Azra

It was the lights that distracted her, the streak of their flight past, carving dimensions from the passing dark.

 

And it was more than the lights: Azra was imagining them like protons, like in that article her Physics teacher Mr. Spence had given her to read, rocketing through the Large Hadron Collider, giving up their “God” particles. What was the name? She was tired; the name wouldn’t come to her. How small would she have to be to see a proton zooming by? Subatomic, certainly. Cornell had an atom-smasher, too. But at the moment, she couldn’t remember the name of the facility, either. 

Her eyes unfocused, and she noticed, also, the way the lights intersected with the pale reflection of the person standing at the subway door. Like a spirit universe riding alongside them, wavering in frequency each time a light in the tunnel sliced through. Or as if the lights were creating the person, and the person faded back into light. Yes, she thought, because that’s the point of E=mc^2, light can become matter, and matter can become light. Light upon light (God guides to His light whom He will). How did that surah start, the Ayat an-Nur? “God is the light of the heavens and the earth.” Light is both a particle and a wave. God is both a particle and a wave.

So, in fact, it was the lights transmogrified into this chain of thought that almost made Azra miss her stop. She was tired enough, bone-tired, that her mind drifted. At her age, the concept of her body aching, for any reason, was a new one. Physical activity never had a special appeal for her, so she wasn't even used to sports-related strains. But after a double shift—brunch, a quick break for family meal, and then a special buyout for a party that evening—climbing up and down the stairs with the bus tub from the basement kitchen to the second-floor gallery—the pain in her feet was a persistent din. She thanked God for a seat on the subway. That was one good thing about the late hour, she supposed: open seats. 

She had texted her parents to let her know why she was coming home so late, and had already gotten a screenful from her mother about how her Uncle Selim was NOT taking care of her in the way that he promised he would. But Azra didn't feel that a promise had been breached. She just assumed that this was the way that things were done in a fine dining restaurant in the West Village. Sometimes some financial firm buys out the whole restaurant for a party and you're still clearing wine glasses at 1 AM. Her mother's set of assumptions about the restaurant industry were based on owning a cafe in Astoria, which did not make them universal.

Azra did not pretend to be an expert, either, since she had only been working for Uncle Selim for a couple of weeks. Uncle Selim was not her actual uncle; he was a relation of her mother's cousin's husband. It was possible that he was just a friend of her mother's cousin's husband, but she didn't ask. The genealogical chart didn’t matter, since there were plenty of people she was happy to respectfully address as Aunt and Uncle without even the possibility of blood relation. After all, she reasoned, it is the spiritual truth: we are all flesh and blood to each other. This belief did, however, cause her occasional problems.

“Are they taking advantage of you, Azra?” Uncle Selim had asked. She had been standing with Sydney, the last of the servers, at the station, watching the remaining guests drag their drunken heels, unaware or uncaring that everyone else had left.

Blood climbed inside her face. “What?”

“Reha said you let Mo and Rocky get cut before you, but weren't you on a double, covering for someone?”

This had been a welcome clarification. And yes, she'd done that. But when the boys had realized they could go home, they were so happy. And besides, when they'd asked, she'd heard: Say yes. Easily done. And she would still benefit, by getting more points in the tip pool, and Uncle Selim would see how hard she was working. He had promised to promote her to backwaiter, and then server, if she worked hard, and was sharp. And then she'd make more money for her trip. Already she was earning more than at her mother's cafe. It was hard to get a first job in a restaurant, Uncle Selim had explained when she first came on. Especially since she chose to wear a başörtüsü, the Turkish version of a hijab. Employers weren't supposed to discriminate, he said, but they did. But here, he promised, she could work her way up, but she'd have to start at the bottom, as a busser.   

 
“Don't let them think you're a pushover,” he'd said that night, winking.

Azra was not a pushover. 

Uncle Selim didn’t know the whole story behind her college deferment. But then again, no one knew. 

Now, exhausted, she let her mind relax into a mirror for God's creation, and God's creation through humankind. Lights blared by in the subway tunnel, particles and wave, and it was beautiful. If she had been a time-traveler from three hundred years in the past, she thought, the sight would have bowled her over. All of it. How perfect is my Lord, and may He be praised, how perfect is my Lord, the Almighty.

Higgs boson. That was what the particle was called. The “God” particle. She knew she would remember.

And then, she heard: Pay attention. Look.

Look at what, she wondered. But it was enough to break her trance and survey the subway car. Immediately, her eye fell on a woman on the bench opposite her, further down. The woman's beautiful hair, a natural dusty blond with a faded rose-colored dye, had attracted her notice when she first got on the train and was looking for a seat. Azra's choice to cover her head did not prevent her from enjoying what other people did with their hair. The woman's large earmuff-style headphones made it seem, at first, like the pink hair emanated from their thick headband, while her roots were entirely blond. She was striking to look at, besides: large eyes, a long, straight nose, with high cheekbones and a square jaw. Snatched cheekbones, she thought. Azra always remembered the first time she heard that word used that way, from her cousin Gizem. But despite having such interesting hair and attractive face, the woman with pink hair was scowling, a reminder that none of those attributes conferred automatic happiness. 

Yes, Azra thought. See? But she was lecturing the part of herself that she wanted to erase:  the part that secretly wished that she were prettier. Not a knockout. Not a head-turner. Just a face that she, herself, liked. She wanted this, even though it contradicted her wish to be modest, and free of society’s beauty standards. But if she were prettier, she rationalized, she’d still be modest. And then, maybe, she wouldn’t feel the need to wear any makeup at all, and wouldn’t have to worry about wudu messing up her eyeliner and waterproof mascara, or if eyeliner invalidated wudu (opinions were mixed), and if she’d need to fix it after prayers, or how much makeup was really halal. Of course, the most makeup Azra ever wore out appeared minimal, tutored by Youtube and Tiktok tutorials on no-makeup makeup. She didn’t wear as much as her cousin Gizem, who loved makeup to the degree of having professional aspirations. But elaborate makeovers held by Gözde and Gizem at all-girl parties had taught Azra the awful truth: she preferred her face with makeup.

 

Scrutinizing her individual features, she tried to apportion blame. But everything was fine on its own. Eyes with long, dark lashes. Reasonably small nose. Plump lips. If her portrait could be done by collage, she might be beautiful. But taken together, she always concluded that her face was vanilla. Were her eyes too small, or too close together? Was her face’s shape too round? Too square? And then she hated this spiral of insufficiency, from physical to moral. Maybe being plain kept her from vanity, but it didn’t keep her from thinking about exterior notions of beauty, so what good was it? Would she be less God’s if she looked like the hijabi Tiktokkers, with their delicate, dewy makeup? No.

But here was this gorgeous woman, scowling, unfulfilled by her beauty. 

Azra turned her thoughts to her scowl’s object: a pair of glasses. This seemed odd. There's a story there, Azra’s mom would say. It became even weirder when the woman got up, put the glasses on the seat behind her, and started to walk out of the train.

Take them [the glasses].

There was no time to question; Azra understood. She hopped up, dashed over, and grabbed them. Spinning around to look for the woman, she realized that it was Herald Square. Elhamdülillah and thanks to the glasses, she hadn't missed her stop. She sprang for the doors just in time. 

But where had the woman with the pink hair gone? She looked down the platform, the subway cars accelerating as they snaked by, and then the other direction. There she was: heading for the escalator. Azra broke into a run. 

“I'm so sorry, excuse me, pardon me,” she said, slaloming around an older gentleman and a hand-holding couple.  The woman was getting on the escalator; Azra pushed herself into the next gear.

“Excuse me! Excuse me!” she called. 

The woman turned: first a reflexive eye over her shoulder, and then fully.

Azra was holding up the glasses. Seeing them, the woman stiffened; her only movement was the escalator's slow climb. That she wasn't facing her ascent gave the moment a surreal quality. Azra had a half-vision of the woman being tractor-beamed into heaven between the converging angles of the moving black handrails, and it gave her a feeling behind her knees, like being close to a steep drop. But she chugged onto the escalator, and climbed the stairs, the acclamation of her rightness propelling her.

“You left your glasses,” she said.

The woman didn't even look at them. “They're not mine.”

Okay, Azra thought, something is definitely hinky. True, when she got on the subway, she hadn't seen the glasses in the woman's hands, but she also hadn't seen them on the black speckled train floor, or an empty seat. The most logical explanation was that they had been in her bag. Because secondly, if they were just a random, lost item, that wouldn't explain why they elicited such a strong emotion as to make the woman scowl. Or why would she be willing to handle them, in the first place? New Yorkers would only pick something up off the street if it were cash, something Azra lamented but recognized. And most importantly, she knew that she was supposed to take the glasses, and if she wasn't supposed to give them back to the woman, what was she supposed to do with them?

“But you had them. You carried them this far,” she was saying. But overlapping came an answer to her last internal question:

She is supposed to take them.

Azra paused, listened.

Yes. Give them to her. She is supposed to take them.

“So I think you're supposed to take them,” she finished. The orb of her understanding sung with completion.

Implacable, the woman looked back at her, a force in her gaze like stone. “I don't know what you're talking about. They're not mine,” she said. She turned, and strode up the escalator, now near the top, with a last athletic leap onto the metal landing platform.

Azra was stunned. Naturally credulous, she couldn’t always detect deception. But the woman was obviously lying. It could be rationally deduced. Sometimes, in moments of conflict, Azra froze, like she hadn’t been given the necessary programming. Of course, she didn’t want to be in conflict with others, but sometimes restraint held her back, and sometimes, befuddlement. Uncle Selim’s words played back to her: “Don’t let them think you’re a pushover.” No. She knew she was capable of advocating for herself, respectfully; it just took time to assemble her argument.

As she, too, crested the top of the escalator, feet glued to her step, she watched the woman speedwalking to the left. Like many of the junction subway stations, Herald Square has a mezzanine for connecting between different train lines, and Azra wondered if the woman was heading for the exit to the street, or for a transfer. Curiosity propelled her forward; maybe she could reapproach. But only two steps in pursuit, she saw that the woman had taken another quick left, down the escalator for the downtown BDFM trains. That was the same line they had both been riding on before, just heading in the opposite direction. It was the most illogical transfer. Suss, even. That’s what her friend Spencer would say.

“Excuse me, sister?” she heard herself calling out. The mystery was too strange to be borne.

But on the escalator down, the woman didn’t turn.

“Ma’am?” 

“They’re not mine! They’re just trash! Fuckin’—let it go!” the woman shouted, unturning, springing into a jog down the narrow escalator steps. Azra watched her disappear into the gloom of the lower platform. Any response disappeared down the singularity of her open mouth.  

People from their train passed her, transferring, exiting. Azra drifted out of the way of the escalator landing plate. Something strange was going on, she thought. Why would any person ride the subway, late at night, in order to leave an object on it, and then go back in the other direction? She mentally re-examined the evidence. The woman had been on the train when Azra got on at West 4th. Even if she'd gotten on at Broadway-Lafayette, why ride all the way to Herald Square? Various hypotheses occurred to her, all ridiculous. Did she need to chaperone the glasses? Was this part of a messaging system between a spy ring, or a drug cartel, or undercover cops? Was there a microchip hidden somewhere inside? For the first time, Azra gave the glasses a close look, but she had to concede she didn't know how to identify a microchip that she wasn't supposed to find. Holding them up, the world, through their lenses, buckled: a fishbowl of mustard-brown tiles and low-ceiling fluorescence. They were certainly someone's real glasses, someone who probably needed them to see. They weren’t trash. She blinked hard.

A wave of conviction wiped clean her unease: the spy ring, the microchip, those were TV stories. Azra always looked forward to her hour or half-hour of TV before bed, but knew that her favorites, from “New Girl” to “The Blacklist” to “Ms. Marvel” were not likely to be reflected in reality. The angels had told her that she was supposed to take the glasses from the subway, and then that the woman was supposed to take them from her, in turn. If the glasses had encoded top-secret information that was supposed to be picked up by someone at Rockefeller Center, they would never put her in the middle of that mess.

But what do I do with them now, she thought. 

She heard: Take them. 

Where do I take them? 

Too late.

What?

Adjust. For now, take them. You will know.

Well, all right, then. Turning, she headed back towards the NQR trains. If that was it for now, she didn’t want to risk missing a train home.