ADEEL BABREE

The air is thick with cigar smoke and June heat. Sweat clings to the back of my neck. The fan overhead turned like an old mule, tired but unwilling to quit just yet. Somewhere inside my headphones, Elmore James is dragging a steel bar across six strings and making the universe confess its sins.

And I am thinking about the weight of a single second.

We rarely notice them individually. Instead, we look at the accumulation of these moments. The endless gathering of instants. Tiny droplets of existence collecting in a bucket with a hole in the bottom.

And because we couldn’t think of anything better, we called it “time.”

Years. Months. Weeks. Days. Hours. Minutes. Seconds.

All of them moments.

A life is nothing more than an enormous pile of moments stacked so high we mistake them for permanence. But there is no permanence. There is only this moment.

And then this one.

And then another.

A train rushing through darkness, each carriage coupled to the next.

One moment dragging another.

Dragging another.

Dragging another.Until suddenly you are forty-two years old, sitting in a room that smells like smoke and memory, wondering where everybody went.

I think about him.

Yahya.

Nineteen years old.

My mind doesn’t shut up. It’s like a tired novelist sitting at his desk at 4 a.m., ashtray full, fingers stained with nicotine, rewriting the same damn sentence for the hundredth time. Trying to save the hero. One second earlier. One second later. A different turn of the head. A different word spoken. Or maybe he stays quiet. Maybe this time the hero comes through a different door. Maybe he takes the back alley instead of the front steps. Maybe he misses the train, stays home that night, never answers the telephone. The novelist edits the scene again. Makes the protagonist duck this time. Makes him hesitate less. Changes the weather. Changes the street. Changes the damn laws of physics if he has to. Anything to stop what’s coming. But the story doesn’t listen. And the novelist just sits there, staring at it like it has no right to end that way. As if language could pay off time’s debt.

It can’t.

It never could.

Still the novelist tries again. Still he rewinds everything by one second, like repetition might eventually crack the universe open and let him slip something through.

Useless labor. Exhausted hope dressed up as thought.

One second earlier. One second later.

My mind asks again and again.

What if I had spoken to him for one second longer.

Just one.

A stupid joke in the driveway.

One more sentence.

One more laugh.

One more pointless observation about the weather. “This year it’s gonna hit fifty, Mamoo” he predicted.

One more complaint about life itself.

One more second before he kicked the bike into gear and disappeared down the street forever.

Would that have done it?

Would that have changed everything?

Maybe.

Maybe not.

But the thought sits there.

Like a nail in the tongue.

What if he woke up late?

What if he had spent one second more setting his hair?

What if the toothpaste cap had fallen behind the sink?

What if he couldn’t find his keys that day?

What if he had forgotten his wallet?

What if there was biryani, his favorite, and he stayed over for dinner?

What if I had offered one more piece of ridiculous advice about the future?

He talked about getting married someday. About having a little place with a vegetable garden. The sort of plans nineteen-year-olds make when death is something that happens only to other people. I listened and nodded and offered my usual nonsense. Save money. Learn patience. Don’t worry so much. Sleep. Take care of your hair. Read. Don’t believe everything you read. More fiber. Take a year off. And keep your elbow up. Don’t rush the run-up. Angle the seam if you want swing. You’ll understand when you’re older.

Hah.

I feel so stupid.

I gave him those small pieces of advice like he had all the time in the world to grow into them.

As though he and I were both traveling toward the same distant station.

As though one day he, too, would be sitting in a hot room somewhere, listening to old records, wondering where all the years had gone.

What if his mother had paused for one second before calling him?

What if the traffic light had taken a little longer to change?

What if I had talked so much that he got tired, got bored, and left a minute early?

What if he took just a little longer blowing out the candles on his birthday cake?

What if, in that small pause, he wished for more time?

What if the other boy stayed home that day to watch cricket on the tele?

Death.

It does not need years. Not months. Not even a minute.

One second is enough.

One second.

Between a funny story you tell your friends about how you nearly died one summer and an obituary.

Between is and was.

That day.

That damned day.

Maybe if he had been one second late.

One second.

The length of a blink. The length of a heartbeat. The length of a breath. The flashing clock on the microwave.

One second later, perhaps the other bike passes harmlessly by. One second later, their paths never cross. One second later, metal never meets metal. Bone never meets road. Blood never meets sunlight. His eyes never close for the last time.

One second later, he comes home. One second later, he grows older. One second later, he falls in love. One second later, he gets married. One second later, he complains about bills and back pain and politicians. One second later, he becomes the old man he was supposed to become. One second later, he lives.

Instead, fate chose the other second. The wrong second. The second that arrived exactly on time.

Years will pass. Entire worlds of moments will pass. Thousands upon thousands of sunsets. Millions of seconds. Yet every now and then, some tiny thing tears open the curtain.

A smell.
A song.
A driveway.
The sound of a motorcycle.

And suddenly the dead are standing beside you again. Not as ghosts. Not as spirits. But as possibilities. As futures that were stolen. As roads that should have continued beyond the horizon.

And that is what hurts. Not that they died. Not even that they left. What hurts is knowing they almost didn’t. They were so close to surviving. So close.

One second is such a small thing. Almost nothing. Less than nothing. A speck. A blink. A hiccup in existence. Yet somewhere between one second and the next, an entire human life disappeared.

And tonight, while Elmore James cries through the speakers and the cigar burns slowly toward my fingers, I keep thinking the same impossible thought.

Somewhere in another universe, another accumulation of moments, another train on another track…

he took one second longer.

And he made it home.