The Human Scale by Wright Lawrence

Author:Wright,Lawrence [Wright, Lawrence]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: FIC000000 FICTION / General
Publisher: Knopf
Published: 2025-03-11T00:00:00+00:00

Malik finished dressing for the wedding festivities, and as he came downstairs to order a cab Yasmine burst into the lobby. “Tony!” she cried. “You’ve got to come with me!”

“Am I late?”

“No, no, I’ll explain.” She drove frantically. “They are saying Jamal is the murderer,” she said.

“Is he?”

“Be serious. Jamal is not a terrorist. Even you must know him better than that.” She told him what she had heard, about the head in the freezer and Jamal’s flight. There was a YouTube video of him bolting out of the butcher shop. “You’ve got to help us. They’ll kill him, I swear it!”

“How’s Dina doing?”

“You will see.”

Dina was sitting in the front room with the lights out. She scarcely acknowledged her mother and Malik as they came in. Omar stood sentry. They all had the faces of people who were about to face execution themselves. The room was overflowing with wedding gifts.

Malik sat beside Dina and wordlessly took her hand. At his touch, she began to sob. She tried to form words but she choked on them. “Don’t let them kill him,” she finally said.

“I’ll do what I can,” Malik promised, not knowing where to begin.

“He’s innocent, Tony, he never did this!”

“Okay.”

“Mom, leave us alone, okay? You, too, Omar.”

Omar started to protest but Yasmine shooed him out the door.

Dina looked around the room at the flowers and gifts strewn across the tables and chairs. “It’s perfect, isn’t it? At the moment of maximum hope and happiness. Gone. What a fool I was.” She wiped her face with a tissue. “Living here, you always expect the worst. The only surprise is how bad the worst can be. Finally, it becomes impossible. You fill to the top with rage. Depression. Fear. Ordinary feelings there is no room for. You begin to understand the suiciders who think they can make death meaningful in a way their life is not.”

“Don’t let that be you.”

Dina shook her head. “I don’t have the courage of my despair. But I understand the anger. Our lives are not like yours. You are free. You can go where you want, be who you want to be. Our lives are like on a railroad track. We go where we are pointed. There are many stops but only one destination.”

Malik was quiet for a moment. “I’ve known dark thoughts. Hopelessness. Many times I wished I had died in the bombing rather than having to live a life that was less than I had before.”

Dina squeezed his hand. Malik continued: “I still think that sometimes. I miss the person I was going to be. But that person had other limitations. If I were ever to recover all that I loss, I’d try to be more like the person I am now. I’m certainly a lot more humble. I’m finding joy from things I wouldn’t have noticed before. I know this doesn’t have anything to do with what you’re experiencing. People will tell you that this will just be a memory one day, a bad dream.

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