Terrorist

by John Updike

  The majority of security personnel were recruited from the minorities, and many women, especially older women, recoiled from the intrusion of black or brown fingers into their purses. The dozing giant of American racism, lulled by decades of official liberal singsong, stirred anew as African-Americans and Hispanics, who (it was often complained) “can’t even speak English properly,” acquired the authority to frisk, to question, to delay, to grant or deny admission and the permission to fly. In a land of multiplying security gates, the gatekeepers multiply also. To the well-paid professionals who travelled the airways and frequented the newly fortified government buildings, it appears that a dusky underclass has been given tyrannical power. Comfortable lives that even a decade ago moved fluidly through circuits of privilege and assumed access now encounter sticking-points at what seem every step, while maddeningly deliberate guards ponder driver’s licenses and boarding passes. Where once a confident manner, a correct suit and tie, and a business card measuring two by three and a half inches had opened doors, the switch is no longer tripped, the door remains closed. How can the fluid, hydraulically responsive workings of capitalism, let alone the commerce of intellectual exchange and the social life of extended families, function through such obdurate thicknesses of precaution? The enemy has achieved his goal: business and recreation in the West are gummed up, exorbitantly so.

  “I thought it went very well, as usual,” Hermione Fogel responds, to a question the Secretary has all but forgotten. He is preoccupied: the clashing claims of privacy and security, convenience and safety, are his daily diet, and yet his compensation in terms of public admiration is nearly nil and in terms of financial compensation distinctly modest, with children approaching the age of college education and a wife who must keep up her end in the endless social rounds of Republican Washington. Except for a black, single woman, a polyglot academic and accomplished pianist in charge of long-range global strategy, the Secretary’s colleagues in the administration were born rich and have made additional fortunes in the private sector during their eight-year holiday from public service under Clinton. In those fat years the Secretary had been grinding his way upward through low-paying government posts in the Keystone State. Now all the Clintonians, including the Clintons themselves, are getting pig-rich with their tell-all memoirs, while the Secretary, loyal and stolid, is wedded to tight-mouthed secrecy, now and ever after.

  Not that he knows anything his Arabists don’t tell him; the world they monitor, of electronic chatter crackling with poetic euphemism and pathetic braggadocio, is as alien and repellent to the Secretary as any underworld of sleepless geeks, even those of Caucasian blood and Christian upbringing. When the heaven splits asunder in the east and reddens like a rose or stained leather—the insertion into this clause from the Koran the non-Koranic “in the east” may or may not, coupled with various rambling and extravagant “confessions” of captured operatives, justify the elevation of the level of police and military watchfulness accorded certain Eastern financial institutions of the spectacular, skyscraping sort attractive to the enemy’s superstitious mentality. The enemy is obsessed with holy sites, and as convinced as the old Communist archenemies had been that capitalism has a headquarters, a head that may be cut off, leaving flocks of the faithful to be gratefully herded into an ascetic and dogmatic tyranny.

  The enemy cannot believe that democracy and consumerism are fevers in the blood of Everyman, an outgrowth of each individual’s instinctive optimism and desire for freedom. Even for a stout churchgoer like the Secretary, a will-of-God fatalism and a heavy bet on the next world have been left behind in the Dark Ages. Those who still hold to the bet have one thing going for them: they are eager to die. The unbelievers love this fleeting life too well: that was another verse that kept coming up in the Internet chatter.

  “I’ll be knocked for this,” the Secretary gloomily confides to his so-called undersecretary. “If nothing happens, I’m a scaremonger. If it does, I’m a lazy leech on the public payroll who allowed the death of thousands.”

  “No one would say such things,” Hermione reassures him, her sallow spinster skin reddening with sympathetic feeling. “Everyone, even the Democrats, knows you are doing an impossible job that nevertheless must be done, for the sake of our national survival.”

  “That about says it, I guess,” the object of her admiration admits, his mouth pinched even smaller by a conscious wryness. The elevator smoothly returns them, with two armed security guards (one male, one female) and a trio of gray-suited staffers, to the level of the White House basement. Outside, church bells are ringing in sunshine blended of Virginia and Maryland rays. The Secretary muses aloud, “Those people out there…Why do they want to do these horrible things? Why do they hate us? What’s to hate?”

  “They hate the light,” Hermione tells him loyally. “Like cockroaches. Like bats. The light shone in darkness,” she quotes, knowing that Pennsylvania piety is a way to his heart, “and the darkness comprehended it not.”

  II

  THE SOOT-STAINED ironstone church beside the lake of rubble is filled inside with pastel cotton dresses and sharp-shouldered polyester suits. Ahmad’s eyes are dazzled, and find no balm in the stained-glass windows, depicting men in parodies of Middle Eastern dress enacting incidents in their supposed Lord’s progress through his brief and inglorious life. To worship a God known to have died—the very idea affects Ahmad like an elusive stench, a stoppage in the plumbing, a dead rodent in the walls. Yet the congregants, a few of whom are even paler than he in his crisp white shirt, bask in the clean-scrubbed happiness of their Sunday-morning assembly. The receding rows of seated and sexually mixed people, and the stagy confused area at the front with its built-in knobbed furniture and high, grimy triple window showing a pigeon about to alight on the head of a white-bearded man, and the giddy murmur of greetings and the crackle of heavy rumps shifting on the wooden pews, all seem to Ahmad more like a movie theatre before the movie starts than a holy mosque, with its thick muffling rugs and empty tiled mihrab and the liquid chants, l ilha ill Allah, emitted by men fragrant of their menial Friday labors and, in their rhythmic unison of obeisance, crammed together as closely as the segments of a worm. The mosque was a domain of men; here, women in their spring shimmer, their expansive soft flesh, dominate.

  He had hoped by arriving just as the ten-o’clock bells were ringing to slip into the back unnoticed, but he is tenaciously greeted by a plump descendant of slaves in a peach-colored suit with wide lapels and a sprig of lily-of-the-valley pinned to one of them. The black man hands Ahmad a folded sheet of tinted paper and leads him forward, up the center aisle, to the front pews. The church is nearly full, and none but the front pews, apparently the less desirable, are empty. Accustomed to worshippers squatting and kneeling on a floor, emphasizing God’s height above them, Ahmad feels, even seated, dizzily, blasphemously tall. The Christian attitude of lazily sitting erect as at an entertainment suggests that God is an entertainer who, when He ceases to entertain, can be removed from the stage, and another act brought on.

  Ahmad thinks he will have the pew to himself, as a sop to his strangeness and his sensed trepidation at being here, but another usher officiously herds down the carpeted aisle a large black family bobbing and bristling with the corn-rowed, beribboned heads of little females. Ahmad is pushed to the pew’s far end, and in acknowledgment of his displacement the patriarch of the brood reaches over the laps of several small daughters to offer Ahmad his broad brown hand and a smile of welcome in which a gold tooth gleams. The mother of this brood, too far away to reach the stranger, gaily follows suit with a distant wave and nod. The little girls glance up, showing moon crescents of eye white. All this kafir friendliness—Ahmad doesn’t know how to repel it, or what further inroads the service will impose. Already he hates Joryleen for luring him into such a sticky trap. He holds his breath as if to fend off contamination and stares straight ahead, where the curious carvings on what he takes to be the Christian equivalent of the min
bar slowly sort themselves out as winged angels; he identifies the one of them blowing a long horn as Gabriel, and the crowded occasion therefore as the same Judgment Day the thought of which prompted Mohammed to gusts of his most rapturous poetry. What a mistake, Ahmad thinks, it is to attempt depiction, in images whose very grain betrays them as mere wood, of the inimitable work of God the Creator, al-Khliq. The imagery of words, the Prophet knew, alone grips the soul with its own spiritual substance. Verily, were men and Djinn assembled to produce the like of this Qur’an, they could not produce its like, though the one should help the other.

  The service at last begins. There is an expectant silence and then a swooping, bouncy thunder whose toylike timbre Ahmad recognizes, from assemblies at Central High, as that of an electric organ, poor cousin of the real pipe organ that he spies gathering dust beyond the Christian minbar. All stand to sing. Ahmad is brought to his feet as if by chains tying him to the others. A blue-robed mass, a choir, floods down the central aisle and fills the spaces behind a low rail beyond which, it seems, the congregation dare not pass. The sung words, distorted by the rhythm and languid accents of these zanj, concern, as best he can understand, a hill far away, and an old rugged cross. From within his resolute silence he spots Joryleen in the choir, a mass of mostly women, massive women among whom Joryleen looks girlishly young and relatively slim. She in turn spots Ahmad, in his pew up front; her smile disappoints him by being tentative, darting, nervous. She, too, knows he should not be here.

  Up, down, everyone in his row but he and the smallest girl go onto their knees and return to sitting. There are group recitations and responses he cannot follow, though the father with the gold tooth shows him the page in the front of the hymnal. We believe this and that, the Lord is thanked for that and this. Then a long prayer is offered by the Christian imam, a stern-faced, coffee-colored man with wireless glasses and a flashing tall bald head. His gravelly voice is electrically amplified so that it booms from the back of the church as well as the front; while he, his eyes tight-shut behind his spectacles, burrows more deeply into the darkness that his mind’s eye sees as he prays, voices from the congregation, here and there, shout out agreement—“Thass right!” “Say it, Reverend!” “Praise the Lord!” Arising like sweat on the skin, a murmur of assent continues when, in the wake of the second hymn, concerning the joys of walking with Jesus, the preacher ascends into the high minbar decorated with carved angels. In ever more rolling tones, moving his head in and out of the amplifying system’s range so that his voice shrinks and swells like that of a man calling from the topmost mast of a storm-tossed ship, he tells of Moses, who led the chosen people out of slavery and yet was himself denied admission to the Promised Land.

  “Why was that?” he asks. “Moses had served the Lord as spokesman in and out of Egypt. Spokesman: our President down there in Washington has a spokesman, our company heads in their lofty offices in Manhattan and Houston, they have spokesmen, spokeswomen in some cases, being spokes-persons comes more naturally to them, doesn’t it, brothers?” There were guffaws and titters, inviting a digression: “Mercy, our beloved sisters do know how to speak. God didn’t give Eve our strength of arm and shoulder, but he gave her double our strength of tongue. I hear laughing, but that’s no joke, it’s simple evolution, like they want to teach our innocent children in all the public schools. But seriously: nobody trusts himself to speak for himself any more. Too many risks. Too many lawyers watching and writing down what you say. Now, if I had a spokesperson right now I would be home watching a TV chat show with Mr. William Moyers or Mr. Theodore Koppel and having a second helping, a second slice or two or three, of that delicious, syrup-saturated French toast my dear Tilly makes for me some mornings after she’s bought herself a new dress, a new dress or some fancy alligator purse she feels the teeniest bit guilty about.”

  Above the chuckles that greet this revelation, the preacher goes on, “That way, I would be saving my voice. That way, I wouldn’t have to wonder out loud with all of you listening why God held Moses back from entering the Promised Land. If I only had a spokesperson.”

  To Ahmad it seems as if suddenly, in the midst of this expectant and heated crowd of dark-skinned kuffr, the preacher is musing to himself, having forgotten why he is here, why all of them are here, while mockingly loud radios can be heard from cars swishing past on the street outside. But the man’s eyes fly open behind his glasses and with a thump he pounces on the big gold-edged Bible in the minbar lectern, saying, “Here’s the reason; God gives it in Deuteronomy, chapter thirty-two, verse fifty-one: ‘Because ye trespassed against me among the children of Israel at the waters of Meribah-Kadesh, in the wilderness of Zin, because ye sanctified me not in the midst of the children of Israel.’”

  The preacher, in his blue big-sleeved robe with a shirt and red necktie peeking out at the top, surveys the congregation with eyes widened in amazement and seems to Ahmad to focus especially upon him, perhaps because his is not a familiar face. “What does that mean?” he asks softly. “‘Trespassed against me’? ‘Sanctified me not’? What did those poor long-suffering Israelites do wrong at those waters of Meribah-Kadesh, in that wilderness of Zin? Raise your hand, anybody who knows.” Nobody does, taken off guard, and the preacher hurries on, consulting his big Bible again, tugging a thickness of its gilded edges over to a place he had marked. “It’s all in here, my friends. Everything you need to know is right spang in here. The Good Book tells how a scouting party went out from the people Moses was leading all that way out of Egypt, they went into the Negev and north to the Jordan and came back and said, according to the thirteenth chapter of Numbers, that the land they had explored ‘floweth with milk and honey,’ but ‘nevertheless the people be strong that dwell in the land, and the cities are walled, and very great,’ and furthermore—furthermore, they reported—‘the children of Anak’ are there, and they are giants next to which ‘we were in our own sight as grasshoppers, and so we were in their sight.’ They knew it, and we knew it, brothers and sisters—next to them we were just little old grasshoppers, grasshoppers that live in the weeds for a few quick days, in the hay of a meadow before it is cut, in the outfield of the baseball field where nobody ever hits the ball, and then are gone, their exoskeletons, as intricate as everything else the good Lord makes, easily crunched in the beak of a crow or swallow, a seagull or a cowbird.”

  Now the preacher’s blue sleeves thrash and bits of spittle from his mouth spark in the lectern light, and the choir below him sways, with Joryleen in it. “And Caleb said, ‘Let’s go, let us go up at once, and possess it’—‘We can take ’em, giants or not. Let’s go do it!’” And the tall coffee-colored man reads, in a voice vibrant and rapid, taking many voices: “‘And all the congregation lifted up their voice, and cried; and the people wept that night. And all the children of Israel murmured against Moses and against Aaron: and the whole congregation said unto them, Would God that we had died in the land of Egypt! or would God we had died in this wilderness!’”

  He looks gravely out at the congregation, his spectacles circles of pure blind light, and repeats, “‘Would to God that we had died in Egypt!’ So why did God bring us out of slavery into this wilderness”—he consults his book—“‘to fall by the sword, that our wives and our children should be a prey’? A prey! Hey, this is serious! Let’s hustle our asses—our oxes and asses—back to Egypt!” He glances into the book, and reads a verse aloud: “‘They said to one another, Let us make a captain, and let us return to Egypt.’ That Pharaoh, he wasn’t so bad. He fed us, though not much. He gave us cabins to sleep in, down by the marsh with all the mosquitoes. He sent us welfare checks, pretty regular. He gave us jobs dishing up fries at McDonald’s, for the minimum wage. He was friendly, that Pharaoh, compared to those giants, those humongous sons of Anak.”

  He stands erect, dropping his impersonation for the moment. “And what did Moses and his brother Aaron do about all this talk? It says right here, in Numbers fourteen, five: ‘Moses and Aaron fel
l on their faces before all the assembly of the congregation of the children of Israel.’ They gave up. They said to the people, the people they were supposed to be leading on behalf of the Almighty Lord, they said, ‘Maybe you’re right. We’ve had it. We’ve been wandering out of Egypt too long. This wilderness is just too much.’

  “And Joshua—you remember him, the son of Nun, of the tribe of Ephraim, he was one of the twelve on that scouting party, along with Caleb—and Joshua stood up and said, ‘Wait a minute. Wait a minute, brethren. This is good land those Canaanites have. Don’t be afraid of those Canaanites, for they’—and I’m reading now—‘are bread for us: their defense is departed from them, and the Lord is with us: fear them not.’” Solemnly, slowly, the preacher repeats, “‘The Lord is with us: fear them not.’ And how did those average Israelites react when those two brave warrior-men stood up and said, ‘Let’s go. Don’t be afraid of those Canaanites’? They said, ‘Stone them. Stone those noisy rascals.’ And they picked up stones—some considerably sharp and ugly flint lying around in that desert wilderness—and were set to crush the heads and mouths of Caleb and Joshua, when something amazing happened. Let me read to you what happened: ‘And the glory of the Lord appeared in the tabernacle of the congregation before all the children of Israel. And the Lord said unto Moses, “How long will this people provoke me? and how long will it be ere they believe me, for all the signs which I have showed among them?” ’ Manna from Heaven had been a sign. Water from the rock of Horeb had been a sign. The voice from the burning bush had been a clear sign. The pillars of cloud by day and of fire by night had been signs. Signs, signs around the clock, twenty-four/seven, as the saying is now.