Terrorist

by John Updike

  “Poor Jack,” Beth continues, rising above the slur, “he’s been knocking himself out to get this boy out of the grip of his mosque. They’re like Baptist fundamentalists, only worse, because they don’t care if they die.” A born peace-maker—maybe all younger sisters are—she reverts to Hermione’s favorite subject. “Tell me what he’s especially worried about these days. The Secretary.”

  “Ports,” came the ready answer. “Hundreds of container ships go in and out of our American ports every day, and nobody knows what’s in a tenth of them. They could be bringing in atomic weapons labelled Argentinean cowhides or something. Brazilian coffee—who’s sure it’s coffee? Or think of these huge tankers, not just the oil, but, say, liquid propane. That’s how they ship propane, liquefied. But think of what would happen in Jersey City or under the Bayonne Bridge if they got to it with just a few pounds of Semtex or TNT. Beth, it would be a conflagration: thousands dead. Or the New York subways—look at Madrid. Look at Tokyo a few years ago. Capitalism has been so open—that’s how it has to be, to make it work. Think of a few men with assault rifles in a mall anywhere in America. Or in Saks or Bloomingdale’s. Remember the old Wanamaker’s? How we used to go there as children with such happy hearts? It seemed a paradise, especially the escalators and the toy department on the top floor. All that’s gone. We can never be happy again—we Americans.”

  Beth feels sorry for Hermione, taking everything so much to heart, and says, “Oh, don’t most people just bumble along still? There’s always some kind of danger in life. Plagues, wars. Tornadoes out in Kansas. People keep going. You go on living until you’re made to stop, and then you’re unconscious.”

  “That’s it, that’s just it, Betty, they’re working on stopping us. Everywhere, anywhere—all it takes is a little bomb, a few guns. An open society is so defenseless. Everything the modern free world has achieved is so fragile.”

  Only Hermione still called her Betty, and only then when she was miffed. Jack and her college friends called her Beth, and after she was married even her parents tried to switch over. To erase the little slip-up, Hermione courts her, trying to enlist her in her own infatuation with the Secretary. “He and these experts we have try to think day and night of worst-case scenarios. For instance, Beth, computers. We’ve built them into the system so that everybody’s dependent, not just libraries but industry, and banks, and brokerage houses, and the airlines, and nuclear-power plants—I could go on and on.”

  “I don’t doubt it.”

  Hermione entirely misses the sarcasm, going on, “There could be what they call a cyberattack. They have these worms that get by the firewalls and plant these applets, they call them, that send back covert messages describing the network they’ve penetrated and paralyzing everything, scrambling what they call the routing tables and getting by the gateway protocols so that not just the stock market and traffic lights but everything freezes—the power grids, the hospitals, the Internet itself, can you imagine? The worms would be programmed to spread and spread until even that television you were watching would go on the fritz, or else show nothing but Osama bin Laden on all the channels.”

  “Herm, honey, I haven’t heard anybody say ‘on the fritz’ since Philadelphia. Aren’t these worms and viruses being sent out all the time, and the source turns out to be some pathetic maladjusted teen-ager sitting in his grubby room in Bangkok or the Bronx? They make a little mess for a while but they don’t bring the world down. They get caught and put in jail, eventually. You’re forgetting all the clever men, and women too, that design these firewalls or whatever. Surely they can keep ahead of a few fanatic Arabs—it’s not as if they invented the computer like we did.”

  “No, but they invented zero, as you may not know. They don’t need to invent the computer to wipe us out with it. The Secretary calls it cyberwar. That’s what we’re in, like it or not, cyberwar. The worms are already out there running around; the Secretary every day has to sift through hundreds of reports that tell him about attacks.”

  “The cyberattacks.”

  “That’s right. You think it’s funny, I can tell from your voice, but it’s not. It’s deadly serious, Betty.”

  This Shaker chair is beginning to hurt. They must have had different body types back then, the Quakers and the Puritans: different philosophies about comfort and necessity. “I don’t think it’s funny, Herm. Of course very bad things can happen, some already have, but—” She forgets what the “but” was to preface. She thinks of walking with the portable phone into the kitchen and reaching into the cookie drawer. She loves the texture of these particular ones; that only one old-fashioned corner store left on Eleventh Street sells. Jack picks them up for her. She wonders when Jack will be back; his tutorials seem to take longer than they used to. “But I’m not aware of too many cyberattacks lately.”

  “Well, thank the Secretary for that. He gets reports even in the middle of the night. It’s aging him, it honestly is. He’s getting white hairs above his ears, and hollows under his eyes. I feel helpless.”

  “Hermione, doesn’t he have a wife? And umpteen children? I saw them in the paper, all going to church at Easter.”

  “Yes, of course he does. I know that. I know where I stand. Our relationship is purely official. And, since you’re being so provocative—and this is very confidential—one of the areas we get most reports from is northern New Jersey. Tucson, and the Buffalo area, and northern New Jersey. He’s very tight-lipped—he has to be—but there are some imams, if I’m pronouncing it right, that distinctly bear watching. They all preach terrible things against America, but some of them go beyond that. I mean, in advocating violence against the state.”

  “Well, at least it’s imams. If the rabbis start in, Jack’ll have to join up. Though he never goes to temple. He might be happier if he did.”

  Hermione’s exasperation breaks out: “Really, I wonder sometimes what Jack makes of you; you don’t take anything seriously.”

  “That was part of the attraction,” Beth tells her. “He’s a depressive, and he liked my being such a lightweight.”

  There is a pause in which she feels her sister resisting the obvious rejoinder: she is no lightweight now. “Well,” Hermione sighs down there in Washington. “I’ll let you get back to your soap opera. My other phone is blinking red; he wants something.”

  “It’s been good to talk,” Beth lies.

  Her older sister has taken the place of her mother in not letting her forget how much is wrong with her. Beth has let herself, as they say, “go.” A scent rises to her nostrils from the deep creases between rolls of fat, where dark pellets of sweat accumulate; in the bathtub her flesh floats around her like a set of giant bubbles, semi-liquid in their sway and sluggish buoyancy. How has this happened to her? As a girl she had eaten what she pleased; it had never seemed to her that she ate more than other people, and still doesn’t: the food just sticks to her more. Some people have bigger cells than others, she has read. Different metabolisms. Maybe it was being marooned in this house, and the house before it—on Eighteenth Street, and the one before that, a half-mile closer to the downtown, before the neighborhood became too bad—marooned by a man who abandoned her without appearing to. At the high school each day earning his living, who could fault him for that? As a young wife she used to sympathize, but as she aged she came to see how he dramatized everything, leaving in the winter dark and not home until long after dark with his extracurricular duties, his problem students, his emergency sessions with delinquent parents. He would come home depressed because of all the problems he couldn’t solve, the poor lives lived in New Prospect to no purpose and now being passed on to the children: “Beth, they don’t give a fuck. They never knew structure. They can’t imagine a life that goes beyond the next fix, the next binge, the next scrape with the cops or the bank or the INS. The poor kids, they’ve never had the luxury of being kids. You see them come into the ninth grade with a little hope left in them, a trace of that eagerness second-graders have,
a belief that if you learn the rules and do the drills you’ll be rewarded; and by the time they graduate, if they do, we’ve knocked it all out of them. Who’s ‘we’? America, I suppose, though it’s hard to put your finger exactly on where it goes wrong. My grandfather thought capitalism was doomed, destined to get more and more oppressive until the proletariat stormed the barricades and set up the workers’ paradise. But that didn’t happen; the capitalists were too clever or the proletariat too dumb. To be on the safe side, they changed the label ‘capitalism’ to read ‘free enterprise,’ but it was still too much dog-eat-dog. Too many losers, and the winners winning too big. But if you don’t let the dogs fight it out, they’ll sleep all day in the kennel. The basic problem the way I see it is, society tries to be decent, and decency cuts no ice in the state of nature. No ice whatsoever. We should all go back to being hunter-gatherers, with a hundred-percent employment rate, and a healthy amount of starvation.”

  Then Jack comes home depressed because the problems beyond solving are getting to be boring, and his gestures at solving them a mere routine, a shtik, a job, a con job. “What really gets me,” he would say, “is they refuse to grasp how bad off they are. They think they’re doing pretty good, with some flashy-trashy new outfit they’ve bought at half-price, or the latest hyper-violent new computer game, or some hot new CD everybody has to have, or a ridiculous new religion when you’ve drugged your brain back into the Stone Age. It makes you seriously wonder if people deserve to live—if the massacre masterminds in Rwanda and Sudan and Iraq don’t have the right idea.”

  And by letting herself get fat she has disqualified herself from cheering him up like she used to. He never would say so. He would never be rude. She wonders if that is the Jewish in him—the sensitivity, the burden, a sense of superiority really that tries to keep his sorrow to himself, getting up early and going to the window rather than wake her up with it by staying in bed. They have had a good life together, Beth decides, pushing herself up from the tiny hard wood-seated Shaker chair, bracing herself with a hand on the back, taking care not to tip it with her weight. That would be a pretty sight, sprawled on the floor with a broken pelvis, unable even to reach down and tug her bathrobe down for the paramedics when they came.

  She must get out of her bathrobe and go do some shopping. They are running out of basics—soap, laundry detergent, paper towels, toilet paper, mayonnaise. Cookies and snacks. She can’t ask Jack to buy all these things on top of picking up the microwave meals from ShopRite or take-out from the Chinese place whenever they keep her at the library until six. And cat food. Where is Carmela? The cat doesn’t get stroked enough, she sleeps all day under the sofa, depressed, and runs around like a wild thing at night. It was wrong in a way to get her spayed, but then if you don’t it’s wall-to-wall kittens.

  She and Jack have had a good life together, Beth tells herself, getting a living pushing pencils—tapping computer keys now—and being pleasant and helpful to people. This was more than Americans in the old days had been allowed to do, slaving in the mills when cities still made things; people are so afraid of the Arabs, but it’s the Japanese and Chinese and Mexicans and Guatemalans and those others in these low-wage platforms who are doing us in, putting our workforce out of work. We come to this country and pen the Indians into reservations and build skyscrapers and super-highways and then everybody wants a piece of our domestic markets, like a whale being gutted by sharks in that Hemingway story; but that was a marlin. The same idea. And Hermione has been fortunate too, landing an important Washington job with one of the administration’s key players, but it’s ridiculous the way she goes on about her boss—the savior of us all, to hear her tell it. You get a spinster mentality from stopped-up hormones, like those nuns and priests who turn out to be so cruel and wanton, not believing any of what they’ve been preaching, to judge from their actions, molesting these poor trusting little children trying to be good Catholics. Getting married and learning the sorts of thing men do, the way they smell and behave, at least is normal: it releases frustrations and quenches ridiculous romantic ideas. On her way to the stairs and her bedroom to change into street clothes (but what? is the problem; nothing is going to disguise a hundred extra pounds, nothing is going to make her look snappy on the street again), Beth thinks she wouldn’t mind peeking into the kitchen to see if there’s something to nibble in the refrigerator even if she did just have lunch. As if to suppress that impulse she lets herself flop back into the La-Z-Boy, and levers up the foot-rest to ease the throb in her ankles. Dropsical, the doctor calls them, where Jack once could circle them with his thumb and middle finger. No sooner stuck there in the chair’s embrace, she realizes she needs to go pee. Well, ignore it and the need goes away, her life’s experience has taught her.

  Now, where did that TV remote get to? She picked it up and clicked the TV off, and then her memory is blank. It’s frightening, how often her mind is blank. She checks both chair arms and with an effort peers over the arms to the celadon carpet that man sold her, thinking for the second time that day of Miss Dimitrova and her stretching exercises. It must have been balanced on an arm and then slid down into the crevice beside the cushion when she just flopped herself here instead of going upstairs to dress. The fingers of her right hand explore the tight crevice, the vinyl imitating cowhide from the old Wild West days that probably weren’t so wonderful if you were there, and then those of the left hand the crevice on the other side, and they do encounter it—the cool matte length of the channel clicker. It would all be easier if her body wasn’t so much in the way, pushing the cushion so tight against the chair arm she had to be careful of catching a nail on a seam or something metal. Hairpins and coins and even needles and pins collect in these cracks. Her mother was always sewing or mending something in that old skirted plaid armchair by the window at home to catch the light, the deep wooden sill with its dotted-swiss curtains and tray of geraniums and view of greenery so lush it kept its moist places right through the middle of the day. She points the remote and clicks it to Channel Two, CBS, and the summoned electrons slowly gather, making sounds and an image. The background music on As the World Turns is subtly more orchestral, less wispily pop, than that on All My Children—woodwinds and deep strings mixed in with the more ghostly sounds, a knocking like hoofbeats fading in the distance. Beth can tell from the excited music and the expressions on the faces of the young actor and actress who have just spoken—angry, eyebrow-knitting, even frightened expressions—that what they have just said to one another was momentous, pivotal, a parting or a murder agreed upon, but she has missed it; she has missed the world turning. Beth could almost cry.

  But life is strange, the way it comes to the rescue. Carmela, out of nowhere, comes and jumps up on her lap. “Where has Baby been?” Beth asks in a high ecstatic voice. “Mama has missed you!” In the next minute, though, she impatiently pushes the cat, settling in on the expanse of warm flesh to purr, off her lap, and struggles to rise again from the La-ZBoy. Suddenly, there are too many things to do.

  Two weeks after his day of graduation from Central High, Ahmad passed his commercial-driver’s-license test at the testing facility in Wayne. His mother, who had allowed him in so many respects to raise himself, accompanied him, in the battered maroon Subaru station wagon she uses for driving to the hospital and for hauling her paintings to the gift shop in Ridgewood and what other display venues she has, including various amateur shows in churches and school auditoriums. Winter salt has eaten away at the lower edges of the chassis, and her careless driving and the hastily opened doors of other cars in parking lots and spiral-ramped garages has taken a toll on the sides and fenders. The front right fender, victim of a misunderstanding at a four-way stop sign, was patched with Bondo body filler by one of her boyfriends, a significantly younger man who dabbled in junk sculpture and moved to Tubac, Arizona, before the patch could be smoothed and painted. So it stays a raw and rough putty color, and in other spots, mostly the hood and roof, the paint, exposed outdo
ors to all weathers, has faded from maroon to the tint of a peach. His mother seems to Ahmad to flaunt her poverty, her everyday failure to blend into the middle class, as if such failure were intrinsic to the artistic life and the personal freedom so precious to infidel Americans. She contrives, with her bohemian wealth of bangles and odd clothing, such as the factory-blotched jeans and vest of purple-dyed leather she wore on this day, to embarrass him whenever they venture together into public.

  That day in Wayne, she flirted with the elderly man, this miserable minion of the state, who administered the exam. She said, “I have no idea why he thinks he wants to drive a truck. It’s an idea he picked up from his imam—not his mama, his imam. The dear child calls himself a Muslim.”

  The man behind the desk at the MVC Regional Service Center in Wayne looked troubled by this gush of maternal confiding. “There can be steady money in it,” he brought out, after thought.

  Ahmad perceived that words came painfully to the public servant, spending a resource within him that he felt to be precious and in short supply. His face, foreshortened as he crouched at his desk, under his winking fluorescent tubes, was subtly deformed, as if it had once been rippled by a harsh emotion and then frozen. This was the sort of hopeless creature his mother lavished her flirtations upon, at the expense of her son’s dignity. The man was so dimly alive in his spider web of regulations that he failed to appreciate how Ahmad, though old enough to apply for Class C CDL, was not yet quite man enough to disown his mother. Conscious merely of the woman’s impropriety and possible mockery, the man snatched from the applicant’s hand the completed physical examination form and had Ahmad thrust his face into a box that had him read, one eye at a time, letters in various colors, telling red from green and both from amber. The machine measured his fitness to drive another machine, and this administrator of the test had been frozen into a kind of wrath because doing his job day after day had transformed him into yet another machine, an easily replaced element in the workings of the merciless, materialist West. It was Islam, Shaikh Rashid had more than once explained, that had preserved the science and simple mechanisms of the Greeks when all Christian Europe had in its barbarism forgotten such things. In today’s world, the heroes of Islamic resistance to the Great Satan were former doctors and engineers, adepts in the use of such machines as computers and airplanes and roadside bombs. Islam, unlike Christianity, has no fear of scientific truth. Allah had formed the physical world, and all its devices when put to holy use were holy. Thus Ahmad, with such reflections, received his truckers’ license. Class C required no road test.