Viral heard his voice called from behind. Arriving down the escalator were Alan, Ada, and Farooq. Ada carried an orange, draw string, plastic bag in her hand and Farooq appeared to be wearing eye shadow.
"Where's Aleph?" Viral asked.
"We left her getting the free Clinique trial at Macy's," Ada said.
Gyn's face lit up. "Do they have MAC, too?" she asked.
"I wouldn't know," Smooshy said, "MAC tests mascara on macaques." Viral winced. "What?" Smooshy asked.
Alan cleared his throat. "Um, macaque can be considered a slur against south asians," he said.
"I know," Smooshy said.
Farooq checked his reflection in the polished marble of a column in the mall's atrium.
"Let's go check, then," Gyn said. "If there isn't MAC we will look for something more sustainable and conscious."
"You don't need any make-up," Viral said.
His mouth had gone dry just before he spoke; he choked on the end of his sentence.
"What was that, Viral?" Gyn asked, with sensitivity.
Grimacing, Smooshy said, "I think he just --", but Alan interrupted.
"He said we'll meet you at the Cinnabon after," Alan said.
"Whatever," Smooshy said.
Gyn waved to the boys, lingering on him, Viral thought.
"See you later," Gyn said.
"Macaques," Smooshy muttered under her breath.
---------------------------------------------------
"Who the fart is your father?" Alan asked.
Typical, Farooq said. Except he didn't say it. Not with his voice but with his eyes, the way they swung sideways and rolled with his neck.
"Just some guy," Viral said. Scratch, scratch. Psoriasis.
A metal hanger sckreeked across a poll as Farooq pawed through the shirts in the men's section of an Eddie Bauer. "Matt LeBlanc is just some guy," Farooq said, holding a buffalo plaid flannel up to the light. "Your father is, to some, the guy." He squished his nose, checked the tag on the flannel and stifled a gag. "Extra-large, gross."
"Yeah, apparently to Gyn he's the guy," Alan said, miming felatio with his tongue against his cheek.
"Apparently to Monica, too," Viral muttered. He distracted himself with a shirt that looked like mustard.
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"Treyna too?" Alan shouted, nearly choking on his bobbing tongue.
"Figures," Farooq clicked.
"What figures?" asked Viral.
Farooq lifted his aviators which kept sliding down his smooth head and looked at Viral then Alan. "North Americans cannot truly be so provincial," he said.
"Want to see what my provincial fist can do to your ass?" Alan threatened.
Farooq cocked his finger and pressed an imaginary button in the air. "You do not want to know what you just proposed in 99% of the world," he said.
"An ass pounding?" Alan said, his jaw jutting forward like a bull dog.
Farooq let the opening bars of a laugh escape before squelching it off Alan's scowl. Mouth still open, unsure of how to read the provincialism of the moment, he looked toward Viral for help. "Is he doing a bit?"
Viral shrugged and held the mustard shirt to his chest to check its match with his complexion.
"Ew, give me that," Farooq said, snatching the shirt from Viral. The metal hanger clipped Viral in the chin and he checked for bruising while Farooq stomped on the shirt that so offended.
An employee shouted from the register 20 yards behind Viral and Alan's back. "Hey!"
Farooq wagged his finger. "You'll thank me when you see what Tom Ford drops in '21," he called back.
The woman squinted hard and lifted the land receiver to her furthest ear.
"Bish thinks I can't see her dialing. I know retail, bish. Oh, I know retail," Farooq said quietly enough for Viral to wonder to whom he was speaking.
"But seriously, brody, you gotta act fast to show Gyn who her real daddy is."
Viral looked at his finger tips to see if Farooq had drawn blood.
Alan continued, "...or your real daddy..." He drifted off, lost in his own analogy.
"Don't listen to the boy," Farooq said. "All that Oepidal, your daddy, my daddy, who's on top shit is so not what women want to deal with in their men today."
"Oh, well, I'm not a man." Viral clarified, relieved.
"But you could be," said Farooq, narrowly missing Viral with the hook of another hanger.
Alan: "...her step-daddy?..."
"It's expectation today that we, men, come to a woman with our own baggage sorted, folded, and packed. Ain't no woman got time to be cleaning up emotional crumbs some caveman's dribbling under the table."
Farooq threw an assortment of garments over his right arm and clicked his heels toward the fitting room. Quicker than a new Adobe Acrobat update, the woman who had helmed the Eddie Bauer check-out line appeared as a sentinel blocking Farooq's path.
"Only one person allowed in the fitting room at a time," the woman said.
"Oh, it's okay," Farooq said, pushing passed her, "They need supervision when it comes to taste."
But the woman's arm locked between her and the fitting room's door frame. Farooq bumped his neck against the crook of her elbow and fell backward two feet.
"Them's the protocols," the woman said. She wore a light blue mask that bunched up at the bridge beneath her nose. Viral saw her nostrils flare like a dinosaur hungry for a lamb.
Farooq reached into his purse and removed a red and white keffiyeh. Quickly, with the dexterity of a Bedouin, he wrapped the checkered print around his lower face and closely cropped, though noticeably thinning, hair.
"You call that a mask?" he said. "This is a mask."
Viral watched the woman's eyes reverse dilate to pinpricks as she relived the trauma of a recent installment of Fox News. She must have been conditioned, Viral thought, because the colors of Farooq's scarf sent her equilibrium spinning like a bull. Beneath the mask, she stammered, and above her eyebrows arched. If Viral had just entered the store and seen the woman's reaction he would have assumed Farooq had exposed himself. Apparently suggesting Hamas was tantamount to slipping the tip, or flashing D, in the Eddie Bauer employee code of conduct.
Viral bobbed his head to the rhythm of the woman's underarms rubbing against the nylon hoody she wore with her name tag attached. Farooq nodded to the fellas, a tacit sign that the intifada had cleared the road ahead.
"Who's ready to transform?" Farooq asked from beneath his head-wrap.
The dramatic flourish made Viral smile and nearly helped him forget about the mumbled compliment he'd feebly passed toward Gyn. But the promise of an escaped past vanished as Alan continued to sputter through workshopping his quip.
Alan: "...his own daddy in law of himself?..."
That, Viral admitted, had the capacity to burn, but not nearly as much as the red-hot poker his father's name carried from Gyn's lips into his gut.