Shards: A Novel Read Free Page B

smoking, putting on makeup, singing, dozing off and waking up just in time to brake, playing air guitar, looking at me with what-the-fuck-are-you-looking-at on their faces.
    Enes met me at LaGuardia, showed me where I was to wait for my flight to Los Angeles, shook my hand limply, and shoved off. I sat on another plastic chair and waited.
    I kept thinking, You made it, man, not believing it. I looked at my hand, this thing I’d been living with all my life, and it felt like I was seeing it for the first time. It seemed only vaguely familiar, yet I was somehow in control of it; it was my hand to use. I glanced up to make sure that what I saw around me was America, confirmed that the seat next to me was a part of that country, then placed my strange hand on its cool plastic surface, and told myself again: You made it; you escaped .
    Two other Prcis made this journey before me. There was my granduncle Bego, who fled the Nazi invasion via Paris, settled in an apartment in Flushing Meadows, and died there, alone. And then there was my uncle Irfan, who fled the Communists in 1969, ended up in California, and twenty-six years later invited me to live with him. We were all from the same town in Bosnia but had fled three completely different countries. Bego escaped the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes. Irfan, the Socialist Federative Republic of Yugoslavia. And me, the newly formed independent state of Bosnia and Herzegovina. Says something about the Balkans: Regimes are plentiful, they don’t last long, and they make people want to run away.
    What came to me then was the voice of my paternal grandmother. She had told me once that every time Bego or Irfan returned toBosnia to visit, they had seemed to her like different people. Unrecognizable. She had blamed this on America.
    I looked at my hand again.
    Through the airport window, I could see a homeless man in a filthy camouflage jacket sitting on a curb, his back to me, playing fetch with a dog. He’d fight the plastic bottle of Dr. Pepper out of the Alsatian’s mouth, tease her with it, and then throw it down the sidewalk. She’d chase after it, her swollen teats swaying, bring it back to him, and the scene would repeat. I sat there mesmerized, telling myself again that I had made it, wishing I had a dog or something warm to touch, to look in the eye. It was then that the morning sun sliced through the clouds, its light hitting the window in such a way that suddenly I saw my reflection. I saw a young man sitting alone on a plastic chair, white-knuckled and wide-eyed and zit-faced, happy and perplexed, and I knew why my grandmother couldn’t recognize her own son, why I was wielding a stranger’s hand. I knew that someone new would get off this plastic chair and board a plane for Los Angeles and that all the while an eighteen-year-old Ismet would remain forever in the city under siege, in the midst of a war that would never end.
    Just as it came, the sun went away. The homeless man threw the bottle. The bitch ran after it. I looked at my hand, then at everything else. I was new and America seemed too big a place to be alone in.
    From the air Los Angeles was vast and gray and pockmarked with light blue pools. Down at LAX, it was hot for a winter afternoon; it was amusing. There were palm trees through the terminal window and people wore sandals in earnest.
    Coming out of this one corridor I saw a man and a woman in their fifties, white, dressed in shiny red-white-and-blue frocks and top hatswith stars all over them. They walked through the crowd, handing them things. The woman came up to me with an ear-to-ear smile.
    “Hello, sir!”
    “Hello.”
    “Could I ask you a couple of questions?”
    She was speaking slowly and clearly. I was glad about that.
    “Yes.”
    “Where are you from, sir?”
    “Bosnia.”
    “Are you visiting us for the first time?”
    “I am refugee.”
    “So you’re here for the government cheese.”
    She said this very loudly, looking around