I’m sitting at Rajiya’s Café in Midtown, waiting for the rakweh I ordered. Maria calls and reminds me that I must be back in the office soon because Curtis Brown is penciled in at 3:30. Thanks, I tell her, I’ll be there soon.

Twenty years ago, Curtis was the star running back at Syracuse. A Heisman Trophy runner-up and the projected number one pick in the NFL draft, Curtis was once the highlight of everyone’s Saturday during football season. Coincidentally, I was a resident at Syracuse while Curtis was playing, so I remember him quite well (my friend Dr. Ronnie Lewis, a fellow resident and Curtis’s after-practice tutor, recommended my practice to him). I remember watching the game his senior year when his helmet split apart. I remember the replay of him being carted off the field. Now, two decades after his injury, Curtis is the head groundskeeper at Fordham Prep, a bouncer on weekends, and my newest patient.

In the café, I anxiously thumb through my phone as has been my habit lately. I haven’t been able to put my phone down since October. I find myself constantly poring through an endless barrage of news articles (my kids call it ‘doomscrolling,’ a term I think is as daunting as it is accurate). I’ve been closely following Columbia University’s solidarity encampment, even though the campus is less than mile from my office. I’m reading about student arrests that happened on campus a few hours ago. At least I’m trying to, but my phone keeps stuttering with incoming calls. First it was Maria, now my mother. The screen says the call is from my mother’s nurse Dani, but I know it’s my mother on the other end. Dani always texts me before calling. Looking at my watch, I suppose my mother would be up now. I answer, reluctantly.

“Mama, shuu fi?” It’s quiet on the other end. “Are you there?” No answer. I hear talking, but not to me. The voices sound far away. The microphone crunches in my ear when a voice finally responds.

“So sorry, Dr. Khatib, it’s me. I left my phone in the other room for one second and found her trying to call you again.” She sounds exhausted and frustrated. I don’t blame her.

“Don’t sweat it. How is she?”

“It’s still early, but the fact that she knew how to call you is a good sign.”

“Sure, I guess. Does she or you need anything? I hope she hasn’t been too difficult for you.” I hear my mother’s voice distantly on the other end, though I can’t understand what she’s saying. It sounds like Dani has moved into another room.

“No, no we’ve got a fun day planned. After her exercises we’re off to the park for a picnic, then I’ll have her bathed and dressed for the evening. We’re showing The Maltese Falcon tonight.” Her tone almost convinces me she’s talking about a friend and not my senile, 94-year-old mother.

“Sounds like fun,” I say. “You have my credit card for anything you might need. Don’t get into too much trouble, you two.”

“We’ll try, but you know how chatty she gets after a meal. Would you like to speak with her? She was asking about you last night.”

I should. I really should. “No, I can’t. I have a patient coming into the office now. Give her my love, and I’ll talk to you later, okay?”

“Of course. And sorry, again. I’ll be more careful about my phone.”

“A girl your age? I’m surprised the thing ever leaves your hands.” She laughs, and I’m relieved she hadn’t taken that the wrong way.

“All right, you take care, Doctor K.”

“You as well and thank you for all your hard work, Dani.”

The coffee comes, cardamom and all, and I try to enjoy it. It’s impossible to taste or even smell it without thinking of Mama and Baba. I’ve become a regular here because the coffee is sublime, and it reminds me of my childhood. Waking up to scent of it in our little apartment, watching Mama’s ibrik boil on our stovetop. It’s bittersweet, though. Every sip since Mama’s cognitive decline feels like a lashing for my professional absence. Maybe part of the reason I come here is as punishment for missing the window to diagnose her Alzheimer’s early on. She hasn’t made her own coffee for a long time; now, her coffee cups only know the Nespresso pod sludge Dani gives her (I’ve told Dani a few times to seek alternatives since we’re boycotting Nestle, but who knows if she listened). If my mother could travel again, I would bring her here specifically for Rajiya’s coffee, and I would hope desperately that it would jar some memories free from the shackles of her disease. I look into my cup at my own muddied reflection. I still need the caffeine to function, so I drink quickly despite burning my tongue.

Because of the three-hour difference between New York and California and my mother’s cognitive decline, it has been too difficult for me to handle any meaningful attempt at conversation with her. She only seems to recall fragments of her life. Not even her life in America, but rather, she remembers her life in Jenin before her family fled in exile. Every time we’ve talked for the past few months, she tells the same story about her and her older sister drying apricots on the roof of their home. Sometimes, when she tries to tell me something that isn’t true, I’ve been unable to hold my tongue and try to correct her. This happened two nights ago when, for some reason, she’d been fixated on where I was born. She believed the same midwife who delivered her in Jenin had also received me in the same room. When I told her that my birth certificate is registered in Brooklyn and that Abouna Yusuf baptized me in our kitchen sink after the church caught fire, she started to cry, then repeated her claims as if what I said meant nothing. I find myself upset when she argues with me, almost as if I’m a little boy again, getting in trouble for something I swear I didn’t do.

I wipe the coffee remnants from my mouth with a napkin and look at the lip-lined stains. The napkin stays in my hand on the subway back to the office while the furious sound of Charles Mingus’s bass thumps deeply into my brain.

I light the candle Maria had bought me for my desk. It’s one of those expensive, three-wick candles, the kind that costs extra because its wicks replicate the crackle of a wood-burning flame. I had to clear off room on my desk to place the damn thing. It looks like a flowerpot packed to the brim with black soil, the wicks like three little germs sprouting from the endless April showers. Maria knocks, and she holds the door for Curtis.

“Hey, Doc, what’s happening,” Curtis asks, standing up and shaking my hand with the might of a thousand men. As he moves, I hear the jingle of what I assume are his custodial keys and think about how cumbersome and redundant they must be, or if they’re anything like I’ve seen in the movies where a custodian is fumbling frantically with an endless keyring.

“Afternoon, Curt, how’s things?”

“Gettin’ by, you know, same thing different day.”

“Yeah, no kidding. Only thing changing is the weather,” I say, as if the brutalization of protesting students and the bombing of innocent civilians are normal occurrences. “Catch the Knicks on Tuesday?”

“Of course. This might be the year.”

“We’ll see. Anything can happen before the playoffs, I know you know that. Did you ever have basketball aspirations?”

He laughs and laces his fingers behind his head. He’s not looking at me, which is not like him. “Everyone in the neighborhood did, but football worked itself out. I wouldn’t have made it in the NBA.”

“I doubt that. When I used to watch you run the ball, the way you moved and broke through tackles, I thought nothing was impossible for you athletically. Who knows, you might’ve been the next Charles Barkley prospect before Zion ever learned to dribble.”

Curtis politely smiles, but he seems distracted. He’s looking around for something, or maybe nothing at all. Perhaps he’s just trying to occupy his mind with anything other than my compliments. Then he speaks quite suddenly, seriously.

“I just got something to get off my chest. Don’t think I’m crazy though, all right? ‘Cause I’m not.”

Obviously, this, whatever it might be, is something intimate he’s been holding on to. I’ve seen this kind of thing before.

Curtis is reaching into his coverall pocket. I hear his keys clashing against each other. He opens his fist, and more than three dozen coins rain down onto the table. They’re dimes, I realize. He’s looking at me as if I should know what to do with them.

“I’m going to be straight with you. All I ask is you hear me out,” he says. He has a particular innocence in his expression that’s hard to describe aside from a softness around the eyes. I know this kind of face; I imagine mine looks the same whenever I attempt to realign the axis of my mother’s memories.

I nod, but we’re interrupted by my phone. It’s Dani’s caller ID, though I’m certain it’s not Dani. She’ll handle it, her. I decline the call and reply saying I’m with a patient. I look up from the phone with apologetic eyes. “Sorry, my mother. Everything’s fine,” I say, hoping I’m right. Curtis’ hands are folded patiently, fingers locked except the two indexes are pressed together upright. His hands look like they can rip a phonebook in half.

He begins speaking about his childhood. Some of the details are also already known to me from the mosaic of Curtis’ media coverage. Raised in Newark, older sister Kiara, military father, schoolteacher/choir-director mother. ESPN ate those occupational details up if I recall correctly.

“What about these coins? Are they from childhood?”

He nods without breaking his momentum. “I was in middle school when I fell out with God. I figured God didn’t have time for us. I was in church only because I wouldn’t be able to watch football after. Even my coach back then was our deacon and had us end practice with a prayer. I had a few dimes in my slacks walking home from service when I was about 11 or something, I can’t remember. I do remember I had holes in the bottom of my shoes. I took one of dimes and wished for my daddy to find a new job, then I threw it into a drain off the curb where I was standing. It’s some Disney shit, but that’s what I did. And you know what? It worked. He got hired for a managerial job he applied for months ago and started making more money than anybody we knew. No more holes in my shoes, no more rips in my sister’s skirts.”

Despite the sharpness in Curtis’ memory, I’m starting to see some signs of CTE reflected in his behavior. Chronic traumatic encephalopathy is one of those mysteries in the sense that I can’t completely verify with Curtis as long as he lives. All our advanced imagining can’t diagnose the disease on living patients, so observation coupled with speech and behavioral analysis must suffice. The signs I’ve seen so far point to it, but his fluid speech indicates that if this is CTE, he is in its earliest stages. Now there’s concerns with memory and identity, possibly some hallucinations or skewed perceptions of reality.

“That wasn’t the only time it happened,” he continues, preventing me from asking clarifying questions. “I told you I didn’t want you to think I was crazy, but this is real. I wished for Kiara to get into Princeton on a scholarship and for my mom’s back to heal.”

He seems much more relaxed, as if the weight of this secret had been a burden. His CTE might be worse than I originally thought. The clock is telling me we’ve only been talking for five minutes, yet I’ve never been more interested with a mind in all my years as a psychiatrist.

I’m lying awake, listening to my wife Shireen gently snore as she dreams. I cannot stop thinking about Curtis’s session. We talked more about his habits, which led us to something we decided to label the ‘memory bank.’ From what I understand, Curtis developed an idiosyncratic habit when he was 11 that, according to him, made miracles happen in his life: Curtis drops dimes (specifically dimes) into storm drains around the city and makes wishes as if it were at the behest of a genie. All three wishes he’d told me earlier came true, admittedly in a different order than how he’d wished them and with months between each wish’s manifestation, but he was convinced he made them happen, nonetheless. He even said that he wished to become the best football player of all time. When I asked him if that wish had come true, he said it would’ve if he hadn’t gotten hurt. Even though I can say he was certainly a gifted athlete, I wanted to press him about this, professionally and gently, about how chance factored into these wishes, such as his injury due to an equipment manufacturer’s error. I couldn’t go through with it, though. It didn’t seem appropriate since it was clear this secret was difficult for Curtis to admit to someone, probably for the first time. I decided instead to ask what he wishes for now, if at all.

To be remembered, he said.

Fame is a powerful drug, especially for someone who’d been in the spotlight from a young age. To want so desperately for your memory to resurface in someone’s mind that you resort to superstitious spending, as if memory is a tangible commodity, fascinated me. That’s when we stepped away from focuses on the wishes from childhood and referred to this concept as the memory bank.

I get up from the bed, careful not to wake my wife, and retrieve a glass of water from the kitchen. Everything in my wrinkled brain is telling me that magical, sewer-shaped wishing wells do not exist. Anywhere, not just Manhattan. It sounds like a story my grandmother would’ve told me, Allah Yerhama. She had all kinds of folklores and myths I remember from childhood. Reading tea leaves and sediment at the bottom of cups, my older sister rubbing chamomile on my skin to soothe aches when my mother was working in the store, tracing prayers into the flour mounds of bread dough. It’s funny what we bring with us into adulthood. Just the other morning Shireen and I were making Ka’ak bread at the house for Easter, and I still etched a cross into the flour the way my grandmother had shown me. Does that gesture do anything? No, not physically, but I feel compelled to do so because I’ve always done it. I believe that kind of nostalgia is like what Curtis is experiencing. As I slide back into bed, my hand involuntarily reaches for the phone on my nightstand, but I pull it back under the duvet. I need to sleep.

Sure enough, the April showers do yield May flowers. It’s a beautiful morning in the city, finally. The air is just crisp enough to feel inside my chest, yet I’m able to sit in the park near my office comfortably without a heavy overcoat. My phone buzzes, an alert. More airstrikes in Rafah. I put it away without opening the article. I want to smash the thing, but my life is tethered to it. Shireen and I had talked the other night over dinner about consuming too much media. She made me promise to keep my scrolling to a minimum. We hadn’t decided on what the “minimum” would be, so I’ve been trying to just stop altogether. I can’t keep my phone on Do Not Disturb (the moon button, as my adult children like to remind me) in case Dani needs to reach me. She’s sent a photo of Mama in her room watching TV. When I moved her into St. Simon’s last year, I went and bought her one of those Sony smart TVs that have all the applications on it. Underneath the photo, Dani writes: Happy Bayan watching YouTube! She loves this wilderness building and cooking channel lol I’ve been enjoying them too! We watch them every night. Something about them makes her tell stories from her childhood. Hope all is well!

I recognize the blanket around my mother’s legs. It’s one she’d made probably in the early seventies. I remember it from my childhood in our old Brooklyn house. It was white, but now it’s almost a wilted-dandelion yellow since it used to drape over the lounge chair near the window.

“Mornin’ Doctor K,” Curtis says as he sits down in front of my desk.

“Hey Curt, how are you?”

“Fine, you know. Staying busy. You saw Brunson go off the other night,” he asks, smiling.

We then spent the first half hour of his appointment talking about basketball, about playoff hopes, my memories of Clyde Frazier as a kid, about a silly game that has little-to-no bearing on the fabric of our universe. Honestly, it was just what I needed after this morning. I had a post-call meltdown after arguing with my mother. She was worried that Baba hadn’t been home for hours, so I spent the better part of my commute to the office trying to remind her Baba died over six years ago.

“That’s good. Well, let’s begin. How have your memory bank deposits been since last time?”

Curtis is rubbing the back of his neck where a scar climbs toward the center of his skull.

“That’s what I want to tell you. I didn’t wish for anything since last time.”

“Why not?”

“I was thinking, and I realized my last wish already came true a month ago, and I didn’t even notice it. It was you, Doc. You remembered me, the old me. You remembered how I used to play. You knew me.”

As he’s telling me this, his voice wavers. Curtis doesn’t strike me as someone who has cried in front of another man, which makes me believe what he’s saying, but he’s also not making sense. He knows I spent the early part of my medical career in Syracuse at the height of his fame. He knows Ronnie Lewis, the man whose referral landed him in my office, and I have been friends for over twenty years. How could I have not known who he was?

“Curt, have you ever thought about correlations versus causality? Or to put it differently, do you truly believe I wouldn’t have remembered you if you hadn’t wished to be remembered?”

“I know you wouldn’t have remembered me because no one does. And I don’t know what you want to call it. Magic, God, whatever. I’m just telling you what happened to me.”

I look at the clock. We’ve gone ten minutes over our time. Before he leaves, I encourage Curtis to revisit the memory bank at least once and write down his thoughts. Not necessarily to make a wish, but to just record what is going through his mind before performing the action. He says he will do that if I think it’ll help, then I walk him to the door, and we shake hands. Returning to my desk, I notice he’d left a dime on it. I put the coin in my pocket and will probably forget about it.

4:45PM. I’m at my usual table by the window, sipping coffee and eating a piece of knafeh. Rajiya herself is rarely in here these days. Typically, her daughter Samira runs things, and when she saw me, she brought the knafeh slice for my birthday. My birthday. I almost forgot it myself.

With my coffee and my knafeh, I think about my conversation with Curtis and wonder if my age is catching up to me, if I should’ve listened to Shireen and my children about retiring earlier this year. For a man my age I am quite able in both mind and body, yet the more I lean toward believing Curtis rather than dismissing his story as CTE nonsense, I can’t help but question myself. Part of me is so desperate for a light in the seemingly endless darkness, from the pandemic and the murder of George Floyd to now Gaza, that magic seems like the only solution to save humanity from itself.

My head has been spinning these past few months; thousands of students around the country are unifying on their campuses for Gaza. Never in my lifetime did I think I’d see this. The most surprising development of all being the rather intense support from all the young white people. I shouldn’t say all, but a lot of them, anyway. My father, who was a thuwwar in Jenin as a youth, used to tell me, “Our kids will take our country back. You’ll see. Our kids will set us free.” It was something he started saying around the time of the First Intifada that stuck with him through the Second, all the way until he died. If only he could see the kids now. Allah Yerhamo. Thinking of him reminds me that I need to call my mother back since I’d hung up on her so rudely this morning. First, a cigarette.

It's already in my mouth before I make it outside. I’m standing in front of the window where my table is to make sure no one touches my things. As I’m fumbling around for my lighter, I pull the coin out. Palming it, I find my lighter in the same pocket and light the cigarette resting between my lips. It’s my theory that all Arabs, at some point in their lives, develop an addiction to the taste of tobacco and coffee together. The combination of harshness and bitterness. As far as when this addiction manifests, my research is inconclusive. Perhaps it’s when our mothers become senile.

The dime looks sad in my palm. Forgotten, like Curtis had been after his injury, even like my mother’s memories. This coin used to be worth something. It still is, of course, but it just doesn’t feel like enough anymore. Here it is, face up, barely catching any light on its surface because of its grassy rust. It’s so small in my hand that I almost can’t feel it. When’s the last time anyone has used a dime, or even asked for one? Everything’s so inflated I can almost wretch at the fact that ten cents is closer to zero than a dollar. I’d bet half of my youngest son’s generation doesn’t know who is on the front. FDR. Right? Why’d I think it was Eisenhower? No, he’s on the silver dollar, or was on. I’m getting too old and too comfortable with digital wallets. There’s a storm drain between me and the sidewalk, right off the curb. I’m thinking about my mother. I take the dime over to it and let it fall from my fingers, watching it slip between the grates and disappear into the earth. I inhale the rest of my cigarette before returning to my coffee and knafeh.

My lockscreen awakens. Incoming Facetime from Dani. The glow reflects off the tired coffee cup. I put in the wireless earbuds my kids bought for me.

My mother appears on the screen; her face, full of life and color, illuminates the palm of my hand.

“Mama? I was just going to call you.”

“Ya Allah,” she exclaims, “Laish? What kind of mother doesn’t call her son on his birthday?” She is sitting against a radiant golden sun, typical of a southern California morning. Looking closer, it almost looks like she’s been adorned with a halo.

My mother, with her weathered soprano voice, begins singing Sana helwa ya gameel through the phone, the halo around her head glowing brighter. She doesn’t finish the song as my weeping drowns out her voice.

“Habibi, shuu fi,” she asks her son, the same way she had more times than she could remember.