Leading up to Kalid's adventure...

Park Slope-Brooklyn/1989

Kalid remembered Julia running across the schoolyard.   She was bleeding from her head and held her left arm to her chest.   She hurried past stunned children until Mrs. Rosenberg stopped her and tried to calm her down.   Mrs Dunn and Mr. Katz shuttled the crowds of   other students back inside the school.   As Kalid walked toward the building, he looked over to Julia curiously.   She was in shock and the teachers held her down so she wouldn't continue to run.   Mr. Dube, bearded science teacher, ran over with a blue plastic first aid kit in his hands.  "The paramedics are on the way," he said as he kneeled down and opened the box.   Julia cried unevenly.   Mr. Dube took held her left arm and Julia breathed in quickly.

"Does that hurt?" he asked and Julia nodded quickly.   Mr.   Dube rested Julia's arm on her lap.   "I think it's broken," he told mrs. Rosenberg who nodded and motioned to Julia's forehead.   Julia held her right hand over the source of the blood and Mr. Dube carefully pulled her hand away.   Drops of blood fell down the front of Julia's face and on to her corduroy pants.   Confused, she looked down at her pants and then brushed her hand through the path of blood.    Julia glanced up at Mrs. Rosenberg who tried to smile and appear calm.   Julia relinquiched herself to the care of her teachers; to Mr. Dube who pressed a gauze pad to her forehead and to Mrs. Rosenberg who held her down without making her feel like she was being held down. She glanced up quickly past the small gathering of concerned teachers and finally noticed Kalid standing and watching.   He smiled nervously and pathetically and shifted his glance away before he ran inside.

Julia didn't finish the fourth grade at Public School 351.   Her aunt pulled her out   and this is when teachers and parents began gossiping about Julia and her family.

"Her aunt is crazy," Kalid overheard Mrs. Rosenberg tell his mother outside the homeroom one morning.  

His mother looked down at Kalid and said in Arabic, "Go to your desk and get your books out."   Kalid followed her instructions and as he walked inside he heard his mother say to his teacher in English, "It's no wonder she was hit in the had with a bat.   With only a crazy aunt to take care of her, what does anyone expect?"   Like many things his mother said, this made very little sense to Kalid, but he took it for what it was and tried to continue with his ten year old life.   He forced the image of Julia and the mystery of that afternoon's events out of his mind until high school, where Julia finally resurfaced and memories of her with blood on her face floated promptly back into Kalid's conciousness.

Park Slope-Brooklyn/ March 19, 2003

The United States military was preparing to fire more than forty satellite guided Tomahawk Cruise Missiles from warships in The Red Sea and The Persian Gulf while Kalid sat in the living room of his apartment and clicked back and forth between college basketball and The Fox Network's countdown to the war in Iraq.  

            "I'll work for anyone as long as they pay me the loot," Kalid had told his college advisor at Columbia University a few days earlier.   He was two months from getting his Masters in Mathematics and he'd spent the last few weeks trying to hustle his way into a job at Morgan Stanley analyzing data and calculating the financial results of potential global events.   Kalid specialized in the mathematics of finance and was likely to get the job, but everyone knew it didn't require an understanding of calculus to predict that this war was going to make some rich people even richer.

            "Sometime during the next few hours they'll start bombing the shit out of Iraq," Kalid said into the phone.   He held the receiver in place with his shoulder while he pulled on his sneakers.    "My brother got out it time if you can believe it.   He's at our mom's house right now."   Kalid checked the basketball score and turned the channel again.   "Listen man, I'll be at The Gate all night."

The Gate was a bar on the corner of Fifth Avenue and Third Street in Park Slope. Kalid had been a regular at The Gate since he was twenty.   His only noticed leave of absence was in the fall of '99 when he drank more than usual and let Heather, a highlighted blonde from Canarsie give him a blowjob under the large wooden table in the back room.   This room was cavernous and dungeon-like and the entire event, girl and all, made Kalid uncomfortable.   Heather wasn't from Park Slope and she wasn't from the neighborhood where Kalid went to high school.   She belonged to a separate category of girls whose schooling remained undetermined.   These were the girls who lived farther south in Brooklyn, in the distant neighborhoods where subways didn't go.   They lived in the neighborhoods where everyone needed a car and everyone had relatives in Jersey.   These were girls who traveled in packs and dressed alike.   They were always caked in makeup creating a veil of unvarying beauty and they were always, always, always either drunk or high.   Kalid knew little else about them.   All he needed to know when he was twenty was that whenever he called their cell phones, they always picked up and whenever he asked them if they wanted to hang out, they always said yes.    That night was the last time Kalid called Heather or any of her friends from Canarsie.   After that, the sight of her made him sick and Park Slope, he figured, wasn't her neighborhood anyway.  

            Kalid grabbed his keys and jacket from his couch.   He turned the lights off in the apartment and the red banner of a network issued terror alert was the last thing he could stand to look at before he turned off the television and left.   He felt he had no other option than to get drunk and wait for the war to begin.

Edward R. Murrow High School-Brooklyn/1997

            Julia resurfaced in the courtyard of Edward R. Murrow High School.   She resurfaced as a pack-a-day smoker and an eventual dropout, but other than that she hadn't changed at all.   Physically, she was a bit taller and her hair was a little longer.   Emotionally, she never seemed to have a care in the world.   After the first week of school, Kalid made his first detour through the courtyard to get to the bagel store and noticed her on the ledge of a window smoking.   She smiled first and waved.

"Hey, what's up?   Kalid, right?" she asked.

"Yeah.   Julia right?"

Julia nodded back.   Kalid hesitated and stopped for a second but he didn't approach her.    He walked through the courtyard and ordered a sandwich at the bagel store.   Kalid walked back through the courtyard with his bagel and Snapple.   He smiled at Julia.   She smiled back at him.   He walked back inside and she stayed in the courtyard and smoked another cigarette.   This first day set the stage for the next four years.   Their interactions never went farther but there was always the promise that one day there would be more.   Kalid told himself at the end of each year that neither one of them was going anywhere.   They had plenty of time to become friends, but when the end of their senior year approached, Kalid started to think they were never going to know one another.   He couldn't understand why he had always felt some sort of connection with Julia without ever having exchanged more than a few words.   "Was sharing history enough?" he wondered.    Once again, Kalid tried not to think about Julia but just as he began to succeed in this, he realized that, once again, she was missing.

"Maybe she moved," a chubby boy sitting on a discarded box spring in the courtyard offered.

            "Nobody knows?   Don't you guys talk?   Don't you know where she is?" Kalid asked

            An undersized girl with red hair looked up at him, "no."

            "She's just like that," the chubby kid explained.   He shrugged and adjusted his nose ring.

            "What goes on out here?" Kalid asked and gave up.   He had scoured the school for Julia over the past three weeks and he wasn't going to waste any more time.   That afternoon he picked up his cap and gown from the office of student affairs and the next morning he discovered Julia running around the outdoor track next to the school.

Fifth Avenue-Brooklyn/2003

"Come home with me," he asked Paula, a veteran bartender at The Gate.

            "Did you stop smoking?" Paula asked him.   She pulled herself up on to one of the coolers behind the bar.   Her hair brown hair was straight and she wrapped it behind her head and twisted it into a bun.

            "No." Kalid revealed a pack of cigarettes and handed her one.  

            "Are you still getting ulcers?" she asked.  

            "Yeah, old news."   Kalid lit a match.

            Paula leaned over with her cigarette.   "What's that like, anyway?"

            "Stomach hurts.   Cough up blood.   That sort of thing."

            "What do you do about it?

            "Drink milk, I guess."

            "Is that what you're supposed to do?"

            "I'm supposed to go to the doctor," Kalid laughed, "but I don't go to the doctor."

            "Of course you don't," Paula said. "How long have you been getting them anyway?"

            "I guess since I was eighteen," Kalid said.

            "What happened when you were eighteen?"

              Kalid thought about it and actually considered telling her.   She leaned in a little and brushed some dust off of her pants before looking him in the eyes.   "Maybe you'll tell me if I go home with you?"   Paula was a few years older than Kalid, maybe thirty.   "Come on, spit it out.   What happened?   What's the big mystery?"

            "Nothing."   Kalid shook his head and once again felt the curse of always being the one to disappoint.

            Paula sat back up and hopped off the cooler.   Signaled by a group of college age guys, she strutted back to the other end of the bar, "I'm gonna need to see some ID's boys."

            Kalid drank the rest of his beer and considered leaving.

East Fifteenth Street and Avenue L-Brooklyn/1996

            Kalid walked up to the fence surrounding the track.   It was just before eight in the morning and except for Julia, the track was empty.   She was on the far side, jogging slowly.   As she rounded the next curve and began approaching Kalid, he could see that she was tired.   She must have been out for a while.   She slowed down and waved at first, but then she stopped and leaned over to catch her breath

            "Are you OK!" Kalid yelled.  

            Julia nodded and pulled an athsma inhaler out of her pocket.

"Hold your arms up above your head.   It helps you catch your breath," Kalid suggested.   Julia walked over to the fence.

            "Does it?"   She lifted her arms up and held on to her elbows.   She nodded with approval and laughed.   "It does."

            "Opens your lungs."

            "Not as fast as my inhaler," she joked and kept her arms raised.

            "I didn't know you had asthma."

            "Comes and goes," she said.

              It was the middle of June in Brooklyn and the breezy morning was just about to break into a humid afternoon.   Julia stepped up to the fence and then ducked through a tear in the chain link.   She caught her shirt on the wire but pulled it loose and stood up in front of Kalid.

              "I just woke up really early and...," she kneeled down and picked up a leaf off the ground.   She held it in front of a soft green caterpillar and waited for it to crawl on.   "I guess I just can't sleep."   She squinted up at Kalid as the sunlight snuck out through the trees. "You know?"

"Where have you been?" Kalid asked.

Julia laughed and shrugged, "Around."

"No really," he said, "you disappeared."  

"Yeah, I know," Julia agreed and tried to think of something else to say.   Kalid waited, wondering how he ever came to care at all.