The Thirty Names of Night: A Novel by Zeyn Joukhadar

Author:Zeyn Joukhadar [Joukhadar, Zeyn]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781982121495
Google: m2IFEAAAQBAJ
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Published: 2020-11-24T00:00:00+00:00

ELEVEN /

THE DAY AISHA’S FUNDING runs out, Sami, Reem, and I go up to Queens to help her move her equipment out of the old house in Forest Hills. She’s been winding down her patients for weeks, so the cages are empty. We load chicken wire and potted plants into the back of her station wagon. As Aisha locks the door of the house, the birds fill the sky as though drawn to our sighing. They’ve been arriving every day from nowhere: orioles roosting on fire escapes, stray jays clinging to box air conditioners, dozens of ravens walking the shop awnings. People harbor different theories about what’s bringing the birds to New York. They congregate like white blood cells to a wound, drawn to arson and eviction notices, to a pig’s head hurled at a masjid door, to the murder of a Black trans woman deadnamed in a police report or the white man who set fire to a woman’s blouse on Fifth Avenue for wearing hijab.

One thing everyone’s agreed on since the goldfinches arrived: never before has New York been so full of birds. A neighborhood petition’s been started to get someone to come in and clean up their droppings, which are everywhere. A week ago, some of the gentrifiers blamed a pair of brothers, whose family had been in the neighborhood almost eighty years after moving from Barbados, who’ve got a pigeon coop on the roof of their building. But it isn’t only pigeons that are filling the streets. Hordes of sparrows block traffic, circling the Brooklyn Public Library and soiling the gilded entrance. Snowy owls arrive out of season and roost in the rooftop gardens of brand-new apartment buildings, spoiling evening soirees with their swooping and screeching.

In the station wagon on the drive to Yorkville, Sami and I crowd the windows with our faces, trying to count the wings. Blackbirds and wrens flank our car, and we glide toward Aisha’s apartment in silence. We unload the crates and the cages, the mesh and the bandages, the empty filing cabinets and the boxes of records. When we’ve deposited everything into Aisha’s storage unit in the basement of the building, she locks the door and we head back upstairs for one last cup of coffee. The lotto numbers come on the radio. We sit around the table, and I think of all the things I’d do with half a million dollars: I’d cover all of Teta’s co-pays, rent and electricity, health insurance for Reem and Sami and me, funding to keep Aisha’s sanctuary going. Growing up, those of us who had to put a hyphen before “American” got scoffed at for sending money home to cousins in the old country or supporting aging parents here on green cards. But you used to shake your head and tell me how, back home, nobody put their parents into nursing homes or let their kin go hungry. The same thing lives on among Sami’s queer and trans friends of color, he tells

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