  Just then a little girl ran by. And he loved her, though he didn’t know her. He didn’t need to. A child is without form. A child is just love.

  Hi, Jiddo, the child said.

  A’tini mai, he said to the little girl. He wanted her to bring him the water. The pure water. Because she was young enough to remember it. She knew what he meant.

  Ehna raji’een, he said to the child, and she nodded her head.

  Weyn baba? he asked the child now, and tears were falling down his face. He was asking for his father. Something was awry in this dream, it was turning dark, the murky water was splashing up into the mountains.

  Weyn baiti? he was asking. Where is my house?

  What’s happening here? Sarah asked, running into the bedroom. She was already in the medicine cabinet, drawing out the oxycodone, the lorazepam.

  I wanna talk to him, Layla cried. Don’t knock him out. This is it. This is all we have.

  They went on and on, back and forth, these people, they were so loud, then he was swallowing something and as it entered him, he began swimming again in that golden pasture, oh the wind overhead, this was the secret road, in that hushed field between cities, he was going home the long way. Lila and Nefisa had come out of the pool that lay just before the station. They were lounging there atop the luminous gates. Rocking up and down, up and down, in the waves.

  Buona sera, he said by way of greeting.

  As snow fell down over the New York night, a little fire was burning in the chimney of the studio on Grove Street. And there, there was the Arno again. He was standing on the Ponte Vecchio, that bridge he had always taken home to Via de’ Bardi. He had almost reached Lila and Nefisa when he heard the adhan echo across the dunes of Kuwait, and whisper through the tents in Damascus, and then fade into the fog over Safad. How long had it been since he had seen this mist disappear all the Holy Land? Even the sea where they say beauty had once walked on water. He was back on the old road, winding up Haret Ein el-Asadi until before him was the blue door at last, engraved with the number 17.

  Siamo amici, he said. Sufien’s eyes had opened again. Yes, there they were, whispering over him, they were praying, Sarah and Layla, over his last breaths. His heart had slowed, and his blood pressure was undetectable. What was left was just an animal now, a beast lying beneath the cold open sky. The former world had passed away.

  Siamo amici, he tried to say again. And it was the truth, the last truth for the time being. Now it was time for another truth.

  Sì, per sempre, Layla said. And Sufien heard her, because music is the last thing to go. Because music leads the way. Per sempre.

  Part VII

  Paradiso 17

  67

  Leone

  Down there, still on Earth, Sufien’s funeral was happening in the town where Sarah had grown up in Alabama, the plot already purchased by Saul long ago.

  Through a haze like that which the ocean sends over land, Sufien could see them, could see Sarah, could see Layla standing with Sufien’s youngest brother, Talal, the one he never loved enough. Sufien could see his former body lying there, could see the flesh he had been contained in for so long, and what he felt, if feeling is the right way to describe it, was pity.

  The procession was happening, in time, in our time, and there were so few in attendance. Sufien did not mind this. Sufien did not mind at all that Layla, Sarah, Talal, and James were the only ones to pay their respects to him on the earthly plane. This was the truth of life, who we touch, who we really touch, the ones who will not forget us, are shockingly few. The other truth was that Ahmed and Firas and the other siblings who might have been able to travel to the States protested the ceremony on account of the fact that Sufien was not being buried in a Muslim cemetery.

  Sufien deserved better, Sarah kept muttering throughout the service, he deserved more. Privately she wondered whether his family was right, and she should have buried him in an Islamic burial ground, or in New York, where she could visit him every day. No matter, she had done her best, she had given him almost everything, but in the end, she could not carry him home.

  You did, you did do your best, Sufien tried to tell her. She could not hear him.

  Down there, it was very quiet, just a few people wearing their Sunday best in that rural church (there was no temple or mosque in town), listening to Erik Satie’s Gnossiennes, which crawls into the ears like a pleasant infection. Layla, Sarah, and Talal spoke briefly, and verses from the Bible and Quran were read, and behind them was the statue of a bloodied Palestinian hung up on his cross forever.

  Meanwhile, Sufien heard a very different orchestra perform his funeral procession. Satie’s notes were outdone by a violin which grazed the firmament, and there was an operatic accompaniment. Impossible that music could approximate color. It did. It did there. Inside of the song was the ocean at rest, clasped by a great dream. See, the blackness was all waves and more souls were being born in the quiet lake of time. God was summer. And now Sufien knew the true meaning of light. Night was falling upon him like snow. When he looked up, when Sufien gazed out, there were hundreds and hundreds of faces, all collected on the traceless hills, and he had known them all, he had greeted them all, at one time or another. You see, for him, there were so many, thousands at his funeral. People to whom he had sold leather wallets in the market in Florence, and some he had gone to school with in Kuwait, or there were those with whom he had walked from Palestine to Syria, lived with in tents as a refugee, some he had driven in a taxi in New York, some he had judged an avocado beside in a grocery store in Phoenix, he had died beside some of them, all at once. And these were the stars. He understood their country at last.

  Sufien heard Layla’s voice, she was hovering over his corpse, kissing the space where his eyebrows had met. It still had the deepest crease there, like lightning had struck him, what mercy he felt now for that wrinkle he had worn so long. Like a scar.

  They were pulling the sheet over his face and he would never be seen again. Layla was speaking down to that body. They were closing the coffin over it…

  And I will dwell in the house of the Lord forever.

  * * *

  *

  So they were burying Sufien in that southern town miles from that beach he had once found and slept upon in his distress, and miles from that same coast where they had conceived Layla. Sarah imagined he might even hear the Gulf from there, from there in his grave.

  Layla could almost forget, as they were about to lower Sufien into the ground, that her bones were made of his bones, and her skin made of his skin, and that her hands, the way her thumbs bent back, were given to her by him. Sarah could not. What was going into the ground was the body of her lifelong lover. She had to resist throwing herself atop the coffin which was draped in a blue cloth, wanting his chest and his arms and his limbs back.

  The only one who could hear Sufien still was James and what Sufien said was, You have to carry me. Talal, and the others, won’t be strong enough.

  And it was true. James lifted the coffin up with Talal, and the other pallbearers, men of the town who had known Sarah as a child, who had worked for Saul, and had come to help, and when they got into position over the grave, had James not been there to bear the brunt of the weight, the coffin would have tipped.

  * * *

  *

  At the reception, they ate fried chicken and fried okra, al fresco, and they all expressed misery that that awful, awful war still wasn’t finished, but at least Sufien hadn’t seen it, at least he never had to see this one, and Layla stared out at the town lake, a lake her mother had swum in all her youth, even beside alligators! wondering if her father could indeed see this with them, see them now beside the water settling into itself toward sleep.

  I can’t believe Bernardo wasn’t here, Sarah said.