Every Exit Brings You Home

  A Novel

  NAEEM MURR

  For Averill

  [He had] the revelation, nearly religious, that the colossal scale of evil could only be matched or countered by some solitary flicker of intense and private humanity.

  Whether this amounted to a loss of faith, or to the acquisition of it, was uncertain.

  —Shirley Hazzard, The Transit of Venus

  Every Exit Brings You Home

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Acknowledgments

  1

  Jack’s phone buzzed in his pocket like a trapped hornet. May’s texts somehow achieved a particular ferocity of vibration.

  They are here. IN MY SPACE!!!

  He hurried to his back deck, entering the heat of August in Chicago. From the top floor of the two conjoined three-flats that constituted the Jensen Grand Condominiums, he watched a white couple, early thirties, perhaps, with a mixed-race girl of four or five, emerging from an ancient white Econoline in the parking lot. ryker franke knife sharpening was inexpertly stenciled on the van’s flanks. Natasha, the building’s developer, had called Jack to tell him she’d sold the final unit: a miracle, given swelling concerns in the news about toxic subprime mortgages. The couple had pulled into May’s space. May, who’d never owned a car, was quick to call the tow truck if anyone violated her parking space’s sacrosanct emptiness.

  The man looked as if he was in a biker gang: bandanaed hair, sunglasses, scruffy goatee, the leather vest on his bare torso revealing a once-muscular body wreathed in tattoos and going to seed. Jack felt apprehensive; even more so when he saw, emblazoned on the back of the man’s vest as he turned to open the van, “Fuck Al-Qaeda” above a skull and two crossed machine guns.

  As he went downstairs to greet them, he cast a “Bonjour, ça va” to Bernard, a gaunt, dark-skinned Haitian, nearly toothless, sitting on the ground-floor deck outside Pauline’s apartment, his gaze at once clairvoyant and confused. A large notice on the railing said, “Tanpri, pa kite galri dèyè a, Papa.” Dad, please don’t leave the back deck.

  “Hello, welcome,” Jack called, propping the gate open with a brick. “I’m Jack, El Presidente of this condo.” Jack couldn’t hide the fact that he looked Mediterranean, with thick, black curls and olive skin, but the biker’s vest made him glad he’d ceased calling himself Jamal.

  “Marcia,” the woman said, adding in a tone more derisive than amused, “do I need to salute you?”

  Tall and slender, she wore skinny jeans and a black tank top, her dirty blond hair in a spiky bob. She had what Jack thought of as Slavic features: a strong jaw (like Birdy’s) and high, broad cheekbones. Her eyes prickled with a defensive fierceness softened slightly by the hazy sea-glass greenish blue of her irises. A colorful tattoo of a seductive La Calavera Catrina stared from her left shoulder while a thorny rose vine bound a dagger to her right bicep.

  “No salutes necessary,” he said with a laugh.

  The biker removed his shades to reveal periwinkle-blue eyes as unlikely and fragile as alpine flowers. He wore a large button with days sober emblazoned beneath numbers you could rotate to change like those on a multiple-dial padlock. He was at 0032.

  “Are you Ryker?” Jack shook the man’s strong but trembling hand.

  “That’s right. You have any blades you need sharpening?”

  “I’ll check.”

  “Could do a group discount for the whole building. And if you need any odd jobs done around here, I charge ten an hour.”

  Ryker noticed Jack glancing at a cluster of blacked-out tattoos across his chest. “Had a few tats I wasn’t proud of before I gave myself to the Higher Power.”

  Marcia, picking up her little girl, interrupted sharply, “We need to get on.”

  “Of course,” Jack said, though he slipped in, “And this is your daughter?”

  “Aisha,” she said impatiently, the child performing a toothy smile, as if posing for a photograph.

  Ryker said, “You can probably tell she’s not mine, but I couldn’t love her more if she was.”

  “Ryker,” Marcia barked, setting Aisha back down.

  Jack noticed some heavy pieces of furniture. “If you need any help,” he offered.

  “We’re fine.” She was becoming irritated.

  “Come on, honey,” Ryker countered, “you’re pregnant and the devil’s playing fucking Jenga with my spine.” Glancing at Jack, he pointed at his own back: “I think I blew out a disk getting this shit into the van.”

  “Pregnant?” Jack said.

  “Three months,” Ryker confirmed.

  “Congratulations. My wife”—Jack hesitated, caught between saying it and not wishing to tempt fate—“she’s pregnant too. Ten weeks.”

  Marcia shot him an odd look, perhaps because the way he’d said it made it seem as if he was lying. He felt he was, glancing up at the windows of his own apartment’s back bedroom, where he could just make out Dimra’s head. He’d left her glued to the television, watching the tail end of the civil war raging in Gaza, hundreds killed as Hamas retook control. Hard to believe the election was just a year ago.

  “This is going to be a building of babies.” Inshallah, God willing, he prayed. “Anyway, please let me help you move some of the heavier stuff at least.”

  “We don’t need help.” Marcia looked ready to punch both him and Ryker, her nostrils flaring, her face aflame. “We just want to get on.”

  That hornet buzzed in his pocket and he checked.

  THEY ARE IN MY SPACE!! TOW TRUCK IS NEXT!

  Retreating, Jack gestured up to where he lived and told them to knock if they needed anything. He joined Dimra in the back bedroom. She’d slipped on her pink silk hijab in case he invited these new neighbors for coffee, her large, gleaming black eyes freshly lined with kohl. Her hand rested tentatively upon her baby bump. It was astonishing to him that all the pain she’d suffered had left no trace in her face, with its trusting glance and the ready smile of her broad mouth. She’d retained all the youthful beauty and innocence that had caused a seismic slippage of hope in his chest at their first meeting with her unhappy parents. Only her long, slender nose, with its distinct dorsal bump, contradicted this childlike aspect with a quality that was almost aristocratic. He loved her now more as if she were his daughter instead of his wife. He might have desired to keep her locked up and safe from the world, but he didn’t have to. Her anxiety and agoraphobia were worsening. She had to take beta blockers just to make it to the fertility clinic without a panic attack.

  She spoke to Jack in Arabic, her rudimentary English maintained only by her connection to neighbors like Pauline and Lulu; she could hardly read in either language. She avoided Arab or Palestinian social groups, partly from shame at having no children, but mostly, like him, for fear she’d meet someone from home who might know or discover the truth about them.

  She grew herbs and vegetables on their sunny deck, made labneh, hanging the homemade yogurt above the sink in cheesecloth, and shopped, when he could accompany her, at the Middle Eastern stores in Albany Park. They never ate out, lived on lentils and beans so they could save every penny from his modest salary, either to send to her parents in Gaza or for fertility treatments. His wife had suffered three miscarriages, and when she failed to become pregnant again, they tried intrauterine insemination without success before scraping together enough for IVF. Ten weeks and four days ago, Jack returned from a three-day shift to the smell of mansaf, the lamb cooking in homemade jameed. Dimra was looking beautiful also, in her least-old dress. When he stepped into their apartment, she sang their wedding song:

  Say to his mother rejoice and be glad,

  place myrtle on the pillows and henna on our hands.

  The wedding is here, the men are all dancing,

  this home is my home and the rooms are all mine,

  We are as one, let the enemy die!

  He guessed, of course, that she must be pregnant. She turned on some lively Arabic music, and they danced a dabka until his phone vibrated.

  ARE YOU HERDING ELEPHANTS? WHAT IS HORRIBLE NOISE? TORTURE FOR ME!

  After switching off the radio, they held each other, kissing in silence.

  Now, turning upon him the full force of her innocence, she spoke with naked longing: “If they need someone to look after the little girl while they’re moving things in . . . ”

  “I’d ask, but that woman’s . . . prickly. Man seems okay. He sharpens knives.”

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  She tipped her head curiously. “The Nawar bedu used to do that when they came to my parents’ village.”

  “The girl’s name is Aisha.”

  “They’re Muslim?”

  He shrugged. “I doubt it. Perhaps her father. She’s not the knife sharpener’s child.”

  Just as Jack was wondering if he should tell her the woman was pregnant, they heard a crash. Ryker had dropped one end of a ratty-looking brown couch. Hurrying down, Jack was ambushed on the second floor by May, who whispered his name sharply and beckoned from behind her screen door. A short, blockish Vietnamese woman a year or two from sixty, she was a besieged little fortress of fear and anger, expressed now in her obdurate, scowling face.

  “I texted you!”

  “Yes, I’m sorry, I—”

  “Tell them they’re in my space,” she demanded.

  “They’re just moving in.”

  “Why’s he lying on the floor?”

  “Looks like he hurt himself.”

  “Is he a gangster? Where’s his shirt?”

  Backing toward the stairs, Jack said, “I’m heading down. I’ll talk to you later.”

  “Parking spaces deeded. Tell them!”

  Ryker lay supine on the concrete, white with pain. Marcia stood over him, sympathy vying with frustration in her face, while Aisha squatted close, singing a curative spell in a magical language, her small hand upon Ryker’s forehead.

  Ryker insisted he just needed to lie still for a while.

  “My wife’s upstairs. She’ll look after Aisha,” Jack said, explaining, “Cars speed up and down this back alley, and we don’t want to run her over with the furniture.”

  Though her mother said nothing, the girl took Jack’s hand, as if she’d realized early on that she couldn’t add any more to the burden of her mother’s life. After taking her up and handing her into Dimra’s delighted embrace, he brought down some flat cushions from their deck furniture for Ryker to lie on. Jack suggested driving him to the hospital, but Ryker didn’t have health insurance.

  Jack spent the rest of the day helping Marcia move in. They drove back and forth from a storage facility in Edgewater. She had no interest in talking and revealed only that she worked for an agency that hired her out as a server for the pleasure cruises leaving from Navy Pier. When he expressed concern about her moving heavy furniture in such heat while she was pregnant, she ignored him. All day she avoided his eyes, her pale face flushed as much with proud anger as with heat and exertion, as if his kindness were a brutish and enslaving power.

  She did ask, however, what it meant that he was condo president. He explained the condominium association and the board members, Lulu the secretary, May the treasurer. Marcia was shocked when she realized she had to pay monthly assessments.

  “To pay you and those women?” she said, with her quick anger.

  “Not us, no. It’s for water, trash, all that stuff, and to build a reserve for maintenance.”

  “I don’t need a reserve,” she said. “I don’t want to be a part of that.”

  “I’m afraid we all have to—”

  “But I have a smaller place.”

  “The basement—”

  “Garden,” she corrected.

  “Of course, I’m sorry. You pay a little less. Have you owned before?”

  “What difference does that make?” She was sharply defensive.

  “Oh, nothing. I didn’t mean to pry. We’re all first-time owners here, so we’re trying to figure this stuff out together. We have a few issues to deal with in the building, so we’re having a condo meeting on Monday at six thirty. Can you make it?”

  “I suppose I’ll have to.”

  He dreaded the painful conversation he’d need to have with her about the serious and expensive issues becoming apparent in the building.

  At last they wrestled the final piece of furniture, an elephantine faux-leather armchair, into the apartment Natasha had greedily carved out of the front half of the basement. Ryker had managed to drag himself onto the platform queen that nearly filled one of the two bedrooms and was softly snoring. Light seeped in from slender windows lining the low ceilings. The bedroom windows, level with the concrete walkway along the south side of the condo, looked out at the cedar fence between the condo and the adjacent apartment building, while the windows of the combined sitting room and kitchen provided a narrow view onto the small front garden and street. Marcia’s back door led into the common-area basement, which often flooded and was full of water heaters, storage units, and bicycles. Her front door opened into the landing for a stairway leading up to the condo’s street entrance. This area, fermenting all the stale cooking smells from the units above, also contained the building’s water pump inside a framed-out-but-never-completed closet.

  After setting the armchair into place, both of them sweaty and breathing hard, Marcia surveyed her new home in a way that made Jack ashamed of the disparaging eye he’d cast over an apartment that should never have been built. It was her first moment of vulnerability, her mouth falling softly open, her eyes filling with a dreaminess befitting the blue-green sea glass of her irises. He recognized the feeling in this look but hadn’t experienced it for a long time—that sense of a fresh start, of anticipation for a new self and fate. This place was hers; she was proud of it. And yet he couldn’t help something rousing in him as he observed the dark bib of sweat between Marcia’s breasts, the elemental tattoos guarding her broad and naked shoulders, her flushed face yielding in this moment to hope.

  She glanced at him then, and he sensed she was trying to muster the courage to thank him. Instead, she asked what the little gold book was, pointing to the pendant that had slipped out of his shirt during the move.

  “It’s the Quran.”

  It hung on a long chain, so he proffered it, and she took it into hands he now noticed were beautiful. “What does it say on the front?”

  “It just says ‘Allah,’ God. You can open it.”

  She delicately slipped off the clasp to reveal the verse. “And what does that say?”

  “My mercy embraces all things.”

  She nodded. They were standing close enough now that their heads were almost touching. Closing it up, she set it carefully back upon his chest.

  “I’m not religious,” he admitted, “but someone gave this to me in a moment when I needed kindness, and that’s”—he felt embarrassed now, oversharing—“why I wear it.”

  “You don’t believe in anything?”

  He thought for a moment. “Faith.”

  “Faith in what?”

  “I don’t know.” He shrugged, wondering how they’d slipped into this place. “Just faith.”

  “That doesn’t make sense,” she said. “You have to have faith in something.”

  Suddenly, footsteps overhead made a sound like that of an ax biting into a tree trunk, the explosive crackle, creak, and whine of the old floors recalling that tree in its deafening collapse.

  “Fee-fi-fo-fum,” Jack joked, the shock of the noise causing him to react with inappropriate levity.

  “What the fuck!” Marcia cried out.

  “That’s Ken,” Jack said. “We have a condo rule that you have to take your shoes off inside. I’ll remind him, now you’re here. The floors are a bit creaky, I’m afraid.”

  “Creaky?” She stared at him, appalled. “It sounds like the whole fucking building’s going to collapse.”

  Jack, sighing, explained, “Natasha, the developer, had her workers hide the creakiness of the floors using spray foam and wedges of cardboard, but it didn’t last long.”

  They now heard a trickling sound they realized was Ken peeing, followed by the flush and rumbling evacuation of his toilet through the soil stack in the wall; everyone’s flushes would echo through that pipe.

  “Oh,” Jack remembered, “and I should tell you that it’s essential only toilet paper goes down the toilet. You have an ejector pump for your sewage. One of our developer’s men flushed a rag down your toilet once and it blocked the line so sewage was pumped up into Ken’s apartment and flooded back down here.”

  Marcia stared at him with pained perplexity, and he realized this probably wasn’t the best time to line up future nightmares behind the one she was currently experiencing. Just as Jack was thinking things couldn’t get any worse, the entire apartment filled with the sound of a dozen pigs being brutally slaughtered.