The Sleeper (2 page)

I don't do my ten-mile run as much as I used to. But that morning after the agents left I thought there was nothing else I could do. I put on my old technical boots, laced them tight around my ankles, and set out for Crookleg Creek. In the first hint of dawn light, the trail was hard to see, and there were times when I had to run in the shallow edges of the water, half leaping from rock to rock. I bellied under fencing, vaulted posts. The sweat came fast, and with it the total concentration on breath, on the pain, on the path, on the nothingness that I was looking for until, three quarters of an hour later, the sun was a red dome on a horizon of tall green corn and the creek was just a trickle coming from a stand of cottonwoods in sight of the Route 70–Route 105 crossroad.

My lungs were burning like a furnace. I felt good. Real good. I entered the long shadow of the trees and followed the darkness in among them, tearing through thin branches of thorns that crossed the trail like tripwires. Near the center of the trees was a pile of rocks that hid the shallow source of the creek. Around them was a small clearing. A lot of trash was lying around, and it wasn't the kind of stuff you wanted to look at too closely. Beer cans, KFC containers, used rubbers. The rocks were scratched and battered and painted with names of high school students and Satanic rock bands. Some of the names I'd heard of, many I hadn't.

But it was the form of the rocks, not what was on them or around them, that interested me. I wondered if they'd been put here by men, and I believed they were, probably by Osage or Kaw. There was no way to be sure, because there was nothing written about this place in any of the books at the library, and everyone just called it “the Rocks” or “Jeffers' Rocks,” because that was the family name of the people who used to own the land.

Ever since I was at Fort Benning, I'd been on the lookout for places like this, where a few men have come together to build with their own hands a house for their gods. There was a place like that on a back road at Benning, a rough one-room clapboard church with a sagging roof and flaking whitewash and torn plastic bags where the glass in the windows ought to be. There were two rough benches, and a table cobbled together from spare lumber, which would have been the altar, and behind that a cross that was nothing more, or less, than two boards nailed together on the wall. When I looked at it, I could see the hands of the men who'd made it, rough and cracked, with seams of raw pink in the black knuckles and torn calluses across the lightness of the palms as they gripped the splintering oak and drove home the nails.

There must be a time, I thought, when you're building the house of God, and you feel His presence.

That was what I had looked for in the pureness of faith and surrender to the One God, but I'd been wrong. I'd deceived myself into thinking man could kill for the sake of his God—and secretly I'd believed I could share in the power of that God. It took me a long time to realize that killing like that is for the sake of killing, nothing more. It is the builders who find their way to Paradise, if there is a Paradise.

The men who put these stones around this spring at Jeffers' Rocks, did they feel the presence of their gods? Did they leave their own spirits, and the spirits they summoned, somewhere hidden in these litter-filled crevices?

I couldn't know. Maybe they weren't Indians at all. Maybe they were just homesteaders piling the stones that broke their plows. But it seemed to me there was a shape, an order, a purpose to the way the rocks were laid that went beyond that. There was something here, and one day at the end of a long hard run, I thought I would see it. Or feel it.

How do you make a home for God? I asked myself.

I headed back toward our house.

How do you make a home for yourself? What is the spirit that makes it happen—that makes one place comfort your soul, and another not?

I fell into an easy stride, somewhere between pain and meditation.

Betsy was the spirit that made our home. She's “just a little slip of a thing—a tadpole,” her stepdad, Deputy Sheriff Bud Nichols, used to say, “but she's got more guts than a burglar.” That wasn't quite right, I thought, but it was close. She sure wasn't tall. I was more than a foot bigger than she was. When we first started going out, one night I lifted her off the ground to kiss her good night and she froze in my arms. “That make you feel good?” she asked me, and I never did it again.

How tough was Betsy? I guess that depended on who you were. She was protective about her body. She wasn't easy to touch at first. And she was real protective about anybody else she loved because she didn't have that much loving herself as a kid. She never knew her father at all, and her mother brought her up alone the first eight years of her life, until Deputy Nichols, as he used to say, made an honest woman of her.

The deputy wished Betsy was a boy, and he wished Betsy was his own, and she didn't want to be either. She went kind of wild when she was fifteen, sixteen, I guess. A lot of boys, a lot of drinking, a lot of fuck-yous to the deputy. Then her mom died of breast cancer, and Betsy moved out of the house.

When I met her after my wars, in 1993, she was twenty-two and on her own and every bit a woman. She came up behind me in the Wal-Mart book section and the first thing she ever said to me was, “You gonna read one of those?” She was wearing shorts and flip-flops and a T-shirt that was a size too small, and the way she smiled I figured she was laughing at me inside.

“Why?” I asked.

“'Cause you been looking at the backs of those books so long, I wonder if you can read at all.”

Not a great introduction, but things got better after that. I asked her out, and we dated about three months, and broke up about five times, before I asked her to marry me.

“Why?” she asked when I popped the question.

“To make a life,” I said. And I guess it was the right answer, because that's what we'd been doing, or trying to do, ever since.

“What God hath joined together, let no man put asunder.” I said the words out loud as I picked up the pace on that long run back to my wife and my baby and my home.

The ringer on the phone in our bedroom didn't work anymore. It clicked and buzzed like a wounded robot, and I barely heard it when I got out of the shower. I thought Betsy's voice would be at the other end. It was her morning off, and she hadn't been at the house when I got back from my run. She usually left a note to say where she and Miriam had gone. But this time she hadn't.

“Salaam Aleikum.”
A man's voice.

“Aleikum salaam,”
I said, feeling a chill of recognition. “Griffin?”

“Hah! You remembered after all these years.”

“I remembered.”

“You been worried I'd call.”

“Not until just now.”

“I'm over at the Super 8.”

“Yeah?”

“How about some breakfast?”

“Have we got something to talk about?”

“Just old times, that's all. Kuwait, Bosnia, New York, Atlanta. You know what I'm talking about.”

“Let's meet at the Chuckwagon, it's down the road from the motel.”

“I sort of like the Jump Start. You never know who you'll meet at the Jump Start.”

“You want to see me? Meet me at the Chuckwagon.”

I never liked Griffin, not since I first saw him during Ranger training at Dugway, praying secretly in the desert—the ritual prayers of a Muslim. He hated me before I hated him, and I always thought part of it was a race thing. My blond hair, my blue eyes: some African-Americans looked at me and saw someone perfect to hate. In the Georgia mountains during one of the Ranger exercises, Griffin turned the whole thing personal, and there were a couple of seconds when I thought he was going to kill me. Then, later, after I'd been with the mujahedin in Bosnia, I saw Griffin in New York on a Secret Service detail. I tried to call him from Atlanta when the moment came for the terror to begin—horror so vast that America might never recover. But Griffin didn't answer, and I had stopped the plague myself.

To hear from him now—and here, in Westfield—was bad news. Almost the worst news.

When I pulled the truck away from the house, the emptiness of the yard shook me a little. Where was Betsy's car? Where was
she
?

 

Griffin sat in a booth leafing through the newspaper. He looked at me, nodded, and waited for me to sit down. He folded the paper and looked again at the huge headline, holding it up for me to see:
AMERICA UNDER ATTACK
. “Good morning,” he said, leaning forward slightly across the table. “Glad you could make it.”

“What brings you here?”

Griffin looked into my eyes for a long time, waiting for me to fill the silence, but I just looked back. Last time I'd seen him he was part of Clinton's detail. He'd been steroid-hard, pumped up, like he ate and slept on the weight bench. Now his face was rounder, his shoulders not so square. I figured he had a desk job. “I came just to see you,” he said.

“Ain't I lucky.”

“Listen, Kurtovic, I know all about you.”

“Uh-hunh.” If he had, I wouldn't have been in Westfield, I'd have been in Leavenworth. Or dead.

“I know about you and the muj.”

“Seems like a long time ago,” I said. “I'm a carpenter these days.”

“Yeah, I know that, too. Self-employed.”

I shrugged. “What do you want, Griffin?”

“Kind of like Uncle Sam,” he said. “I want you.”

“Not interested.”

He held up the paper so I could look at the picture of the Trade Center in flames. I nodded. “Nothing I can do about that,” I said.

His eyes narrowed. “Hell, you say.”

I smiled. “You ain't working for the Secret Service anymore, are you?”

“Changed agencies.”

“I figured. And what you want—let me guess—what you want is for me to get in touch with some of my old buddies in the muj.”

“That's about the size of it.”

“Because you think they did this.”

“We know they did this.”

“Do you?”

“Yes.”

“Bullshit. It's only been twenty-four hours since the attack, and now you know for sure who did it? If you know that much that quick, you
knew
enough to have stopped it. You don't know anything. You've got no idea and, you know what, me either. I got no idea what's going on. But I can tell you one thing, I don't have any old buddies in the muj. If I ever did, they're dead. You still pray?” Griffin made a motion with his hand like we were playing cards and he was telling the dealer he'd pass.

“No?” I said. “Did you let your bosses know how you prayed? I'll bet you didn't. But I'll bet you think you got great insights.”

“Here's my insight. In 1992 you quit the Rangers. Seems you got religion, found Allah during the Gulf War or something. You went to Bosnia, where your father came from, and you joined the muj there. Then you came back to the States and landed a job Xeroxing stuff at the Council on Foreign Policy for a researcher named Chantal Richards, a middle-aged broad you were fucking. You were in contact with Rashid Yousufzai, who was at that time planning the first attack on the World Trade Center. His body was found in Atlanta, hung from the catwalk in the CNN center. Your brother-in-law's body was found there the same day. Also on the same day, we have video of you at the Atlanta airport. How's that for insight?”

“You guys don't share much with the FBI, do you?”

“We can if we need to.”

“Y'all ready to order?” The waitress stood over us, and I had the weird sense she'd materialized out of nowhere.

“Just some more coffee,” said Griffin.

“Ham and eggs. The eggs over easy,” I said, “with hash browns.” And she went away.

Griffin nodded and smiled. “Ham?”

“I'm dereligioned,” I said. “I've got no use for preachers, no use for imams, and no use for holy warriors.”

“So you're our man.”

“No,” I said. “I don't work for the USG. Not now. Not ever again.”

“Don't say no,” said Griffin. “Say you'll think about it.”

“No,” I said.

“You will think about it,” he said. “You can't help thinking about it.”

About that much he was absolutely right.

Betsy's old Saturn was in front of the house, and I looked in it as I walked past just to make sure everything was the way it should be. Betsy and Miriam must have gone to Wendy's for a burger because there were some loose fries and a half-drunk shake in the back next to Miriam's car seat. In the front, the passenger side was piled with papers and a big loose-leaf notebook for the night class on Web design that Betsy was taking at South Kansas College. In front of the driver's seat the visor was turned down, and I figured Betsy had been looking at herself, and maybe brushing out her hair. She didn't wear much makeup. The checklist showed everything normal. A little messy, but normal.

I leaned in the car and picked up some of the trash, put up the visor, and cradled Betsy's books in my arm like I would have done if we'd been walking home from school together.

“Where'd you two go?” I shouted as I let the screen door slam behind me. But no one answered.

Fear ran under my skin like electricity. The kitchen was empty, and so was our little family room. I went down the hall. Miriam wasn't in her room. I listened. Nothing. The door to our bedroom was opened. Sheets were jumbled in a pile on the unmade bed.

I don't know what I saw at that moment. A kind of emptiness. As if the last five years had just disappeared and there was no history before this moment, and there wouldn't be any history after. Blank past, blank future, blank present, and the whole of me as hollow and weightless as a ghost.

Then the sheets moved.

“Well?” said Betsy. “You got something better to do?”

“Oh, Baby,” I said, shaking my head to drive out the images that had just been there. I threw off my shirt and unbuttoned my jeans. “But where's Miriam?”

“Left her over at her Aunt Lea's. Thought we could use a little break to cheer us up.” She looked me up and down. “I can see you're ready to cheer me up. Come here, darlin', put your arms around me like a circle round the sun.”

She smelled like life, my Betsy. I held her close to me and breathed her in. We kissed so that our lips just touched, just barely, and passion moved between us like a spirit, through our mouths, through our eyes. Her breasts were small and round and as I ran my tongue over them in the mid-day brightness of the room she stopped me for a second. “Don't, baby, don't look at the stretch marks,” she said. And all I could do was laugh. “Everything looks better than perfect to me,” I said. There was no use telling her how much I loved every inch of her body, inside and out, including those tiny lines on the side of the breasts that had held the milk for my daughter. And those wonderful pink nipples, so hard against my fingertips and my tongue. Her stomach, just slightly rounded, and soft, and warm as the earth on a summer day. The light brown hair between her legs, glistening now, rich with the human-animal smells of love, her vagina tasting of salt and iron, like blood, like the world of the living. “Get your face back up here and do your duty,” she said, and as I slid inside her, feeling her body slowly giving way to mine, there was no world but this one of the here, and of the now.

The Kansas sun coming through the little skylight in our roof made a shining square around us on the bed, forcing us to close our eyes as we lay in each other's arms. And in that enormous moment of peace I realized that I had never in my life been so happy, or so afraid.

“Let's talk,” said Betsy.

“Let me listen to you breathe,” I said. “Let's just let ourselves be.”

It has seemed strange to me, always, that women want to talk about every single thing in life, while men just want to know that those things are there: love, family, home. Talking about them doesn't make them happen. They're worlds within worlds that you create by being together, by building together. And it's all so fragile, I thought, as I lay there with Betsy in our room in our house in the square light of the sun. You build and you share and you love and you dream—and you fight and you cry—and you build some more. And still people will come out of nowhere to take it all down, tear it all apart.

Griffin. He and I talked for ten minutes, maybe, and he threatened me ten times. He threatened me with the law, he threatened me through my family, he threatened me through my pride.

“Easy, Baby,” said Betsy, running her finger along my jaw. “What's all this? You're so tense.”

“What happened yesterday,” I said. “It's left a kind of hole in me.”

“Everybody feels like that, Darlin'. Everybody.”

I kissed her. “Yeah.” But I could not tell her what was closing in on us. I could not explain how much I knew about the terror, how much I had been a part of it.

 

I, Kurt Kurtovic, thirty-four years old, born in Kansas, have seen war and death and more than once have caught sight of the eternal hereafter. I have been a soldier of the American government, and of God Almighty. Righteousness followed me many days of my life, and there was a time when I believed that I, with the help of the Lord, could change the face of America and the world.

Killing was something I did well. I was trained as a U.S. Army Ranger, specialized in demolition. I first saw action in Panama, then the Gulf War. After that I embraced Islam, the unremembered religion of my immigrant father, and I went to Bosnia to find my family's roots and my self. But I found nothing except a new place to practice my skills at slaughter. Sickened to death by death, I wanted to find a way to stop the killing once and for all, and I let myself be persuaded that only by making the United States feel the pain of the rest of the world could there finally be peace and justice for all.

I have held in my hand a terror to end all terrors. And yet, I could not do the thing that I had prayed to do, could not bring myself to unleash a plague that would decimate the nation's children. And I had killed the man who would.

No one had known, I thought. No one had seen. I came home to the quiet unawareness of a Main Street where someone was always flying the American flag. Westfield, Kansas. I had left because I thought I had no roots here. When I came back I discovered this place was as close to me as the eye in my face. It was the lens through which I saw the world. And I had fallen in love with Betsy, who was a little girl I never had noticed when I left for the wars, and was a wonderful woman when I returned. We had built our life. We had conceived a future.

How do you protect such a thing, when you know firsthand the horrors that lie in wait?

“Betsy,” I said, “I think I'm going back on active duty.”

She was silent for a while.

I rolled over to look at her face and into her eyes. “I won't be gone long. A few weeks maybe. At most a few months. And we'll be getting a regular paycheck. That won't be so bad.”

“Oh, God, Kurt.” She turned her face away. “Oh, God. Don't—don't.” She was quiet for a long time and I felt her body harden in my arms. “Just come back to me,” she said. “Just come back to us.”

“God himself couldn't keep me from doing that,” I said.

 

“It's too early for a story, Daddy.”

“You mean it's too early for you to go to sleep.”

“Yes.”

“How about a story now and sleep later?”

“Yes!”

“Once there was a mean old man—how mean was he?”

“Very, very mean.”

“Very, very, very mean. And meaner than that.”

“Ohhh, very mean.”

“Yep. And the mean old man lived on a big old mountain. And you know what they called him?”

“The Old Man of the Mountain!”

“You've heard this story before.”

“Go on, Daddy.”

“And everybody around that mountain for miles and miles—thousands of miles—was scared of the Old Man. They knew he could turn boys and girls into birds.”

“Big birds.”

“Scary birds. With big claws. Who would swoop out of the sky and—”

“Don't tickle, Daddy. Don't!”

“And sometimes the birds would carry little children away and hide them in a cave deep in the mountain.”

“Bad birds.”

“Very bad. And sometimes the birds would poke holes in the clouds with their beaks, and make it rain when little kids wanted to go out to play. And sometimes they made big clouds of smoke that burned everybody's eyes. And sometimes they just pooped on everybody's head.”

“Daddy!”

“Really! And then one day the birds made a big mistake. They picked up a princess who was, oh, just about your age, and they carried her away to the mountain and dropped her in the cave. And you know what her name was?”

“Miriam!”

“Yes it was. And Miriam was a very beautiful princess. She wore shoes just like yours, but made of jewels that sparkled like starlight. She wore a dress made of silk as blue as the sky.

And in her long blonde hair, which was almost as pretty as yours, she wore two golden barrettes as shiny as the sun. Princess Miriam took one look around that cave and she said, ‘Hey, I'm not staying in this dump!' So she waited until she saw a ray of light coming down. It wasn't much. Just a thin, weak little light. But when she caught it with her golden barrette, it got stronger, and it started to light up the whole cave so that all the kids could see each other, and, even more important, they saw the ladder that was hidden all this time in the dark. One by one, with Princess Miriam leading the way, they all climbed out and…I'll tell you more next time.”

“No! Now!”

“The Old Man used to eat his breakfast every morning at a big old table on top of the big old palace on top of the big old mountain so he could look out and see all the lands and all the people that were afraid of him. The little boys and girls he'd turned into birds were in cages and on perches all around and they made an awful lot of noise. So he didn't hear Miriam and the kids from the cave when they came tiptoeing, and sidestepping, and elbow-sliding through the hallways of his palace. They ran up behind him and pushed him so hard that the old chair, and the old table, and the Old Man fell off the mountain, down and down and down into a deep dark hole that sucked him in—pop!

“As soon as he was gone, the birds turned back into little boys and girls. The cave in the mountain suddenly became a sunlit garden. And everybody agreed that Miriam should be the queen of all the lands, and all the peoples, for a thousand miles around, for ever and ever. And so, Miriam, who was very happy, invited her daddy to come and drink milk with her every morning, sometimes out of the carton, and they lived happily every after.”

 

Betsy stood in front of the bookshelf that took up one wall of our family room. She ran her fingers over the spines, many of them cracked and broken, touching them delicately, like she could learn something from their texture or their temperature. “You've been waiting a long time for this,” she said.

A chill seeped into my gut. She could not know how right she was, how long I had waited for this time, and how afraid of it I was. She knew I'd been a Ranger. She knew I'd experimented with different religions and she knew I was “in a special counterterrorist task force.” I'd told her all that when we were dating, and I wasn't even sure she believed me then. The stepdaughter of the deputy sheriff in Westfield was used to lawmen bullshitting her. But I didn't think I'd told her anything else. Not the whole truth, anyway.

“Look at all these books,” she said. “There's hundreds of them.” They were mostly histories and mostly in historical order, starting with my mother's Bible and my father's Qur'an. Karen Armstrong's
Holy War.
Amin Maalouf's
The Crusades Through Arab Eyes.
Bernard Lewis's little book
The Assassins,
which was the real story, I thought, of the Ismailis and the Old Man of the Mountain who led them nine hundred years ago. I was fascinated by the way violence and faith came together, and by all that they destroyed. And the books had helped me understand that world I touched and turned away from. They taught me about the difference between faith and fanaticism, between salvation and destruction.

“These books took you away from me,” she said. “When you were reading them you were far, far away.”

“They saved me,” I said.

“Saved you from what?”

But that I could not tell her.

 

I looked out the window of the executive jet at splashes of light five miles beneath us. Small towns set among big farms. The heart of America in darkness.

“Do you think there's any chance it's over?” said Griffin.

“No,” I said, “it's not over, and it didn't just begin. You know that. I know that. The killers know it. The only people who didn't know this war was on were the people down there. And they still don't know what to make of it. They've spent their whole life in the eye of a hurricane. Death and destruction everywhere around them, but all they saw was blue skies.”

“Didn't know you were such a bleeding heart,” said Griffin.