Zoa’s Arks

CHAPTER ONE Although Bilal had always found a way to see rainbows in people, he finally admitted the colors were now slipping away. It was like streaks of broken hair dye running down oily, pimply, wrinkled cheeks. This sad acknowledgement happened during an otherwise satisfyingly wonderful road trip north. That’s also when he accepted the burden of repairing this unbearable situation. The adventure began on a day in August of 2012 infiltrated by temperatures in the mid-nineties, the sun’s harpoons of heat fully unleashed, uninhibited, into a cloudless azure summer sky. Wearing a headband to wick the sweat, Bilal rolled down the car's front windows and drove without air-conditioning, preferring the rush of the breeze from the open road. He wrapped sunglasses around his eyes to tame the glare and would travel about three hours from his seacoast home to reach his destination. He stopped to fuel up. “It’s a hot one today,” said a hefty man who was finishing pumping gas adjacent to the fuel dispenser Bilal was using. “Yes it is,” Bilal said. The man waited for a receipt. When it failed to print, the man who looked like he enjoyed an occasional brawl sighed loudly and jabbed his oversized thumb several times into the touchscreen as if that would get it to work. “You gotta be kidding…out of paper again,” he said and began forcefully and repeatedly punching the machine with his enormous hand, now to punish it. “Hey, buddy, settle down. You’re a good guy. You don’t want to break something. That won’t fix it,” Bilal said. “This happens way too often.” “I hear you. It happens to me, too, and it’s frustrating,” Bilal said to the stranger, intentionally laughing to try to deescalate the tension. “Next time, it’ll be my turn to get jerked around.” “Okay, okay.” The man calmed down and even chuckled. He walked toward the store, shaking his head, and looked back and waved before entering to get his cash register-generated receipt. Bilal thought, what a pleasant surprise—I just acted more like my old self, something I haven’t been lately. He finished pumping. The man returned, now smiling, still shaking his head. As he was getting into his car, he yelled over to Bilal, “Thanks. I was so mad I think I would of broke my hand.” “Probably not,” Bilal said, looking again at the man’s hands, “but maybe the machine.” Bilal drove off. Having felt useful, he smiled contentedly, but then had to laugh because, although serious, the brief encounter was a little comical, too. Were it a person, Bilal’s trustworthy BMW would likely feel the same as he did, that this relaxed journey heading north was a respite from the rigors of the more demanding work commute to and from Boston. In addition to being hard on the engine and other parts, that risky ride they endured together five days a week required the operator to frequently veer clear of distracted drivers swerving unpredictably, a nail-biter ordeal for the car, which was obviously always wishing to keep itself together in one piece. It would keep its fingers crossed, hoping Bilal employed undivided attention and sharp reflexes as they maneuvered across lanes of wall-to-wall traffic to get to highway exits. And the car would petition the gods that the driver be sure to watch for suddenly-appearing emergency vehicles and not become exhausted from the repetitive braking whenever they were trapped in stop-and-go traffic jams. It would also knock on any wood it could find, begging that the windshield be spared from vision-impairing, wiper-challenging splat dropped by patrolling seagulls. But those problems were pleasantly missing during this trek up north, the shiny, clean automobile heading in the opposite direction from all that chaos and physical abuse. Bilal was thoroughly relaxed, taking in the surroundings while quietly listening to Blood On the Tracks with the volume low so the music sounded muffled and distant, as if coming from somewhere in another room in a large building. After that album concluded, he was in the mood for sax, so he switched to Germfree Adolescents and raised the volume. The rest of the time, he left the music off and bonded instead with the bouncing, rolling mechanical sounds of a vehicle navigating over a river of pavement.