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Sayid was not a good Muslim. He wanted to be able to blame life on the island, but he couldn’t. He had never been the type to prostrate himself five times a day for his prayers. Sometimes, the best he could do was once a day. He’d also never taken his pilgrimage. He tried to be kind to the poor, although since he'd been relatively poor most of his life, especially now, it was hard to judge. He’d said that there was no God but Allah, but at times he hadn’t quite been sure. All in all, in his life there were scores of things he should have done that he didn’t, and even more things that he never should have done that he did with apology and finally relish.
It didn’t matter that Sayid’s heart was devoted to Allah in the same way a man’s heart might be dedicated to a long-dead spouse: refusing to move on, sometimes stubbornly, sometimes because it was maybe the only thing that seemed reasonable to cling to. It didn’t seem to matter, because the Islam that people recognized was the very one he could not forgive. He thought that given the state of the world, he would be very happy to account himself a bad Muslim. But that didn’t explain his restless, homeless feeling, the hollowness in his heart.
He generally did pray at least once a day, at dusk, even if he only vaguely knew which direction Mecca was. This daily ritual saved him, he knew. If he didn’t have that chance to block out the world and remember that there were things more powerful than their constant stupidity, he would have broken by now. He wished for a copy of the Qur'an, but it would have likely been translated into English or something other than the sacred language that actually had the power to bring him peace with its familiar poetry.
He prayed now in a different way than he had before. Surviving the crash had made the world more real, just as had slicing open a man’s neck and watching blood spill on the floor. Just enough but not too much.
*
Eko started each day doing the one thing he knew he must, for his salvation and his sanity: he apologized. He always thought of it as an apology and not begging God for forgiveness, because he wasn’t sure if the things he’d done could be forgiven. Strangely enough, he was fairly sure God had already forgiven him for being a priest. God would know his necessity and reward him for choosing something good this time, something life-giving rather than destructive, or at least he would be glad that a good thing chose him, just as surely as the drug runners had all those years ago.
His role as a religious man was important, to him and to others. He had always had the bulk to make people obey him, but it was different when Charlie scrambled after a falling rafter in their skeleton of a church. Charlie obeyed his body as though it were a mass of unerring, mystical truth. He felt like he was a magnet, drawing out the curiosity and the sadness and the pain of the people around him. They didn’t even have to tell him; he simply saw it. He’d always been an observant man—paranoid, he might have said, and because he had to be—but taking on the collar had made his vision startlingly clear. It had also given him something to do with the energy that had always lain, crouched and waiting, in his heart. He had once projected it like the terrible wrath of God, when he had no God but himself, but now he let it physically radiate from him until he could calm even a woman as dangerous as he.
So he started each day with a full rosary and then his own personal litany of sins, because repeating them kept him from forgetting. But once spoken, he let his words fly up to the sky to stay there throughout the day. He imagined them physically arriving at God’s doorstep, where they might be gingerly examined and finally rejected, sent back to earth while he slept so that he awoke with this fresh need, every day, to speak them out of his soul for a while.
*
When Sayid heard that Eko was building a church, he didn’t think it in the slightest bit odd, even though everyone else did. That he was being assisted by Charlie was a little puzzling, but not in the grand scheme of things. It seemed that nobody stayed an outcast on this island for too long. There was always someone more righteous or more broken that needed to give absolution.
As Sayid walked into the clearing in the heat of the day, Eko was there alone, and he didn’t turn for the longest time from what he was doing. Then he simply pivoted on the large stick he held planted on the ground until he was face to face with Sayid. “Hello,” he said.
“You have lost your helper.”
“He is feeling sick today. He would have worked until he was very ill, but I asked him to go back to the beach. For my own sake.” Eko gave a calm smile, and it was then he realized how odd it was that he’d never spoken to this man, only watched him work from time to time.
“What should I call you? Mister Eko?”
“Eko is enough. But would you permit me to call you Sayid?”
“Why would I not?”
“I am sorry if I hurt you.” Sayid looked at him quizzically, so he said, “When Ana shot the beautiful woman who died. I am sorry if I fell too heavily on you.”
Sayid hadn’t expected anything so deep from a casual conversation, and he struggled to keep himself from being pulled back into that quicksand he’d only recently learned to drag himself out of. He forced his mental gaze away from Shannon’s broken body and remembered panic mixed with numbness, his own and Ana Lucia’s. “Sometimes, when I think about that day, I feel as if you were trying to protect me as well as Ana Lucia.”
Eko just smiled, ethereal again. “So I may call you by your name?”
“Yes.”
“Good. Because it is easy to see that you are someone I should know better.”
“Why?”
“I could talk to you of who you are to these people, but instead I will ask you: how do you know where to find Mecca if you don’t know where you are?”
“The sun. And I believe that Allah will understand the…limitations I have here.”
“Yes, I think that is very much like I imagine the God we know. Do you know anything about the Catholic faith?”
“Not very much.”
“We honor God through making our churches beautiful. We use gold and silver and whatever shines to make his value known. What we see is important to us as we worship.” He gestured to a crude statue of the virgin Mary.
Sayid shook his head. “It is blasphemous for a Muslim to create images of Mohammed.”
“Yes,” he said. “We all do things in our own way.” Leaning the stick against the frame of the building, he walked a few paces closer to Sayid, close enough that they could actually see each other’s eyes when they talked. Eko’s imposing figure was nothing compared to the deep darkness of his eyes. They should have frightened Sayid, but instead they drew him in.
Eko said, “Why have you come here?”
“I do not know.”
“Do you think Allah would forgive this building?”
“For what?”
“Being built by two clumsy, imperfect people. And for having no gold.”
“Why does it matter what Allah would say?”
“Is this not his house?”
Sayid smiled, then. “I don’t know exactly what it is that Allah wants. I never have.”
“I could tell you what I think God wants, but I would not insult you. What I will say is I have seen you praying, and it rewards me with hope.”
Eko returned to his structure, examining it but clearly not ignoring Sayid. Sayid asked him, “Do you need any help here, Eko?”
“I thank you, but it would hurt Charlie terribly to let anyone share in our project.”
So Sayid nodded at him and walked toward the beach side of the clearing. Then Eko added, “I will also say one more thing that you do not need to answer.”
Sayid turned back, chilled by Eko’s tone, not threatening but speaking of things it was almost certain Sayid didn’t want to discuss. It was rather like he was encountering Eko not in some strange, unreal jungle tragedy but suddenly, out of the quiet, and he felt no less like Eko had knocked him to the ground and pinned his arms.
Eko said, “I know that there is a man you are all keeping in the hatch. I think he is a bad man. I will not say whether it is right to hurt him, but you should not let him go. I do not think you will. But you will end up hurting yourself if you continue to go to him and ask questions that you cannot get answers for. Do not ask me how I know this or why I feel bold enough to say such things. I only know they are true.”
There didn’t seem to be a reply to that, so Sayid continued out of the clearing. Then Eko called out behind him, with a touch of the frantic: “If I know, then I am one you may tell. Do not forget.”
*
Eko and Charlie were working hard in the merciless heat the next day when Sayid strolled past. He was out on the beach, but he turned his head for a moment to look into the clearing to survey their progress. He locked eyes with Eko only briefly before he went on. At one time, Eko had believed that if he spoke too much, he would reveal himself to be too vague, too enigmatic to be understood, but eventually he realized that what he lacked in ability to say, people heard anyway, without the words. And then there were some men and women who only understood the world in such half-formed phrases and clouded ideas, because the world was too sharp and too difficult to see in its reality. That need for things vaguer than bright, piercing hope sometimes came from having been the world’s sharpness, having embodied the world’s difficulty, having detested it even as it probed a finger into the soul, cold and dirty.
Eko knew Sayid. He had to hope it would be enough to be of help to either of them.