Terrorist

by John Updike

  “And hold down,” his teacher repeats, “until—”

  “Boom,” Ahmad supplies.

  “Yes,” the man agrees; the word hangs in the air like a mist.

  “You are very brave,” the younger, taller, and thinner of the two strangers says, in an English virtually accent-free.

  “He is a faithful son of Islam,” Charlie tells him. “We all envy him, right?” Again Ahmad feels irritation with Charlie, for acting proprietorial where he has no ownership. Only the doer owns this deed. Something preoccupied and bossy in Charlie’s approach casts doubt on the absolute nature of istishhd and the exalted, dread-filled condition of the istishhd.

  Perhaps the technician feels this slight failure of accord among the warriors, for he rests a paternal hand on Ahmad’s shoulder, soiling the boy’s white shirt with oily fingerprints, and explains to the others, “His way is good. To be hero for Allah.”

  Back in the cheerfully orange truck, Charlie confides to Ahmad, “Interesting to see their minds work. Tools, hero: no shades in between. As if Mubarak and Arafat and the Saudis don’t all have their special situations and their own intricate games to play.”

  Again, Charlie strikes a note that feels, to Ahmad in his newly elevated and simplified sense of himself, slightly false. Relativism seems cynical. “Perhaps,” he offers in polite contradiction, “God Himself is simple, and employs simple men to shape the world.”

  “Tools,” Charlie says, staring humorlessly ahead through the windshield, which Ahmad wipes every morning but which becomes dirty anyway by the end of the day. “We’re all tools. God bless brainless tools—right, Madman?”

  A certain simplicity does lay hold of Ahmad in the troughs between surges of terror and then of exaltation, collapsing back into an impatience to be done with it. To have it behind him, whatever “him” will then be. He exists as a close neighbor to the unimaginable. The world in its sunstruck details, the minute scintillations of its interlocked workings, yawns all about him, a glistening bowl of busy emptiness, while within him a sodden black certainty weighs. He cannot forget the transformation awaiting him, behind, as it were, the snapped camera’s shutter, even as his senses still receive their familiar bombardment of sights and sounds, scents and tastes. The luster of Paradise leaks backward into his daily life. Things will feel big there, on a cosmic scale; in his childhood, only a few years into this life, falling asleep, he would experience a sensation of hugeness, every cell a world, and this demonstrated to his childish mind religion’s truth.

  His workload at Excellency has lightened, and he is left with stretches of idleness in which he should read the Qur’an, or study the pamphlets, readily available from overseas sources, composed and printed to prepare a shahd—the ablutions, the mental cleansing of the spirit—for his end, or her end, for women now, their loose black burqas well concealing their explosive vests, are permitted, in Palestine, the privilege of martyrdom. But his mind is too a-flutter to sink into study. His whole existence has become enraptured as perhaps the Prophet’s was in accepting Gabriel’s dictation of the divine suras. Ahmad’s every minute has taken on the intimate doubleness of prayer, the self-release of turning aside and addressing a self not his own but that of Another, a Being as close as the vein of his neck. More than five times a day he finds the opportunity, most often in the store’s barren parking lot, to spread his mat in the eastward direction and touch his forehead to the earth, each time receiving, through the concrete, the close comfort of submission. The slaglike dark weight nagging within him skews his view of the world, and bedecks each twig and telephone wire with jewels he has never before noticed.

  Saturday morning, before the store has opened, he sits on a step of the loading platform, observing a black beetle struggling on his back on the concrete of the parking lot. The day is September eleventh, still summer. The early sun slants off the rough, pale surface with a mildness that holds in it the heat of the coming day as a seed not yet germinated holds in it the eventual blossom. The concrete in its cracks has permitted weeds to flourish, the tall weeds of the dying season, with their milky spittle and fine-haired leaves, wet with autumn’s heavy dew. The sky above is cloudless, but for some dry shreds of cirrus and a disintegrating jet trail. Its pure blue is still somehow soft, powder-blue, from its recent immersion in darkness and stars. The beetle’s tiny black legs wave in the air, groping for a purchase with which to right itself, casting sharp shadows elongated by the sun at its morning slant. The legs of the small creature wiggle and writhe in a kind of fury, then subside into a semblance of thought, as if the beetle seeks to reason a way out of its predicament. Ahmad wonders, Where did this bug come from? How did it fall here, seeming unable to use its wings? The struggle resumes. How precise the shadows of its legs are, cast with an all-loving fidelity by photons that have travelled ninety-three million miles to this exact spot!

  Ahmad rises from his seat on the coarse plank step and stands over the insect in lordly fashion, feeling huge. Yet he shies from touching this mysterious fallen bit of life. Perhaps it has a poisonous bite, or, like some miniature emissary from Hell, it will fasten onto his finger and never let go. Many a boy—Tylenol, for one—would simply crush this irritating presence with his foot, but for Ahmad the option does not exist: it would produce a broadened corpse, a squashed tangle of tiny parts and spilled vital fluid, and he does not wish to contemplate any such organic horror. He looks around him briefly for a tool, for something stiff with which to flip the insect over—the dark little cardboard, for instance, used to give the two parts of a Mounds bar integrity, or to reinforce a double Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup—but he sees nothing suitable. Excellency Home Furnishings tries to keep its private lot litter-free. The African-American “muscle” and Ahmad himself have been sent out into it with a green garbage bag, on clean-up duty. He spots no happenstance spatula lying loose but, on a sudden inspiration, remembers the driver’s license in his wallet, a plastic rectangle in which a scowling and unflattering image of himself is embedded with some numerical data important to the state of New Jersey and a hologrammatical, counterfeit-repellent image of its Great Seal. With this, he manages, after a few tentative, squeamish attempts, to flip the tiny creature at his mercy over onto its legs. Sunlight strikes sparks of iridescence, purple and green, from the biform shell of folded wings. Ahmad goes back to his perch on the step to enjoy the good results of his rescue, his merciful intervention in the natural order. Fly away, fly away.

  But the bug, right side up, its shiny body minutely hoisted on its six legs above the rough concrete, merely creeps a fraction of its length and then remains still. Its antennae searchingly wave, then they too stop. For five minutes that partake of the eternal, Ahmad watches. He returns his license with its burden of coded information to his wallet. Cars blaring rap music rush by out of sight on Reagan Boulevard, the noise swelling and receding. An airplane gaining altitude out of Newark rattles in the hardening sky. The beetle, paired with its microscopically shrinking shadow, remains still.

  It had been on its back in its death throes and now is dead, leaving behind a largeness that belongs not to this world. The experience, so strangely magnified, has been, Ahmad feels certain, supernatural.

  V

  THE SECRETARY is in a bad mood that makes his loyal undersecretary cringe. His moods sweep through Hermione like a power boat’s backwash through a hovering jellyfish. For one thing, he, she knows, hates being pulled back to his office on a Sunday; it disrupts his cherished afternoons of leisure with Mrs. Haffenreffer and their family, whether spent at a late-season Orioles game up in Baltimore or on a stroll through Rock Creek Park, with all those children suited up for a run except for the fifth, the youngest, who at age three still gets to ride in the jogging stroller. Miss Fogel cannot be jealous of his wife and family; she almost never sees them and they are an invisible part of him, like the parts properly concealed inside his blue suit and boxer shorts. But in her mind she sometimes accompanies him, imagining a more relaxed, husb
andly presence than the tense battler against shadows who shows up in his cramped corner office. Hermione intuits that, now that summer’s swampy heat at last has lifted and the buttonwoods and plane trees around the Mall are tinged in their broad leaves by a dignified dullness, the Secretary yearns to be out of doors. She can tell from the tension bulging out the back of his very dark suit coat. Men in American jobs used to wear blue or brown suits—Daddy would leave the house on Pleasant Street to take the trolley in the same brown pin-stripe, with a vest, for a week at a time—but now the only serious color is black, or navy blue close to black, in mourning for the bygone days of cheap freedom.

  He has been wrought up, lately, by the common and yet well-publicized lapses in airport security. It seems that every sleazy reporter and headline-grabbing House Democrat who wants to can triumphantly brandish knives, blackjacks, and loaded revolvers which have successfully ridden through the X-ray scanners of carry-on luggage. The two of them, Secretary and undersecretary, have stood shoulder to shoulder with the security details, being slowly hypnotized by the endless procession of ghostly suitcase interiors irradiated in unreal colors—cyanic greens, fleshy peach tones, sunset magentas, and the telltale midnight blue of metal. Automobile and house keys fanned like card hands, with their rings and little chains and souvenir gizmos; the unblinking blank stare of wire-frame reading glasses in cloth cases; zippers like the skeletons of miniature snakes; bubble-clusters of coins left bunched in pants pockets; constellations of gold and silver jewelry; the airy chains of eyelets in sneakers and shoes; the tiny metal knobs and cogs in travelling alarm clocks; hair dryers, electric razors, Walkmans, miniaturized cameras: all contribute their deep-blue diatoms to the pale swim of tweaked cathode rays. Small wonder that dangerous weapons again and again waft past eyes glazed by eight hours of deciphering two-dimensional images of packed accoutrements, searching for the tumor of malice, the abrupt silhouette of deadly intent, within an oceanic stream of the everyday blandness of American lives boiled down to their basic nuggets—the equipment necessary for a few days’ stay in another city or state in the materialist comfort that is our globally abnormal norm. A pair of nail scissors or knitting needles—while these are being spotted and confiscated, four-inch knives pass as shoe shanks seen on edge, and a petite pistol of mostly hard plastic sneaks through taped into a pewter porringer supposedly being transported, if its dark orb is challenged, as a present for a baby being baptized tomorrow in Des Moines. The inspection always ends, has to end, with the Secretary clapping the underpaid watchdogs on their uniformed shoulders and telling them to carry on; they are defending democracy.

  He turns in his black suit from the radiant window looking over the Ellipse and the Mall, trampled meadows where those sheep the citizenry graze in their jogging suits and polychrome shorts and running shoes configured like space ships in ’thirties comic books. “I’m wondering,” he confides to Hermione, “if we should put the Mid-Atlantic region back on the orange level of alert.”

  “Sir, begging your pardon,” she says, “but I talk with my sister in New Jersey, and I’m not sure the people know what to do different as the levels go up.”

  The Secretary chews this over a moment, with his powerful, rueful masseters, then asserts, “No, but the authorities do. They up their own levels; they have a whole menu of emergency measures in front of them.” Yet even as he utters this reassurance he feels irritation—she can tell by the way his fine eyes narrow under their thoroughly masculine but beautifully formed brunette brows—at the gaps that exist between his single isolated will and the myriad assorted officers, efficient and indifferent, corrupt and sterling, who, like frayed neuron-endings, make contact or not with the vast, sluggish, carefree populace.

  Helplessly Hermione offers, “But I think people do like the sensation that steps are being taken, by a whole government department devoted to their homeland security.”

  “My trouble is,” the Secretary blurts, helpless in turn, “I love this damn country so much I can’t imagine why anybody would want to bring it down. What do these people have to offer instead? More Taliban—more oppression of women, more blowing up statues of Buddha. The mullahs in northern Nigeria are telling people not to let their children be given polio vaccine, and then the kids are brought in paralyzed to the health-aid clinic! They wait until they’re totally paralyzed to bring them in, after they’ve gone all the way with the local mumbo-jumbo.”

  “They fear losing something, something precious to them,” Hermione says, trembling on the edge of a new degree (the degrees are subtle, and are negotiated within the strict proprieties of a thoroughly Republican and Christian administration) of intimacy. “So precious they will sacrifice their own children to it. It happens in this country, too. The marginal sects, where some charismatic leader seals them off from common sense. The children die, and then the parents cry in court and are acquitted—they’re children themselves. It’s frightening, the power of abuse adults have over their children. It makes me glad, frankly, I never had any.”

  Is this a plea? A complaint that, standing together though they are on the lip of a splendid Sunday in the capital of the greatest nation on Earth, she is a spinster and he a married man bound by the vows of his religion to be as one, spiritually and legally, with the mother of his own children? They should be her children. In the workings of the national government, spending twelve, fourteen hours a day in the same room or adjacent rooms, they are just as much one as if legally married. His wife hardly knows him, compared with Hermione. This thought gives her so much satisfaction that she must quickly erase an inadvertent smile from her face.

  “Damn!” he explodes, his mind having been moving on its own track and coming up against the sore matter that has brought him back to his office on this day supposedly of rest. “I hate losing an asset. We got so few in the Muslim community, that’s one of our weaknesses, that’s how they caught us with our pants down. We don’t have enough Arabic speakers, and half of those we do have don’t think like we do. There’s something weird about the language—it makes them feeble-minded, somehow. Their Internet chatter—Heaven will split asunder beneath the Western river. The light shall be admitted. What the fuck kind of sense does that make? Pardon my French, Hermione.”

  She murmurs forgivingly, marking the new level of intimacy.

  He goes on, “Our problem is, the asset was holding out on us, keeping too many cards in his own hands. He wasn’t following procedure. He had some vision of a great revelation and round-up, like in the movies, starring guess who? Him. We know about the money conduit in Florida, but the bagman has vanished. He and his brother own a cut-rate furniture store up in northern New Jersey, but nobody answers any phones or comes to the door. We know something about a truck, but don’t know where it is or who’s doing the driving. The explosives team, we got two out of the four, but they aren’t talking, or else the translator isn’t telling us what they’re saying. They all cover for each other, even the ones on our payroll, you can’t trust your own recruits any more. It’s an unholy mess, and wouldn’t you know the body turns up on a Sunday morning!”

  In their native Pennsylvania, she knows, people could be trusted. A dollar is still a dollar there, a meal a meal, a deal a deal. Rocky looks like a boxer should, and dishonest men smoke cigars, wear checked suits, and wink a lot. She and the Secretary have wandered far from that elemental land of genial sincerity, of row houses numbered with stained glass in unchanging fanlights, of miners’ sons who become star quarterbacks, of pork sausage sizzling in its own fat and scrapple drenched in maple syrup—foods that make no pretense of not being loaded with lethal cholesterol. She longs to comfort the Secretary, to press her lean body like a poultice upon his ache of overwhelming responsibility; she wants to take his meaty weight, which strains against his de rigueur black suit, upon her bony frame, and cradle him on her pelvis. Instead, she asks, “Where is the store?”

  “A city called New Prospect. Nobody ever goes there.”

&nbs
p; “My sister lives there.”

  “Yeah? She should get out. It’s full of Arabs—Arab-Americans, so-called. The old mills brought them in and then slowly folded. The way things are going, there won’t be a thing America makes. Except movies, which are getting crappier every year. My wife and I—you’ve met Grace, haven’t you?—used to love them, we used to go all the time, before the kids came and we had to get sitters. Judy Garland, Kirk Douglas—they gave good honest value, every performance, one hundred ten percent. Now all you hear about these kid movie actors—the women don’t like being called actresses any more, everybody’s an actor—is drunk driving and who’s pregnant out of wedlock. They make these poor black teen-age girls think it’s just the thing, to bring a baby into the world without any father. Except Uncle Sam. He gets the bills, and no thanks from them: welfare’s their right. If there’s anything wrong with this country—and I’m not saying there is, compared to any other, France and Norway included—is we have too many rights and not enough duties. Well, when the Arab League takes over the country, people’ll learn what duties are.”

  “Exactly so, sir.” The “sir” is meant to recall him to himself, his own duties in the present emergency.

  He hears her. He turns back to moody contemplation of the capital’s Sunday calm, with its distant prospect of the Tidal Basin and the smooth white knob, like an observatory with no opening for the telescope, of the Jefferson Memorial. People blame Jefferson now for holding on to his slaves and fathering children by one of them, but they forget the economic context of the times and the fact that Sally Hemings was very pale. It’s a heartless city, the Secretary thinks, a tangle of slippery power, a scattering of great white buildings like the field of icebergs that sank the Titanic. He turns and tells his undersecretary, “If this thing in New Jersey blows up, there’ll be no sitting on fat-cat boards for me. No speaker’s fees. No million-dollar advance on my memoirs.” It was the sort of confession a man should make only to his wife.