Terrorist (30 page)

Ahmad recalls a name dropped weeks ago. "Are you Mr. Karini?"

"No, no," he says. "No no no. Not even friend. Friend of friend—all fight for God against America."

The younger operative, not much older than Ahmad, hears the word "America" and utters a heated long Arabic sentence that Ahmad does not understand. Ahmad asks Charlie, "What did he say?"

Charlie shrugs. "The usual."

"You sure this will work?"

"It'll do a ton of damage, minimum. It'll deliver a statement. It'll make headlines all over the world. They'll be dancing in the streets of Damascus and Karachi, because of you, Madman."

The older unidentified man adds, "Cairo, too." He smiles that engaging smile of square, spaced, tobacco-stained teeth and strikes his chest with his fist and tells Ahmad, "Egyptian."

"So was my father!" Ahmad exclaims, yet in exploration of the bond can only think to ask, "How do you like Mubarak?"

The smile fades. "Tool of America."

Charlie, as if joining in a game, asks, "The Saudi princes?"

"Tools."

"How about Muammar al-Qadaffi?"

"Now, too. Tool. Very sad."

Ahmad resents Charlie intruding in the conversation between what are, after all, the key players, the technician and the martyr; it is as if, his martyrdom assured, he can be brushed aside. A tool. He asserts himself, asking, "Osama bin Laden?"

"Great hero," the man with oil-blackened fingers answers. "Cannot be caught. Like Arafat. A fox." He smiles, but has not forgotten the point of this meeting. He says to Ahmad in his most careful English, "Show me what you will do."

The boy is beset by a freezing sensation, as if reality has shed a layer of its bulky disguise. He overcomes his distaste for the ugly plain truck, dispensable like him. He reaches toward the detonator, his face stretched into a question.

The stocky technician smiles and reassures him, "Is O.K. Not connected. Show me."

The small yellow lever, L-shaped in cross-section, touches his hand, it seems, rather than his hand touching it. "I turn this switch to the right"—it stiffly resists, and then sucks, as if magnetized, into its off position, ninety degrees away— "and push this button down in here down." Involuntarily he closes his eyes, feeling it sink half an inch.

"And hold down," his teacher repeats, "until—"

"Boom,
" Ahmad supplies.

"Yes," the man agrees; the word hangs in the air like a mist.

"You are very brave," the younger, taller, and thinner of the two strangers says, in an English virtually accent-free.

"He is a faithful son of Islam," Charlie tells him. "We all envy him, right?" Again Ahmad feels irritation with Charlie, for acting proprietorial where he has no ownership. Only the doer owns this deed. Something preoccupied and bossy in Charlie's approach casts doubt on the absolute nature of
istishhdd
and the exalted, dread-filled condition of the
istishhddi.

Perhaps the technician feels this slight failure of accord among the warriors, for he rests a paternal hand on Ahmad's shoulder, soiling the boy's white shirt with oily fingerprints, and explains to the others, "His way is good. To be hero for Allah."

Back in the cheerfully orange truck, Charlie confides to Ahmad, "Interesting to see their minds work. Tools, hero: no shades in between. As if Mubarak and Arafat and the Saudis don't all have tlieir special situations and their own intricate games to play."

Again, Charlie strikes a note that feels, to Ahmad in his newly elevated and simplified sense of himself, slightly false. Relativism seems cynical. "Perhaps," he offers in polite con-

tradiction, "God Himself is simple, and employs simple men to shape the world."

"Tools," Charlie says, staring humorlessly ahead through the windshield, which Ahmad wipes every morning but which becomes dirty anyway by the end of the day. "We're all tools. God bless brainless tools—right, Madman?"

A certain simplicity does lay hold of Ahmad in the troughs between surges of terror and then of exaltation, collapsing back into an impatience to be done with it. To have it behind him, whatever "him" will then be. He exists as a close neighbor to the unimaginable. The world in its sunstruck details, the minute scintillations of its interlocked workings, yawns all about him, a glistening bowl of busy emptiness, while within him a sodden black certainty weighs. He cannot forget the transformation awaiting him, behind, as it were, the snapped camera's shutter, even as his senses still receive their familiar bombardment of sights and sounds, scents and tastes. The luster of Paradise leaks backward into his daily life. Things will feel big there, on a cosmic scale; in his childhood, only a few years into this life, falling asleep, he would experience a sensation of hugeness, every cell a world, and this demonstrated to his childish mind religion's truth.

His workload at Excellency has lightened, and he is left with stretches of idleness in which he should read the Qur'an, or study the pamphlets, readily available from overseas sources, composed and printed to prepare a
shahid
—-the ablutions, the mental cleansing of the spirit—for his end, or her end, for women now, their loose black burqas well concealing their explosive vests, are permitted, in Palestine, the privilege of martyrdom. But his mind is too a-flutter to sink

into study. His whole existence has become enraptured as perhaps the Prophet's was in accepting Gabriel's dictation of the divine suras. Ahmad's every minute has taken on the intimate doubleness of prayer, the self-release of turning aside and addressing a self not his own but that of Another, a Being as close as the vein of his neck. More than five times a day he finds the opportunity, most often in the store's barren parking lot, to spread his mat in the eastward direction and touch his forehead to the earth, each time receiving, through the concrete, the close comfort of submission. The slaglike dark weight nagging within him skews his view of die world, and bedecks each twig and telephone wire with jewels he has never before noticed.

Saturday morning, before the store has opened, he sits on a step of die loading platform, observing a black beetle struggling on his back on the concrete of the parking lot. The day is September eleventh, still summer. The early sun slants off the rough, pale surface with a mildness that holds in it the heat of the coming day as a seed not yet germinated holds in it die eventual blossom. The concrete in its cracks has permitted weeds to flourish, the tall weeds of the dying season, with their milky spittle and fine-haired leaves, wet with autumn's heavy dew. The sky above is cloudless, but for some dry shreds of cirrus and a disintegrating jet trail. Its pure blue is still somehow soft, powder-blue, from its recent immersion in darkness and stars. The beetle's tiny black legs wave in the air, groping for a purchase with which to right itself, casting sharp shadows elongated by the sun at its morning slant. The legs of the small creature wiggle and wridie in a kind of fury, then subside into a semblance of thought, as if the beetle seeks to reason a way out of its predicament. Ahmad wonders,
Where did this bug come

from?
How did it fall here, seeming unable to use its wings? The struggle resumes. How precise the shadows of its legs are, cast widi an all-loving fidelity by photons that have traveled ninety-three million miles to this exact spot!

Ahmad rises from his seat on the coarse plank step and stands over die insect in lordly fashion, feeling huge. Yet he shies from touching this mysterious fallen bit of life. Perhaps it has a poisonous bite, or, like some miniature emissary from Hell, it will fasten onto his finger and never let go. Many a boy—Tylenol, for one—would simply crush this irritating presence with his foot, but for Ahmad die option does not exist: it would produce a broadened corpse, a squashed tangle of tiny parts and spilled vital fluid, and he does not wish to contemplate any such organic horror. He looks around him briefly for a tool, for something stiff with which to flip the insect over—the dark little cardboard, for instance, used to give die two parts of a Mounds bar integrity, or to reinforce a double Reese's Peanut Butter Cup—but he sees nothing suitable. Excellency Home Furnishings tries to keep its private lot litter-free. The African-American "muscle" and Ahmad himself have been sent out into it with a green garbage bag, on clean-up duty. He spots no happenstance spatula lying loose but, on a sudden inspiration, remembers the driver's license in his wallet, a plastic rectangle in which a scowling and unflattering image of himself is embedded with some numerical data important to the state of New Jersey and a hologrammatical, counterfeit-repellent image of its Great Seal. With this, he manages, after a few tentative, squeamish attempts, to flip the tiny creature at his mercy over onto its legs. Sunlight strikes sparks of iridescence, purple and green, from the biform shell of folded wings. Ahmad goes back to his porch on the

step to enjoy the good results of his rescue, his merciful intervention in the natural order. Fly away, fly away.

But the bug, right side up, its shiny body minutely hoisted on its six legs above the rough concrete, merely creeps a fraction of its length and then remains still. Its antennae searchingly wave, then they too stop. For five minutes that partake of the eternal, Ahmad watches. He returns his license with its burden of coded information to his wallet. Cars blaring rap music rush by out of sight on Reagan Boulevard, the noise swelling and receding. An airplane gaining altitude out of Newark rattles in the hardening sky. The beetle, paired with its microscopically shrinking shadow, remains still.

It had been on its back in its death throes and now is dead, leaving behind a largeness that belongs not to this world. The experience, so strangely magnified, has been, Ahmad feels certain, supernatural.

V

rHE SECRETARY is in a bad mood that makes his loyal undersecretary cringe. His moods sweep through Hermione like a power boat's backwash through a hovering jellyfish. For one thing, he, she knows,
hates
being pulled back to his office on a Sunday; it disrupts his cherished afternoons of leisure with Mrs. Haffenreffer and tlieir family, whether spent at a late-season Orioles game up in Baltimore or on a stroll through Rock Creek Park, with all those children suited up for a run except for the fifth, the youngest, who at age three still gets to ride in the jogging stroller. Miss Fogel cannot be jealous of his wife and family; she almost never sees them and they are an invisible part of him, like the parts properly concealed inside his blue suit and boxer shorts. But in her mind she sometimes accompanies him, imagining a more relaxed, husbandly presence than the tense battler against shadows who shows up in his cramped corner office. Hermione intuits that, now that summer's swampy heat at last has lifted and the buttonwoods and

plane trees around the Mall are tinged in their broad leaves by a dignified dullness, the Secretary yearns to be out of doors. She can tell from the tension bulging out the back of his very dark suit coat. Men in American jobs used to wear blue or brown suits—Daddy would leave the house on Pleasant Street to take the trolley in the same brown pinstripe, with a vest, for a week at a time—but now the only serious color is black, or navy blue close to black, in mourning for the bygone days of cheap freedom.

He has been wrought up, lately, by the common and yet well-publicized lapses in airport security. It seems that every sleazy reporter and headline-grabbing House Democrat who wants to can triumphantly brandish knives, blackjacks, and loaded revolvers which have successfully ridden through the X-ray scanners of carry-on luggage. The two of them, Secretary and undersecretary, have stood shoulder to shoulder with the security details, being slowly hypnotized by the endless procession of ghostly suitcase interiors irradiated in unreal colors—cyanic greens, fleshy peach tones, sunset magentas, and the telltale midnight blue of metal. Automobile and house keys fanned like card hands, with their rings and little chains and souvenir gizmos; the unblinking blank stare of wire-frame reading glasses in cloth cases; zippers like the skeletons of miniature snakes; bubble-clusters of coins left bunched in pants pockets; constellations of gold and silver jewelry; the airy chains of eyelets in sneakers and shoes; the tiny metal knobs and cogs in travelling alarm clocks; hair dryers, electric razors, Walkmans, miniaturized cameras: all contribute their deep-blue diatoms to the pale swim of tweaked cathode rays. Small wonder that dangerous weapons again and again waft past eyes glazed by eight hours of deciphering two-dimensional images of packed accou-

trements, searching for the tumor of malice, the abrupt silhouette of deadly intent, within an oceanic stream of the everyday blandness of American lives boiled down to their basic nuggets—the equipment necessary for a few days' stay in another city or state in the materialist comfort that is our globally abnormal norm. A pair of nail scissors or knitting needles—while these are being spotted and confiscated, four-inch knives pass as shoe shanks seen on edge, and a petite pistol of mostly hard plastic sneaks through taped into a pewter porringer supposedly being transported, if its dark orb is challenged, as a present for a baby being baptized tomorrow in Des Moines. The inspection always ends, has to end, with the Secretary clapping the underpaid watchdogs on their uniformed shoulders and telling them to carry on; they are defending democracy.

He turns in his black suit from the radiant window looking over the Ellipse and the Mall, trampled meadows where those sheep the citizenry graze in their jogging suits and polychrome shorts and running shoes configured like space ships in 'thirties comic books. "I'm wondering," he confides to Hermione, "if we should put the Mid-Atlantic region back on the orange level of alert."