Terrorist

by John Updike

  “It is a society that fears getting old,” Ahmad agrees, gently braking in anticipation of a far-off green light’s turning red before the truck gets there. “Infidels do not know how to die.”

  “No,” Charlie says, his unstoppable voice halting, and sounding cautious. “Who does?” he asks.

  “True believers,” Ahmad tells him, since he has asked. “They know that Paradise awaits the righteous.” Gazing through Excellency’s tall and dirty windshield at the oil-stained macadam and red taillights and blaring blobs of reflected sun that compose a summer day along a truck route in New Jersey, he quotes the Qur’an: “God giveth you life, then causeth you to die: then will He assemble you on the day of resurrection: there is no doubt of it.”

  “Absolutely,” Charlie says. “Good stuff. ‘No doubt of it.’ Me, if a good reason came up, I’d be happy to cash it in. You, you’re too young. You got all your life ahead of you.”

  “Not so,” Ahmad says. He did not hear in Charlie’s gruff response the quaver of doubt, the silken shimmer of irony, which he detects in the voice of Shaikh Rashid. Charlie is a man of the world, but Islam is solidly part of that world. Lebanese are not fine-honed and two-edged like Yemenis or handsome and vanishing like Egyptians. He shyly points out, “Already I have lived longer than many martyrs in Iran and Iraq.”

  But Charlie is not done with the women he sees on television commercials. “And now,” he says, “the drug cartels have made such a killing with Viagra and so on they’re selling sex enhancement, as they call it, to women. There’s one commercial—you may not have seen it, it doesn’t come on too often—showing a woman, kind of sensible and plain, a schoolteacher, you figure, or an office manager for some middle-grade tech company, not the upper end, with this little frown on her face so you know something’s missing in her life, and the music adds an undercurrent, kind of a minor-key nagging, and the next thing you know you see her floating along swathed in this filmy stuff, barefoot; she better be barefoot, because when you look she’s walking on water, trailing ripples, there off the beach where it’s just a couple of inches deep, but even so she’s not sinking in, and has a new hairdo, and better makeup, so she’s gone all misty in the face, like that terrific cocksucker I was describing—I think they have some dilator they put in the eyes of these women to make them look that way—and then you get the reason, the logo of this new ‘hormone enhancer,’ they call it. The message is, she’s been laid. She’s been knocking herself silly with multiple orgasms. They would never have admitted that in commercials ten, fifteen years ago—that women want it, they want it a lot; being fucked is a relaxant and a beauty aid. How about you, Madman? You getting a lot lately?”

  “A lot of what?” Ahmad’s attention perhaps has wandered. They have come off the Turnpike at Bayway and are in some anonymous downtown with a lot of double parking that creates tight spots for Excellency to squeeze through.

  “Poontang,” Charlie says with exasperation, sucking in his breath as the orange truck scrapes past a lumbering school bus loaded with staring little faces. “Pussy,” he clarifies. When Ahmad, blushing, offers no response, Charlie announces in a tone of quiet resolve, “We gotta get you laid.”

  The towns of northern New Jersey are enough alike—storefronts and sidewalks and parking meters and neon signs and quickly passed patches of civic green space—to create even in a moving vehicle a sensation of being stuck. The territories he and Charlie together drive through, with their summer scents of softened tar and spilled motor oil and of onions and cheese exhaled from small eateries out into the street, are much the same until they get south of South Amboy or the Sayreville exit on the Jersey Pike. Yet as one small city yields to the next Ahmad comes to see that no two are identical, and each has social variety within it. In some neighborhoods large houses sprawl in the shade back from the roadway on lush rising lawns populated by squat trim shrubs like security guards. Excellency makes few deliveries to such homes, but passes them on its way to inner-city rows where the front steps spring up straight from the sidewalk, without even the merest excuse for a front yard. Here those awaiting delivery tend to live: darker-skinned families with voices and televisions sounding from back rooms, out of sight, as if chamber after chamber of linked family members telescope out from the vestibule. Sometimes there are signs of Islamic practice—prayer mats, women in hijabs, framed images of the twelve imams including the Hidden Imam with his featureless face, identifying the household as Shia. These homes affect Ahmad with uneasiness, as do the city neighborhoods where shops advertise in mixed Arabic and English and mosques have been created by substituting a crescent for the cross on a deconsecrated Protestant church. He does not like to linger and chat, as Charlie does, making his way in whatever dialect of Arabic is offered, with laughter and gestures to bridge gaps in comprehension. Ahmad feels his pride of isolation and willed identity to be threatened by the masses of ordinary, hard-pressed men and plain, practical women who are enrolled in Islam as a lazy matter of ethnic identity. Though he was not the only Muslim believer at Central High, there were no others quite like him—of mixed parentage and still fervent in the faith, a faith chosen rather than merely inherited from a father present to reinforce fidelity. Ahmad was native-born, and in his travels through New Jersey he takes interest less in its pockets of a diluted Middle East than in the American reality all around, a sprawling ferment for which he feels the mild pity owed a failed experiment.

  This fragile, misbegotten nation had a history scarcely expressed in the grandiose New Prospect City Hall and the lake of developers’ rubble on whose opposite shores stand, with their caged windows, the high school and the sooty black church. Each town bears in its center relics of the nineteenth century, civic buildings of lumpy brown stones or soft red brick with jutting cornices and round arched entryways, ornate proud buildings outlasting the flimsier twentieth-century constructions. These older, ruddier buildings express a bygone industrial prosperity, a wealth of manufacture, machinery and railroads harnessed to the lives of a laboring nation, an era of internal consolidation and welcome to the world’s immigrants. Then there is an underlying earlier century, which made the succeeding ones possible. The orange truck rumbles past small iron signs and overlookable monuments commemorating an insurgency that became a revolution; from Fort Lee to Red Bank, its battles had been fought, leaving thousands of boys asleep beneath the grass.

  Charlie Chehab, a man of many disparate parts, knows a surprising amount about that ancient conflict: “New Jersey’s where the Revolution got turned around. Long Island had been a disaster; New York City was more of the same. Retreat, retreat. Disease and desertions. Just before the winter of ’seventy-six–’ seventy-seven, the British moved down from Fort Lee to Newark, then to Brunswick and Princeton and Trenton, easy as a knife through butter. Washington straggled across the Delaware with an army in rags. A lot of them, believe it or not, were barefoot. Barefoot, and winter coming on. We were toast. In Philadelphia, everybody was trying to leave except the Tories, who sat around waiting for their buddies the redcoats to arrive. Up in New England, a British fleet took Newport and Rhode Island without a fight. It was over.”

  “Yes, and why wasn’t it?” Ahmad asks, wondering why Charlie is telling this patriotic tale with such enthusiasm.

  “Well,” he says, “several things. Some good things were happening. The Continental Congress woke up and stopped trying to run the war; they said, ‘O.K., let George do it.’”

  “Is that where the phrase comes from?”

  “Good question. I don’t think so. The other American general in charge, a silly prick called Charles Lee—Fort Lee is named after him, thanks a bunch—let himself be captured in a tavern in Basking Ridge, leaving Washington in total charge. At this point Washington was lucky to have an army at all. After Long Island, see, the British had gone easy on us. They let the Continental Army retreat and get across the Delaware. That proved to be a mistake, for, as they must have taught you at school—what the fuck do the
y teach you at school, Madman?—Washington and a plucky band of threadbare freedom fighters crossed the Delaware on Christmas Day and routed the Hessian troops garrisoned in Trenton, and took a whole bunch of prisoners. On top of that, when Cornwallis brought down a big force from New York and thought he had the Americans trapped south of Trenton, Washington snuck off through the woods, around the Barrens and the Great Bear Swamp, and marched north to Princeton! All this with soldiers in rags who hadn’t slept for days! People were tougher then. They weren’t afraid to die. When Washington ran into a British force south of Princeton, an American general named Mercer was captured, and they called him a damn rebel and told him to beg for quarter, and he said he wasn’t a rebel and refused to beg, so they bayoneted him to death. They weren’t such nice guys, the British, as Masterpiece Theatre lets on. When things looked their worst at Princeton, Washington on a white horse—this is honest truth, on a truly white horse—led his men into the heart of the British fire and turned the tide, and ran after the retreating redcoats shouting, ‘It’s a fine fox chase, my boys!’”

  “He sounds cruel,” Ahmad said.

  Charlie made that negative American noise in his nose, aahnn, signifying dismissal, and said, “Not really. War is cruel, but not the men who wage it necessarily. Washington was a gentleman. When the battle at Princeton was over, he stopped and complimented a wounded British soldier on what a gallant fight they had put up. In Philadelphia, he protected the Hessian prisoners from the pissed-off crowds, who would have killed them. See, the Hessians, like most professional European soldiers, were trained to give quarter only in certain circumstances, and to take no prisoners otherwise—that’s what they did on Long Island, they butchered us—and they were so amazed at the humane treatment they got instead that a quarter of them stayed here when the war was over. They intermarried with the Pennsylvania Dutch. They became Americans.”

  “You seem very enamored of George Washington.”

  “Well, why not?” Charlie considers, as if Ahmad has sprung a trap. “You have to be, if you care about New Jersey. Here’s where he earned his spurs. The great thing about him, he was a learner. He learned, for one thing, to get along with the New Englanders. From the standpoint of a Virginia planter, the New Englanders were a bunch of unkempt anarchists; they had blacks and red Indians in their ranks as if these guys were white men, just like they had them on their whaling ships. Washington himself, actually, for that matter, had a big black buck for a sidekick, also called Lee, no relation to Robert E. When the war was over, Washington freed him for his services to the Revolution. He had learned to think of slavery as a bad thing. He wound up encouraging black enlistment, after resisting the idea initially. You’ve heard the word ‘pragmatic’?”

  “Of course.”

  “That was Georgie. He learned to take what came, to fight guerrilla-style: hit and hide, hit and hide. He retreated but he never gave up. He was the Ho Chi Minh of his day. We were like Hamas. We were Al-Qaida. The thing about New Jersey was,” Charlie hurries to add, when Ahmad takes a breath as if he might interrupt, “the British wanted it to be a model of pacification—winning hearts and minds, you’ve heard of that. They saw what they did on Long Island was counterproductive, recruiting more resistance, and were trying to play nice here, to woo the colonists back to the mother country. At Trenton, what Washington was saying to the British was, ‘This is real. This is beyond nice.’”

  “Beyond nice,” Ahmad repeats. “That could be the title of a TV series for you to direct.”

  Charlie doesn’t acknowledge the playful idea. He is selling something. He goes on, “He showed the world what can be done against the odds, against a superpower. He showed—and this is where Vietnam and Iraq come in—that in a war between an imperialist occupier and the people who actually live there, the people will eventually prevail. They know the terrain. They have more at stake. They have nowhere else to go. It wasn’t just the Continental Army in New Jersey; it was the local militias, little sneaky bands of locals all across New Jersey, acting on their own, picking off British soldiers one by one and disappearing, back into the countryside—not playing fair, in other words, by the other guy’s rules. The attack on the Hessians was sneaky, too—in the middle of a blizzard, and on a holiday when not even soldiers ought to have to work. Washington was saying, ‘Hey, this is our war.’ About Valley Forge: Valley Forge gets all the publicity, but the winters after that he camped out in New Jersey—in Middlebrook in the Watchung Mountains, and then in Morristown. In Morristown, the first winter was the coldest in a century. They chopped down six hundred acres of oak and chestnut trees to make huts and have firewood. There was so much snow that winter the provisions couldn’t get through and they nearly starved.”

  “For the state of the world now,” Ahmad offers, to get in step with Charlie, “it might have been better if they had. The United States might have become a kind of Canada, a peaceable and sensible country, though infidel.”

  Charlie’s surprised laugh becomes a snort in his nose. “Dream on, Madman. There’s too much energy here for peace and sensible. Contending energies—that’s what the Constitution allows for. That’s what we get.” He shifts in his seat and shakes out a Marlboro. Smoke envelops his face as he squints through the windshield and appears to reflect upon what he has told his young driver. “The next time we’re south on Route Nine we ought to swing over to Monmouth Battlefield. The Americans fell back, but stood up to the British well enough to show the French they were worth supporting. And the Spanish and Dutch. All of Europe was out to cut England down to size. Like the U.S. now. It was ironical: Louis Seize spent so much supporting us he taxed the French to the point where they revolted and cut off his head. One revolution led to another. That happens.” Charlie exhales heavily and in a graver, surreptitious voice pronounces, as if not sure Ahmad should hear the words, “History isn’t something over and done, you know. It’s now, too. Revolution never stops. You cut off its head, it grows two.”

  “The Hydra,” Ahmad says, to show he is not completely ignorant. The image recurs in Shaikh Rashid’s sermons, in illustration of the futility of America’s crusade against Islam, and was first encountered by Ahmad in watching children’s television, the cartoons on Saturday mornings, while his mother slept late. Just he and the television in the living room—the electronic box so frantic and bumptious with the hiccups and pops and crashes and excited high-pitched voices of cartoon adventure, and its audience, the watching child, utterly quiet and still, the sound turned down to let his mother sleep off her date last night. The Hydra was a comic creature, all its heads chattering with each other on their undulating necks.

  “These old revolutions,” Charlie continues confidentially, “have much to teach our jihad.” Ahmad’s lack of a response leads the other to ask in a quick, testing voice, “You are with the jihad?”

  “How could I not be? The Prophet urges it in the Book.” Ahmad quotes: “Mohammed is Allah’s apostle. Those who follow him are ruthless to the unbelievers but merciful to one another.”

  Still, the jihad seems very distant. Delivering modern furniture and collecting furniture that had been modern to its dead owners, he and Charlie ride Excellency through a sweltering morass of pizzerias and nail salons, thrift outlets and gas stations, White Castles and Blimpies. Krispy Kreme and Lovely Laundry, Rims and Tires and 877-TEETH-14, Starlite Motel and Prime Office Suites, Bank of America and Metro Information Shredding, Testigos de Jehovah and New Christian Tabernacle: signs in a dizzying multitude shout out their potential enhancements of all the lives crammed where once there had been pastures and water-powered factories. The thick-walled, eternity-minded structures of municipal purpose still stood, preserved as museums or apartments or quarters for civic organizations. American flags flew everywhere, some so tattered and faded they had evidently been forgotten on their flagstaffs. The world’s hopes had centered here for a time, but the time was past. Ahmad sees through Excellency’s high windshield clots of males and females hi
s age gathering in gabbling idleness, idleness with an edge of menace, the brown skins of the females bared by skimpy shorts and tight elastic halters, and the males arrayed in tank tops and grotesquely droopy shorts, earrings and wool skullcaps, clownish jokes they play on themselves.

  A kind of terror at the burden of having a life to live hits Ahmad through the dusty windshield glare. These doomed animals gathered in the odor of mating and mischief yet have the comfort of their herded kindred, and each harbors some hope or plan of a future, a job, a destination, an aspiration if only to rise in the ranks of dope dealers or pimps. Whereas he, Ahmad, with abilities that Mr. Levy had told him were ample, has no plan: the God attached to him like an invisible twin, his other self, is a God not of enterprise but of submission. Though he endeavors to pray five times a day, if only in the truck body’s rectangular cave with its stacked blankets and packing pads, or in a patch of gravel behind a roadside eating place where he can spread his mat for a cleansing five minutes, the Merciful and Compassionate has illuminated no straight path into a vocation. It is as if in the delicious sleep of his devotion to Allah his future has been amputated. When, in the long lulls of devouring the miles, he confesses his disquiet to Charlie, the usually talkative and well-informed man seems evasive and discomfited.