PAGES — boilerplate magazine

My Father’s Garden by Adam Benamram

Peace was intermittent in that time. More often than not we could hear missiles trailing through the air or bombs going off. Nowhere was safe and we lived with the knowledge that at any moment our small house, made of rough white rocks bridged by a thick mortar, could soon become our tomb. I was a young boy then and so the knowledge never gave way to fear. It was the only life I knew.

We were among the lucky, we had a garden. It was my father’s garden and he showed it intense care. He kept the arid soil watered, red peppers neatly placed, never intermingling with the cucumbers. The grapes he allowed to grow up the back of the house and we would eat them one-by-one in the summertime, spitting out the large seeds that could ruin a bite if you weren’t careful. He sometimes grew jasmine flowers for my mother, the seeds of which he collected on short walks he took alone when the fighting died down, briefly. His pride, however, rested on the thick-branched fig tree that grew in the center of the garden with its smooth trunk and plump fruit, consistent in the puzzle-patterned shape of its leaves and protected by the patchwork of wire and wooden slats he had repurposed into a tall-enough fence. I would often peer out through the holes in that fence, a good way to watch the world without truly stepping into it.

The garden was my father’s safe haven. Anything important sent him out to the garden, and usually us with him. At his most worried he worked the soil, he brought us out there for holidays, he spent an hour there just looking over what he had grown when he learned my sister would be born, and most of his prayer he did facing the Western wall of that makeshift fence.

By the time I was twelve years old, I was praying daily out in the garden with my father. It was a meditative experience in peaceful moments. You could hear both near and far, the sound of bees buzzing among the flowers, birds in the fig tree, as well as trucks rolling down the street and the ezan phasing in and out from the speaker at the top of the minaret that was so tall, it even overlooked our little garden from so far away. The smells were pushed by a gentle breeze, soft thyme mixing with the sharp mint and the sweetness of fallen figs. In the middle of the day the sun shone down powerfully and you saw the dull red of your eyelids, even as you put your head to the ground.

We laid on our mats as we always did—not a monotonous task, but a grounding one—when we heard the high-pitched whine of a missile. I continued to pray; in a situation such as this there are always three options. The first is prayer and the missile passes you by. The second is again prayer and the missile strikes you and you die closer to God than at any other time. The third is the revocation of prayer in which case I do not think it matters whether the missile misses or not. And so I continued to pray.

The whine grew louder and seconds later I heard a swish and a thump. I was compelled to look up to see that the branches of the fig tree were swaying, jostled by a huge gust of wind. I looked down at the earth below it and there in the soft soil that my father had only just hoed and aerated was a large hole. Neither of us moved. I turned to my father for what to do next but he was fixated on that hole. For entire minutes we sat in this posture, my eyes fixated on my father’s, his on the indication that, no matter whether we were actually in imminent danger, something important occupied that hole in our garden. Years later at an American university I attended an introductory philosophy class in which we discussed Shcrödinger’s cat. Placed in a box with a poisonous gas released at an unknown and random time, the cat could be said to be both alive and dead at the same time. Only the observation of the cat released it from its prison. Sitting under the bright fluorescent lights I could think only of this moment where, without moving, without reacting, my father and I could remain both alive and dead—could remain unaffected by that aftermath—and my eyes never wavered.

Finally he looked up from that hole, then down at his mat, and began to roll it up. I was still rooted in place but I watched as he walked inside the house, leaving the door open behind him. He walked back out, holding a filled watering-can which he brought over to the hole and immediately emptied into it. The circuits, he explained, Like the hot plate. He spoke in reference to the hot plate my mother used for cooking which I had ruined the month before when I spilled a bottle of water, sending sparks flying and earning a curt, well-deserved slap across the face. With that I was freed. My father understood the situation fully, its inner machinations and exactly how to deal with the problem. I rolled up my prayer mat and followed him back inside.

* * * * *

We never called anyone to remove the missile. There was no police and no bomb squad and, even if there were, they would have had much more important bombs to worry about. My father continued to love his garden. He watered his peppers and his cucumbers, the grapes and the flowers and the fig tree, and he began to water the dormant projectile, too. After a few days the hole fell into itself and closed up, but he continued to soak the area in hopes that it would rust and eventually break down into just a memory.

Slowly, the bomb became a part of the garden. On days when my father was sick or could find work, someone else had to take care of the watering and weeding, and we all knew that this empty spot was a stop that had to be made. Years passed and, though we did not forget about it, we no longer worried about it. It was our unspoken secret, no longer recognized as a threat, only as a responsibility.

The fighting ended at around the same time. It took months, trickling out of the suburban areas first and then slowly, at last, receding from the bigger cities. But peace came with a price. You could no longer watch television, listen to music, keep family pictures. There was only one channel now that played and I found it exceedingly boring. The adult programming we watched on our little black-and-white TV was dull and one-note (propaganda as I later learned) and the children’s programming which generally involved a rabbit chasing a carrot, I found too immature. We didn’t have many pictures of the family. Those we did, we hid behind paintings on a thin canvas, stuck between the glass, the paper, and the frame. Our family sat safely behind these perfect patterns, blossoming from singular points and rapidly expanding into colliding hexagons, squares, and triangles that eventually made every shape imaginable, only infinitesimally small. We watched over our own lives through that infinity of shapes.

The music ban hit my father especially hard. He had a large plastic bin of cassettes—Ahmad Zahir, Mehri Maftun, Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan—that he often pulled from at random and dropped into our tape player, another luxury of ours. When general peace began, however, personal peace disappeared. Anyone could expect a raid at all hours of the day and, fearing for our lives, my father sealed the bin, making sure it was watertight, and buried it in the garden, not far from the bomb. The tapes, too, entered our routine, only now we knew where not to water so as to preserve them. We never ended up unearthing them.

The other big change was in our schooling. I was permitted to attend the same school, but we now studied more religious texts and many of my teachers left or had disappeared. Women were not allowed to study, however, and my sister who had recently completed her sixth grade was relegated to secret study in our garden with my mother or my father, whoever had more time available to spend with her that day. This worked for a while, a few months even, but they found us out as they always seemed to find out. Perhaps it was a neighbor, or someone walking by who happened to peer through one of the many holes in our fence but it does not matter how, only that they knew.

On a late Thursday afternoon, two men walked through our open front door, both carrying large assault rifles. These I had seen only on the adult TV programming, but I associated them with a familiar sound—a sound that was supposed to be heard exclusively from far away. I was in the kitchen, making myself something to eat and as they walked by I was unable to move. In my memory I believe I was cordial, greeting the men with a, Good afternoon, but I forgot to ask them if they wanted something to drink.

They asked if my sister lived here. She does. They asked me if my parents were home. They are not. One of them asked me if I had prayed this morning. Of course. The other asked me if I was scared of them. I did not know. I said nothing. They asked me where my sister was and I could think of nothing but to point to the sliding-glass doors.

They walked out to the garden where my sister was watering the jasmine flowers and, wordlessly, one of them pulled out a knife and killed her with a cut across the throat. Then they stood there, enjoying the garden, enjoying the smells and the shade and the beautiful sights that we so lovingly tended to and created in our haven of a backyard. Then they left as quickly as they had come, causing no real disturbance in the daily routine. I never even thought to shout for help.

We buried my sister in the garden, beside the cassette tapes, beside the missile. Above her body, my father planted more jasmine, shaded by our enduring fig tree. She too became a part of the gardening routine.

* * * * *
I spoke of this incident in an English class I attended at the American university where I discovered living-dead cats. I found it relevant to the conversation, but my classmates simply stared at me and, after a quick aside from the professor that truly meant nothing, no one responded to what I had said. They felt no need to engage with my life—indeed they felt an internal pressure, I believe, not to engage—because if you don’t give thought to something, you don’t have to make a moral judgement. And so my sister’s death passed for them as fact, not something good or evil, rather something that simply was. Or maybe that made it both; in their minds I think she might have been both dead and alive.

In my second year at university I lived with my friend Jason, a tall blonde man from Arizona. I brought up this moment from my English class, marveling at my peers’ inability to even briefly ponder an event that was so integral to my life. We’re at war with you, he said. I had no response to this. It struck me as quite reductive, placing me with “them” and him with “us,” even as we slept and ate and studied under the same roof. We were pursuing the same major, we often pined after the same women, we enjoyed watching the same television shows together. I began praying in my room rather than next to the couch in the living room where there was more space.

Still, Jason became one of my very best friends and we travelled together during breaks in our schooling. On a trip to Germany I was detained at the gate. I was asked to step aside as Jason made his way helplessly onto the plane. Two security officers brought me to a nearby windowless room where they asked me the normal questions. Did you pack your own items? Did anyone give you anything to take on your flight? Why do you grow your beard? A woman on the same flight believed that she recognized me from a list of terrorists she had seen on television. I missed the plane and the airline paid for me to take the next two hours later. They’re even upgrading you to business class, said the woman who printed my new ticket. Thrilling. Now when I travel I build an extra two or three hours into my itinerary. This is a product of fear.

When I arrived in Germany, Jason was waiting in a black taxicab. He lamented my treatment by the airport staff so profusely that by the time we reached our hotel I was apologizing to him for the worry he had felt. He eventually got over it and we went to bed as the sun peeked over the horizon. We had a wonderful time in Germany.

* * * * *

I was hired as an associate professor of anthropology at Iowa State University: Iowa State’s first Middle Eastern, Muslim, non-American, associate professor in the Anthropology Department, that’s how they introduced me. My mother passed away of tuberculosis a little while before that as I was earning my Ph.D. and she wouldn’t let me come home to see her—or rather I could not leave the United States and be readmitted due to my stupid oversight and my unrenewed visa. I said goodbye to her by phone. I felt so alone.

A year later, visa successfully renewed, I travelled home to see my father. We had horrifyingly little to talk about. I told him about my work, the wide berth people gave my academic interests due to my Islamic background. I was never questioned when I proposed the study of Middle Eastern relations because why should I not be interested in the one thing they felt defined me?

My father spoke of the garden. It was wholly the same as when I had visited some three years before. The routine was unchanged: water the bomb, skip the tapes, tend to the jasmine. There was now also a small headstone in my mother’s memory. On the flight over I had had a premonition that I would reach my childhood home, walk through the kitchen to the garden, and find that the missile had finally exploded. It never did and it still has not.

We still prayed together, outside among the fruits and the flowers, shaded by the fig tree. Its branches had continued to lengthen since I’d left for university more than a decade before, and it now covered that entire area, with patches of sunlight shining through. We prayed there with my sister and my mother, with the growing plants and the memory of flowing music, we prayed with the bees and the ants and the snakes and the birds, and we prayed with the missile, whose sharp whine had long diminished to a dull trill: the trill of the garden.

Mirandus
words and images by Simon Locker

An image of city and sky assembles before me. Wasn’t this the swooping drama I had yearned for when I left this morning with the camera? It was a clunky Sony thing from the ‘90s or early two-thousands, but what’s the difference—decades are a poor way to organize history anyway. Ten years don’t hug the contours of upheaval and repression and mutation.

I found it at a garage sale and biked home with it perched on my handlebars. Then I brought it with me today. I don’t know what I wanted to do with it. There was already a tape in the machine, a yellow and black eight millimeter labeled O’DONOVAN 1999 in neat black capitals. It was full of old family movies, the kind that doesn’t age well because it contains laughter, or the strange piano recitals of cousins who no longer play piano but spend eighty percent of their paychecks on fentanyl, or the belabored birthday party interviews with members of the family who are no longer members of the family and never should have been.

I was drawn to the camera because it could emit the fabric of that moment towards the end of the twentieth-century that I would never live, but that I would always know through symbols, projections, intimations. The machine’s bent colors, the grain of its image, its cracked audio forever revealed the years when it was used, when it was advertised in profane consumer reports and carted to turn-of-the-century reunions. History hung on its every frame.

In some doomed way I longed to see my world through the lenses of the past, to translate the material of today into the pixelated and distorted shapes of history. It was the only reason I wanted to record anything at all. If I rewrote Miranda in the image of the camera, would she stay with me? Could I help her? Would our story belong to the past?

I took my truck west on 6th and down to where the creek cuts a gash through the city. I parked and locked the doors, took a path down to the edge of the waterway pulled myself over a rusted fence, straddling the cold bar at the top and twice nearly dropping the camera into the gutters of used bikes and used syringes and used glossy packages of blunt wraps.

That 2002 pickup, white and rust-brown where it was dinged up, had carried me and Miranda across the country spitting and sputtering.

I jumped down from the top of the fence and my ankles stung, the tight, coiled pain briefly spreading up my heels. I had practiced these motions countless times, at night and in the hellscape late afternoon. Laughter would ricochet through the damp freeway overpasses and I would know the eroding concrete monuments of a failed and forgotten future.

Miranda had four gold hoops of identical size. Two around the edge of her left nostril and two on the upper cartilage of her left ear, each ring of each pair equidistant from the center of their respective body parts. We drove with no map, miraculously illuminating a path through sagebrush and lavender. Somehow, we oriented ourselves in the grid of interstates and back roads that bind the flesh of a country. We would see how far we could drive without sleeping and sometimes at night we would smoke too much to stay up and blast through entire states, and every time Miranda lit one up, she would pass it to me first. This was not for my benefit, not to give me the first drag, but to offload some of the guilt of each new cigarette, as if it diminished her responsibility in the act or transferred some of its weight across the center console.

It was the middle of the summer and she wore knee-length carpenter shorts and white socks and dark leather shoes, and just before sunset we’d always, and I mean without fail, pull off the road to sit in the bed of my truck, or climb some tragic water tank indelibly marked with a ‘50s motor oil logo, rust eating into the color and line of history. Sweat would weigh down our shirts and hang on the hair behind our ears, and we’d watch the blood ball sun burst over wheat and cattle and red clay canyons and endless oceans of sage. Then there was usually no talk, because there was already an infinite conversation contained in the most minute motions of our hands and our eyes.

The name Miranda might come from Latin. Mirandus: to be marvelled at. But I like the theory that it was produced by Shakespeare for The Tempest. That it erupted into the realm of language because a writer sat at a desk and wrote something that was wrong, thus inventing a word, a world. Miranda shared with me this origin. She felt that it was a falsehood, a lie from which other parts of her radiated. She meant nothing, three syllables randomly fused together. But for me the solidification of Miranda out of the wisps and mists of language meant everything. It allowed for a kind of liberation where wrong sounds were not wrong, but that they butted up against the flesh of speech and ruptured the folds of a fortified tongue.

As we drove, finally approaching Miranda’s city across the sea, she spoke. We had been on the road for a few months and our arrival at her house in Brooklyn had been methodically delayed.

“You do know that you can’t come in,” she said.
“Where?”
“My house. You can’t come in when we get there. I just need to pay my dues, you know, say hi to the dog and kiss my mom or whatever, then we can go upstate or to Vermont or Maine.”
“Okay,” I said. “I thought we were gonna see the city.”
“We can see the city, but you can’t come in,” she said.
“Okay, I get it. But why? Why would it be so awful.”
“It’s not that it would be awful. It’s that I don’t want you to meet her. I don’t want my family to invade us. I want to tell you things like you are untouched by the past.”
“But I already know everything. So what’s the difference if I meet your mom?”

She popped a paper match with one hand and lit a cigarette.

“Because then in your mind there’ll be a voice and an eye color to my stories, and it will all become too real, and you’ll leave, won’t you?” The static jumped and cracked. The colors bent in and out of crude four sided pixels. Her voice was stretched and restitched, fried almost beyond recognition. Smoke filled the screen.

Before the trip we had both been pleasantly lost for a few months, drifting from the grids of command and behavior that hang in the air. But we were also swimming through hysteria—citywide benders and little blue pills and each week we were further from any kind of salvation. And that was both a wild screaming freedom and a horrifying freefall, our stomachs crawling up our throats.

Our trip, which was really more of a departure with no end date, felt like a series of impulsive decisions, motions that cannot have consequences or implications because nothing comes after them. They exist pure and clean and untouched by guilt. And since we knew that nothing did come after one’s actions, no final culmination nor moment of exalted clarity, this was exactly how we aimed to live. In that way we were ecstatic and in that way we mourned the dead.

Soon thick smoke would choke the arches of glass that bent through the city, and it would hang low in the sterile corridors, those places where the mirrored buildings watched and judged, and where well-hidden klaxons could at any moment announce the start of curfew.

As we approached Texarkana, Texas I watched rusting transmission towers fan out into yellow brush. They were placed perpendicular to the road so that every forty miles I would look out the window and they would snap into alignment, forming for a second a straight line of infinite structures stretching out to the horizon.

When we reached Texarkana we walked into a bar full of men in ‘70s shirts leaning heavily over their drinks. And it was the ‘70s. Framed pictures plastered the wall, but they weren’t of celebrities, like in Hollywood restaurants and Connecticut pizza places. These pictures buzzed with the grain of sixty millimeter film, sons and fathers next to bloated trout, farm girls and tractors and leagues of wheat, cows and clapboard houses and dogs caked in mud.

Miranda and I sat in a dark booth, staring down a pitcher of beer, the room smoky and tepid. A mother and three small children entered the bar and the high squeals of siblings filled the booths and dark corners of the room. I looked at the faces of the children, towheaded and streaked with traces of red dirt, and they echoed those local faces on the wall, and then I suddenly knew they were the same people, some of the same children. Soon I could see most of the men in the bar reflected on the walls, bordered by slim pieces of homemade frame; they drank and watched themselves stretched through time, their faces levitating above bottles of bourbon.

We paid our bill and left. It was 97 degrees out and as soon as we stepped out the door we were wading through viscous, swampy tar. A sweet apocalypse of cicadas enclosed around us, and neon weeds sprouted from crumbling, heat-stressed brick.

What did it mean for flora to reclaim what humans had forged? Heaven bent to our methods, supersonic booms and empty coiled towers on Park, and still everything returning to dust and wet. This is our mid-century epoch. Writing it is mere archaeology.

We drove to the edge of Texarkana, beery and laughing, where the little grid of streets stopped pretending and trailed directly off into dirt. Miranda parked behind an abandoned gas station right out of an Ed Ruscha photograph, except the whole building was completely consumed by kudzu. The stuff sprouted through gaps in the patchwork tin roof and rushed through the door frames, bright dense green vines against postwar reds and yellows.

The two old gas pumps stood ten feet apart like fossils revealed after some total cataclysm, the STANDARD logo atop the crest of each pump beaming in the 6:00 PM sun, conjuring latent images of Studebaker trucks and pleated pants and roadside diners.

We kept the windows down. The air was an impossible molasses. Then, still laughing, we pulled off our sweat-heavy clothes and I caught hazy, saturated glimpses of the thick coiled black snake just above Miranda’s hip, and the black butterflies on her ribs, and the thin curved black line with a bow that wrapped around her upper thigh.

Dry, fingerlike spindles of vine lapping at the top of the truck in the hot wind.

The warm LCD strings hummed as they jumped and curved from the screen, and the slowly advancing tape purred. Miranda and I were neither present nor past, neither here in the ruins of empire nor there in the warm glaze of Americana, but drowning in a fever of time, with dull headaches and little beads of sweat on our wrists and collarbones that held perfect teardrop shape before imploding in silent ecstasy and darting down our arms and our chests.

Later, long after Texarkana, we built bookcases in our one bedroom apartment off 6th Street. Miranda and I found and cut and sanded and stained the wood ourselves. After a few months, I picked up a book and the middle shelf splintered apart. Even some of the texts were chewed through, obliterated, you could say, rendered blank and flat by the insects, bugs whose intricate dance I would never understand. But I already knew the futility of trying to know such things. Archeology is more bounds and borders than possibilities.

The second time we passed through Tennessee I lost her. We were just east of Knoxville and I realized I should have stopped there for gas, where we moved for an hour through rainy traffic past water towers and brick smokestacks, old refineries and forges battered by the downpour.

I couldn’t get a range readout on the old truck, so I had been nervous about gas since L.A., especially in the desert. But Miranda was never nervous, because I think some part of her wanted to run out of gas between Kingman and Flagstaff. Maybe she wanted to break down and walk out into these alien valleys, and feel the humming, high-pitched sunset light funnel through oblique juniper trees and into our eyes.

“I can’t do it,” said Miranda, her eyes trained forward in thought.

“Miranda,” I said in frustration. We had passed Knoxville on the I-40 just two weeks ago, turning around in Virginia, again pushing back Miranda’s return home.

“We can keep going, go back up to the Midwest, or Mexico.” She wouldn’t look at me.

“You don’t know what it’s like to enter your house and feel gravity pulling you to the floor. Or see your dad sitting on the sofa staring into space, beer going warm on the coffee table, not a thought in his head. I think about running into him in a grocery store parking lot, or on the train, and what would I do? Brief eye contact? For how long would I cry after stepping off at my stop? But you know what the worst part is?” I could sense things rupturing in her mind, her inner self breaking through layers of mirrored, out-of-reach models.

“I am supposed to take care of him! He says to me, you’re going to take of me when I’m old and sick. I am? How could I? How can I not?”

Now the rain had stopped, and I watched wet moss and slate and hills flash past the windows. Miranda stopped talking and I didn’t have a response for her. Language couldn’t voice whatever it was that boiled within her, and so something else had to give way.

We stopped in a small town to get gas. I stood by the pump and Miranda went inside to get a pack of cigarettes. The tank was full. I walked inside to piss. I didn’t see her inside. When I got back to the pump she was gone, and I didn’t see it, but the camera would have caught it all in beautiful grain and distortion, her short brown hair flashing behind her as she found a ride in the parking lot, crossed the street with a woman half her height and slipped into a brown sedan with Mississippi plates.

I walked along the basin of the creek, holding the camera by the strap of its bulky plastic case, a kind of cheap black plastic made thick to look like leather but that scuffed easy and frayed like twine.

The dark water ran by me on the right, and on either side the concrete sloped up to accommodate a fuller flow. I was looking for a place where I could set up the camera and let it run, where it could take in a good few minutes of city noise, traffic and sirens and fronds rustling in the wind. I wanted to capture in that static an image of the scraggy hill that rose to the south revealing motionless oil drills and cranes bending towards the heavens. But the camera had already become rooted in my mind, had already begun to sculpt and render my world. What I saw and heard was filtered through its aura.

I approached a bridge in the creek and pulled myself up over a ladder enclosed in a rusted metal box. It was almost dusk now and things had begun to feel grey and alien. I placed the camera on the top of the bridge, just resting it on the concrete, and it assimilated perfectly what was in my field of vision. There was no difference between what I saw and what the camera saw. I had manipulated my eyes, through the tunnels and interstices of history, to see.

The sound of the city rolled towards me, immediately filtered back through time and made gorgeous. It was curfew now. The klaxons fired and waxed in and out of pitch.

From the top right corner of the screen, Miranda descended in a painstakingly adorned chariot carried by bony black wings, transfigured finally and forever in the glow of history, black mesas and broad blue skies and railroads and wheat fields and clothes lines and junkyards flashing in her eyes. She stopped and swayed over the city like so many lights above America, hanging and ticking in the smog-choked night.

RCP8.5

Fig. 1 IPCC’s RCP8.5 scenario average change in surface temperature (1986-2005 to 2081-2100). The RCP8.5 is the most extreme climate scenario, a future humans are not likely to survive for long. Models take available data, knowledge of how our climate functions and has functioned, and makes projections based on trends that can be extrapolated. A model does not proclaim absolute certainty. We do not know exactly what will happen. This watercolor may bleed 1000km too far west – this map, like the projection, is not an exact look at the future. Yet these models hold immense value as they give us a larger idea of what will happen on different paths we take. We can see that the impacts will not be evenly spread. We can see how extreme this temperature regime is. We can see that this is an uninhabitable world, regardless of how the watercolor dried. William Riley.