Terrorist

by John Updike

  He has taken to searching television for traces of God in this infidel society. He watches beauty pageants where luminous-skinned and white-toothed girls, along with one or two token entrants of color, compete in charming the master of ceremonies with their singing or dancing talents and their frequent if hasty expressions of gratitude to the Lord for their blessings, which they intend to devote, when their singing days in bathing suits are done, to their fellow-man in the form of such lofty vocations as doctor, educator, agronomist, or, holiest calling of all, homemaker. Ahmad discovers a specifically Christian channel featuring deep-voiced, middle-aged men in suits of unusual colors, with wide, reflective lapels, who leave off their impassioned rhetoric (“Are you ready for Jesus?” they ask, and “Have you received Jesus in your hearts?”) to break suddenly into sly flirtation with the middle-aged female members of the audience, or else jump back, snapping their fingers, into song. Christian song interests Ahmad, above all gospel choruses in iridescent robes, the fat black women bouncing and rolling with an intensity that at times appears artificially induced but at others, as the choruses go on, appears to be genuinely kindled from within. The women hoist high their hands along with their voices and clap in a rocking, infectious manner that spreads even to the smattering of whites among them, this being one area of American experience, like sports and crime, where darker skins unquestionably prevail. Ahmad knows, from Shaikh Rashid’s dry, half-smiling allusions, of the Sufi enthusiasm and rapture that had anciently afflicted Islam, but finds not even a faint echo of it in the Islamic channels beamed from Manhattan and Jersey City—just the five calls to prayer broadcast over a still slide of the great mosque of Mohammed Ali in Saladin’s Citadel, and solemn panels of bespectacled professors and mullahs discussing the anti-Islamic fury that has perversely possessed the present-day West, and sermons delivered by a turbanned imam seated at a bare table, relayed by a static camera from a studio strictly devoid of images.

  It is Charlie who broaches the subject. One day in the cab of the truck, as they pass through an unusually empty piece of northern New Jersey, between an extensive cemetery and a surviving piece of the Meadows—cattails and shiny-leaved reeds rooted in brackish water—he asks, “Something eating you, Madman? You seem quiet lately.”

  “I am generally quiet, no?”

  “Yeah, but this is different. At first it was ‘Show me’ quiet, now it’s more a ‘What’s up?’ kind of quiet.”

  Ahmad does not have so many friends in the world that he can risk losing one. There is no going back from this juncture, he knows; he has little to go back to. He tells Charlie, “Some days ago, when I was doing deliveries alone, I saw a strange thing. I saw men removing wads of money from that ottoman I delivered to the Shore.”

  “They opened it in front of you?”

  “No. I left, and then crept back and looked in the window. Their manner made me suspicious, and curious.”

  “You know what curiosity did to the cat, don’t you?”

  “It killed it. But ignorance can also kill. If I am to deliver, I should know what I am delivering.”

  “Why so, Ahmad?” Charlie says, almost tenderly. “I saw you as not wanting to know more than you can handle. In truth, ninety-nine percent of the time the furniture you are delivering is just that—furniture.”

  “But who are that fortunate one percent who win a bonus?” Ahmad feels a tense freedom, now that the juncture is behind them. It is like, he imagines, the release and responsibility a man and a woman feel when they first take off their clothes together. Charlie, too, seems to feel this; his voice sounds lighter, having shed a level of pretense.

  “The fortunate,” he says, “are true believers.”

  “They believe,” Ahmad guesses, “in jihad?”

  “They believe,” Charlie carefully restates, “in action. They believe that something can be done. That the Muslim peasant in Mindanao need not starve, that the Bangladeshi child need not drown, that the Egyptian villager need not go blind with schistosomiasis, that the Palestinians need not be strafed by Israeli helicopters, that the faithful need not eat the sand and camel dung of the world while the Great Satan grows fat on sugar and pork and underpriced petroleum. They believe that a billion followers of Islam need not have their eyes and ears and souls corrupted by the poisonous entertainments of Hollywood and a ruthless economic imperialism whose Christian-Jewish God is a decrepit idol, a mere mask concealing the despair of atheists.”

  “Where does the money come from?” Ahmad asks, when Charlie’s words—not so different, after all, from the world-picture that Shaikh Rashid more silkily paints—have run their course. “And what are the recipients to do with these funds?”

  “The money comes,” Charlie tells him, “from those who love Allah, both within the U.S. and abroad. Think of those four men as seeds placed within the soil, and the money as water to keep the soil moist, so that some day the seeds will split their shells and bloom. Allhu akbar!”

  “Does the money,” Ahmad persists, “come somehow through Uncle Maurice? His arrival here seems to make a difference, though he disdains the daily workings of the store. And your good father—how much is he part of all this?”

  Charlie laughs, indulgently; he is a son who has grown beyond his father but continues to honor him, as Ahmad has done to his own. “Hey, who are you, the CIA? My father is an old-fashioned immigrant, loyal to the system that took him in and let him prosper. If he knew any of what you and I are discussing, he would report us to the FBI.”

  Ahmad in his new capacity tries a joke: “Who would swiftly mislay the report.”

  Charlie does not laugh. He says, “These are important secrets that you have extracted from me. They are life-and-death stuff, Madman. I’m wondering right now if I’ve made a mistake, telling you all this.”

  Ahmad seeks to minimize what has passed between them. He realizes that he has swallowed knowledge that cannot be coughed back up. Knowledge is freedom, it said on the front of Central High. Knowledge can also be a prison, with no way out once you’re in. “You’ve made no mistake. You’ve told me very little. It was not you who led me back to the window to see the money being counted. There could be many explanations for the money. You could have denied knowledge of it, and I would have believed you.”

  “I could have,” Charlie concedes. “Perhaps I should have.”

  “No. It would have put falsity between us, where there has been trust.”

  “Then you must tell me this: are you with us?”

  “I am with those,” Ahmad says slowly, “who are with God.”

  “O.K. Good enough. Be as silent as God about this. Do not tell your mother. Do not tell your girlfriend.”

  “I have no girlfriend.”

  “That’s right. I promised to do something about that, didn’t I?”

  “You said I should get laid.”

  “Right. I’ll work on it.”

  “Do not, please. It is not yours to work on.”

  “Friends help each other out,” Charlie insists. He reaches over and squeezes the young driver’s shoulder, and Ahmad does not entirely like it; it reminds him of Tylenol’s bullying grip that time in the high-school hall.

  The boy states, with a new-won man’s dignity, “One more question, and then I will say nothing until I am spoken to on these matters. Is there a plan developing, with these seeds that are being watered?”

  Ahmad knows Charlie’s facial expressions so well he does not have to look sideways in the truck to see the man’s rubbery lips work around as if exploring the shape of his own teeth, and then heavily exhale in an exaggerated sigh of exasperation. “Like I said, there are always a number of projects under consideration, and how they develop is somewhat hard to predict. What does the Book say, Madman? And the Jews plotted, and God plotted. But of those who plot, God is the best.”

  “In these plots, will I ever have a part to play?”

  “You might. Would you like that, kid?”

  Again, Ahmad feels a jun
cture being reached, and a gate closing behind him. “I believe I would.”

  “You believe? You got to do better than that.”

  “As you say, individual events are not easy to predict. But the lines are clear.”

  “The lines?”

  “The lines of battle. The armies of Satan versus those of God. As the Book affirms, Idolatry is worse than carnage.”

  “Right. Right,” Charlie agrees, and slaps his thigh as if to wake himself up, there in the passenger’s seat. “I like that. Worse than carnage.” He is a naturally talkative and humorous man, and it has been hard for him to keep a straight face, talking with Ahmad like two men walking through a cemetery where they may some day lie. “One thing to keep in mind,” he adds. “There’s an anniversary coming up, in September. And the people who call the shots—our generals, so to speak—have an old-fashioned thing about anniversaries.”

  Jacob and Teresa have made love and bring the sheets up over their naked bodies. The breeze through her bedroom windows is cool. September is drawing near; single yellow leaves, like isolated sparks, show in the wearying greenery. They both, he reflects after his warm bath in her flesh, could lose a few pounds. Her skin, where it is not freckled, is almost too pale, like that of a plastic doll except that it yields under his thumb, leaving a pink dent slow to erase itself. His shaggy arms and chest pain him with their slack, rumpled look; at home the bathroom mirror shows him the beginnings of puckery pseudo-breasts, and his stomach under its twin black swirls of hair has developed another fold. On his chest, the white hairs have no curl, and stick out like wavery antennae: an old man’s hairs.

  Terry cuddles against him, her snub nose snuggled into his armpit. His love for her stirs within him like the start of nausea.

  “Jack?” she breathes.

  “What?” He sounds ruder than he had intended.

  “What makes you so sad?”

  “I’m not sad,” he says. “I’m fucked. You really do it. I thought my old chassis was ready for the junk heap, but you get those spark plugs firing. You’re gorgeous, Terry.”

  “Cut the malarkey, as my father used to say. You haven’t answered my question. Why are you sad?”

  “Maybe I was thinking, Labor Day’s coming. It’s going to be harder to work us in.” He has learned to express his difficulties in deceiving his wife without mentioning Beth’s name, which Terry hates to hear, for some reason that eludes him. If the truth were known, Beth should be the jealous and indignant one.

  Terry smells his very thought. “You’re so afraid of Beth’s finding out,” she spitefully says. “So what if she did? Where can she go? Who would want her, in the shape she’s in?”

  “Is that the point?”

  “No? So what is the point, baby? You tell me.”

  “Not hurting people?” he suggests.

  “You don’t think I hurt? You think being fucked and deserted the next minute doesn’t hurt?”

  Jack sighs. The fight is on, the same old fight. “I’m sorry. I’d like to be with you more.” Leaving before he gets bored suits him, actually. Women can be boring. They make everything personal. They’re so wrapped up in self-preservation, self-presentation, self-dramatization. With men you don’t have to keep maneuvering, you just punch. Dealing with a woman is like jujitsu, looking for the trip.

  She senses the threatening run of his thoughts and says, mollifyingly if grumpily, “She probably guesses anyway.”

  “How would she do that?” Though of course Terry is right.

  “Women know,” she tells him smugly, bragging up her gender, cuddling closer to him, and toying annoyingly with the hair on his rumpled slack belly. She says, “I keep telling myself, ‘Love him less. For your own good, girl. For his good, too.’”

  But as Terry says this, she feels an inner sliding and glimpses the relief she might experience if he indeed were to become less to her—if her tacky relationship with this melancholy old loser of a guidance counselor were in fact to end. At the age of forty she has parted from a number of men, and how many of them would she want back? With each break, it seems to her in retrospect, she returned to her single life with a fresh forthrightness and energy, like facing a blank, taut, primed canvas after some days away from the easel. The broken circle of her, an arc of it held open in hope of a phone call from a certain man, a knock on the door, an invasion and transformation from without, would close again. This Jack Levy, smart as he is, and even sensitive at times, is a heavy case. A guilty Jewish gloom weighs him down, and her too, if she lets it. She needs somebody nearer her own age, and unmarried. These married men are always more married than they let on at first. They even try to marry her, without letting go of the legal one first.

  “How’s Ahmad doing?” he asks her, pseudo-paternally.

  He keeps asking her about Ahmad, though as far as she’s concerned she wants to move on from mothering to something she’s better at. “With me on night duty lately,” she says, “and him doing deliveries until after dark many days, we hardly overlap. He’s gotten fuller in the face and the rest of him more muscular, what with all this lifting he does—this Charlie he loves so much just comes along for the ride, as far as I can tell. These Lebanese, they get the last penny’s worth out of their help. The blacks they hire keep quitting on them, Ahmad did mention. Lately they seem to have promoted him—at least he comes home later and, the few times I see him, acts preoccupied.”

  “Preoccupied?” Jack says, preoccupied himself—worrying about big Beth, no doubt. Face it: much as she would miss Jack’s flattery in bed when they get there, he would be good riddance. Maybe she needs another artist, even if he’s like the last, Leo: Leo the un-lion-hearted, utterly stuck on himself, a dripper and scrubber channeling Pollock sixty years too late, quick to push and slap back when he’s de-inhibited on liquor or meth, but at least he made her laugh and didn’t try to lay a guilt trip on her, implying he could have been a better mother of Ahmad than she was. Or maybe she should go out with a resident, like that new little guy with a blinky stammer on his way to be a neurosurgeon; but, face it, she is too old for a resident now, and in any case they always pass up the nurses they fuck and go for the proctologist’s daughter. Still, just the thought of the world of men out there, even at her age, even in northern New Jersey, hardens her heart against this lugubrious, boringly well-intentioned, stale-smelling man. She resolves to put him behind her.

  “Secretive,” she clarifies. “Maybe he’s found a girl. I hope so. Isn’t he way overdue?”

  Jack says, “Kids today have more to worry about than we did. At least than I did—I shouldn’t talk as if we’re the same age.”

  “Oh, go ahead. Help yourself.”

  “It’s not just AIDS and the rest; there’s a certain hunger for, I don’t know, the absolute, when everything is so relative, and all the economic forces are pushing instant gratification and credit-card debt at them. It’s not just the Christian right—Ashcroft and his morning revival meeting down in D.C. You see it in Ahmad. And the Black Muslims. People want to go back to simple—black and white, right and wrong, when things aren’t simple.”

  “So my son is simple-minded.”

  “In a way. But so is most of mankind. Otherwise, being human is too tough. Unlike the other animals, we know too much. They, the other animals, know just enough to get the job done and die. Eat, sleep, fuck, have babies, and die.”

  “Jack, everything you say is depressing. That’s why you’re so sad.”

  “All I’m saying is that kids like Ahmad need to have something they don’t get from society any more. Society doesn’t let them be innocent any more. The crazy Arabs are right—hedonism, nihilism, that’s all we offer. Listen to the lyrics of these rock and rap stars—just kids themselves, with smart agents. Kids have to make more decisions than they used to, because adults can’t tell them what to do. We don’t know what to do, we don’t have the answers we used to; we just futz along, trying not to think. Nobody accepts responsibility, so the kids, some
of the kids, take it on. Even at a dump like Central High, where the demographics are stacked against the whole school population, you see it—this wish to do right, to be good, to sign up for something—the Army, the marching band, the gang, the choir, the student council, the Boy Scouts even. The Boy Scout leader, the priests, all they want is to bugger the kids, it turns out, but the kids keep showing up, hoping for some guidance. In the halls, their faces break your heart, they’re so hopeful, wanting to be good, to amount to something. They expect something of themselves. This is America, we all expect something, even the sociopaths have some sort of a good opinion of themselves. You know what they wind up being, the worst discipline cases? They wind up being cops and high-school teachers. They want to please society, though they say they don’t. They want to be worthy, if we could just tell them what worth is.” His discourse, delivered in a rapid, edgy mutter from within his hairy chest, lurches: “Shit, forget what I just said. The priests and Boy Scout troop leaders don’t only want to bugger them; they want to be good, too. But they can’t, the little boys’ bottoms are just too inviting. Terry, tell me: why am I going on like this?”

  Her inner sliding brings her to: “Maybe because you sense that this is your last chance.”

  “My last chance at what?”

  “At sharing yourself with me.”

  “What are you saying?”

  “Jack, it’s no good. It’s hurting your marriage and isn’t doing me any good either. It did at first. You’re a great guy—just not my guy. After some of the jerks I’ve been dealing with, you’re a saint. I mean it. But I got to deal with reality, I’ve got to think about my future. Already, Ahmad’s gone—all he needs from me is some food in the refrigerator.”

  “I need you, Terry.”

  “You do and you don’t. You think my painting’s a crock—”

  “Oh no. I love your painting. I love it that you have this extra dimension. Now, if Beth—”

  “If Beth had an extra dimension, she’d break through the floor.” She laughs at this image, sitting up in bed so her breasts bounce free of the sheet, their top half freckled, the half with the nipple untouched by the sun no matter how many other men have put their lips and fingers there.