Terrorist (20 page)

Ahmad sees his mother as an aging woman still in her heart a girl, playing at art and love—for she is alive lately with a preoccupation in which her son detects a new lover, though this one, unlike the run of them, does not come around to the apartment and vie witJi Ahmad for dominance of the premises.
She may be your mother but I fuck her,
their manner said, and this too was American, this valuing of sexual performance over all family ties. The American way is to hate one's family and flee from it. Even the parents conspire in this, welcoming signs of independence from the child and laughing at disobedience. There is not that bonding love which the Prophet expressed for his daughter Fatimah:
Fatimah is a part of my body; whoever hurts her, has hurt me, and whoever hurts me has hurt God.
Ahmad does not hate his mother; she is too scattered to hate, too distracted by her

pursuit of happiness. Though they still live together in that apartment perfumed with the sweet and acrid odors of oil paints, she has as little to do with the self he presents to the daytime world as do the pajamas, greasy widi sweat, that he sleeps in at night and sheds before the shower through which he hurries into the morning purity of the working day, and his mile walk to work. For some years it has been awkward, their bodies sharing the limited space of the apartment. Her ideas of healthy behavior include appearing before her son in her underwear or a summer nightie that allows the shadows of her private parts to show through. On the summer street she wears halters and miniskirts, blouses unbuttoned at the top and low-slung jeans tightest where she is fullest. When he rebukes her attire as improper and provocative, she mocks and teases him as if he is flirting with her. Only at the hospital, with pale-green scrubs, decently baggy, worn over her indiscreet street clothes, does she meet the Prophet's injunction to women, in the twenty-fourth sura, to throw veils over their bosoms and to display their ornaments only to dieir husbands and fathers and sons and brothers and slaves and eunuchs and, the Book emphasizes,
children who note not women's nakedness.
As a child often or less, he more than once, to patch over the lack of a babysitter, waited for her at Saint Francis's and would rejoice to see her flushed with the hurry of her job, muffled below the waist in scrub pants and tliick-soled running shoes, with no bangles to break die silence. A tense moment was reached when, at fifteen, he became taller dian she, and sprouted a dark down on his upper lip: still under forty, she still foolishly hoped to catch a man, to pluck a rich doctor from the midst of his harem of comely young attendants, and her teen-age son was betraying her as middle-aged.

From Ahmad's standpoint she looked and acted younger

than a mother should. In the countries of the Mediterranean and the Middle East, women withdrew into wrinkles and a proud shapelessness; an indecent confusion between a mother and a mate was not possible. Praise Allah, Ahmad never dreamed of sleeping with his mother, never undressed her in those spaces of his brain where Satan thrusts vileness upon the dreaming and the daydreaming. In truth, insofar as the boy allows himself to link such thoughts with the image of his mother, she is not his type. Her flesh, mottled with pink and dotted with freckles, seems unnaturally white, like a leper's; his taste, developed in his years at Central High, is for darker skins, cocoa and caramel and chocolate, and for the alluring mystery of eyes whose blackness, opaque at first glance, deepens to the purple of plums or the glinting brown of syrup—what in the Qur'an figure as
large dark eyeballs, kept close in their pavilions.
The Book promises:
And theirs shall be the dark-eyed houris, chaste as hidden pearls: a guerdon for their deeds.
Ahmad regards his mother as a mistake that his father made but that he never would.

Charlie is married, to a Lebanese woman Ahmad sees rarely, coming into the store toward closing hour, at the end of her own day's work, which was performed in a legal office where tax forms are filled out for those who cannot do it for themselves, and where paper intercessions are made with the governments of the city, the state, and the nation as each exacts its tribute from all citizens. There is a mannish air to her Western dress and pants suits, and only her olive complexion and tfiick, untrimmed eyebrows distinguish her from a kafir. Her hair bushes out to several inches all around her head, but in the photograph Charlie keeps on his desk she is wearing an extensive head scarf that conceals every hair, and smiles above the faces of two small children. He never

speaks of her, yet speaks of women often, especially the women who appear on television commercials.

"Did you see the one on the Levitra ad for guys who can't get it up?"

"I rarely watch television," Ahmad tells him. "Now tliat I am no longer a child, it does not interest me."

"Well, it should—how can you know what the corporations that run this country are doing to us if you don't? The one in the Levitra ad is my idea of absolute pussy, purring away about her 'guy' and how he likes 'quality' in his erections—she doesn't say 'erections' but that's what the whole ad is about, pricks getting hard enough, erectile dysfunction is the biggest thing the drug-makers have hit upon since Valium—and the way she gazes off into the middle distance and gets misty-eyed, you can just see, see through a woman's eyes, this big stiff prick of his, hard as a rock, and her mouth does this funny little thing—she has a
great
mouth—it kind of ripples, tiie tiny little muscles in the lips, so you know she's picturing it, thinking of blowing it—the
perfect
mouth for cocksucking—and then, looking, you know, all kind of misty and smug and sexually satisfied, she turns to the guy— some male model, probably gay in his real life—and, quick as a wink, says,
'Look
at that!' and touches his cheek where he was making a dimple, listening sheepishly to her talking about how great he is. You wonder how the hell diey did it— how many takes on videotape before she thought of it, or if the scriptwriter for
the
commercial thought of it and wrote it out ahead of time—but it seems so spontaneous, you wonder how they got her to look so sexed-up. She really has that happily fucked look women get, you know? And it's not just the soft focus."

This, Ahmad thinks to himself a little mournfully, is male

talk, which he, in his severe white shirt and black jeans, skirted the edges of in high school, and which his father might have provided in measured and less obscene fashion, had Omar Ashmawy waited to play a father's role. Ahmad is grateful to Charlie for including him in the club of male friendship. Fifteen or more years older than he, and married though he doesn't sound it, Charlie seems to assume that Ahmad knows everything he knows, or that if not he wants to know it. The boy finds it easier to talk to Charlie sideways, staring ahead through the truck windshield and with his hands on the wheel, than he does face to face. He tells him, blushing in exposing his piety, "I do not find that television encourages clean thoughts."

"Hell, no. Wake up: it's not meant to. Most of it is just crap they put out to fill in between the commercials. That's what I'd love to be doing, if I didn't have Dad's business to keep from going under. His brother got it going with him and now sits down there in Florida bleeding us dry with his cut. I'd love to make commercials. Planning it out, putting together the elements—the director, the cast, the sets, the script; those things have to have a script—and then socking John Q. Public with it, right in the kisser, so he can't ever think straight again. Your gut to his gut, telling him what he can't live without. What else do they give us, these media moguls? The news is sob-sister stuff—Diane Sawyer, the poor Afghani babies, boo-hoo-hoo—or else straight propaganda; Bush complains about Putin turning into Stalin, but we're worse than the poor old clunky Kremlin ever was. The Commies just wanted to brainwash you. The new powers that be, the international corporations, want to wash your brains away, period. They want to turn you into machines for consuming—the chicken-coop society. All this

entertainment—Madman, it's crap, the same crap that kept the masses zombified in the Depression, only then you stood in line and paid a quarter for the movie, where today they hand it to you free, with the advertisers paying a million a minute for the chance to mess with your heads."

Ahmad, steering, tries to agree: "It is not on the Straight Path."

"You kidding? It's the Yellow Brick Road, paved with insidious intentions."
In-sid-i-ous,
Ahmad thinks, recalling the last time he was preached at. In the side of his field of vision he sees sparks of saliva spray from Charlie's mouth in his hurry to speak. "Sports," the man spits out. "They pay zillions for the rights to televise sports. It's reality without being real. The money has ruined the professional leagues; nobody sticks with their team any more, they jump ship for another fifteen mill when already they can't count the money they have. There used to be team loyalty and some regional identification, but the morons in the stands don't know what they're missing. They think this has always been it, greedy players and records broken every year. Barry Bonds—he's better than Ruth, better than DiMaggio, but who can love that juiced-up surly bastard? Fans now don't know about love. They don't care about it. Sports are like video games; the players are holograms. You listen to these radio talk shows and want to say to these Cheeseheads or Jetheads or whatever who spout off endlessly, 'Oh, please, get a fucking life.' My God, the poor saps have all these statistics memorized, as if
they^re
getting paid A-Rod's salary. And the so-called comedies the networks dish up—Jesus— who's laughing? It's slop. And Leno and Letterman, more slop. But the commercials, they are fantastic. They're like Faberge eggs. When somebody in this country wants to sell

you something, they really buckle down. They get intense. You watch the same commercial twenty times, you see how every second has been weighed out in gold. They're full of what physicists call
information.
Would you know, for example, that Americans were as sick as they are, full of indigestion and impotence and baldness, always wetting their pants and having sore assholes, if you didn't watch commercials? I know you say you never watch it, but you really shouldn't miss this Ex-Lax commercial with this cute dish with long straight hair and Waspy long teeth who looks out through the camera and tells you, just
you,
sitting there with your bag of Fritos, that she has a weakness for junk food—skinny as a rail, with a weakness for junk food supposedly—and has to battle constipation sometimes? How old is she? Twenty-five if that, and as buff as Lance Armstrong, and you can bet she hasn't missed taking a dump for a day in her life, but the Ex-Lax CEO wants the old ladies out there not to be ashamed of their plugged-up colons. 'Look,' he's saying to them, the Ex-Lax CEO is saying, 'even a snappy Waspy chick like this can't always take a shit, or keep her underpants dry on the golf course, or her hemorrhoids from ruining her day in the bleachers; so, Grandma, you're not some old piece of crud on the trash heap, you're in the same boat with these young glamour pusses!' "

"It is a society that fears getting old," Ahmad agrees, gently braking in anticipation of a far-off green light's turning red before the truck gets there. "Infidels do not know how to die."

"No," Charlie says, his unstoppable voice halting, and sounding cautious. "Who does?" he asks.

"True believers," Ahmad tells him, since he has asked. "They know that Paradise awaits the righteous." Gazing

through Excellency's tall and dirty windshield at the oil-stained macadam and red taillights and blaring blobs of reflected sun that compose a summer day along a truck route in New Jersey, he quotes the Qur'an:
"God giveth you life, then causeth you to die: then will He assemble you on the day of resurrection: there is no doubt of it."

"Absolutely," Charlie says. "Good stuff. 'No doubt of it.' Me, if a good reason came up, I'd be happy to cash it in. You, you're too young. You got all your life ahead of you."

"Not so," Ahmad says. He did not hear in Charlie's gruff response the quaver of doubt, the silken shimmer of irony, which he detects in the voice of Shaikh Rashid. Charlie is a man of the world, but Islam is solidly part of that world. Lebanese are not fine-honed and two-edged like Yemenis or handsome and vanishing like Egyptians. He shyly points out, "Already I have lived longer than many martyrs in Iran and Iraq."

But Charlie is not done with the women he sees on television commercials. "And now," he says, "the drug cartels have made such a killing with Viagra and so on they're selling sex enhancement, as they call it, to women. There's one commercial—you may not have seen it, it doesn't come on too often—showing a woman, kind of sensible and plain, a schoolteacher, you figure, or an office manager for some middle-grade tech company, not the upper end, with this little frown on her face so you know something's missing in her life, and the music adds an undercurrent, kind of a minor-key nagging, and the next thing you know you see her floating along swathed in this filmy stuff, barefoot; she better be barefoot, because when you look she's walking on water, trailing ripples, there off the beach where it's just a couple of inches deep, but even so she's not sinking in, and has a new

hairdo, and better makeup, so she's gone all misty in the face, like that terrific cocksucker I was describing—I think they have some dilator they put in the eyes of these women to make them look that way—and then you get the reason, the logo of this new 'hormone enhancer,' they call it. The message is, she's been laid. She's been knocking herself silly with multiple orgasms. They would never have admitted that in commercials ten, fifteen years ago—that women want it, they want it a lot; being nicked is a relaxant and a beauty aid. How about you, Madman? You getting a lot lately?"