Terrorist

by John Updike

  “Yes,” said Ahmad when the older man could not finish.

  “But most important,” Shaikh Rashid urged, “is the Holy Qur’an. If your spirit were to weaken in the long night ahead of you, open it, and let the only God speak to you through His last, perfect prophet. Unbelievers marvel at the power of Islam; it flows from the voice of Mohammed, a manly voice, a voice from the desert and the marketplace—a man among us, who knew earthly life in all its possibilities and yet hearkened to a voice from beyond, and who submitted to its dictation though many in Mecca were quick to ridicule and revile him.”

  “Master: I will not weaken.” Ahmad’s tone verged on impatience. When the other man at last was gone, and the chain lock secured, the boy stripped to his underwear and performed ablutions in the tiny bathroom, where the basin nudged the shoulder of anyone sitting on the toilet. On the inside of the basin a long brown stain testifies to years of a faucet dripping rusty water.

  Ahmad takes the room’s one chair to the room’s only table, a bedside table of varnished maple scarred by ash-colored troughs of cigarettes allowed to burn down beyond its top’s bevelled edge. Reverently he opens the gift Qur’an. Its flexible gilt-edged pages fall open to the fiftieth sura, “Qf.” He reads, on the left-hand side where the English translation is printed, a distinct echo of what Shaikh Rashid has said:

  They marvel forsooth that one of themselves hath come to them charged with warnings. “This,” say the infidels, “is a marvelous thing:

  What! when dead and turned to dust shall we…? Far off is such a return as this?”

  The words speak to him, yet make insufficient sense. He studies the Arabic on the facing page, and realizes that the infidels—how strange it is that they, the devils, have a voice in the Holy Qur’an—are doubting the resurrection of the body, which the Prophet has been preaching. Ahmad, too, can scarcely picture the reconstitution of his body, after he succeeds in leaving it; instead he sees his spirit, that little thing inside him that keeps saying “I…I…,” entering the next life immediately, as if pushing through a swinging glass door. In this he is like the unbelievers: bal kadhdhab bi ̉l-aqqi lamm j̉ahum fa-hum f amrin marj. They, he reads in the facing English, have treated the truth which hath come to them as falsehood; perplexed therefore is their state.

  But God, speaking in His magnificent first-person plural, brushes their perplexity aside: Will they not look up to the heavens above them, and consider how We have reared it and decked it forth, and that there are no flaws therein?

  The sky above New Prospect, Ahmad knows, is hazy with exhaust smoke and summer humidity, a sepia blur above the jagged rooftops. But God promises that a better sky, a flawless sky, exists above it, with its blazing patterns of blue stars. “We” goes on, As to the Earth, We have spread it out, and have thrown the mountains upon it, and have caused an upgrowth in it of all beauteous kinds of plants, for insight and admonition to every servant who loveth to turn to God.

  Yes. Ahmad will be God’s servant. Tomorrow. The day which is almost upon him. Inches from his eyes, God is describing His rain, which causeth gardens to spring forth, and the grain of harvest, and the tall palm-trees with date-bearing branches one above the other for man’s nourishment.

  And life give we thereby to a dead country. So also shall be the resurrection. A dead country. That is this country.

  As simple and unanswerable as the first creation shall the second be. Are We wearied out with the first creation? Yet are they in doubt with regard to a new creation?

  We created man: and We know what his soul whispereth to him, and We are closer to him than his neck-vein.

  This verse has always borne a special, personal meaning for Ahmad; he closes the Qur’an, its pliant leather cover dyed the uneven red of a rose’s streaked petals, certain that Allah is present in this small, strange room, loving him, eavesdropping on the whispers of his soul, its inaudible tumult. He feels his neck-vein beat, and hears the traffic of New Prospect, now murmuring, now roaring (motorcycles, corroded mufflers), circulating some blocks away around the great central lake of rubble, and hears it dwindle after the City Hall clock chimes eleven. He falls asleep waiting for the next quarter-hour, though he expected to stay awake all night in the blanched, hovering tremble of his high, selfless joy.

  Monday morning. Sleep slips suddenly from him. There is again that sense of a shout dying away. A lump of soreness in his stomach puzzles him, until within seconds he remembers the day, and his mission. He is still alive. Today is the day of a long journey.

  He consults his watch, carefully laid on the table next to the Qur’an. It is twenty to seven. Traffic is already audible, traffic whose unsuspecting flow he will join and disrupt. The entire East, God willing, will be paralyzed. He showers in a stall equipped with a torn plastic curtain. He waits for the water to heat up, but when it does not he forces himself into the cold dribble. He shaves his face, though he knows that debate rages over how God prefers to see men face to face. The Chehabs preferred him to shave, since bearded Muslims, even teen-agers, alarmed the kafir customers. Mohammed Atta had shaved, and most of the eighteen other inspired martyrs. The anniversary of their feat was last Saturday, and the enemy will have relaxed his defenses, like the men of the elephant before the assault of birds. Ahmad has brought his gym bag and from it takes clean underwear and socks and his last fresh-laundered white shirt, pleasantly stiffened by a number of pieces of cardboard.

  He prays on the prayer rug, the mock-mihrab in its abstract pattern orienting him toward, in the distracting geography of New Prospect, the sacred black Ka’ba in Mecca. In touching his brow to its woven texture, he notices that same faint human odor present in the blue blanket. He has joined a procession of those who have stayed for whatever hidden purpose here in this room before him, showering in the cold rusty water, smoking their cigarettes as the clock chimed. Ahmad eats, though his appetite has vanished within the tension of his stomach, six segments of the orange, half the plastic cup of yogurt, and a significant portion of the bread of Abbas, though the sweetness of its honey and anise seeds strikes him as less than delicious at this hour, with his mighty deed pressing close upon him and crowding upward into his throat like a battle cry. He places the uneaten portion of the sticky holiday bread in the refrigerator, on the biggest piece of shirt cardboard, with the yogurt cup and half-orange, as if for the next tenant, but without attracting ants and roaches to a feast. His mind works through a haze like that which precedes the event described in the Meccan sura called the Blow, on the day when man shall become like scattered moths and the mountains like tufts of carded wool.

  At seven-fifteen he closes the door behind him, leaving behind in the safe room the Qur’an and the cleanliness instructions for another shahd but taking his gym bag, packed with his soiled underpants, socks, and white shirt. He passes through a dark hallway and emerges onto an empty side street that was moistened by a small rain sometime in the night. Orienting himself by the steeple of City Hall, Ahmad walks north, toward Reagan Boulevard and Excellency Home Furnishings. He deposits his gym bag in the first corner trash can he sees.

  The sky is not crystal-clear but damp and gray, a furry low sky bleeding downward tails of vaporous fuzz. The night that has passed has set a gleam on the asphalt streets, their manholes, their shiny dribbles and patches of tar. Dampness adheres to the still-green leaves of bushes straggling beside front steps and porches, and the overlapped strips of aluminum siding, its color baked in. Most of the close-packed houses he passes are not yet fully stirring, though from weakly lit windows at the back, where the kitchens are, sounds of plates and pots and the Today show and Good Morning America signal breakfasts being consumed, and a Monday like many another in America beginning.

  An unseen dog in a house barks at the shadow-sound of Ahmad passing on the sidewalk. A ginger-colored cat with one blind eye like a crazed white marble is huddling close to the front screen door as it waits to be let in; it arches its back and flashes a golden spark from its narrowed go
od eye, sensing something uncanny in this tall young stranger passing. The air tingles on Ahmad’s face but there is not enough of a drizzle to soak his shirt. The starched cotton feels crisp across his shoulders; his black stovepipe jeans sheathe the long legs that float in the watery space below his belt. His running shoes lick up the distance between himself and his fate; where the sidewalk is smooth, the elaborate relief of their soles leaves moist prints. Who shall teach thee what the Blow is? he remembers, with the answer: A raging fire! The distance to Excellency is half a mile, six blocks of tenements and small enterprise—a Dunkin’ Donuts open and a corner grocery ungrated but a pawn shop and an insurance agency still closed. Reagan Boulevard is already loud with traffic, and the school buses have begun to prowl, their angry red lights blinking in rapid seesawing alternation as they swallow the clusters of children waiting with their bright backpacks. For Ahmad there will be no return to school. Central High now seems, with all its menacing clatter and impious mockery, a toylike miniature castle, a childish place of safety and deferred decision.

  He waits for the traffic light to display its walking man before he crosses the boulevard. Its oil-stained concrete is more familiar to him as the surface supporting the tires of his truck than as this silent, enigmatically speckled plane beneath his feet. He turns left and approaches from the east, walking past the funeral home with its wide porch and white awnings—UNGER & SON, a strange unctuous hungry name—and then the tire store that was once a gasoline station, the pumps uprooted but its island intact. Ahmad halts on the curb of Thirteenth Street, looking over to the Excellency lot. The orange truck is not there. Charlie’s Saab is not there. Two unknown cars, one gray and one black, are there, diagonally parked in a heedless, space-consuming way, amid signs of mysterious activity: a litter of Styrofoam coffee cups and clamshell-style take-out containers that have been dropped on the cracked concrete and then flattened, in a coming and going of tires, like road kill.

  Overhead, the sun burns through the overcast and throws a weak white light, as of a failing flashlight. Before Ahmad can be seen—though no one appears to be sitting in the strange, arrogantly trespassing cars—he ducks right, up Thirteenth Street, and crosses it only when he is hidden behind the screen of bushes and tall weeds that have grown up behind the rusting Dumpster, on property belonging not to Excellency but to the rear of a long-defunct diner in the shape of an old-fashioned trolley car. This boarded-up relic lies at the corner of a narrow street, Frank Hague Terrace, whose row houses, semi-detached, are quiet during the weekdays, until school lets out.

  Ahmad consults his watch: seven twenty-seven. He decides to give Charlie until quarter of eight to show up, though their schedule had called for seven-thirty. But then it bears down upon him more and more strongly as the minutes pass that something has gone wrong; Charlie will not show up. This lot is poisoned. This empty space behind the store used to give him a sensation of being watched from above, but now it is not God watching, nor God’s breath he feels. He, Ahmad, is watching, with held breath.

  A man in a suit abruptly comes out of the back of the store, onto the loading platform some of whose thick planks still ooze pine sap, and comes down the steps where Ahmad would often idly sit. Here he and Joryleen exited together that night and then parted forever. The man walks boldly to his car and talks to someone over a kind of radio or cell phone in the front seat. His voice, like a policeman’s, doesn’t care who hears it, but amid the swish of traffic it carries to Ahmad with no more meaning than birdsong. For a second his white face turns full in Ahmad’s direction—a well-fed but not happy face, that of an agent for infidel governments, powers that feel power slipping away—but he doesn’t see the Arab boy. There is nothing to see, just the Dumpster rusting in the weeds.

  Ahmad’s heart beats as it did that night with Joryleen. He regrets now the waste, not using her when she had been paid for. But it would have been evil, exploiting her in her fallen condition, though she saw her condition as not so bad and only temporary. Shaikh Rashid would have disapproved. Last night, the shaikh seemed troubled, something was pressing on him he didn’t want to share, a doubt of some kind. Ahmad could always sense his teacher’s doubts, since it was important to him that there not be any. Now fear invades Ahmad. His face feels swollen. A curse has been laid on this peaceful place, which had been his favorite spot in the world, a waterless oasis.

  He begins walking, down silent Hague Terrace—its children at school, its parents at work—for two blocks and then cuts back to Reagan Boulevard, toward the Arab district, where the white truck is hidden. There has been some mixup, and Charlie must be meeting him there. Ahmad hurries, breaking into a light sweat under the hazy sun. The businesses along Reagan Boulevard deal in big goods—tires, carpeting, wallpaper and paint, major kitchen appliances. Then there are car agencies, mammoth lots holding new automobiles parked as tight as military formations, cars by the acre, windshields and chrome glittering now that the sun is wearing through, reflecting light as if across a wind-tossed wheat field, striking sparks off of strings of shiny triangles and streamers twisted in spirals that slowly turn. A new style of attention-getter, a creation of recent technology, are these weirdly lifelike segmented plastic tubes that when blown full of air from underneath wave their arms and jerk back and forth in torment, in constant beckoning agitation, begging the passerby to pull in and buy an automobile or, if posed at an IHOP, a stack of pancakes. Ahmad, the only person walking on the sidewalk along this stretch of Reagan Boulevard, meets such a tube-giant twice as high as he, a hysterically gesturing green djinni wearing a fixed, pop-eyed smile. Passing it warily, the lone pedestrian feels on his face and ankles the hot air that makes this importuning, agonized, grinning monster appear to live. God giveth you life, Ahmad thinks, then causeth you to die.

  At the next traffic light he crosses the boulevard. He strides down Sixteenth Street toward West Main, through a mostly black section like the one he walked Joryleen home to that time after hearing her sing in church. The way her mouth opened so wide, the milky pinks of it. That time on the second floor, all those beds packed in side by side, maybe he should have let her blow him like she offered to. Less mess, she said. All girls, not just hookers, learn how to do it now, at school there had always been loose crude talk about it, which girls were willing to do it, and which said they liked to swallow it. Separate yourselves therefore from women and approach them not, until they be cleansed. But when they are cleansed, go in unto them as God hath ordained for you. Verily God loveth those who turn to Him, and loveth those who seek to be clean.

  As Ahmad walks along, swift and scissoring in black and white, yet with a native trace of the American lope, he sees shabbiness in the streets, the fast-food trash and broken plastic toys, the unpainted steps and porches still dark from the morning’s dampness, the windows cracked and not repaired. The curbs are lined with American cars from the last century, bigger than they ever needed to be and now falling apart, cracked taillights and no hubcaps and tires flat in the gutters. Women’s voices rise from back rooms in merciless complaint against children who were born uninvited and now collect, neglected, around the only friendly voices in their hearing, those from the television set. The zanj from the Caribbean or Cape Verdeans plant flowers and paint porches and take hope and energy from being in America, but those born here for generation after generation embrace dirt and laziness as a protest, a protest of slaves that now persists as a lust for degradation, defying that injunction of all religions to keep clean. Ahmad is clean. His cold shower this morning lives as a glowing second skin beneath his clothes, a foretaste of the great cleansing he is hurrying toward. His watch says ten of eight.

  He moves swiftly, without running. He must not attract attention, he must slip through the city unseen. Later would come the headlines, the CNN reports filling the Middle East with jubilation, making the tyrants in their opulent Washington offices tremble. For now the tremble, the mission are still his, his secret, his task. He remembers himself running
, crouching and shaking out his naked arms for looseness, waiting for the starter’s pistol to go off and the knot of boys to unravel forward with an angry hail of thumping feet on Central High’s antiquated cinder track, and until his body took over and his brain dissolved itself in adrenaline he was more nervous then than he is now, because what he does now occurs within the palm of God’s hand, His vast encompassing will. Ahmad’s best official time for the mile had been 4:48.6, on a springy composition track, green with embedded red lane lines, over at a regional high school in Belleville. He had come in third, and his lungs afterwards felt scorched in the fire of his finishing kick over the last hundred yards; he had passed two boys, but two more stayed out of reach of his legs, mirages ahead that kept receding.

  After five blocks Sixteenth Street comes into West Main. Elderly Muslims stand around like soft statues in their dark suits and the occasional dirty gallabiya. Ahmad finds the Pep Boys and the Al-Aqsa True Value storefronts, and then the alley behind them that he and Charlie had walked along to what had been Costello’s Machine Shop. He makes sure there is no one watching as he draws near to the small side door of quilted metal painted a vomitous tan. No Charlie stands outside. There is no sound within. The sun has burned through, and Ahmad feels his shoulders and back sweating; his white shirt is no longer pristine. The Monday is astir a half-block distant on West Main. There is some traffic, cars and pedestrians, in the alley. He tries the new brass knob on the door, but it doesn’t turn. He keeps twisting it, in exasperation. How can little unthinking bits of metal balk the will of as-Samad, the Perfect?

  Fighting panic, Ahmad tries the big door, the sliding door. It has a handle down low that when turned makes two rods release a pair of side latches. The handle turns; the door shocks him by sliding up with a counterweighted ease that feels like flight, a curved moment of flight before it settles rattlingly into its rails above, in the gloom near the ceiling.