Terrorist

by John Updike

  “Well, in less than three years you’ll be getting the Class A CDL and can drive any load—hazmat, trailer rigs—out of state. You’ll be making great money.”

  “But to what end? As you say, to consume consumer goods? To feed and clothe my body that will eventually become decrepit and worthless?”

  “That’s a way to look at it. ‘Life sucks, and then you die.’ But doesn’t that leave out a lot?”

  “What? ‘Wife and kids,’ as people say?”

  “Well, with wife and kids on board, it’s true, a lot of these big, meaning-of-it-all existential questions take a back seat.”

  “You have the wife and kids, and yet you rarely speak of them to me.”

  “What’s to say? I love ’em. And what about love, Madman? Don’t you feel it? Like I say, we got to get you laid.”

  “That is a kind wish on your part, but without marriage it would go against my beliefs.”

  “Oh, come on. The Prophet himself was no monk. He said a man could have four wives. The girl we’d get you wouldn’t be a good Muslim; she’d be a hooker. It wouldn’t matter to her and shouldn’t matter to you. She’d be a filthy infidel with or without whatever you did to her.”

  “I do not desire uncleanness.”

  “Well, what the hell do you desire, Ahmad? Forget fucking, I’m sorry I brought it up. What about just being alive? Breathing the air, seeing the clouds? Doesn’t that beat being dead?”

  A spatter of sudden summer rain from the sky—cloudless, an overall pewter gray shot through with smothered sunlight—speckles the windshield; at the touch of Ahmad’s hand the wipers begin their cumbersome flapping. The one on the driver’s side leaves a rainbow arc of unswept moisture, a gap in its rubber blade: he makes a mental note to replace that faulty blade. “It depends,” he tells Charlie. “Only the unbelievers fear death absolutely.”

  “What about daily pleasures? You love life, Madman, don’t deny it. Just the way you come to work early every morning, eager to see what’s on our schedule. We’ve had other kids on the truck who didn’t see a thing, didn’t give a damn, they were dead behind the eyes. All they cared about was stopping at the junk-food chains to eat a ton and take a piss and, when the day was over, going out and getting high with their buddies. You, you got potential.”

  “I have been told that. But if I love life, as you say, it is as a gift from God that He chose to give, and can choose to take away.”

  “O.K., then. As God wills. In the meantime, enjoy the ride.”

  “I am.”

  “Good boy.”

  One July day, on the way back to the store, Charlie directs him to swing into Jersey City, through a warehouse region rich in chain-link fences and glittering coils of razor wire and the rusting rails of abandoned freight-car spurs. They proceed past new glass-skinned tall apartment buildings being erected in place of old warehouses, to a park on a point from which the Statue of Liberty and lower Manhattan loom close. The two men—Ahmad in black jeans, Charlie in a loose olive-drab coverall and yellow work boots—attract suspicious glances from older, Christian tourists as they all stand out on a concrete viewing platform. Children who have just been in the domed Liberty Science Center dart in and out and jump on the low iron fence that guards the drop to the river. A breeze and swarms of sparkle like dazzling gnats come in off the Upper Bay. The world-famous statue, copper-green across the water, presents a rather diminished side view at this angle, but lower Manhattan thrusts forward like a magnificently bristling snout. “It’s nice,” Charlie observes, “to see those towers gone.” Ahmad is too busy absorbing the sight to respond; Charlie clarifies, “They were ugly—way out of proportion. They didn’t belong.”

  Ahmad says, “Even from New Prospect, from the hill above the falls, you could see them.”

  “Half of New Jersey could see the damn things. A lot of the people killed in them lived in Jersey.”

  “I pitied them. Especially those that jumped. How terri-ble, to be so trapped by crushing heat that jumping to certain death is better. Think of the dizziness, looking down before you jump.”

  Charlie says hurriedly, as if reciting, “Those people worked in finance, furthering the interests of the American empire, the empire that sustains Israel and inflicts death every day on Palestinians and Chechnyans, Afghans and Iraqis. In war, pity has to be put on hold.”

  “Many were merely guards and waitresses.”

  “Serving the empire in their way.”

  “Some were Muslims.”

  “Ahmad, you must think of it as a war. War isn’t tidy. There is collateral damage. Those Hessians George Washington woke from their sleep and shot were no doubt good German boys, sending their pay home to Mother. An empire sucks the blood of subject peoples so cleverly they don’t know why they’re dying, why they have no strength. The enemies around us, the children and fat people in shorts giving us their dirty little looks—have you noticed?—do not see themselves as oppressors and killers. They see themselves as innocent, absorbed in their private lives. Everyone is innocent—they are innocent, the people jumping from the towers were innocent, George W. Bush is innocent, a simple reformed drunk from Texas who loves his nice wife and naughty daughters. Yet, out of all this innocence, somehow evil emerges. The Western powers steal our oil, they take our land—”

  “They take our God,” Ahmad says eagerly, interrupting his mentor.

  Charlie stares for a second, then agrees slowly, as if this had not occurred to him. “Yes. I guess so. They take from Muslims their traditions and a sense of themselves, the pride in themselves that all men are entitled to.”

  This is not quite what Ahmad said, and sounds a bit false, a bit forced and far removed from the concrete living God who stands beside Ahmad as close as the sunshine warming the skin of his neck. Charlie stands opposite him with knitted thick eyebrows and his flexible mouth clenched in a sort of pained stubbornness; he has a soldier stiffness to him, a cancellation of the genial road companion habitually lodged in the side of Ahmad’s vision. Seen frontally, Charlie, who neglected to shave this morning, and whose eyebrows meet above the creased bridge of his nose, fails to harmonize with the expansive loveliness of the day—the sky cloudless but for a puffy far scatter over Long Island, the ozone at the zenith so intense it seems a smooth-walled pit of blue fire, the accumulated towers of lower Manhattan a single gleaming mass, speedboats purring and sailboats tilting in the bay, the cries and conversation of the tourist crowd making a dapple of harmless sound around them. This beauty, Ahmad thinks, must mean something—a hint from Allah, a fore-shadow of Paradise.

  Charlie is asking him a question. “Would you fight them, then?”

  Ahmad has missed what “them” refers to, but says “Yes” as if answering a roll call.

  Charlie appears to repeat himself: “Would you fight with your life?”

  “How do you mean?”

  Charlie is insistent; his brows bear down. “Would you give your life?”

  The sun leans on Ahmad’s neck. “Of course,” he says, trying to lighten the exchange with a flicking gesture of his right hand. “If God wills it.”

  The slightly false and menacing Charlie collapses, and is replaced by the good-natured motormouth, the ersatz older brother, who grins to put the exchange behind them, tucking it away. “Just what I thought,” he says. “Madman, you’re a good brave kid.”

  At times, as the summer wears on, its August bringing later sunrises and earlier dusks, Ahmad is considered competent enough, enough a trustworthy member of the Excellency team, to handle on his own, with a dolly in the truck, a day of deliveries. He and two black minimum-wagers—“the muscle,” Charlie calls them—have the truck loaded by ten, and Ahmad is off with a list of addresses, a sheaf of invoices, and his set of full-color Hagstrom maps from Sussex County all the way down to Cape May. The deliveries one day include an old-fashioned item, a horsehair-stuffed leather ottoman, to a town on the Upper Shore, south of Asbury Park; it will be his longest drive of the day and
his last destination. He takes the Garden State past Route 18, skirting the eastern edge of the U.S. Naval Ammunition Depot, and exits at 195 East, toward Camp Evans. By means of lesser roads, over misty low terrain, he works his truck toward the sea; the salty wild smell strengthens and there is even a sound—the precisely spaced breathing of the surf.

  The Shore is a region of architectural oddities, of buildings in the shape of elephants or cookie jars, windmills and plaster lighthouses. A long-settled state, it holds in its cemeteries, Charlie has more than once boasted, tombstones cut to imitate a giant shoe or a light bulb or one man’s beloved Mercedes; there are, in pine barrens and along mountain roads, a number of allegedly haunted mansions and insane asylums, which flit through Ahmad’s mind as daylight gradually fades. Excellency’s headlights pick out seaside cottages in tight rows, with scruffy front yards of lightly grassed sand. Motels and night spots name themselves with neon signs whose defective connections sizzle in the dusk. Ornately carpentered houses built as vacation homes for well-to-do large families with their numerous servants have been reduced to offering ROOMS and BED & BREAKFAST and VACANCY. Even in August this is not a bustling resort. Along what seems to be the main street one or two restaurants are plywooded shut, their oysters and clams and crabs and lobsters still advertised but no longer served up steaming.

  From the bleached boardwalks that do for sidewalks, clusters of people stare at his high square orange truck as if its appearance is an event; they look, in their medley of bathing suits and beach towels and tattered shorts and T-shirts imprinted with hedonistic slogans and jibes, like refugees who were given no time to gather their effects before fleeing. Children among them wear towering hats of plastic foam, and those who might be their grandparents, having forsaken all thought of dignity, make themselves ridiculous in clinging outfits of many colors and patterns. Sunburned and overfed, some sport in complacent self-mockery the same foam carnival hats as their grandchildren wear, tall and striped ones as in the books by Dr. Seuss or headgear shaped like open-mouthed sharks or lobsters extending a giant red mitt of a claw. Devils. The guts of the men sag hugely and the monstrous buttocks of the women seesaw painfully as they tread the boardwalk in swollen running shoes. A few steps from death, these American elders defy decorum and dress as toddlers.

  Searching for the address on the last invoice of the day, Ahmad steers the truck through a grid of streets back from the beach. There are no curbs or sidewalks. The macadam’s edges crumble into patches of sunbaked grass. The houses are shingled and small and close together, with an air of minimum upkeep and seasonal rental; about half of them display signs of life within—lights, a flickering television screen. Children’s bright beach toys litter some yards; surfboards and inflatable Nessies and SpongeBobs wait on screened porches for the next day’s oceanic romp.

  Number 292, Wilson Way. The cottage shows no exterior signs of habitation, and the front windows are masked by drawn Venetian blinds, so Ahmad is startled when the front door pops open seconds after he presses the chiming doorbell. A tall man with a narrow head made to seem narrower still by his close-set eyes and tight-cropped black hair stands behind the screen door. Unlike the crowds near the beach, he is dressed in sun-repellent clothes, in gray trousers and a long-sleeved shirt the indeterminate color of an oil stain, buttoned at his wrists and throat. His stare is not friendly. There is a wiry tension to his whole body; his stomach is admirably flat.

  “Mr.”—Ahmad consults his invoice—“Karini? I have a delivery from Excellency Home Furnishings in New Prospect.” He consults the invoice again. “An ottoman in multicolored dyed leather.”

  “In New Prospect,” the flat-stomached man repeats. “No Charlie?”

  Ahmad is slow to understand. “Uh—I drive the truck now. Charlie is busy in the office, learning the business in the office. His father is sick with diabetes.” Ahmad fears these superfluous sentences will not be understood, and he blushes, there in the dark.

  The tall man turns and repeats the words “New Prospect” to the others in the room. There are three others, Ahmad sees—all men. One is short and heavyset and older than the other two, who are not much older than Ahmad. All are dressed not in resort clothes but as if for manual labor, sitting on the rented furniture as if waiting for the work to begin. They respond with mutters of approval in which Ahmad thinks he hears, buried among the inflections, the words fuls and kfir; the tall man observes him listening and asks him sharply, “Enta bteki ‘arab?”

  Ahmad blushes and tells him, “La?—ana aasif. Inglizi.”

  Satisfied, and a shade less tense, the man says, “Bring in, please. All day we wait.”

  Excellency Home Furnishings doesn’t sell many ottomans; they belong, like New Prospect’s City Hall, to a more ornate age. Wrapped in a thick transparent plastic to protect its delicate skin of tinted leather patches sewn together in an abstract six-sided pattern, the item, pre-owned but well preserved, is a stuffed cylinder solid enough to take a sitting man’s weight but soft enough to support pleasantly the slippered feet of one stretched at his ease in an armchair. It makes a lightweight armful, slightly rustling as Ahmad carries it from the truck across the crabgrass to the front room, where the four men sit in the light of a single wan table lamp. None offer to take the burden from his arms.

  “On floor is O.K.,” he is told.

  Ahmad sets the thing down. “It should go very nicely in here,” he says, to break the silence in the room, and, standing up, “Would you please sign here, Mr. Karini?”

  “Karini not here. I sign for Karini.”

  “None of you is Mr. Karini?” The three men smile the quick, hopeful smile of those who have not understood what has been asked.

  “I sign for Karini,” the leader of the group insists. “I am colleague of Karini.” Without further resistance Ahmad lays the invoice on the end table with the dim lamp and indicates with the pen where to sign. The nameless lean man signs. The signature is thoroughly illegible, Ahmad observes, and he notices for the first time that one of the Chehabs, father or son, has scrawled “NC” on the invoice—no charge, significantly less than the hundred-dollar minimum for free delivery.

  As he closes the screen door behind himself, more lights come on in the cottage’s front room, and as he walks across the sandy lawn to his truck he hears an excited gabble of Arabic, with some laughter. Ahmad climbs up into the driver’s seat of the truck and revs the engine to make sure they hear him depart. He moves down Wilson Way to the first intersection and turns right, parking in front of a cottage that looks unoccupied. Quickly, quietly, his breathing shallow in his chest, Ahmad walks back along a path worn in the grass in place of a sidewalk. No car or person is moving on the scruffy little street. He goes to the window at the side of 292’s front room, where a struggling hydrangea bush with parched lavender blooms offers some concealment, and carefully peeks in.

  The ottoman has been disrobed of its plastic protection and set up on a tile-top coffee table in front of a worn plaid sofa. With a retractable touch-knife the size of a silver dollar, the leader has cut the stitches on one of the triangular patches that form a six-sided star, a snowflake of red and green, in the circular leather top. When this triangle has become a big-enough loose flap, the leader’s lean hand can insert itself down the inside and extract, pinched between two long fingers, quantities of green American currency. Ahmad cannot read, through the dying hydrangea bush, the denominations, but, to judge from the reverence with which the men are counting and arranging the bills on the tile-top table, the denominations are high.

  IV

  CHARLIE’S UNCLE and Habib Chehab’s brother, Maurice, rarely comes up from Florida, but the heat and humidity of Miami in July and August drive him north for those months. He stays off and on at Habib’s home in Pompton Lakes and shows up occasionally at Excellency Home Furnishings, where Ahmad sees him—a man much like his brother, only bigger and more formal, given to seersucker suits, white leather shoes, and shirts and neckties rather too
obviously coördinated. He formally shakes Ahmad’s hand the first time they meet, and the boy has an unpleasant sensation of being sized up, by eyes more guarded than Habib’s, with even more gold in them, and less quick to break into a twinkle of amusement. He is the younger brother, it turns out, though he has the overweening manner of an older. Ahmad, an only child, is fascinated by brotherhood—its advantages and disadvantages, the quality it imparts of being in some sense duplicated. Had he been blessed with a brother, Ahmad would feel less alone, perhaps, and rely less on the God he carries with him, in his pulse and thoughts. Whenever he and Maurice see each other in the store, the portly, smooth man in his pale clothes gives Ahmad a slightly smiling nod that says, I know you, young man. I have your number.

  Ahmad’s glimpse of the dollars he delivered to the four men in the cottage on the Upper Shore stays with him as something partaking of the supernatural, that featureless vastness which yet deigns, by Its own unfathomable will, to reach into our lives. He wonders if he dares confess his discovery to Charlie. Was Charlie aware of the contents of the ottoman? How many others of the pieces of furniture they have delivered and collected were similarly loaded in their crevices and interior hollows? And to what purpose? The mystery savors of the events reported in the newspapers, the headlines he barely skims, of political violence abroad and domestic violence locally, and in the nightly newscasts that he clicks through while channel-surfing the stations on his mother’s obsolete Admiral.