Terrorist

by John Updike

  “Mother—”

  “What, darling? Don’t make it long, I’m on duty in forty minutes.”

  “I wanted to thank you, for putting up with me all these years.”

  “Why, what a strange thing to say! A mother doesn’t put up with her child; the child is her reason for being.”

  “Without me, you would have had more freedom to be an artist, or whatever.”

  “Oh, I’m as much of an artist as I have talent for. Without you to care for, I might have just sunk myself in self-pity and bad behavior. And you’ve been such a good boy, really—never giving me real trouble, like I hear about at the hospital all the time. And not just from the other nurse’s aides but from the doctors, with all that education they have and the lovely homes. They give their children everything, and yet they turn out horribly—self-destructive and other-destructive. I don’t know how much credit to give your Mohammedanism. Even as a baby, you were so trusting and easy. Everything I suggested, you thought was a good idea. It worried me, even, you seemed so easily led, I was afraid you’d be influenced by the wrong people as you grew older. But look at you! A man of the world, earning good money just as you said you would, and handsome besides. You have your father’s lovely lanky build, and his eyes and sexy mouth, but nothing of his cowardice, always looking for a shortcut.”

  He does not tell of the shortcut to Paradise he is about to take. He tells her instead, “We don’t call it Mohammedanism, Mother. That sounds as if we worshipped Mohammed. He never claimed to be God; he was just God’s prophet. The only miracle he ever claimed was the Qur’an itself.”

  “Yes, well, darling, Roman Catholicism is full of these fussy distinctions too, about all these things nobody can see. People make them up out of hysteria and then they get passed on as gospel. Saint Christopher medals and not touching the wafer with your teeth and saying the mass in Latin and no meat on Fridays and crossing yourself constantly, then it all got tossed out by Vatican Two as cool as you please—stuff that people had believed for two thousand years! The nuns put such ridiculous stock in all of it, and expected us children to, too, but all I saw was a beautiful world around me, for however briefly, and I wanted to make images of its beauty.”

  “In Islam, that’s called blasphemy, trying to usurp God’s prerogative of creation.”

  “Well, I know. That’s why there aren’t any statues or paintings in mosques. To me that seems unnecessarily bleak. God gave us eyes to see what, then?”

  She talks while rinsing her cereal bowl and slapping it into the drainer in the sink, and hurrying her toast up out of the toaster and slapping on jam between gulps of coffee. Ahmad tells her, “God is supposed to be beyond description. Didn’t the nuns say that?”

  “Not really, that I remember. But, then, I only had three years of parochial school before switching to public, where they were supposed not to mention God, for fear some Jewish child would go home and tell his atheist lawyer parents.” She looks at her watch, thick-faced like a diver’s watch, with big numbers she can see while taking a pulse. “Darling, I love having a serious conversation, maybe you could convert me, except there are all these baggy hot clothes they make you wear, but now I’m truly getting late and must run. I don’t even have time to swing you by work, I’m so sorry, and anyway you’d be the first one there. Why don’t you finish up your breakfast and the dishes and then walk over to the store, or even run? It’s only ten blocks.”

  “Twelve.”

  “Remember how you used to run everywhere in those little track shorts? I was so proud, you looked so sexy.”

  “Mother, I love you.”

  Touched, even stricken, sensing some abyss of need within him but able only to dart to the edge and away, Teresa pecks a kiss on her son’s cheek and tells Ahmad, “Well, of course, you sweet thing, and I do you. What is it the French say? Ça va sans dire. It goes without saying.”

  He is blushing, stupidly, hating his own hot face. But he must get this out: “I mean, all those years, there I was obsessing about my father, and you were the one taking care of me.” Our mother is the Earth itself, from which we drew existence.

  Her hands flit over herself to check that everything is in place; she looks at her watch again, and he can feel her mind flying, flying away. Her response makes him doubt that she heard what he said. “I know, dear—we all make mistakes in relationships. Can you possibly see to your own supper tonight? The Wednesday-evening sketch group is starting up again, we have a model tonight—you know, we each kick in ten dollars to pay her and have five-minute poses followed by a longer sitting, you can bring pastels but they discourage oils. Anyway, Leo Wilde called the other day and I promised to go with him. You remember Leo, don’t you? I used to go out with him, a little. Stocky, wears his hair in a ponytail, funny little granny glasses—”

  “I remember him, Mother,” Ahmad says coldly. “One of your losers.”

  He watches her rush out the door, hears her rapid padded steps in the hall and the muffled heave of the elevator answering her call. At the sink he washes his dirty bowl and orange-juice glass with a new zeal, the thoroughness of a last time. He leaves them in the drainer to dry. They are utterly clean, like a desert morning, the crescent moon sharing the sky with Venus.

  At Excellency, out on the lot, with the freshly loaded orange truck between themselves and the office window from which old, bald Mr. Chehab might see them talking and sense a conspiracy, he tells Charlie, “I’m in.”

  “I heard. Good.” Charlie gives Ahmad a look, and it’s as if his Lebanese eyes are new to the boy, crystalline in complexity, this part of us not quite flesh, brittle with its amber rays and granulations, the area around the pupil paler than the dark-brown ring rimming the iris. Charlie has a wife and children and a father, Ahmad realizes; he is tied to this world in a way Ahmad isn’t. His substance is knottier. “You sure, Madman?”

  “As God is my witness,” Ahmad tells him. “I burn to do it.”

  It always faintly embarrasses him, he does not know why, when God arises between himself and Charlie. The man makes one of his intricate quick mouths, a pinching of the lips together and then puffing them out, as if something inside has been regretfully kept from escaping.

  “Then you’ll need to meet some specialists. I’ll arrange it.” He hesitates. “It’s a little tricky, it may not happen tomorrow. How’re your nerves?”

  “I have placed myself in God’s hand, and feel very serene. My own will, my own cravings, are at rest.”

  “Right.” Charlie lifts his fist and punches Ahmad on the shoulder with it, in a gesture of solidarity and mutual congratulation such as when football players bump helmets, or basketball players exchange high-fives even as they back-pedal into their defensive positions. “All systems go,” Charlie says; his wry smile and wary eyes mix in an expression in which Ahmad recognizes the mixed nature—Mecca and Medina, the rapt inspiration and the patient working-out—of any holy enterprise on Earth.

  Not the next day but the next, a Friday, Charlie, sitting in the passenger seat, directs the truck to leave the lot and go right on Reagan, then left at the light up on Sixteenth down to West Main, into that section of New Prospect, extending some blocks west of the Islamic Center, where emigrants from the Middle East, Turks and Syrians and Kurds packed into steerage on the glamorous transatlantic liners, settled generations ago, when the silk-dyeing and leather-tanning plants were in full operation. Signs, red on yellow, black on green, advertise in Arabic script and Roman alphabet Al Madena Grocery, Turkiyem Beauty, Al-Basha, Baitul Wahid Ahmadiyya. The older men visible on the streets have long since discarded the gallabiya and the fez for the dusty-black Western-style suits, shapeless with daily wear, favored by the Mediterranean males, Sicilians and Greeks, who preceded them in this neighborhood of tight-to-the-street row houses. The younger Arab-Americans, idle and watchful, have adopted the bulky running shoes, droopy oversize jeans, and hooded sweatshirts of black homeys. Ahmad, in his prim white shirt and his black jeans slim
as two stovepipes, would not fit in here. To these co-religionists, Islam is less a faith, a filigreed doorway into the supernatural, than a habit, a facet of their condition as an underclass, alien in a nation that persists in thinking of itself as light-skinned, English-speaking, and Christian. To Ahmad these blocks feel like an underworld he is timidly visiting, an outsider among outsiders.

  Charlie seems at ease here, cheerfully exchanging jabber for jabber as he directs Ahmad to park the truck in a jammed parking lot behind a Pep Boys and the Al-Aqsa True Value hardware store. He pleadingly holds up ten fingers to the True Value clerk who has emerged, arguing that nobody in his right mind could refuse him ten minutes of off-street parking; to clarify his point, a ten-dollar bill changes hands. Walking away, he mutters to Ahmad, “Out on the street the damn truck sticks out like a circus van.”

  “You do not wish to be observed,” Ahmad deduces. “But who would observe?”

  “You never know” is the unsatisfactory reply. They walk, at a pace brisker than Charlie’s usual one, along a back alley running parallel to Main and haphazardly lined with razor-wire-topped chain-link fences, asphalt lots forbiddingly marked PRIVATE PROPERTY and CUSTOMERS ONLY, and the porches and front steps of housing meekly fitted into back-lot slices of urban space, their original wooden sides covered with aluminum clapboards or metal sheets patterned to imitate bricks. Non-domestic structures of real, time-darkened brick serve as warehouses and back-lot workplaces for the shops that front on Main Street; some are now boarded-up shells, with every exposed window smashed by methodical delinquents, and from others emerge the glow and clangor of small-scale manufacture or repair still being carried forward. One such building, of a brick painted a dour tan, has rendered its metal-sashed windows opaque with an interior coating of the same tan paint. Its wide overhead garage door is down, and the tin sign above, advertising in clumsy hand-painted letters COSTELLO’S MACHINE SHOP All Repairs and Body Work, has faded and rusted into near-illegibility. Charlie raps on a small side door of quilted metal, with a shiny new brass lock. After a considerable silence, a voice from within asks, “Yes? Who?”

  “Chehab,” Charlie says. “And the driver.”

  He speaks so softly that Ahmad doubts he has been heard, but the door does open, and a scowling young man steps aside. Ahmad is coping with his sensation that he has seen this man before when Charlie roughly, with fear’s rigid touch, takes his arm and pushes him inside. The interior space smells of oil-soaked concrete and an unexpected substance that Ahmad recognizes from two summers spent, in his mid-teens, as a junior member of a lawn crew: fertilizer. The caustic dry odor of it parches his nose and sinuses; there are also the scents of an acetylene welding torch and of closeted male bodies needing to be bathed and aired. Ahmad wonders if the men—two of them, the younger slender one and a stockier older, who turns out to be the technician—were among the four in the cottage on the Jersey Shore. He saw them for only a few minutes, in an unlit room and then through a dirty window, but they exuded this same sullen tension, as of distance runners who have trained too long. They resent being asked to talk. But they owe Charlie the deference paid a supplier and an arranger, at a level above them. Ahmad they regard with a kind of dread, as if, so soon to be a martyr, he is already a ghost.

  “L ilha ill Allh,” he greets them, as a reassurance. Only the younger—and though young he is older than Ahmad by some years—replies in kind, “Muammad raslu Allh,” muttering the formula as if tricked into an indiscretion. Ahmad sees that no merely human response, no nuance of sympathy or humor, is expected of them; they are operatives, soldiers, units. He straightens his posture, seeking their good opinion, shouldering his similar role.

  Traces of the building’s former life as Costello’s Machine Shop linger in the cloistered, layered air: overhead, beams, chains, and pulleys for hoisting engines and axles; workbenches and arrays of small drawers whose pulls are blackened by greasy fingers; pegboards painted with the silhouettes of absent tools; scraps of wire and sheet metal and rubber tubing left where the last hand set them aside at the end of the last repair; drifts of discarded oil cans and gaskets and traction belts and emptied parts packages in the corners, behind oil drums used as trash cans. In the center of the concrete floor, under the only bright lights, with extension cords feeding into its cab like the tubes sustaining a patient on life support, sits a truck much the size and shape of Excellency. Instead of being a Ford Triton E-350, it is a GMC 3500, not orange but a bleak white, the way it came from the factory. On its side has been lettered, in carefully but not professionally done black block letters, the words WINDOW SHADES SYSTEMS.

  Ahmad dislikes the truck at first sight; the vehicle has a furtive anonymity, a generic blankness. It has a hard-used, slummy look. At the side of the New Jersey Turnpike he has often seen ancient sedans from the ’sixties and ’seventies, bloated and two-tone and chrome-laden, broken down, with some hapless family of color clustered waiting for the state police to come and rescue them and tow away their shabby bargain. This bone-white truck savors of such poverty, such pathetic attempts to keep up in America, to join the easy seventy-miles-per-hour mainstream. His mother’s maroon Subaru, with its Bondo-patched fender and its red enamel abraded by years of acid New Jersey air, was another pathetic attempt. Whereas bright-orange Excellency, its letters gold-edged, has a spruce jolliness to it—as Charlie said, a circus air.

  The older, shorter of the two operatives, who is fractionally more friendly, beckons Ahmad to come look with him into the cab’s open door. His hands, the fingertips stained with oil, flow toward an unusual element between the seats—a metal box the size of a cigar box, its metal painted a military drab, with two terminal knobs on the top and insulated wires trailing from these back into the body of the truck. Since the space between the driver’s and passenger’s seats is deep and awkward to reach down into, the device rests not on the floor but on an inverted plastic milk crate, ducttaped to the crate’s bottom for security. On one side of the detonator—for such it must be—there is a yellow contact lever, and in the center, sunk a half-inch in a little well where a thumb would fit, a glossy red button. The color-coding smacks of military simplicity, of ignorant young men being trained along the simplest possible lines, the sunken button guarding against accidental detonation. The man explains to Ahmad, “This switch safety switch. Move to right”—snap—“like this, device armed. Then push button down and hold—boom. Four thousand kilos ammonium nitrate in back. Twice what McVeigh had. That much needed to break steel tunnel sheath.” His black-tipped hands shape a circle, demonstrating.

  “Tunnel,” Ahmad repeats, stupidly, nobody having spoken to him before now of a tunnel. “What tunnel?”

  “Lincoln,” the man answers, with slight surprise but no more emotion than a thrown switch. “No trucks allowed in Holland.”

  Ahmad silently absorbs this. The man turns to Charlie. “He knows?”

  “He does now,” Charlie says.

  The man gives Ahmad a gap-toothed smile, his friendliness growing. His flowing hands describe a larger circle. “Morning rush,” he explains. “From Jersey side. Right-hand tunnel only one for trucks. Newest built of three, nineteen fifty-one. Newest but not strongest. Older construction better. Two-thirds through, weak place, where tunnel makes turn. Even if outer sheath hold and keep out water, air system destroyed and all suffocate. Smoke, pressure. For you, no pain, not even panic moment. Instead, happiness of success and God’s warm welcome.”

  Ahmad recalls a name dropped weeks ago. “Are you Mr. Karini?”

  “No, no,” he says. “No no no. Not even friend. Friend of friend—all fight for God against America.”

  The younger operative, not much older than Ahmad, hears the word “America” and utters a heated long Arabic sentence that Ahmad does not understand. Ahmad asks Charlie, “What did he say?”

  Charlie shrugs. “The usual.”

  “You sure this will work?”

  “It’ll do a ton of damage, minimum. It’
ll deliver a statement. It’ll make headlines all over the world. They’ll be dancing in the streets of Damascus and Karachi, because of you, Madman.”

  The older unidentified man adds, “Cairo, too.” He smiles that engaging smile of square, spaced, tobacco-stained teeth and strikes his chest with his fist and tells Ahmad, “Egyptian.”

  “So was my father!” Ahmad exclaims, yet in exploration of the bond can only think to ask, “How do you like Mubarak?”

  The smile fades. “Tool of America.”

  Charlie, as if joining in a game, asks, “The Saudi princes?”

  “Tools.”

  “How about Muammar al-Qadaffi?”

  “Now, too. Tool. Very sad.”

  Ahmad resents Charlie intruding in the conversation between what are, after all, the key players, the technician and the martyr; it is as if, his martyrdom assured, he can be brushed aside. A tool. He asserts himself, asking, “Osama bin Laden?”

  “Great hero,” the man with oil-blackened fingers answers. “Cannot be caught. Like Arafat. A fox.” He smiles, but has not forgotten the point of this meeting. He says to Ahmad in his most careful English, “Show me what you will do.”

  The boy is beset by a freezing sensation, as if reality has shed a layer of its bulky disguise. He overcomes his distaste for the ugly plain truck, dispensable like him. He reaches toward the detonator, his face stretched into a question.

  The stocky technician smiles and reassures him, “Is O.K. Not connected. Show me.”

  The small yellow lever, L-shaped in cross-section, touches his hand, it seems, rather than his hand touching it. “I turn this switch to the right”—it stiffly resists, and then sucks, as if magnetized, into its off position, ninety degrees away—“and push this button down in here down.” Involuntarily he closes his eyes, feeling it sink half an inch.