The Terrorist’s Son (6 page)

Attica is massive and gray—it's like the castle of a depressed king. We go through security. The guards inspect everything, even the groceries, which have to be perfectly sealed.

“We got a problem here,” one of them says.

He is holding up the Entenmann's. There's something wrong with the box. It turns out that there's a hole in the cellophane window on top, so they won't let me take it in. My eyes start stinging with tears. I know that the minute we walk away, the guards are going to eat my cookies. They
know
there's nothing wrong them.

My mother puts a hand on my shoulder. “Guess what,” she whispers.

If I answer, my voice will break, and I don't want to embarrass myself in front of the guards, so I just look at my mother expectantly until she leans down and says these amazing words in my ear: “I bought another box.”

I run across the grass toward my father. He's grinning broadly and waving for me to run faster, faster, faster. He's standing in front of a white, suburban, one-story house that's been plunked down inside Attica's walls so families like ours can spend the weekend together. There's a picnic table, a swing set, an outdoor grill. I'm out of breath when I reach my father. I throw my arms around his waist, and he reaches down to pick me up. He pretends I've gotten too big for him to lift—“Ya Allah,” he groans, “Z must be short for Z-normous!”—and he falls on his back in the newly cut grass. We wrestle for a few moments, then my brother calls from the swing set, “Push me, Baba, push me!”

The weekend is perfect—even the boring moments are perfect, because they're
normal
. We play soccer with the family from the house next door. We have spaghetti
and meatballs for dinner, and a plate of Entenmann's for dessert. Then my parents say goodnight early and disappear into a bedroom. My sister tells our little brother he should go to bed but he says he's not tired, not even the tiniest bit—then falls asleep within thirty seconds on a black leather couch in the living room. So my sister and I seize the moment and watch a videotape of
Cujo
, which I snuck into our basket at the prison library. It's about this sweet Saint Bernard that gets bitten by a bat and gets rabies, then starts going mental in Connecticut. My sister and I snuggle close as we watch. Our mother would go mental herself if she knew we were watching it, which adds to the thrill.

So for one weekend we actually
are
the family that Baba insists we will always be. Yes, the phone rings each night at six
PM
, and my father has to recite his full name and his prison identification number and some other stuff to prove that he hasn't tried to escape. Yes, there's a fence topped with barbed wire running along the perimeter of our green suburban yard. And yes, beyond that, there's a colossal, gray thirty-foot wall. But the five of us are together, and the world doesn't seem like a threat. It's as if the big gray wall is protecting us—keeping other people
out
, rather than my father
in
.

As always, there's more to the picture than I understand. Baba may be a gentle Saint Bernard when he's with us, but the moment we leave he turns rabid again. When we pile back into the station wagon for the endless drive back to New Jersey—dazed and happy and
full of all that dangerous hope—my father returns to his cell and rants about the Jewish judge who sentenced him to prison and instructs visitors from the mosque to murder him (“Why should I be merciful with him? Was he merciful with me?”). When that plan fails, he turns his attention to an even more vile plot. While I am fantasizing about being a real family, he is fantasizing about bringing down the Twin Towers.

I'm about to turn ten, and I've been bullied at school for years. I can't pretend it's just because of who my father is. For reasons I will probably spend my whole life trying to unravel, I seem to be a magnet for abuse. The bullies' latest trick is to wait until I've turned to open my locker and then slam my head against it and run. Whenever this happens, the principal says he wants to be “fair to all parties,” so I usually get sent to detention along with the bullies. The anger and dread have made a permanent nest in my stomach. Today's a Friday, and my mother has let me stay home from school to recover from what we agree to call “a stomach bug.”

I'm camped out on the couch, watching
Harry and the Hendersons
, a movie about a family who's hiding a Bigfoot-type creature from the police because the police won't understand how kind and gentle he is. In the middle of the movie, there's breaking news. My mother's in her bedroom, trying to write a historical novel, so she's not there to turn off the TV this time.

There's been an explosion in the parking lot beneath the North Tower of the World Trade Center. The NYPD, the FBI, and the ATF are on the scene, the early theory being that a transformer has exploded.

I knock on my mother's bedroom door. When she doesn't answer, I crack open the door a bit. My mother is sitting at her desk. She's engrossed in writing her novel—it's about an American woman who goes to the Middle East and has some kind of adventure, that's all I know—and she's typing in a sort of trance.

“You should come out,” I say. “There's something going on.”

“Can't,” she says, without looking up.

“But—”

“Stop it, Z. My heroine's caught in a sandstorm, and her camel won't budge.”

So I flop back on the couch and watch the story unfold for hours. The wreckage is horrific. People are stumbling out covered in ash. The reporter is saying, “We've never seen anything like this before.” At three
PM
, my mother comes out of her bedroom, blinking in the sunlight like she's emerging from a cave. She looks at the TV and stops short.

“Why didn't you
tell
me?” she says.

•  •  •

Hundreds of FBI agents comb through the rubble at the blast site. They abandon the theory about the transformer when they discover remnants of the Ryder van that carried the explosives. The FBI traces the van back to Mohammed Salameh—the deliveryman who'd promised to marry my sister when she came of age—and arrests him on March fourth when he returns to the
rental company to report the van stolen and demand that he get his four-hundred-dollar deposit back. In the months that follow, America shivers at the previously incomprehensible thought of terrorism at home, as well as at the fact that its governmental agencies had been caught unawares. It will be years before the last conspirator is convicted, but alarming details surface daily about how the plot came together.

A startling fact emerges: My father helped strategize the attack from his cell at Attica, using visitors as go-betweens to associates back home. One of those associates was his old mentor, the Blind Sheikh, who was still residing—and issuing fatwas—in the States, despite being a known terrorist. The Blind Sheikh offered his followers “spiritual guidance.” He encouraged not just the WTC plot, according to the government, but also signed off on a plan that would have been far more deadly, had it ever come to pass: five more bombs detonated within ten minutes at the United Nations, the Lincoln and Holland Tunnels, the George Washington Bridge, and a federal building housing the FBI in New York City.

For practical purposes, though, the WTC operation was run by the Kuwaiti-born Ramzi Yousef. He had studied electrical engineering in Wales and bomb-making at a terrorist training camp in Pakistan. He entered the United States with a fake Iraqi passport in 1992 and, upon being detained, played a get-out-of-jail-free card by requesting asylum. A court date was set.
And, because holding cells were full, Yousef was released on his own recognizance in New Jersey, whereupon he and his team began collecting the ingredients for the bomb. Just hours after the attack, Yousef left the country, without inconvenience. “We declare our responsibility for the explosion on the mentioned building,” he said in a letter to the
New York Times
. “This action was done in response for the American political, economical, and military support to Israel, the state of terrorism, and to the rest of the dictator countries in the region.”

The six victims, of course, had no ties whatsoever to American foreign policy. In truth, the bombing was an act of hatred destined—like all such acts—only to inspire more hatred in its turn. I wish I could do more to honor the innocents than just repeat their names, but I'd be ashamed if I didn't do at least that much. All of them died simply living their lives: Robert Kirkpatrick, Bill Macko, and Stephen Knapp were all maintenance supervisors at the WTC. They were eating lunch together when the bomb went off. Monica Rodriguez Smith was a secretary. She was seven months pregnant and doing clerical work when she was killed. Wilfredo Mercado worked for the restaurant Windows on the World. He was checking in deliveries. And John DiGiovanni was a salesman who specialized in dental products—he was just parking his car.

By the fall of 1995, the government has gotten around to translating the full contents of the forty-seven boxes taken from our home after Kahane's assassination.
They have determined that the killing was indeed part of a conspiracy, and—thanks to some double-jeopardy loophole—retried my father for the murder, as well as for his part in the World Trade Center bombing.

My father still insists that he is innocent of absolutely everything. I believe him because—well, because I am twelve years old. My mother has doubts. She hears a sour note in my father's voice on the phone now. He rants to her about the conspiracy against him, about the enemies of Allah, whose lies are legion. He is full of schemes to get released, and he barks orders at her:
Write to the judge! Call Pakistan! Go to the Egyptian embassy! Are you writing all this down?!
My mother yeses him quietly.

On October first, my father, along with the Blind Sheikh and eight others, is convicted of forty-eight out of fifty charges and sentenced to life plus fifteen years without parole. The murder of Monica Rodriguez Smith's unborn child is included in the sentencing.

After the new round of convictions, we see my father once—at the Metropolitan Correctional Center in New York. My mother is terrified about what will become of her and her children. We are destitute. We have no plans for survival—and no hope of my father ever being a true father, or husband, again. Even now, my father will not admit any guilt. When he goes to hug and kiss my mother, she pulls away for the first time, so repulsed that she thinks she's going to vomit. For many years, she will try to console us by saying that we have a father who loves us. But she will always remember the visit to the
MCC as the day that her own heart finally gave up. My father is shipped off to a series of maximum-security prisons around the country. We can no longer afford to visit, even if we wanted to. My mother barely has the money to pay for my father's collect calls anymore. I don't want to talk to him anyway. What's the point? All he ever says is, “Are you making your prayers? Are you being good to your mother?” And all I want to say is,
Are
you
being good to my mother, Baba? Do you know that she has no money and that she's crying all the time?
But, of course, I'm too scared to say any of this. So my father and I keep having the same pointless conversations, and I twist the springy phone cord tighter and tighter around my hand because I just want it all to stop.

My mother wants it to stop, too. All that matters to her now is her children.

She demands a divorce, and we all change our last name.

We've seen my father for the last time.

Zak visiting his father on Rikers Island in 1991.

Zak visiting his father. Attica Correctional Facility, 1994. In the background: The small house where the family stayed together for the weekend.