Jihadi (4 page)

The dead guy telling this story wants you to know Thelonius was born in 1961 in Los Angeles, California, the only child of a suspicious, hard-working, well-read, bourbon-loving, wife-beating truck driver, George, and a homemaker with low self-esteem, Irene. Back then, you called a homemaker a housewife. They moved to San Francisco. Made a home there. George said he was tired of the road.

By 1966, Thelonius’s father, now a suspicious, hard-working alcoholic, had used the savings of five years to buy himself a small bookstore. In which he cut his wife’s throat. Thelonius happened to observe that, which wasn’t in George’s plan.

Thelonius moved in with his grandparents Hal and Louise B. in La Pine, Oregon, right after what his grandparents agreed to refer to as The Accident, when they referred to it at all. Which wasn’t often.

He kept asking when he would be able to go home. They always changed the subject. When they did, he read his copy of
SERGEANT USA #109. THE HERO THAT WAS
.

Nine months after Thelonius arrived in Oregon, his father went to prison. Read a lot there, according to the initial, and only, letter. Didn’t write back when Thelonius responded to that letter nine times.

In La Pine, Thelonius craved approval, created a series of alarmingly violent hand-drawn comic books, and described himself to teachers and everyone else who would listen as a ‘bright, active, and curious child’. Whoever heard that had to agree.

At some point during the confusing years following The Accident, Thelonius established a certainty: the necessity of victory. Everything else became a blur. The more things Thelonius made happen, the dead guy recalls, the more chances there were for winning. Winning mattered.

Two of his teachers, Miss Tokstad (Arts and Crafts) and Mr. Hess (Everything Else) described him as ‘extremely competitive’.

He blamed others with a deep ferocity, and was always in a hurry. Preventing him from attaining goals, or being perceived as doing so, was dangerous. He devoured a book on memory techniques, with the aim of always securing the highest grades on tests. Coming in second on an exam produced an unwholesome expression on the boy’s face. One recess, during a foot race, he elbowed a much smaller, younger boy, who had scored one hundred on a math test, out of the way, causing a fall that broke the boy’s wrist.

Thelonius insisted, with apparent seriousness, that his opponent was an android.

Mr. Hess did not send his star pupil to see the principal – Thelonius had, after all, reported the collision – but he did suspect some kind of problem. Back in the early seventies, students with excellent grades who had extreme competitiveness issues were not referred to psychologists.

Thelonius finished first in that race, got more A’s, made more things happen. He refused to wait for anything. He became a bright, active, curious boy scout, then a bright, active, curious class president, then a bright, active, curious high school swimming star.

Thelonius worked out a lot, developed serious upper body strength, made All-Everything, made the Honor Society, and was extremely patriotic. His grandparents told him how proud they were about the way he’d bounced back from The Accident. Thinking his grandson was sleeping, Hal said to Louise late one night that George had no right to see how well his son was doing, that George never inspired anyone, never won anything, and never amounted to anything but a killer.

George died in prison, trying to kill someone who’d threatened him. Thelonius was nineteen when Hal and Louise sat him down to tell him. He went to his room and reread
THE HERO THAT WAS
.

A voice said,
If you kill, make sure you kill for America, kid
.

Thelonius captained the winning swimming team in the 1980
Oregon State High School Championships, a special moment of triumph. It was followed by enrolment in the army in 1982, an even bigger triumph, given Hal’s status as an army veteran. That was followed by winning a spot in the Special Forces in 1983: the biggest triumph of Thelonius’s young life. That was followed by a vasectomy in 1985 by an army doctor who had been nervous about performing the procedure on a twenty-four-year-old. Thelonius said, ‘Just get started.’

Thelonius had almost gotten somebody pregnant. That was not going to happen again.

Two years in Special Forces. Then off to school to study international relations, which the army paid for, because they saw potential in Thelonius. Then more time in school, also paid for by the army. Then, on an application form, a request that he ‘briefly summarize’ his ‘life philosophy’, which he shared and, later, framed.

Followed by certain members of the intelligence community seeing potential in Thelonius, like the army had.

And falling in love with Becky.

Followed by his entry into the exciting world of espionage. Followed by a fast track at the Directorate, which he loved. Followed by various hush-hush assignments.

Followed, in 2005, by the mess he ran into in the Islamic Republic, which got complicated both for himself and for Child the cat, a mixed-breed whose uncertain parentage Becky could never excuse.

Followed by his murder during an interrogation session in (he predicts) the early summer of 2006.

The grey-suited man with grey hair, reduced to shouting from the hood of a black Lincoln Continental and clearly not used to this kind of duty, was a friend of Thelonius Liddell’s.

He flicked off the bullhorn by accident, then flicked it back on. It popped, too loud, as it reawakened. The embassy, he informed everyone, had investigated the incident with the flechettes. It had been a tragic accident. People should return to their homes.

Sorry!

No one returned home.

The crowd had grown to thirty thousand now. It surged with firm, unintelligible purpose against three of the four massive iron gates that surrounded the embassy compound. No one paid attention to the man in grey. They all kept chanting
Allahu Akbar
.

The earnest man on the Lincoln, having reached the limit of his effectiveness, asked if there was anyone in the crowd who could translate for him so that he could do a better job of clarifying the situation. Fatima did not even think about raising her hand.

She found herself in a corner, pushed by the throng’s ceaseless, expanding geometry into an obscure convergence of two angles of the embassy gate. There were many such nooks surrounding the embassy. This particular nook had a locked service entry. It barricaded a dumpster.

A heavyset woman next to Fatima jabbed her in the side.

Fatima assumed at first that the jab in her side was just an over-energetic spike in the chaotic, respectful movement of the huge crowd, but when the heavyset woman elbowed her a second, and then a third time, Fatima turned and glared. The woman’s eyebrows arched upward in alarm, and she pointed toward a segment of the immaculately manicured embassy lawn before them.

Adjacent to that lawn was a small rectangle of concrete, right behind the dumpster: a flat place that looked like a loading area. The rectangle was cut off from the view of the rest of the crowd. There, a few feet away from them on the rectangle of cement, a U.S. marine, his back to Fatima, stood above a large, open Koran.

He was urinating on it.

No answer from Becky. The milk carton was still, but it bore her picture.

Thelonius and Becky had been married since 1993, which was twelve years now. In all of that time, Thelonius had refused to have a baby with her, his reasons not always open for discussion. She had certainly worked them all out for herself by now. Both Becky and Thelonius, of course, had lost their mothers at a young age.

‘I don’t understand why you’re so worried about repeating your father’s mistakes,’ Becky had said on their honeymoon, her smile wide. ‘Just don’t make
my
father’s mistakes. Don’t disrespect me.
Don’t betray me. Don’t micromanage me. Don’t screw the help. Or I’ll kill you.’

They laughed at that, raised their glasses of red wine, clinked them, drank to his promise, laughed at Dad, and (Thelonius having sworn credibly enough that he had no intention of screwing the help) made love.

Becky talked a lot during sex, something Thelonius didn’t and couldn’t do. She even told fitful, whispered stories that focused him while he was inside her. She was all about stage management, all words and knees and words and elbows and words and green eyes to die for. He did what she told him to do. Why not? She made him feel, for a moment at least, like he was home.

The whirring blades of a helicopter sent to monitor the crowd drowned out what would have been the splash of a stream of urine hitting the Koran’s open pages.

When he finished, the marine rearranged himself, picked the Koran up by a dry corner, heaved it into the dumpster, and stalked away in an arrogant, loose-limbed manner that made Fatima’s flesh crawl. He had kept his back to them the whole time. Neither Fatima nor the heavyset woman could have accurately described his face.

Fatima fought a powerful urge to flee. Given the crowd, she could not have run away, even if she’d allowed herself to try. She stood her ground.

Perhaps she was brave. Or perhaps the moment was structured in such a way as to instil courage.

Naked Becky held Thelonius in her arms in 1993 and said, ‘Big boys don’t cry.’

It was a night of stars, counted through a big window overlooking a broad, unnameable Massachusetts lake happy to reflect starlight. Becky, whose mother had read her Shakespeare, pointed out the constellations she knew, of which there were many: the lesser lights, the greater ones, and even her slim hand, the same shade of even flame as the moon. She counted that as a constellation, too. The night was luminous. She was luminous. Her story of Prospero. Her kiss on his forehead. Her love.

‘We won’t be talking about this again. Time goes in one direction. Do you hear?’

He nodded.

‘Say it out loud, Thelonius. Time goes in one direction.’

‘Time,’ Thelonius said, ‘goes in one direction.’

He closed his eyes and tried to believe it. His face was still wet all over. In La Pine, Oregon, his grandmother Louise wiped his face, told him that his mother had loved him very much. Told him he would be fine. The boy was not so sure. He had begun to have flashbacks, found himself, without warning, watching his father cut his mother. He was terrified he would have one at school.

‘Say it out loud, Thelonius,’ his grandmother Louise said. ‘Everything is going to be all right.’

‘Everything,’ Thelonius said, ‘is going to be all right.’

Haste and hard work, he found, stopped the flashbacks.

The era of Just Getting Started had begun.

In the late spring of 2000, Thelonius, sleeping poorly, exhausted with Becky’s lectures on the subject of parenthood, Just Got Started. He brought a little charcoal fluffball of a kitten to their ample Salem foursquare. He unboxed him in the living room for Becky’s inspection, announcing him, mock-pretentiously, as Child.

Becky refused to call him that at first, but everything she proposed over the next week or so – Marx, Stalin, Castro, Lenin, Lennon
– brought unacceptable cultural and geopolitical baggage that Thelonius rejected as unsuited to the animal’s genial, baffled personality. So he remained Child.

Child, Becky said, played into Thelonius’s ‘deep need to be responded to’. Child saw things that were not there and expressed his concerns about them until Thelonius stroked his furry back to calm him. Then he purred in gratitude. Child noticed when Thelonius was not around, and, more often than not, went to whatever room Thelonius occupied. Child became skittish and anxious whenever Thelonius went off on assignment, relaxed again when he came home. Child was family.

At the time Child died, Thelonius and Becky had not made love for a long time, but it was best (he decided, sitting there at the kitchen table) not to think about things like that. Time might collapse on him.