I told her the story that I’d told Anvar. She took notes as I spoke, even though she was also recording it on what Anvar had called a Dictaphone.
When I was done speaking, Hale said nothing. She just looked at me, weighing my worth.
Did she know that I was lying? I fought the urge to look away from Hale’s eyes, to fidget or walk around. I had not come this far to be stopped. No. No, I had to convince her.
“I have evidence,” I said. “I’ll give it to you.”
“What evidence?” Agent Hale asked.
“Qais bought a gun.”
“That isn’t evidence that supports your claims, Ms. Saqr.”
“Wait,” Anvar said. “Hold on. Qais did come to me to ask me about the Second Amendment. He admitted to buying a gun, then asked if the right to bear arms included explosives.”
For the first time in forever, the agent looked away from me. Her tone got harder than it had been somehow.
“You didn’t think to report this to anyone?”
Anvar shrugged. “Report what? It was an entirely theoretical discussion.”
“Possibly not,” Hale muttered. Then louder she asked, “And you will swear he asked you that? You’ll swear it under the penalty of perjury?”
“Of course,” he said.
That seemed to be enough for Agent Hale. She turned back to face me, and this time when she spoke, she leaned forward a little. It was all I could do not to fall on my face to thank God. It was a miracle. The Lord of the Universe really was with me.
“What else do you have, Ms. Saqr?”
“Pictures he’s taken,” I said. “Famous places that he might target. The Golden Gate Bridge. Subway stations. Union Square. And I have maps—”
“How did you come to possess these things?”
“Qais has been trying to get Abu—my father—to go along with his mission. My father is a good man. He refuses all the time, but Qais got him a copy of Dabiq.”
“What is a Dabiq?” Anvar asked.
“An ISIS recruitment magazine,” the agent replied. The neutrality had gone from her face.
I reached into my backpack and pulled out the copy of Dabiq. Anvar reached for it, but Agent Hale stuck her hand out to stop him.
“Don’t touch it.”
He nodded and leaned over my shoulder to study the magazine cover more closely. A man dressed in black with a long beard was smiling up at us, heavily armed but apparently carefree. The caption read: wish you were here.
“What do you think?” Hale asked Anvar.
“I think print media is dead,” he said. “As is the guy on the cover, I assume.”
Then I pulled out my journals. They were identical, bright pink, with the images of sleeping unicorns drawn on them. Each cover had one word written on it, in a looping, playful font: believe.
“I wrote down everything I could starting a year and a half ago,” I said. “These will be helpful. Right?”
Anvar reached for one, and I expected Hale to stop him again, but she didn’t. In fact, as he picked one up, she took the other one.
“Very helpful,” Agent Hale said. “With all of this, we’ve definitely got him.”
ANVAR
I flipped through the pages of Azza’s journal, trying to avoid getting glitter from the unicorn’s horn on my hands as best I could. Entries had been made in a small, neat hand. Azza had mostly used a purple pen, which, combined with the cheery, flamboyant cover, made for a stark contrast with the grim content.
There was no time to read it all in detail, but as I scanned the text, something felt wrong, like the urgent, low howling of the desert wind before the coming of a sandstorm. I searched the words, the thin, almost fragile paper they were written on, trying to discover what it was that was bothering me.
“What is it, Mr. Faris?” Agent Awiti Hale was looking at me, an eyebrow raised.
The journal began with an entry from a year and a half ago. It was about me, about the day Azza had asked me about morality, about choosing between limits and priorities. That had happened just before Aamir’s recent engagement party.
In fact, I’d only met Azza around Eid al-Adha. I’d spoken about Mikey and Sisyphus at the mosque. That had happened this year.
Eid had been September 12, 2016. I remembered thinking how fortunate it was that it had not fallen on September 11.
So how did her journal record a conversation between us in 2015, before we’d met?
There was only one possible answer.
The journals were a lie.
Azza had lied to the DHS. And to me.
I glanced over at Azza, in my gaze a question I could not ask, not while Agent Hale was here. She was still as a statue. Her green eyes were wide and fixed on me, unblinking.
My fingers clamped down on the spine of the journal hard, and it clapped shut. The innocent, sleeping, mythical creature on the cover mocked me with its injunction to believe. I turned the book over, so I wouldn’t have to look at it.
I took a deep calming breath, trying to force the suddenly rigid muscles in my jaw to relax. Anger wasn’t affordable. I needed to be rational. To be a lawyer.
“Anvar,” Hale said again. “What is it?”
I needed time to figure out how much Azza—or whatever her name was—had lied about, and what the consequences of those falsehoods would be. So long as I stayed silent, I had options. Once I told the DHS what I’d realized, they would be in charge.
“It is just distressing,” I said finally, handing the journal to Hale, “to read everything that’s happened to Azza. She’s had a difficult life.”
Hale tilted her head and gave me an odd look. “But you knew that already, didn’t you?”
“Not really. I’ve never heard the details.”
“Are we done?” Azza asked.
The DHS agent frowned, then got to her feet. “I’ll be back. I’ll have more questions for Ms. Saqr later.”
A reprieve. I managed not to let out a sigh of relief. “I’m sure you will.”
“I expect your client will cooperate fully with our investigation?”
“We called you, remember?”
“Only after you had no choice left. I’m going to bring this Qais character in, and once we have his testimony, we’ll be in touch. Thank you, Mr. Faris.”
“I didn’t do anything,” I said. “It was all my client.”
And that, at the very least, happened to be something that was absolutely true.
* * *
—
I leaned against the door as it closed behind me. Azza remained seated, staring down at her now empty backpack. She spoke first.
“Thank you for not telling them.”
I tried to control my tone. I didn’t want to raise my voice. I fear I wasn’t entirely successful. I definitely wasn’t able to soften the question I felt I had to ask.
“How could you be so unbelievably stupid?”
“Anvar, I—”
“You never kept a journal, did you?”
She shook her head.
“You wrote the whole thing in the last month or so. You made it seem like you’d been doing it for over a year.”
“Yes,” she said.
“Why?”
Azza didn’t answer.
“Tell me why.”
“I need to be rid of Qais.”
“So,” I said. “Everything you told me was a lie?”
“No.” She jumped to her feet, as if driven upward by the force of her denial. “He isn’t a terrorist, but everything else, what he did to me…I’m not lying about that. I wouldn’t.”
“Who will believe you now?” I asked her. “You manufactured evidence.”
Except me, I didn’t add. I did believe her. That was different though. I knew her. At least, I thought
I did. I could sense the truth in her voice and read it on her face.
It would be different for DHS. From their perspective, her credibility had been fatally compromised.
“They won’t realize,” Azza said.
“It took me forty seconds to figure it out. Agent Hale seems very sharp. What happens when they come back and ask you specific questions about what is in those journals? What happens when they question Qais, and he has alibis?”
“But maybe—”
“What happens when they run a fingerprint analysis on that ISIS magazine you said belongs to Qais? Has he ever touched it?”
Azza shook her head.
“Has Qais touched the pictures of his ‘targets’?”
“No. I just got them off the internet.”
“Azza, they’re going to figure this out very, very fast.”
She stared up at me. For the first time since this had started, for the first time since I’d met her, really, I saw naked uncertainty in her eyes. It was as if she hadn’t ever considered that her plan, which had been terrible by any objective measure, might fail.
“What do I do?”
I had no idea.
“I read about these cases online,” Azza said to my silence. “The FBI targets low-IQ Muslims and traps them into getting in trouble, right? They want to catch terrorists so badly, they’ll invent them if they have to. They’ll want to believe me.”
She was right about that. DHS would want to believe her. I was convinced that they had believed her for the moment, but Hale had made her work for it. Azza wasn’t giving her enough credit.
When DHS examined the evidence, the thin illusion Azza had manufactured would fall apart. What crime would they charge her with? Obstruction, probably. Lying to a federal agent…
There would be no looking the other way about Azza’s or Abu Fahd’s immigration status. They’d be deported, at the very least.
“What should I do?”
There were no pieces left on the board for me except one, and when you’ve got only one piece, you have only one option. You move.
“If I were you,” I said, “I’d run.”
AZZA
Run? That was the best plan he could come up with? I’d been running my whole life.
“I’m not going to do that, Anvar. I can’t anymore. I’m tired.”
I waited for him to respond, but for once it looked like Anvar Faris had no words to offer. I glanced at the window I’d been standing by hours before, at the waiting dark, always ready to swallow up those who wander into it.
Maybe that was the only home I was ever going to have.
He made a helpless gesture, raising his hands a little, palms out, before letting them drop to his sides. “I’m sorry.”
I wanted to stay here, in this city, Mama’s city to which she’d never been. Now it seemed like everything I’d done, everything I’d imagined, everything I’d written, had been for nothing at all.
“All I want, all I have ever wanted, is to live,” I said. “To live, to be home and to be free. That’s not too much to ask. It can’t be.”
Anvar stepped up beside me. “You can decide to stay if you want. I don’t know what happens if you do, but I’ll stand for you, no matter what comes.”
They would say I was a criminal, put me in jail, then in front of a judge. I’d get either locked up or sent back to Iraq, where there was nothing for me now. Staying was a foolish choice.
“I could go somewhere cold,” I said. “I’ve always wanted to see snow fall. It sounds beautiful.”
“It is in the beginning. Then dogs pee on it, people walk on it, drive cars by it, and it just ends up looking like gross sludge.”
“I should’ve guessed. There’s nothing beautiful left in the world.”
He looked like he wanted to tell me I was wrong, but he didn’t. Instead, he said, “I can help you with the details. I have some money.”
“No. Wait. Not now. Please. Let’s go lie down. Let’s pretend like nothing has gone wrong. Can we pretend that things are like they were for a while?”
“Yes,” he said. “We can absolutely do that.”
ANVAR
We didn’t touch, except for our hands, and we stared at the ceiling, as if we were very young, and above us was a field of stars.
“I hate you a little,” Azza said. “Not in a bad way.”
“It’s a good hate?”
“I don’t understand you, Anvar.” She wove her fingers around mine. “You have all the freedom I have ever wanted, more than most people ever have, but you cage yourself, keep yourself from doing things, taking things, that you want. All of your life is yours, and you just…you live like you have no choices, like your fate is written.”
I looked over at her, but she wasn’t looking at me.
“Only a little time in my life has ever belonged to me,” she said. “I stole what happiness I could find in the time I had. Maybe my Lord will forgive me. I have reason to hope. Despite everything, I know that He is Merciful.”
I shook my head, amazed.
“After the life you’ve lived, how can you say that? How can you know that?”
“It’s simple,” she said. “I know because I met you.”
* * *
—
“What are you going to do about Qais?”
The last thing I saw, before Azza’s face was obscured by her niqab, was a frown. “What do you mean?”
It was the only detail we hadn’t discussed. We’d talked about where to go, how to get there and how to stay off the grid until she could cross the border north. She needed some cash, and I gave her what I could. She was going to leave her phone behind, ditch the niqab and abandon her email accounts.
It could work, even though it was more difficult than it has ever been to be forgotten.
Azza was so calm. Taking a moment to lie still, talk and build an oasis in her mind had strengthened her resolve. It was easy to forget that this was a woman who had walked the world. It was hubris, perhaps, to even think she needed my help.
“They are going to arrest him.”
“Good,” she said. “That was the point.”
“Azza, he’s innocent.”
“He’s not innocent.”
I stepped back from the sharp edge of her tone. I couldn’t see her face anymore, but I’d been in enough arguments to know from the concrete in her eyes and the steel in her voice that there was nothing I could say to make her accept my position.
I tried anyway, refusing on that night to be daunted by futility. “He’s innocent of the charges Homeland Security wants to bring against him.”
“He did what he did. He should suffer.”
“Absolutely. But if they go in thinking they’re taking down a dangerous terrorist, knowing he might be armed, we don’t know what will happen. If things go sideways, they may not take him alive at all.”
“I hope he dies then.”
I wanted to tell her that it would haunt her if he did get killed, but I wasn’t sure that was true. Azza wanted revenge. Getting it, however, required my silence.
I couldn’t tell Agent Hale that Azza had lied, not until Azza had escaped as best she could. It was necessary for her to get as much of a head start on the agents as possible. That didn’t mean that my silence had to be absolute. I could warn Qais that he was being hunted.
He could run too.
Even if Azza had no qualms about using the justice system to extract vengeance, I certainly did. Justice and vengeance are different things, though they are often confused. That’s what had happened in Taleb Mansoor’s case.
“You can’t do this. I can’t do it. We don’t take from the world what we can’t give back to it.”
“I don’t know what that means.”
“It means we have to live careful l
ives.”
“Why?”
I frowned. It was not a question I had ever asked, but only because the truth of that proposition had always seemed self-evident to me. Maybe it was an easier thing to understand when you had blood on your hands, even if it was only the blood of a goat.
“Because, Azza, the damage we do to each other, to the world, survives us. In the time we have, we must consider the consequences of—”
“The world will be better when Qais isn’t in it. And not just for me. He was the one who destroyed Bhatti’s office.”
“How do you know that?”
“He hates Bhatti because Bhatti kept him away from me, from what he imagines is his.”
Our landlord had called Qais a hyena, but that was not proof of guilt. Not that it mattered. I wasn’t saying that Qais didn’t deserve a harsh fate, or that his absence wouldn’t make society better. That wasn’t my position. I was arguing, as I always had, for process.
“We don’t get to make that call.”
“Then who does?”
It wasn’t my night for having answers to the questions she was asking.
I knew how Bariah Faris would reply, of course. My mother would say that only God got to decide the shape of the world. It was a nice answer, perhaps even a true answer, but not a complete one. When you hold a knife in your hand, you’re responsible for what you do with it. The will of a higher power doesn’t absolve you of the consequences of your decisions. Religion is not morality, despite what Ma might think.
When I didn’t answer, Azza stepped closer and rested a hand on the side of my face, forcing me to look into her unreadable eyes. “Don’t interfere, Anvar,” she whispered. “Let it happen. This is all I have left. I need to hurt Qais. You can’t take this away from me. Please.”
I turned my head slightly, so I could kiss her palm. I gave her no promise but stopped pushing back. She wasn’t going to change her mind, and it was possible I’d never get to speak to her again. I didn’t want to waste the last few words we had left.
“Wherever you go, Azza, whatever name you take and whoever you become, I hope that you find everything you’re looking for.”
The Bad Muslim Discount Page 31