Terrorist

by John Updike

  “Your father,” Levy prompts.

  “Exactly. He had hoped, my mother has explained to me, to absorb lessons in American enterprise and marketing techniques. It was not as easy as he had been told it would be. His name was—is; I very much feel he is still alive—Omar Ashmawy, and hers is Teresa Mulloy. She is Irish-American. They married well before I was born. I am legitimate.”

  “Fine. I didn’t doubt it. Not that it matters. It’s not the baby who’s not legitimate, if you follow me.”

  “I do, sir. Thank you. My father well knew that marrying an American citizen, however trashy and immoral she was, would gain him American citizenship, and so it did, but not American know-how, nor the network of acquaintance that leads to American prosperity. Having despaired of ever earning more than a menial living by the time I was three, he decamped. Is that the correct word? I encountered it in an autobiographical memoir by the great American writer Henry Miller, which Miss Mackenzie assigned us in Advanced English.”

  “She did? My goodness, Ahmad; times change. You used to find Miller only under the counter. You know the expression ‘under the counter’?”

  “Of course. I am not a foreigner. I have never been abroad.”

  “You asked about ‘decamp.’ It’s an old-fashioned word, but most Americans know what it means. To break up a military camp is the original sense.”

  “Mr. Miller used it, I believe, of a wife who left him.”

  “Yes. Small wonder. That she decamped, I mean. Miller would not have been an easy husband.” Those lubricated three-ways with the wife in Sexus. Was the English department assigning Sexus? Is nothing to be held in reserve, for adulthood?

  The young man takes a surprising tangent from his counselor’s awkward remarks. “My mother tells me that I cannot remember my father,” he says, “and yet I do.”

  “Well, you were three. Developmentally speaking, you could have a few memories.” This is not Jack Levy’s intended direction for the interview.

  “A warm, dark shadow,” Ahmad says, leaning forward, with a jerk, in his earnestness. “Very white, square teeth. A small, neat mustache. I get my own personal neatness from him, I am sure. Among my memories is a sweet smell, perhaps aftershave lotion, though with a hint of some spice in it, perhaps a Middle Eastern dish he had just consumed. He was dark, darker than I, but elegantly thin-featured. He parted his hair very near the middle.”

  This intent digression makes Levy uneasy. The boy is using it to hide something—what? Jack points out, deflatingly, “Perhaps you have confused a photograph with a memory.”

  “I have only one or two photographs. My mother may have some she has hidden from me. When I was small and innocent, she refused to answer my many questions about my father. I think his desertion left her very angry. I would like, some day, to find him. Not to press any claim, or to impose any guilt, but simply to talk with him, as two Muslim men would talk.”

  “Uh, Mr.—? How do you like to be called? Mulloy or—” he looks again at the cover of his folder—“Ashmawy?”

  “My mother attached her name to me, on my Social Security and driver’s license, and her apartment is where I can be reached. But when I am out of school and independent I will become Ahmad Ashmawy.”

  Levy keeps his eyes down on the folder. “And how do you plan to support this independence? Your marks were good, Mr. Mulloy, in chemistry and English and so on, but I see you switched last year to the voke track. Who advised you to do that?”

  The young man lowers his own eyes—solemn black lamps, long-lashed—and rubs as if at a gnat by his ear. “My teacher,” he says.

  “Which teacher? A course switch like that should have been checked with me. We could have talked, you and I, even if we aren’t two Muslim men.”

  “My teacher is not here. He is at the mosque. Shaikh Rashid, the imam. We study together the sacred Qur’an.”

  Levy tries to suppress his distaste, saying, “Yes. Do I know where the mosque is? I fear I don’t, except for the huge one on Tilden Avenue that the Black Muslims put up in the ruins after the ’sixties riots. Is that the one you mean?” He is sounding bristly, and doesn’t want to. It wasn’t this boy who had woken him up at four o’clock, or who had fouled his brain with thoughts of death, or had made Beth oppressively fat.

  “West Main Street, sir, about six blocks south of Linden Boulevard.”

  “Reagan Boulevard. They renamed it last year,” Levy says, making a disapproving mouth.

  The boy doesn’t pick up on it. Politics for these teen-agers is an obscurer department of celebrity heaven. Polls show they think Kennedy was the next-best President after Lincoln, because he had celebrity quality, and anyway they don’t know any of the others, not even Ford and Carter, just Clinton and the Bushes, if they can tell the Bushes apart. Young Mulloy—Levy had a mental block with the other name—says, “It is on a street of stores, above a beauty shop and a place where they give you cash. It is not easy to find, the first time.”

  “And the imam of this hard-to-find place told you to switch to the voke track.”

  Again the boy hesitates, protecting what it is he is protecting, and then says, staring boldly from those great black eyes, in which the irises are hard to distinguish from the pupils, “He said the college track exposed me to corrupting influences—bad philosophy and bad literature. Western culture is Godless.”

  Jack Levy leans back in his squeaking old-fashioned wooden swivel chair and sighs, “Would that it were.” Fearing trouble with the school board and newspapers if they got wind of his saying this to a student, he backtracks: “That slipped out. Some of these evangelical Christians get my goat, blaming Darwin for the sloppy job God did, creating the universe.”

  But the boy is not listening, pursuing his own point. “And because it has no God, it is obsessed with sex and luxury goods. Look at television, Mr. Levy, how it’s always using sex to sell you things you don’t need. Look at the history the school teaches, pure colonialist. Look how Christianity committed genocide on the Native Americans and undermined Asia and Africa and now is coming after Islam, with everything in Washington run by the Jews to keep themselves in Palestine.”

  “Whew,” Jack says, wondering if the boy recognizes that he is talking to a Jew. “That’s quite a bill of particulars, to get you off the college track.” As Ahmad widens his eyes, staring into so much injustice, Jack notices that his irises are not plain black but with a greenish tinge in their brown, a pinch of the Mulloy in him. “Did the imam ever suggest,” he asks, letting the chair’s recoil lean him confidentially across the desk, “that a bright boy like you, in a diverse and tolerant society like this one, needs to confront a variety of viewpoints?”

  “No,” Ahmad says with surprising abruptness, his soft lips bunching in a pout of defiance. “Shaikh Rashid did not suggest that, sir. He feels that such a relativistic approach trivializes religion, implying that it doesn’t much matter. You believe this, I believe that, we all get along—that’s the American way.”

  “Right. And he doesn’t like the American way?”

  “He hates it.”

  Jack Levy, still sitting forward, braces his elbows on his desktop and his chin thoughtfully on his intertwined fingers. “And you, Mr. Mulloy? You hate it?”

  The boy shyly casts his eyes down again. “I of course do not hate all Americans. But the American way is the way of infidels. It is headed for a terrible doom.”

  He does not say, America wants to take away my God. He protects his God from this weary, unkempt, disbelieving old Jew, and guards as well his suspicion that Shaikh Rashid is so furiously absolute in his doctrines because God has secretly fled from behind his pale Yemeni eyes, the elusive gray-blue of a kafir woman’s. Ahmad in his fatherless years with his blithely faithless mother has grown accustomed to being God’s sole custodian, the one to whom God is an invisible but palpable companion. God is ever with him. As it says in the ninth sura, Ye have no patron or helper save God. God is another person close beside him, a
Siamese twin attached in every part, inside and out, and to whom he can turn at every moment in prayer. God is his happiness. This old Jewish devil, beneath his cunning, worldly-wise, mock-fatherly manner, wishes to disrupt that primal union and take the All-Merciful and Life-Giving One from him.

  Jack Levy sighs again and thinks ahead to the next appointment—another needy, surly, misguided teen-ager about to float away into the morass of the world. “Well, perhaps I shouldn’t say this, Ahmad, but in view of your grades and SATs, and your way-above-average poise and seriousness, I think your—what’s that word?—imam helped you to waste your high-school years. I wish you had stayed on the college track.”

  Ahmad comes to Shaikh Rashid’s defense. “Sir, there are no resources for any college expenses. My mother fancies herself an artist; she stopped her own education at the level of nurse’s aide, rather than invest two more years in her own education when I was a pre-school child.”

  Levy ruffles his thinning, already mussed hair. “O.K., sure. These are tight times, what with heightened security and Bush’s wars soaking up what used to be a surplus. But, let’s face it, there’s still a lot of scholarship money out there for smart, responsible kids of color. We could have gotten you some, I’m sure of it. Not Princeton, maybe, and maybe not Rutgers, but a place like Bloomfield or Seton Hall, Fairleigh Dickinson or Kean, can be excellent. Still, for now, that’s pretty much water over the dam. Sorry I wasn’t on to your case earlier. Get your high-school diploma, and see how you feel about college in a year or two. You know where to find me, I’d do what I could. What, may I ask, had you planned to do after graduation? If you have no job prospects, think about the Army. It’s not everybody’s sweetheart any more, but it still offers a pretty good deal—teaches you some skills, and helps with an education afterwards. It helped me. If you have any Arabic, they’d love you.”

  Ahmad’s expression stiffens. “The Army would send me to fight my brothers.”

  “Or to fight for your brothers, it could be. Not all Iraqis are insurgents, you know. Most aren’t. They just want to get on with business. Civilization started there. They had an up-and-coming little country, until Saddam.”

  The boy’s eyebrows, thick and broad as a man’s though the hairs are finer, knit into a scowl. Ahmad stands up to leave, but Levy isn’t quite ready to let him go. “I asked,” he insists, “do you have any job lined up?”

  The answer comes reluctantly: “My teacher thinks I should drive a truck.”

  “Drive a truck? What kind of truck? There are trucks and trucks. You’re only eighteen; I happen to know you can’t get a license for a tractor rig or tank truck or even a school bus for three more years. The exam for the license, a CDL—that’s commercial driver’s license—is tough. Until you’re twenty-one you can’t drive out of state. You can’t carry hazardous materials.”

  “I can’t?”

  “Not as I remember. I’ve had young men before you who were interested; a lot got scared off, by the technical side of it and all the regulations. You have to join the Teamsters. There’s a lot of hurdles, in trucking. A lot of thugs, too.”

  Ahmad shrugs; Levy sees that he has exhausted the young man’s quota of coöperation and courtesy. The boy has clammed up. O.K., so will Jack Levy. He’s been in Jersey longer than this pretentious kid. As he hopes, the less experienced male cracks and breaks the silence.

  Ahmad feels impelled to justify himself to this unhappy Jew. The scent of unhappiness rolls off Mr. Levy as sometimes it does off of Ahmad’s mother, after one boyfriend has let her down and before the next has shown up, and no painting of hers has sold for months. “My teacher knows people who might need a driver. I would have somebody to show me the ropes,” he explains. “It’s good pay,” he adds.

  “And long hours,” the guidance counselor says, slapping this student’s folder shut, having scribbled on the topmost page “lc” and “nc,” his abbreviations for “lost cause” and “no career.” “Tell me this, Mulloy. Your faith—it’s important to you.”

  “Yes.”

  The boy is protecting something; Jack can smell it.

  “God—Allah—is very real to you.”

  Ahmad says, slowly, as if betranced or reciting something memorized, “He is in me, and at my side.”

  “Good. Good. Glad to hear it. Keep it up. I was exposed to religion a little, my mother would light the Hanukkah candles, but I had this father who was a scoffer, so I followed his example and didn’t keep it up. I never had it to lose, really. Dust to dust’s my sense of it all. Sorry.”

  The boy blinks and nods, a bit frightened by such a confession. His eyes seem round black lamps above the stark white shirt; they burn into Levy’s memory and return at times like afterimages of the sun at sunset, or the flash from a camera when you obligingly pose, trying to look natural, and it goes off unexpectedly soon.

  Levy pursues it: “How old were you when you…when you found your faith?”

  “Age eleven, sir.”

  “Funny—that’s the age when I announced I was giving up the violin. Defied my parents. Asserted myself. The hell with everybody.” The boy still stares, refusing the bond. “O.K.,” Levy concedes. “I want to think about you a little more. I may want to see you again, give you some relevant material, before you graduate.” He stands and on an impulse shakes the tall, slender, fragile-seeming youth’s hand, which he doesn’t do with every boy at the end of a session, and would never do with a girl these days—the merest touch risks a complaint. Some of these little hot twats fantasize. Ahmad’s clasped hand is so limp and damp Jack is startled: still a shy kid, not yet a man. “Or, if not,” the counselor concludes, “you have a great life, my friend.”

  On Sunday morning, while most Americans are still in bed, though a few are struggling out to an early mass or a scheduled golf match in the dew, the Secretary for Homeland Security upgrades the so-called terror-threat level from yellow, meaning merely “elevated,” to orange, meaning “high.” That’s the bad news. The good news is that the higher level applies only to specific areas of Washington, New York, and northern New Jersey; the rest of the nation remains on yellow.

  The Secretary tells the nation, in his all-but-sublimated Pennsylvania accent, that recent intelligence reports, in what he terms “alarmingly close and harmonious detail,” indicated an attack upon sensitive targets in those specific Eastern metropolitan areas, which “the enemies of freedom have been studying with the most sophisticated tools of reconnaissance.” Financial centers, sports arenas, bridges, tunnels, subways—nothing is safe. “You may expect to see,” he tells the lens of the television camera, which is like a gun-colored, lens-covered porthole on whose other side presses an ocean of trusting, anxious citizens, “special buffer zones to secure the perimeters of buildings from unauthorized cars and trucks; restrictions to affected underground parking; security personnel using identification badges and digital photos to keep track of people entering and exiting buildings; increased law-enforcement presence; and robust screening of vehicles, packages, and deliveries.”

  He cherishes and emphasizes the phrase “robust screening.” It conjures up an image of strapping men in green or gray-blue jumpsuits tearing apart vehicles and packages, venting in their vigor the Secretary’s daily frustration at the difficulty of his task. His task is to protect in spite of itself a nation of nearly three hundred million anarchic souls, their millions of daily irrational impulses and self-indulgent actions flitting out of sight just around the edge of feasible surveillability. This mob’s collective gaps and irregularities form a perfect rough surface whereupon the enemy can grow one of his tenacious, wide-spreading plots. Destruction, the Secretary has often thought, is so much easier than construction, and disruption than social order, that the upholders of a society must always lag behind those who would destroy it, just as (he had been a football player for Lehigh in his youth) a fleet-footed receiver can always gain a step on the defending cornerback. “And God bless America,” he publicly concludes.r />
  The red light above the little porthole goes off. He is off the air. He abruptly shrinks in size; now his words will be heard by only the handful of TV technicians and loyal staffers around him, here in this cramped media facility sunk a hundred bombproof feet beneath Pennsylvania Avenue. Other Cabinet-level officials get marble-and-limestone federal buildings so long that each has its own horizon, whereas he must function huddling in a small windowless office in the basement of the White House. With a Herculean sigh of weariness, the Secretary turns from the camera. He is a large man, with a slab of muscle across his back that gives the tailors of his dark-blue suits extra trouble. In his massive head his mouth looks truculently small. His haircut, on that same head, also looks small, like a hat belonging to someone else but jammed on anyway. His Pennsylvania accent is not a broad, syllable-swallowing growl like Lee Iacocca’s or a piercing honk like Arnold Palmer’s; of a generation younger than they, he speaks a neutral, media-friendly English, which only in its tense solemnity and certain vowel shadings betrays its source in a Commonwealth renowned for seriousness, for earnest effort and stoic submission, for Quakers and coal miners, for Amish farmers and God-fearing Presbyterian steel magnates.

  “Whajja think?” he asks an assistant, a slender pink-eyed fellow-Pennsylvanian, sixty-four but virginal, Hermione Fogel.

  Hermione’s transparent skin and fluttering, embarrassed demeanor express an instinctive underling’s yearning for personal invisibility. In the spirit of cumbersome fun with which the Secretary expressed his affection and trust, he brought her with him from Harrisburg and gave her an informal title: Undersecretary for Women’s Purses. The problem was real enough: women’s purses were sinkholes of confusion and sedimented treasure in whose depths any number of compact terrorist-weapons—retractable box-cutters, exploding sarin pellets, lipstick-shaped stun guns—could be secreted. It was Hermione who had helped develop the search protocols for this crucial area of darkness, including the simple wooden stick with which security guards at entrances could probe the depths and not give offense with the rummaging touch of their naked hands.