Jihadi (27 page)

The man behind the bar punched a button, nodded to the manager, and put the phone away. Then: nothing. An awful silence descended upon the whole restaurant.

Only Thelonius heard the volcano’s low rumble. It forced his eyes shut, made him think of what it would be like to shoot rat-eyed Dick Unferth through the head. Who ought to have known better, for Christ’s sake. Who at least ought to have come to him.

‘Look at me, you sick bastard,’ Becky screamed. ‘You had this
coming
. You
both
did. I have been double-crossed for the last time. You hear? I will not let either of you, or any other man, get the jump on me, ever again. I will
not
be infantilized. I am taking up management of R. L. Firestone, Incorporated for the foreseeable future, and
I will control our messaging as I see fit, by whatever
means
I see fit, and I will pursue
whatever
kind of alliance with Dick Unferth that I decide makes the most sense for you and me strategically.’

Thelonius, who had been trying to make the scene go away, stood, opened his eyes.

The volcano blew.

He flipped the table. Silver clattered. Glass shattered.

‘Choose. Him or me. By the time I get back from this mission. You hear?’

Becky turned away from him.

She headed toward the door without a word and was gone. The restaurant went still as a corpse. Thelonius stood in the middle of that stillness for a long time.

‘He could have warned me,’ Thelonius shouted. ‘He knew before I did. It was
his
damn fault things got out of hand. That bastard could have told me.’

‘Told you what?’ asked the Raisin.

The cell again. The window again and the city at nightfall outside again. The book again on the windowsill. All of it waiting for him. Had he wanted this discussion? Was it even worth avoiding?

‘That my wife was over the goddamned edge. That she wanted him, wanted his body, I mean, but only to prove a point.’

The Raisin turned away. Negotiated a new pack of cigarettes that needed opening.

‘A private matter,’ the Raisin said.

Another emptiness. Just like Becky turning away when he flipped the table.

Damn it.

‘Don’t you dare tune me out. Listen, I try to fix things when they go wrong. I do
try
. Your eating with a fork or with your fingers. It’s none of my business. I know that. I try. Sometimes the words just come out wrong. But when they do, it’s just
words
, goddammit. It’s just
words
we say. We’re not murderers, you know. Listen to me. Hey. Look me in the
eye
when I’m talking to you.’

He had, without quite realizing it, advanced upon the tiny grey figure. He had come to within an inch of it, and was hissing into its face.

‘So. America is in a rage,’ the Raisin hissed right back, closing in to within an inch of Thelonius.

‘America is about to strike. And it is always the women and the children who end up suffering whenever you resolve to make one of your points, whenever you decide to say something no one can ignore, whenever you choose to destroy something you think needs destroying.’

The ‘s’ sounds caused little drops of spittle to land on Thelonius’s face. The Raisin’s cigarette breath was raw and open.

Thelonius began backing away. He had not meant to go nose to nose, had not meant that at all.

On the floor, the little milk carton on his lunch tray began to vibrate.

‘I am an old woman now,’ the Raisin pronounced carefully, but with a lower, deeper, angrier rasp than before, a rasp that cut right into him. ‘I may seem an easy target. I am fifty, but seventy to the eye, I know, and likely enough to die soon. Two years in here, America. And twenty-four on your American cigarettes. Haram. I shall die here. I have lost a husband and two sons. The husband to the BII, one son to disease, another to murder. All I had. Never a grandchild. Because of
you
, America. And I have something
left
in me.’ The word ‘left’ growled with a ferocity that unsettled him.

Thelonius, stepping and stepping and stepping his way backward, hit the cot, stumbled, flopped upon it without meaning to, and stood again. He took up a position to the side of it, with his back against the wall, as far away from the diatribe as possible. His heart beating hard. The little carton of milk on his tray vibrating still.

‘Are you listening, America?’

An old woman?

‘Two sons from my womb, do you understand?’ The rasp. The blanket. The eyes, yes, no, wait. Wait.

‘Stop
messing
with me,’ Thelonius shouted, ‘I just want
out
of here. Stop
shaking
things. Stop shaking the milk, goddammit. How the hell do you do that? Whatever you’re doing, man. Just stop. What do you mean, you’re an old woman?
Woman?
What is
wrong
with you people? How stupid do you think we
are
? What is with that
shaking
?’

And still the little milk carton shook.

The Raisin scowled, gathered the blanket up shoulder-tight, and rushed at Thelonius like a skittering insect, unpredictable, immediate, inevitable, across the length of the cell in an instant.

She slapped him across the face with surprising force. She grabbed his right wrist.

‘We
all
want out,’ came the sharp, lethal rasp again, and she placed Thelonius’s hand at the fold of the blanket covering her chest. ‘Feel this. Feel it.’

Thelonius did. Her cold hand clasped upon his. He felt her heart beat through the blanket. It paralyzed him.

‘Do you feel this? Do you, America? This is the breast of a woman who nursed two baby boys gone. One from the typhus. When you took out the power grid and the water in 1991. One from a BII sniper, 2001. Both of them dead. All my milk for nothing. You understand?’

Thelonius shook his head. He did not understand.

‘You in your national rage. Making your points to the world. 1991. 2001. 2002. 2003. Your oceans of rage, your flames and your press conferences, your shock and your awe. And always the women and the children cut and howled at and killed in your rage. I will thank you to stay on your own side of the room henceforward, sir.
Thanks to you, they came for me. For
me
. Because I dared to say out loud that the government you installed should be taken down. Concerned I might elicit sympathy, might organize the female inmates. Stuck me here. You want
out
? You have the State Department to talk to. They will get you out. I will
die
here, America. With the men. On your cigarettes. And with all my milk spent for nothing. For America. For you. For your rage. For you to blame your mistakes on others. For you to pretend only other nations go insane. You will stay on this side of the cell,
Murderer
. Do we have an understanding
now
?’

He nodded.

From the corner of his eye, Thelonius saw Sergeant USA crouching at the edge of the cell, his red-white-and-blue mask ablaze in the remnants of the midday sun, levelling a revolver at the wrinkled old woman.

‘No, Sarge. Don’t. Don’t do it.’

She unlocked his hand, surveyed the cell and regarded him with a familiar, professional tolerance. She withdrew slowly, stepping away, her eyes trained on him. When she reached her cot, she averted her gaze again like a cat that knows it is out of attack range.

She just sat there for the longest time.

‘Do us both a favour and avoid telling me how sorry you are,’ she said. ‘Sorry compounds the problem at this stage.’

She picked up her pack of cigarettes, stared at it, discarded it, picked up the prayer beads instead and began to mumble. Sergeant USA holstered his revolver and slipped noiselessly under the cot.

That left Thelonius to sit mute, listening to the mumbling and the humming of the milk carton, which combined for strange harmony. He couldn’t look at the carton for more than a second at a time. So he stared at the ceiling, or at the floor, or at her watching him.

After five minutes or so of moving her beads, she stopped and said, ‘Whenever something vibrates, America, slow down. You should learn how to look at it. Vibrating means change. It means Allah wants you to notice something. And grow. Allah says, “You
see the earth barren and desolate, but when we send down rain to it, it vibrates, and its yields increase. Truly, He who gives life to the earth can give life to those who are dead.” Vibration is life. Change. Growth. If it bothers you at first, look at whatever is shaking for a while and then look again, longer next time, so as to slow down. Keep looking until things
slow down
.’

Thelonius was glad when the guard, oblivious, came to collect the trays.

He stayed on his side of the cell.

‘Goddamn me if I don’t know an insurgent when I see one,’ Mike Mazzoni said, flicking his cigarette through the open window, his eye on something, his blood up. He turned off the music. ‘And
that
is a fucking insurgent.’

This particular insurgent, a pedestrian, also happened to be an asshole: Jimmy’s snivelling younger brother Jimmy Two. When Jimmy Two saw Mike Mazzoni, he shouted ‘DOG MAN!’

The kid, who had frequented the Wreck Room back when there
were dogfights to bet on and shout at, scooped up a handful of pebbles and let fly at the driver’s side of Mike Mazzoni’s armoured vehicle.

‘Game over,’ Mike Mazzoni said.

The pebbles flew in the open window and bounced off the hood: Chicka da chickety chick. One hit Mike Mazzoni on the nose. Then again, the shout: ‘MAZZONI! DOG MAN.’ As he ran, he shouted, ‘MAZZONI DOG MAN!’ over his shoulder again, his elbows and knees flying every which way. He was fast. He turned a corner.

‘Gone, no way to make a positive ID,’ said Dayton. ‘Too quick. Get him next time.’

‘Oh, hell no,’ said Mike Mazzoni. And gunned the engine.

At this very window, as she did the dishes, Wafa had once said of the Americans, ‘They live as though everything is someone else’s fault. They never consider their personal arrogance as connected in any way to the national arrogance that gets them into trouble.’

‘But
we’re
Americans,’ Fatima had protested.

‘Used to be. Not anymore.’

Fatima was the one doing the dishes now. Perhaps the American could be helped. Perhaps not.

There was a sudden howl from outside. Something Noura didn’t like about a flower, which she dropped, then laughed at, then knelt to recover. She gathered more and more of the tiny red-and-white wildflowers, waved her thin hands in dismay as the new batch flew in all directions, and shouted at some insect not to sting her. She ran. She stopped. She lectured the air.

She was no woman yet, not in bearing, certainly not in her capacity to withstand sorrow or challenge. Yet the structure of her body was changing. That was undeniable. At some point soon, someone would have to have a talk with Noura.

Not a talk about the mechanics of the thing. Noura already knew that part backwards and forwards, and occasionally soliloquized about it in her dreamy, matter-of-fact way.

No. This – what Fatima now had to consider – was the Real Discussion, the discussion that came years after all the talk about where babies came from and how they were placed there. This was a different discussion altogether, one requiring care and tact.

This was the talk about the way men and women either helped each other or destroyed each other. The talk about how love either saves or eradicates, how it has no middle way. The talk about what might be expected from men, about the practical advantages of
reinforcing certain restrictions of the faith governing one’s encounters with them, about knowing when and how to turn away from them. It was Noura’s time.

Ummi knew the Real Discussion needed to take place, yet she was no good at that talk. Baba would have been better at giving these talks than Ummi. When it was Fatima’s time, Ummi had only begun the discussion at Wafa’s prompting. Ummi had collapsed into evasion and gossip and reverie when she’d tried to conduct the Real Discussion, and the resulting empty, over-told anecdotes about failed betrothals and sorrowful families had only left Fatima wondering what on earth the pauses, the raised eyebrows and the pointed emphases were all meant to convey.

That left Wafa to conduct the Real Discussion with Fatima.

Wafa did this the very morning after Ummi’s pointless rehashing of her sister-in-law’s broken engagement, which had only led to Fatima rolling eyes. Fast forward to Wafa, strolling with her on the way to buy fruit, her shoulders back and her eyes on the road ahead.

Wafa began with the words ‘Now, Fatima, you know it is your time.’

The talk was masterful, encompassing everything. Not merely what elements of one’s person must be concealed in public, which Fatima knew, but
why
they must be concealed. Not merely whose hand one may not brush against casually with one’s own hand, but
why
it must not be brushed against. What may be expected of men and what may not. How to tell when they believed themselves to be speaking truthfully and when they imagined they were deceiving you.

Wafa’s words had been different from Ummi’s: insight rooted in an experience the origins of which Fatima dared not attempt to decipher; insight every syllable of which spoke of incontestable personal authority. Fatima’s eyes had narrowed, her steps had slowed. Her heart had opened. She had never listened so intently to anyone.

Now Wafa was gone when she was most needed.

Ummi was still useless on such matters, far worse than useless,
in fact: a hindrance and an irritation. With Noura still likely to talk about the naked ravings of Crazytown with anything or anyone that moved, Fatima had to begin the Real Discussion. How? When? Who knew how much good it would do?

Noura was edging toward the outer border of the wild, unthreaded tangle she called a garden, pressing toward that dark pool that lay beyond the kitchen window’s rectangle.

Fatima rapped on the glass. Noura turned, nodded, and came back.

Noura remembered things that mattered to her. The trick, as ever, was to
make
them matter to her.

A horn honked outside. Fatima pictured her silent, expressionless driver waiting, felt his usual sullen impatience and heard the tough, grim motor of his old grey sedan idling. He never got out.

Fatima stayed at the kitchen window and took a moment to remind herself of something else Wafa said while standing on this very spot.