Terrorist (29 page)

"In Islam, diat's called blasphemy, trying to usurp God's prerogative of creation."

"Well, I know. That's why there aren't any statues or paintings in mosques. To me that seems unnecessarily bleak. God gave us eyes to see what, then?"

She talks while rinsing her cereal bowl and slapping it into the drainer in the sink, and hurrying her toast up out of the toaster and slapping on jam between gulps of coffee. Ahmad tells her, "God is supposed to be beyond description. Didn't the nuns say tiiat?"

"Not really, that I remember. But, then, I only had tJiree years of parochial school before switching to public, where they were supposed not to mention God, for fear some Jewish child would go home and tell his atheist lawyer parents." She looks at her watch, thick-faced like a diver's watch, with big numbers she can see while taking a pulse. "Darling, I love having a serious conversation, maybe you could convert me, except there are all these baggy hot
clotb.es
they make you wear, but now I'm truly getting late and must run. I don't even have time to swing you by work, I'm so sorry, and anyway you'd be the first one tJiere. Why don't you finish up your breakfast and the dishes and tben walk over to the store, or even run? It's only ten blocks."

"Twelve."

"Remember how you used to run everywhere in those little track shorts? I was so proud, you looked so sexy."

"Mother, I love you."

Touched, even stricken, sensing some abyss of need within him but able only to dart to the edge and away, Teresa pecks a kiss on her son's cheek and tells Ahmad, "Well, of course, you sweet thing, and I do you. What is it the French say?
Qa va sans dire.
It goes without saying."

He is blushing, stupidly, hating his own hot face. But he must get this out: "I mean, all tJiose years, there I was obsessing about my father, and
you
were the one taking care of me."
Our mother is the Earth itself, from which we drew existence.

Her hands flit over herself to check that everything is in place; she looks at her watch again, and he can feel her mind flying, flying away. Her response makes him doubt that she heard what he said. "I know, dear—we all make mistakes in relationships. Can you possibly see to your own supper

tonight? The Wednesday-evening sketch group is starting up again, we have a model tonight—you know, we each kick in ten dollars to pay her and have five-minute poses followed by a longer sitting, you can bring pastels but they discourage oils. Anyway, Leo Wilde called the otber day and I promised to go with him. You remember Leo, don't you? I used to go out with him, a little. Stocky, wears his hair in a ponytail, funny little granny glasses—"

"I
remember
him, Motber," Ahmad says coldly. "One of your losers."

He watches her rush out the door, hears her rapid padded steps in die hall and die muffled heave of die elevator answering her call. At the sink he washes his dirty bowl and orange-juice glass with a new zeal, the thoroughness of a last time. He leaves tbem in the drainer to dry. They are utterly clean, like a desert morning, die crescent moon sharing die sky with Venus.

At Excellency, out on die lot, witb the freshly loaded orange truck between themselves and the office window from which old, bald Mr. Chehab might see diem talking and sense a conspiracy, he tells Charlie, "I'm in."

"I heard. Good." Charlie gives Ahmad a look, and it's as if his Lebanese eyes are new to the boy, crystalline in complexity, tbis part of us not quite flesh, brittle witb its amber rays and granulations, die area around the pupil paler than the dark-brown ring rimming the iris. Charlie has a wife and children and a fadier, Ahmad realizes; he is tied to diis world in a way Ahmad isn't. His substance is knottier. "You sure, Madman?"

"As God is my witness," Ahmad tells him. "I burn to do it."

It always faintly embarrasses him, he does not know why, when God arises between himself and Charlie. The man makes one of his intricate quick mouths, a pinching of the lips together and then puffing them out, as if something inside has been regretfully kept from escaping.

"Then you'll need to meet some specialists. I'll arrange it." He hesitates. "It's a little tricky, it may not happen tomorrow. How're your nerves?"

"I have placed myself in God's hand, and feel very serene. My own will, my own cravings, are at rest."

"Right." Charlie lifts his fist and punches Ahmad on the shoulder with it, in a gesture of solidarity and mutual congratulation such as when football players bump helmets, or basketball players exchange high-fives even as they backpedal into their defensive positions. "All systems go," Charlie says; his wry smile and wary eyes mix in an expression in which Ahmad recognizes the mixed nature—Mecca and Medina, the rapt inspiration and the patient working-out— of any holy enterprise on Earth.

Not die next day but the next, a Friday, Charlie, sitting in the passenger seat, directs the truck to leave the lot and go right on Reagan, then left at the light up on Sixteenth down to West Main, into that section of New Prospect, extending some blocks west of the Islamic Center, where emigrants from the Middle East, Turks and Syrians and Kurds packed into steerage on the glamorous transatlantic liners, settled generations ago, when the silk-dyeing and leather-tanning plants were in full operation. Signs, red on yellow, black on green, advertise in Arabic script and Roman alphabet
Al Madena Grocery, Turkiyem Beauty, Al-Basba, Baitul Wahid Ahmadiyya.
The older men visible on die streets have long since discarded the gallabiya and the fez for the dusty-black

Western-style suits, shapeless with daily wear, favored by the Mediterranean males, Sicilians and Greeks, who preceded them in this neighborhood of tight-to-the-street row houses. The younger Arab-Americans, idle and watchful, have adopted die bulky running shoes, droopy oversize jeans, and hooded sweatshirts of black homeys. Ahmad, in his prim white shirt and his black jeans slim as two stovepipes, would not fit in here. To these co-religionists, Islam is less a faith, a filigreed doorway into the supernatural, than a habit, a facet of their condition as an underclass, alien in a nation that persists in thinking of itself as light-skinned, English-speaking, and Christian. To Ahmad these blocks feel like an underworld he is timidly visiting, an outsider among outsiders.

Charlie seems at ease here, cheerfully exchanging jabber for jabber as he directs Ahmad to park the truck in a jammed parking lot behind a Pep Boys and the Al-Aqsa True Value hardware store. He pleadingly holds up ten fingers to trie True Value clerk who has emerged, arguing that nobody in his right mind could refuse him ten minutes of off-street parking; to clarify his point, a ten-dollar bill changes hands. Walking away, he mutters to Ahmad, "Out on the street the damn truck sticks out like a circus van."

"You do not wish to be observed," Ahmad deduces. "But who would observe?"

"You never know" is the unsatisfactory reply. They walk, at a pace brisker than Charlie's usual one, along a back alley running parallel to Main and haphazardly lined with razor-wire-topped chain-link fences, asphalt lots forbiddingly marked private property and customers only, and the porches and front steps of housing meekly fitted into back-lot slices of urban space, their original wooden sides covered

with aluminum clapboards or metal sheets patterned to imitate bricks. Non-domestic structures of real, time-darkened brick serve as warehouses and back-lot workplaces for the shops that front on Main Street; some are now boarded-up shells, with every exposed window smashed by methodical delinquents, and from others emerge the glow and clangor of small-scale manufacture or repair still being carried forward. One such building, of a brick painted a dour tan, has rendered its metal-sashed windows opaque with an interior coating of the same tan paint. Its wide overhead garage door is down, and the tin sign above, advertising in clumsy hand-painted letters Costello's Machine Shop
All Repairs and Body Work,
has faded and rusted into near-illegibility. Charlie raps on a small side door of quilted metal, with a shiny new brass lock. After a considerable silence, a voice from within asks, "Yes? Who?"

"Chehab," Charlie says. "And the driver."

He speaks so softly that Ahmad doubts he has been heard, but the door does open, and a scowling young man steps aside. Ahmad is coping with his sensation that he has seen this man before when Charlie roughly, witli fear's rigid touch, takes his arm and pushes him inside. The interior space smells of oil-soaked concrete and an unexpected substance that Ahmad recognizes from two summers spent, in his mid-teens, as a junior member of a lawn crew: fertilizer. The caustic dry odor of it parches his nose and sinuses; there are also the scents of an acetylene welding torch and of closeted male bodies needing to be bathed and aired. Ahmad wonders if the men—two of them, the younger slender one and a stockier older, who turns out to be the technician— were among the four in the cottage on the Jersey Shore. He saw them for only a few minutes, in an unlit room and then

through a dirty window, but they exuded this same sullen tension, as of distance runners who have trained too long. They resent being asked to talk. But they owe Charlie the deference paid a supplier and an arranger, at a level above them. Ahmad they regard with a kind of dread, as if, so soon to be a martyr, he is already a ghost.

"La ildha Ma Allah,"
he greets them, as a reassurance. Only the younger—and though young he is older than Ahmad by some years—replies in kind,
"Muhammad rasvlu Allah,
" muttering the formula as if tricked into an indiscretion. Ahmad sees that no merely human response, no nuance of sympathy or humor, is expected of them; they are operatives, soldiers, units. He straightens his posture, seeking their good opinion, shouldering his similar role.

Traces of the building's former life as Costello's Machine Shop linger in the cloistered, layered air: overhead, beams, chains, and pulleys for hoisting engines and axles; workbenches and arrays of small drawers whose pulls are blackened by greasy fingers; pegboards painted with the silhouettes of absent tools; scraps of wire and sheet metal and rubber tubing left where the last hand set them aside at the end of the last repair; drifts of discarded oil cans and gaskets and traction belts and emptied parts packages in the corners, behind oil drums used as trash cans. In the center of the concrete floor, under the only bright lights, with extension cords feeding into its cab like the tubes sustaining a patient on life support, sits a truck much the size and shape of Excellency. Instead of being a Ford Triton E-350, it is a GMC 3 500, not orange but a bleak white, the way it came from the factory. On its side has been lettered, in carefully but not professionally done black block letters, the words Window Shades Systems.

Ahmad dislikes the truck at first sight; the vehicle has a furtive anonymity, a generic blankness. It has a hard-used, slummy look. At the side of the New Jersey Turnpike he has often seen ancient sedans from the 'sixties and 'seventies, bloated and two-tone and chrome-laden, broken down, with some hapless family of color clustered waiting for the state police to come and rescue them and tow away their shabby bargain. This bone-white truck savors of such poverty, such pathetic attempts to keep up in America, to join the easy seventy-miles-per-hour mainstream. His mother's maroon Subaru, with its Bondo-patched fender and its red enamel abraded by years of acid New Jersey air, was another pathetic attempt. Whereas bright-orange Excellency, its letters gold-edged, has a spruce jolliness to it—as Charlie said, a circus air.

The older, shorter of the two operatives, who is fractionally more friendly, beckons Ahmad to come look witii him into the cab's open door. His hands, the fingertips stained with oil, flow toward an unusual element between the seats—a metal box the size of a cigar box, its metal painted a military drab, with two terminal knobs on the top and insulated wires trailing from these back into the body of the truck. Since the space between the driver's and passenger's seats is deep and awkward to reach down into, the device rests not on the floor but on an inverted plastic milk crate, duct-taped to the crate's bottom for security. On one side of the detonator—for such it must be—there is a yellow contact lever, and in the center, sunk a half-inch in a little well where a thumb would fit, a glossy red button. The color-coding smacks of military simplicity, of ignorant young men being trained along the simplest possible lines, the sunken button guarding against accidental detonation. The man

explains to Ahmad, "This switch safety switch. Move to right"—
snap
—"like this, device armed. Then push button down and hold—
boom.
Four thousand kilos ammonium nitrate in back. Twice what McVeigh had. That much needed to break steel tunnel sheath." His black-tipped hands shape a circle, demonstrating.

"Tunnel," Ahmad repeats, stupidly, nobody having spoken to him before now of a tunnel. "What tunnel?"

"Lincoln," the man answers, with slight surprise but no more emotion than a thrown switch. "No trucks allowed in Holland."

Ahmad silently absorbs this. The man turns to Charlie. "He knows?"

"He does now," Charlie says.

The man gives Ahmad a gap-toothed smile, his friendliness growing. His flowing hands describe a larger circle. "Morning rush," he explains. "From Jersey side. Right-hand tunnel only one for trucks. Newest built of three, nineteen fifty-one. Newest but not strongest. Older construction better. Two-thirds through, weak place, where tunnel makes turn. Even if outer sheatJi hold and keep out water, air system destroyed and all suffocate. Smoke, pressure. For you, no pain, not even panic moment. Instead, happiness of success and God's warm welcome."