Gardens of Water by Alan Drew Read Free Book Online Page A

the most fragile strands of a thread pullingsmail toward life. One skipped phrase, one misplaced recitation, and he knew that thread would snap, severing him from his son.
    “He’s dead, Baba.”rem seemed to be crying from the bottom of the sea, her voice barely rising through fathoms of water. “smail is dead.” too far away.
    “I need you,” he heard her say again. There was distant sobbing, but after a while it stopped and he didn’t hear her voice again.
    He wanted to slap her for givingsmail up so quickly, but she was After that there were only the words of supplication and the space in his head, the space in which he tried to lift his soul closer to God so God could see that he couldn’t live ifsmail should die. He might have slept; he had a vague memory of someone making him lie down, tree limbs swaying above his head, but he wasn’t sure, and when he was most lucid he found himself prostrated in the very same spot in the dirt. In his mind he offered his own life for the life of his son, he offered his wife’s and his daughter’s, he even bartered away their time in Heaven. He swore if God should be merciful thatsmail’s life would be the picture of Muslim humility; he would see to it, make it his personal mission in life.
    Then sometime later, hours, days, when he began to weaken and the sounds of bulldozers rattled his skull and the shouts of men filled his head, he realized he was demanding God to bend to his will. He was not offering God anything; he was fighting him, throwing up his fists and spitting into the sky. And then a calm suddenly came over him, a calm like the moment before he drifted off to sleep, when breathing becomes steady and the brain feels submerged in warm water, and he said clearly in his mind:
    “Take my son if it’s your will. If it is your will, then it’s his fate.”
    He repeated this in his head, until the words began to lose their meaning, until his voice became nothing and he felt as though every bone in his body was as insubstantial and weightless as a bird’s. He whispered it to himself until he no longer felt the muscles in his mouth, and his tongue seemed to have been cut out, until even his heart ceased beating in his ears and he was no longer a father, a husband, or a man. He was dust, simply the grains of God’s making.
    He heard the voice cry out, “There’s someone here.” The words pierced the fog and emptiness and shocked him into consciousness. He didn’t know how long he had been collapsed in the dirt, but he could no longer feel his legs and he was bent to the side, half-lying in the street. A tractor with a scoop attached to the front lumbered by him, the wheels spinning up dust just in front of his face. The sun beat down and his brain pounded as though someone had hit him in the forehead with a hammer. He was thirsty, starving. He looked toward the voice and found a dozen men pulling at a pile of debris. He tried to stand, but his legs wouldn’t work.
    “Help me!” he screamed.
    The man who had just parked the tractor jumped from the driver’s seat and pulled Sinan to his feet.
    “I can’t walk,” Sinan said.
    The man carried him to the pile of rubble and set him down. There Sinan began to shove his bare hands back into the shards of broken buildings. As he dug, his legs tingled back to life. He plunged into a hole in the pile and pulled at every torn thing in front of him, searching for something round, something soft—skin, the curve of a skull, the length of an arm, the tender underside of bare feet.
    “Stop, stop,” a man yelled in accented Turkish. It was the American from upstairs and he stood in a hole just next to Sinan’s. Dried blood caked his right eye and his silver-rimmed glasses sat askew across the bridge of his nose. He was covered in white dust. Everyone stopped digging, and the American dropped to his chest, placing an ear to a television with a hole clear through the middle. Thick dust swirled in the air and in the