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By Root 1252 0

just feel your way along (unless you’re Kay, in which case you barely slow down, despite the gimpy leg) to the next door, which feels as if it could open to a dungeon, an arsenal or an opium den. Suddenly you find yourself inside a dim, low space full of men wearing ankle-length tunics, with devout-looking beards and faces that always convey surprise and displeasure no matter how many times we come. Middle Eastern music plays in the background, but shuts off as soon as we walk in. Seeing Kay, some of the men walk out. Then Walid comes out and greets us, and while still stealing nervous glances at us, the remaining men go back to their work, which involves slicing open an endless heap of cardboard boxes containing all manner of small electronics and personal hygiene products, plus tobacco and baby formula, then setting out the boxes on shelves for clients like us to rummage through.

Given the way you enter, Screaming Eagle doesn’t feel like a legitimate business, but instead like part of an underground economy where much goes on that is sketchy. Essentially, Walid is a middleman who dips his hand in the torrents of consumer goods flowing about the globe. Things like razor blades, teeth whitener, iPod headphones and batteries moving around peripatetically between the factories where they are made and the shelves where they are finally sold, and sometimes getting hijacked. Take baby formula, one of the most expensive items in a grocery store. The underground retail market loves almost nothing more than a twenty-five-dollar can of Enfamil because it has a constant worldwide demand and the price is consistently high. In fact, illicit sales of Similac and Enfamil are thought to reach hundreds of millions of dollars globally, and attract the likes of—yes—Al Qaeda and Hezbollah. It’s laughable but true, and though Screaming Eagle isn’t an outlet of the terrorist baby-formula-and-teeth-whitening market (every time government inspectors have raided our store, their stuff has checked out), lots of places just like it in Brooklyn are.

This is one reason I have the urge to leave—the feeling of being an intruder. Walid’s employees, who have the jumpy air of newly arrived immigrants, stop working so they can stare at us. Maybe they’re offended; after all, most of Screaming Eagle’s clients are Middle Eastern shopkeepers like old Salim, who got us into this place. There aren’t many mismatched couples like the clean-cut white guy and the Asian grandma wearing a skin-tight T-shirt and red lipstick, trailing cigarette smoke.

It testifies to Kay’s character, courage or whatever you want to call it that she appears to be the only woman to set foot into Jetro or Screaming Eagle. At first that struck me as odd, since you always see women at Korean delis. You see men too, but less frequently, and often just in their golf clothes at the beginning or the end of the day. At many Korean-owned businesses, a husband’s job is to bring money to and from the store and open the heavy steel shades (leading to the moniker “shutterman”) before heading off to the driving range. Many also pick out the store’s inventory at a place like Jetro or the Hunts Point produce market in the Bronx. However, with Edward running his own business, Kay does this part, too.

At Screaming Eagle she avidly sifts through the cardboard boxes. She’s in her element; this is her kind of shopping. It takes brass to come in here and a merchant’s steely eye to find the good stuff, and at the end Kay gets to jujitsu with Walid over prices. The discounts end up being worth it, but even if they weren’t I think Kay would come in here anyway. Afterward she always wants me to tell her what I know about Yemen and the Middle East, which isn’t much. It may look like Kay’s all business, but she’s curious, just like anyone else. Who are these people? What are they doing here? and What do they think of us? Which are, of course, the same questions I have about Kay.

GAB’S COUSIN JUNG comes over that Sunday for a barbecue, and while chatting with him in the backyard I confide my struggle to understand