by John Updike
“That little thing in your nose. I didn’t notice it before. Just those little rings on the edge of your ear.”
“It’s new. You don’t like it? Tylenol likes it. He can hardly wait till I get a tongue stud.”
“Piercing your tongue? That’s horrible, Joryleen.”
“Tylenol says the Lord loves a sporty woman. What does your Mr. Mohammed say?”
Ahmad hears the mockery but nevertheless feels tall standing next to this short, ripe girl; he looks down past her face, with its gleam of mischief, to the tops of her breasts, exposed by a loose-necked springtime blouse and still glazed with the excitement and exertion of her singing. “He advises women to cover their ornaments,” he tells her. “He says good women are for good men, and unclean women for unclean men.”
Joryleen’s eyes widen and she blinks her lids, taking this unsmiling solemnity as part of him, which she might have to deal with. “Well, I don’t know where that leaves me,” she says cheerfully. “Their notion of unclean was pretty broad in those there days,” she adds, and brushes back some moisture from her temple, where the hair is fine like a boy’s mustache before he thinks to shave. “How’d you like my singing?”
He takes thought, while the chattering congregants stroll past, their duty done for the week, and the in-and-out sun makes feathery weak shadows beneath the emergent locust leaves. “You have a beautiful voice,” Ahmad tells her. “It is very pure. The uses to which it is being put, however, are not pure. The singing, especially of the very fat woman—”
“Eva-Marie,” Joryleen supplies. “She’s the most. She never gives it less than her everything.”
“Her singing seemed to me very sensual. And I did not understand many of the words. In what way is Jesus such a friend to all of you?”
“What a friend, what a friend,” Joryleen pants lightly, in imitation of the way the choir broke up the hymn’s phrases suggesting the repetitive (as he understood them) motions of sexual intercourse. “He just is, that’s all,” she insists. “People feel better, thinking he’s right there. If he isn’t there caring, who is, right? The same thing, I ’spect, with your Mohammed.”
“The Prophet is many things to his followers, but we do not call him our friend. We are not so cozy, as your clergyman said.”
“Hey,” she says, “let’s not talk this stuff. Thanks for coming, Ahmad. I never thought you would.”
“You have been gracious to me, and I was curious. It is helpful, up to a point, to know the enemy.”
“Enemy? Whoa. You didn’t have no enemies there.”
“My teacher at the mosque says that all unbelievers are our enemies. The Prophet said that eventually all unbelievers must be destroyed.”
“Oh, man. How’d you get this way? Your mother’s just a freckle-faced mick, right? That’s what Tylenol says.”
“Tylenol, Tylenol. How close are you, may I ask, to this fount of wisdom? Does he consider you his woman?”
“Oh, that boy’s just trying things out. He’s too young to get fixed up with any one lady friend. Let’s walk along. We’re getting too many looks.”
They walk along the northern edge of the empty acres waiting to be developed. A painted big sign shows a four-story parking garage that will bring shoppers back to the inner city, but for two years nothing has been built, there is only the picture, more and more scribbled over. When the sun, slanting from the south above the new glass buildings downtown, comes through the clouds, a fine dust can be seen lifting from the rubble, and when the clouds return the sun becomes a white circle like a perfect hole burned through, exactly the size of the moon. Feeling the sun on one side of him makes him conscious of the warmth on the other, the warmth of Joryleen’s body moving along, a system of overlapping circles and soft parts. The bead above her nostril-wing gleams a hot pinpoint; sunlight sticks a glistening tongue into the cavity at the center of her scoop-necked blouse. He tells her, “I am a good Muslim, in a world that mocks faith.”
“Instead of being good, don’t you ever want to feel good?” Joryleen asks. He believes she is sincerely curious; in his severe faith he is a puzzle to her, a curiosity.
“Perhaps the two go together,” he offers. “The feeling and the being.”
“You came to my church,” she says. “I could go to your mosque with you.”
“That would not do. We could not sit together, and you could not attend without a course of instruction, and a demonstration of sincerity.”
“Wow. That may be more than I have time for. Tell me, Ahmad, what do you do for fun?”
“Some of the same things you do, though ‘fun,’ as you put it, is not the point of a good Muslim’s life. I take lessons twice a week in the language and lessons of the Qur’an. I attend Central High. I am on the soccer team in the fall—indeed, I scored five goals this past season, one a penalty shot—and do track in the spring. For spending money, and to help out my mother—the freckle-faced mick, as you call her—”
“As Tylenol called her.”
“As the two of you evidently call her—I clerk at the Shop-a-Sec from twelve to eighteen hours a week, and this can be ‘fun,’ observing the customers and the varieties of costume and personal craziness that American permissiveness invites. There is nothing in Islam to forbid watching television and attending the cinema, though in fact it is all so saturated in despair and unbelief as to repel my interest. Nor does Islam forbid consorting with the opposite sex, if strict prohibitions are observed.”
“So strict nothing happens, right? Turn left here, if you’re walking me home. You don’t have to, you know. We’re getting into worse neighborhoods. You don’t want to be hassled.”
“I wish to see you home.” He goes on, “They exist, the prohibitions, for the benefit less of the male than of the female. Her virginity and purity are central to her value.”
“Oh, my,” Joryleen says. “In whose eyes? I mean, who’s doing this valuing?”
She is leading him, he feels, close to the edge of betraying his beliefs, just in responding to her questions. In class, he observed at the high school, she talked well, so that the teachers became engaged with her, not realizing that she was leading them from the set lessons and wasting classroom time. She has a wicked streak. “In the eyes of God,” he tells her, “as revealed by the Prophet: ‘Enjoin believing women to turn their eyes away from temptation and to preserve their chastity.’ That’s from the same sura that advises women to cover their ornaments, and to draw their veils over their bosoms, and not even to stamp their feet so their hidden ankle bracelets can be heard.”
“You think I show too much tit—I can tell by where your eyes go.”
Just hearing the word “tit” from her lips stirs him indecently. He says, staring ahead, “Purity is its own end. As we were discussing, it is both being good and feeling good.”
“What about all them virgins on the other side? What happens to purity when those young-men martyrs get there, all full of spunk?”
“Their virtue enjoys its reward, while remaining pure, in the context God has created. My teacher at the mosque thinks that the dark-eyed virgins are symbolic of a bliss one cannot imagine without concrete images. It is typical of the sex-obsessed West that it has seized upon that image, and ridicules Islam because of it.”
They continue in the direction she indicated. The neighborhood grows shaggier around them; bushes are untended, houses unpainted, sidewalk squares in places tilted and cracked by tree roots underneath; the little front yards are speckled with litter. The rows of houses lack a few, like teeth knocked out, the gaps fenced in but the thick chain-link fencing cut and twisted under the invisible pressure of people who hate fences, who want to get somewhere quick. The row houses in some blocks become a single long building with many peeling doors and four-step stairs, old and wooden or new and concrete. Overhead, high twigs interlace with electric wires carrying electricity across the city, a sagging harp that dips through gaps lopped by tree crews. Spatters of blossom and unfolding l
eaf, in color between yellow and green, appear luminous against the cloud-blotched sky.
“Ahmad,” Joryleen says with a sudden exasperation, “suppose none of it is true—suppose you die and there’s nothing there, nothing at all? What’s the point of all this purity then?”
“If none of it is true,” he tells her, his stomach clenching at the thought, “then the world is too terrible to cherish, and I would not regret leaving it.”
“Man! You are one in a million, no kidding. They must love you to death over at that mosque.”
“There are many like me,” he tells her, both stiffly and gently, half rebuking. “Some are”—he does not want to say “black,” since the word though politically correct does not sound kind—“what you call your brothers. The mosque and its teachers give them what the Christian U.S. disdains to—respect, and a challenge that asks something of them. It asks austerity. It asks restraint. All America wants of its citizens, your President has said, is for us to buy—to spend money we cannot afford and thus propel the economy forward for himself and other rich men.”
“He ain’t my President. If I could vote this year I’d vote to kick him out, in favor of Al Sharpton.”
“It makes no difference which President is in. They all want Americans to be selfish and materialistic, to play their part in consumerism. But the human spirit asks for self-denial. It longs to say ‘No’ to the physical world.”
“You scare me when you talk like that. It sounds like you hate life.” She goes on, revealing herself as freely as if she is singing, “The way I feel it, the spirit is what comes out of the body, like flowers come out of the earth. Hating your body is like hating yourself, the bones and blood and skin and shit that make you you.”
As when standing above that glistening trail of a disappeared worm or slug, Ahmad feels tall, tall enough to be dizzy, looking down at this short round girl whose indignation at his yearning for purity gives her voice and lips a lively quickness. Where her lips meet the other skin of her face there is an edge, a little line like the circle cocoa leaves on the inside of a cup. He thinks of sinking himself into her body and knows from its richness and ease that this is a devil’s thought.
“Not hate your body,” he corrects her, “but not be a slave to it either. I look around me, and I see slaves—slaves to drugs, slaves to fads, slaves to television, slaves to sports heroes that don’t know they exist, slaves to the unholy, meaningless opinions of others. You have a good heart, Joryleen, but you’re heading straight for Hell, the lazy way you think.”
She has halted on the sidewalk, in a bleak, treeless stretch, and he thinks it is her anger at him, her disappointment near tears, that has stopped her, but then realizes that this drab doorway is hers, with its four wooden steps stained gray as if with never-ending rain. He at least lives in a brick apartment building on the north side of the boulevard. He feels guilty about her disappointment, since in inviting him to walk with her she laid herself open to expectation.
“You’re the one, Ahmad,” she says, turning to go in, planting a foot on the first drab step, “don’t know where he’s heading. You’re the one don’t know which fucking end is up.”
Sitting at the heavy old round brown table that he and his mother call “the dining table” though they never dine at it, Ahmad studies the Commercial Drivers’ License Home Study Course booklets, four of them, each stapled together. Shaikh Rashid helped him send away to Michigan for them, writing the check for $89.50 on the mosque account. Ahmad always thought truck-driving was something for simpletons like Tylenol and his gang at school, but in fact there is a confusing amount of expertise to it, such as all the hazardous materials that have to be publicly identified one from another by means of four different placards measuring ten and three-quarters inches and placed in a diamond shape. There are flammable gases like hydrogen and poisonous/ toxic gases like compressed fluorine; there are flammable solids like wetted ammonium picrate and spontaneously combustible ones like white phosphorus and ones spontaneously combustible when wet like sodium. Then there are real poisons like potassium cyanide and infectious substances like the anthrax virus and radioactive substances like uranium and corrosives like battery fluid. All this has to be trucked, and any spills of a certain quantity (depending on toxicity, volatility, chemical durability) must be reported to the DOT (Department of Transportation) and EPA (Environmental Protection Agency).
Ahmad is sickened, thinking of the paperwork, the shipping papers bristling with numbers and codes and prohibitions. Poisons should never be loaded with animal or human food; hazardous materials even in a tightly sealed canister should never ride up front with the driver; beware of heat, leaks, and sudden changes in speed. Besides hazardous substances there are ORM (Other Regulated Materials) that might have an anesthetic or irritating or noxious effect on a driver and his passengers, such as monochloroacetone or diphenylchlorarsine, and a material that might damage the vehicle if leaked, like the liquid corrosives bromine, soda lime, hydrochloric acid, sodium-hydroxide solution, and battery acid. All across this land, Ahmad now realizes, hazardous materials are hurtling, spilling, burning, eating roadways and truck beds—a chemical deviltry making manifest materialism’s spiritual poison.
Then, the booklets tell him, there is, in shipping liquids by bulk in tanker trucks, outage, also called ullage, the amount by which the cargo falls short, so that the tank will not burst when its contents expand during shipping—if, say, ambient temperature goes as high as one hundred thirty degrees. And also, with tank vehicles, the driver must beware of liquid surge, more acute and dangerous in the case of so-called smooth-bore tanks than in that of those with inside baffles or complete compartments. Even in these, however, sideways surge can overturn a truck taking a curve too sharply. Forward surge can push a truck out into traffic at a red light or stop sign. Yet sanitation regulations forbid baffles in a tanker transporting milk or fruit juice; baffles make the tanks harder to clean, and hence invite contamination. Transportation is full of dangers that Ahmad has never before contemplated. It excites him, however, to see himself—like the pilot of a 727 or the captain of a supertanker or the tiny brain of a brontosaurus—steering a great vehicle through the maze of dire possibilities to safety. He is pleased to find in the trucking regulations a concern with purity almost religious in quality.
Somebody knocks at the door, at quarter of eight at night. The noise, not far from the table where Ahmad studies by the light of a battered bridge lamp, jolts him from his focus on ullage and tonnage, surge and flow. His mother quickly emerges from her bedroom, which is also her painting studio, and goes—rushes, even—to answer the knock, fluffing up her light red hair—nape-length, henna-enhanced—as she goes. She greets mysterious interruptions more hopefully than Ahmad. He is still, ten days after attending the infidel church service, nervous about having trespassed on Tylenol’s territory; it is not impossible that the bully and his gang will waylay him sometime, even at night, calling him out from his own apartment.
Nor is it impossible, though unlikely, that an emissary from Shaikh Rashid knocks. His master has few disciples. He has seemed on edge lately, as if something weighs upon him; he feels to Ahmad like a finely honed element in a structure on which too much tension is imposed. This past week the imam showed a short temper with his pupil in a discussion of a verse from the third sura: Let not the infidels deem that the length of days we give them is good for them! We only give them length of days that they may increase their sins! and a shameful chastisement shall be their lot. Ahmad dared ask his teacher if there wasn’t something sadistic in the taunt, and in the many verses like it. He ventured, “Shouldn’t God’s purpose, as enunciated by the Prophet, be to convert the infidels? In any case, shouldn’t He show them mercy, not gloat over their pain?”
The imam presented half a face, the lower half being hidden by a trimmed beard flecked with gray. His nose was thin and high-arched and the skin of his cheeks pale, but not pale as Anglo-Saxons or Irish were, freckled an
d quick to blush, like Ahmad’s mother (a tendency the boy has regrettably inherited), but pale in a waxy, even, impervious Yemeni way. Within his beard, his violet lips twitched. He asked, “The cockroaches that slither out from the baseboard and from beneath the sink—do you pity them? The flies that buzz around the food on the table, walking on it with the dirty feet that have just danced on feces and carrion—do you pity them?”
Ahmad did, in truth, pity them, being fascinated by the vast insect population teeming at the feet of godlike men, but, knowing that any qualifications or signs of further argument would anger his teacher, responded, “No.”
“No,” Shaikh Rashid agreed with satisfaction, as a delicate hand tugged lightly at his beard. “You want to destroy them. They are vexing you with their uncleanness. They would take over your table, your kitchen; they will settle into the very food as it passes into your mouth if you do not destroy them. They have no feelings. They are manifestations of Satan, and God will destroy them without mercy on the day of final reckoning. God will rejoice at their suffering. Do thou likewise, Ahmad. To imagine that cockroaches deserve mercy is to place yourself above ar-Ram, to presume to be more merciful than the Merciful.”
It seemed to Ahmad that, as with the facts of Paradise, his teacher resorted to metaphor as a shield against reality. Joryleen, though an unbeliever, did have feelings; they were there in how she sang, and how the other unbelievers responded to the singing. But it was not Ahmad’s role to argue; it was his to learn, to submit to his own place in Islam’s vast structure, visible and invisible.
His mother may have hurried to the door in expectation of one of her male friends, but her voice in Ahmad’s hearing backs off, puzzled and yet not alarmed, respectful. A polite, weary voice slightly familiar to Ahmad is announcing itself as Mr. Levy, the guidance counselor at Central High School. Ahmad relaxes; it is not Tylenol or anybody from the mosque. But why Mr. Levy? Their conference left Ahmad uneasy; the counselor communicated dissatisfaction with Ahmad’s plans for his future and a desire to interfere.