Jihadi (5 page)

Fatima, who had never met the heavyset woman, suggested it might be best to leave unspoken what they had both seen behind the dumpster. She appealed to her as a sister in Islam, said life was complicated enough at the moment. The heavyset woman didn’t respond. Instead, she scowled, averted her gaze, edged away from Fatima, and melted into the crowd.

For the sake of compromise, for the good of the marriage, Becky made a point of noting, once a month or so, that she had gone along with Thelonius’s gag name of Child – ‘but only as a reminder,’ she insisted, ‘that the subject is not closed.’ Five years later, Thelonius asked his unseen wife: ‘Becky. Where is the cat?’

The sound of Becky taking a deep breath. The sound of Becky saying ‘Goodbye’. A flash of peach and black. The sound of the phone being dropped on the cradle. The sound of a familiar argument that had not yet started.

Then from the next room: ‘You’ll be making a speech at the Freedom Banquet, T.’

‘The Freedom Banquet. I’d forgotten. Who’s setting that up?’

‘Dick Unferth,’ Becky’s voice answered. ‘Your new boss.’

Thelonius felt cold rain, pinpricked with hail, piercing his veins.

‘According to Dick, whom we now
trust
, T, that heroic return from the Islamic Republic won us the keynote slot. Keynote! Oh, don’t wince. I mean, you are
home
, aren’t you? You are still
alive
, aren’t you? You are
proof of concept
, right? Keynote means we are top of the heap. Dad or no Dad. It means we get a strategic vision theme, if we want it. Which we do. We get all the big themes we want from now on: freedom, courage, respect, democracy and so forth. Justice, your favourite. If we want that. Also sacrifice; can’t forget sacrifice. Whatever we want. Quite a coup, T. Oh: you’ll love this. Your pal, Carl Arnette? The dispenser of all the good gossip? The Directorate’s embodiment of neutral Switzerland? The one who claims he has no ambitions? Turns out he coveted, and I mean
coveted
coveted, a slot at the Freedom Banquet. Tried to persuade Dick to let him speak right before you. Wanted Dick to give him the First and Fourth Amendments, their ongoing relevance to the mission. Good Gravy.
That
came under serious consideration for about ten seconds. We can go anywhere we want now. Anywhere.
Anywhere
. If we follow the script, and follow the Law of Appearances. So much for us to work toward, you know. If we just work together. Say something, for Christ’s sake, T.’

The Law of Appearances.

Becky’s latest obsession held that, to the degree you managed people’s perceptions, you managed reality. Control the message. Unferth stuff. She had been on this for weeks before he left for the Republic. He had been hoping it would have worn off by now. The ice in Thelonius’s veins ran colder, sharper.

‘I suppose I constitute some kind of internal trophy now.’

She still had not made her way into the room. Her shadow rearranged its hair.

‘Oh, stop. You aren’t really serious about making difficulties. You aren’t going off the reservation
now
. I know you aren’t. Consider the possibilities. There are some big victories in store for us, some
wonderful things, wonderful, if we market ourselves properly. Some respect. If we control the variables. Even heroes have to follow the rules, T, once they get home.’

Market ourselves. Control the variables. Follow the rules.

Icy rain outside, too.

‘What about Carl? He was held hostage, back in ’94, you know. Why shouldn’t he say a few words?’

He already knew the answer. Too pre 9/11.

After the deluge of words, another drought. That disapproving silence of hers, designed to intimidate: there was an art to avoiding it. Like sidestepping her occasional ethnic jokes. You just change the subject the instant you see it coming.

‘By the way,’ Thelonius said, ‘I couldn’t find Child this morning.’

Becky stepped into the dining room.

Having shaken the phone’s vague imprint from her hair, having made it symmetrical again for him, she opened the blinds. She settled into her customary chair, opened the most recent Sunday
New York Times Magazine
, shielded the bottom of her face with it and flashed her green eyes across the top.

‘You couldn’t find Child,’ Becky said, ‘because I drove him to the pound last week while you were still in the Republic.’

Thelonius’s abdomen tightened. The milk carton trembled.

‘That animal no longer made sense here, T. Too many scratches. Too much shedded hair in too many corners. And the litter box. You gone. Who knew how long. Some decisions make themselves. Why are you staring at that?’

The back of Thelonius’s milk carton rattled to a halt. It showed him a colour image of Child, terrified, backed into a bleak cage, eyes wide after having seen too much, his great tufts of dark fur matted with blood and urine. The caption above the photo read: LOST CHILD.

Thelonius backhanded the carton, watched milk spray in a dense arc across the dining room, barely missing Becky. She frowned at him.

‘That was not closed,’ Becky said, calm but firm. ‘Deep breaths, T, from the diaphragm.’

Thelonius obeyed. He had been trained, in moments of crisis, to do what he was told.

The guilty dead guy writing this, recalling his countless misplaced obediences, spots a big expanse of nothing below his scribbled words, finds this nothing preferable, reaches for a new sheet of paper.

A convoy of tanks approached, each equipped with water cannons. Fatima took a deep breath and found cover behind a van. She drew herself into a ball.

In the end, the van did little to protect her from the jets of water, but it did separate her decisively from a photographer she had noticed. She had no desire to show up on the front page of the newspaper the next morning. The tanks dispersed the crowd, pummelling protesters with high-velocity torrents. Order vanished. A cascade of water, stray garments, and lost objects overtook the street. The tanks belonged to the Islamic Republic. The Americans paid for them, though.

People scattered like leaves. Everyone began to head home. The tanks withdrew. When the street was empty enough, Fatima emerged from behind the van.

The next morning’s papers explained that the Americans had apologized for the flechettes. The problem was an error in intelligence. Their troops had believed they were firing those flechettes at insurgents. The story in the paper explained how sorry the Americans were for being wrong about that. Fatima scanned the paper for another news item, but did not find it. She breathed deep and gave thanks to the Creator. It seemed no one besides Fatima and the heavyset woman – whose name Fatima never got – had seen the marine do what he did. An end to it, then.

‘Blind rage?’

Thelonius, standing, staring at his wife’s feet, nodded twice, fast. He breathed in just as deeply as he could breathe. Stress response CONSCIOUS. Stress response CONSCIOUS. Becky straightened in her seat, uncrossed her slim, white ankles, just visible below their curtain of peach-and-black satin, and dropped the
New York Times Magazine
, which landed on the floor with a light slap. She was scanning him, making sure there was movement in the midsection beneath his grey T-shirt and jeans: the diaphragm rising and falling, from long practice. Thelonius refused to meet her eye, but he was breathing deeply, sending her a sign of his intent to cope. Stress response CONSCIOUS. Let the breath in and let the breath out. Thelonius closed his eyes, saw his father holding a bloody knife.

A volcano rumbled.

He shook himself, opened his eyes, meant to walk toward her.

She’s a machine, kid. Take her out.

But his knee flinched, and wouldn’t take the weight.

That damned limp. He sat again.

Stress breath CONSCIOUS.

Look at the puddle breathing on the floor.

The dead guy telling this story has decided not to give titles to these chapters.

That will be Becky’s job, he predicts – aware, as he is, that each of those blanks at the beginning of a chapter will leave an opening, a gap of intention, and counting on Becky, as he does now, to fill those gaps. She fills in all the blanks as she sees fit now. And she leaves blank whatever she concludes does not or should not exist.

The dead guy telling this story wants to make sure Becky knows why he is writing this in the way he is: illuminating people and events and thoughts by impersonating them, experiencing them, thinking them through, creating and recreating them as necessary. Lying. Referring to himself in the third person, even though he’s right here. Or, from time to time, in the second.

Because:

When she first took you into her arms, one of the things she did for you was lie to you and tell you stories. You knew they were lies, the things she told you to get you out of your funks, but you let her tell them anyway. She made you feel better that way. Made you feel that there could be a home for you.

She took care of you.

She made you feel whole for a while. You thought she made you survive. Here in the Beige Motel, you decided, it was the stories that did that. So you concluded you would take yourself into your own arms and tell yourself your own lies. Live your own stories, on paper. And maybe, just maybe, use those stories to resolve your own debts.

THWOCK. PLOOF. KA-THOK.

This page is full now. Maybe you wrote those sound effects too big. On to the next.

Sometimes when you stare at a new, empty rectangle of paper you see yourself entering the gold dawn of the high-mounted window in the Yard.

Sometimes, when you are writing, you find yourself floating there.

Sometimes you feel like you are on your way home.

Fatima wore a gold headscarf her first day on the job. Her new boss subjected her to an hour-long ‘orientation session’. A short, plump, mustachioed, disagreeable-looking fellow, he went by the name of Murad Murad. Thanks to family connections, he had obtained a rumpled military uniform he had no right to wear, and whenever he made the ‘I’m important’ face this attire seemed to him to demand, he looked as though he had just eaten something indigestible. He told Fatima she was to think of him from this point forward as her father. She spent much of her first day trying not to.

After Murad Murad had led her one-on-one ‘orientation session’ – sixty-four minutes of telling Fatima how to find people she already knew how to find, how to turn on a computer she already knew how to turn on – he circled past her cubicle every forty minutes or so to ask how she was settling in.

She told him she was settling in fine.

Becky had earned her Master’s degree in psychology at the age of nineteen.

She considered that the least of her achievements, though. She took greatest pride in her status as the youngest credentialed psychologist ever to be employed by the Directorate. This came about, in part, because of her insistence on prominence in any arena in which she competed, a trait she shared with Thelonius. As she admitted to anyone who asked, the distinctions she earned also had a
great deal to do with family connections. Her family tree, she liked to boast, had ‘deep and twisted roots’.

The Sharps, her mother’s family, had been wealthy segregationists on one side and founding John Birchers on the other. The Firestones, on the other hand, had been academics and diplomats and spies and heavy drinkers, sometimes all in one person.

At her father’s personal request, and such requests from Dad were in fact orders, Becky manned, against her will, the Career Day table for the Directorate at Mt. Sinai University. She had told her father on several occasions, as Career Day approached, that she considered such an assignment beneath her.

‘That,’ said Dad, ‘is the problem.’

Becky arrived early, fulfilling her father’s request (read: order) on a grey, snowy April morning in 1992. That was how she met Thelonius, who was studying international relations at Mt. Sinai. The shivering and sole Directorate representative at a recruitment table she knew herself to be surrealistically overqualified to occupy, she spotted him eyeing her, then pretending to inspect a brochure. He left the table, skittish for some reason. He pushed his way through the big glass door. She got up and followed him out, onto a little terrace, where the flurries had picked up a dense, abrupt momentum. She recruited Thelonius in a blizzard she had no business being out in.

‘I’m Becky Firestone. And you are?’

A Green Beret in a hurry, working on his Master’s degree in international relations. Eyes that drilled through you. Family problems he didn’t feel like discussing, beyond mentioning that his mother had died early. (Hers had, too, but she opted to say nothing of that today.) Tough. Intense. Disciplined. Loved George Bush, the first George Bush, and all he stood for, loved how he had brought the wall down, loved what he had done in Iraq. Hated Communists with a passion. Hated Saddam with a passion. Hated many things with a passion.

They came back indoors and brushed off the snow, careful not to touch each other yet. Becky resumed her spot at the table.

He filled out the form.

Thelonius watched her read his life philosophy over a second time, laugh a second time, look him in the eye.

Becky told him she thought he might like intelligence work. Even in that moment, and for reasons that he would not understand for years to come, part of Thelonius had been tempted to find some way to tell her directly, then and there, that he was not a normal person. That he had every reason to believe he was a difficult man on a difficult trajectory, a glide path that could only disrupt, in painful ways, the orbits it happened to intersect. But she held his gaze and said, right out loud:

‘I’m here to help.’

So he said nothing, in those earliest days, about his being difficult, guided by the twin theories that she had somehow already figured it out – which she had – and that she must surely have known what she was doing.

‘Makes a person think about things like destiny,’ she said from behind the desk, still fixing him with those wide, green eyes.

‘What does?’

‘Your philosophy. The eating thing.’ She arched an eyebrow, as though she wanted him to repeat some part of it out loud.

He looked away.

‘Simple,’ she said, the echoes of a faint smile shading her voice. The voice went higher when she was interested in you. ‘Maybe a little rude and obvious. Some people are afraid of that. Not me. I believe America’s great moments have always come when we offered simple solutions and then delivered them. That’s our destiny in this country. Simplicity. That’s why Communism fell, you know. Simple ideas we proposed and then stuck to. Lines we drew and then defended. No delays, no concessions, no procrastination. It will be you next time. Defending us. I can tell. Making that kind of contribution. Drawing that kind of line. It’s
meant
to be you.’

Her certainty caught him by surprise. He checked again: the green eyes were still trained on him. He was supposed to say something, but nothing came.

‘You want to know why we won the Cold War?’

‘Sure,’ Thelonius said.

‘Because our system is better. Fairer. Theirs was neither just nor perceived as just. That’s why it collapsed. That’s why we buried them. That’s why the next century is going to be the American century. Because perceptions of justice always depend on big, shared ideas that everyone can eventually come to accept as foundational for both themselves and the community. Like enterprise and personal initiative. As you suggest.’

He nodded as though he understood.

‘Personally, I think Washington is a swamp,’ she said, ‘and Langley, too, and yes, I do feel sorry for anyone who has to clear that swamp. You mention Bush. Bush is a good man, maybe a great man, but I do hope the swamp doesn’t drag him and his family down. Langley eats people, you know. It eats them alive.’

‘I’ve heard that, yes.’

‘But maybe it’s worth it – if you are
meant
to make a contribution, that is. For the country, I mean. Bush, by the way, will be re-elected. That’s meant to be, too.’

‘How do you know so much about what’s meant to be?’

‘It’s our job,’ she said, ‘to know what happens next.’

He rushed things. She slept with him quite early on, and against her better judgement, she said, but only after assuring him that the next person she went to bed with would, according to her own personal sense of destiny, become her husband. He nodded. But he was not sure what it meant to agree to such a thing.

Nowadays, Becky does not believe in destiny.

All the years they were together, Becky never formally diagnosed Thelonius – no one ever did – and she never wrote any prescriptions for him, either. But she had fallen in love with him during Career Day. That was the problem.

As a result, she pulled strings for him within the Company, got him on the fast track he craved, helped him to talk things through, usually in bed. She pointed him toward the right articles in the right journals. She also begged him to get therapy, and his stubborn refusal to do so drew her closer to him. She knew he needed help. Needed taking care of.

Nine months into the relationship, six months into his career at the Directorate, he went silent for three brutal days of what was supposed to be their vacation, refusing to speak to her, or look at her, or touch her, sleeping in a separate room of the cottage they’d rented on the Cape. He locked her out of his room and played her mix tapes at top volume.

When he finally emerged, on the morning of the fourth day, he begged her to forgive him for the terrible things he’d said behind the door. She hadn’t heard any of them, whatever they were, and she wondered whether he had said anything terrible at all. Regardless, he obviously regretted
something
. So she forgave him.