The Occurrence

  He asked Arama where he might find sanctuary for her. Arama told him she had already spoken with the Mother Superior of her parish. She would be happy to offer Jhana-Merise refuge at her convent on the edge of town.

  15

  Hashim opened his eyes. The perfume of licorice tea and the heat of the afternoon sun warming a bowl of apricots on a weathered windowsill filled him with the heavy scent of childhood. He knew he was in the home of his grandfather. He hadn’t been here in years. The bad blood began after Hashim had orchestrated the deaths of a busload of American school children in the name of Allah. It wasn’t the Allah his grandfather knew.

  Qadir appeared, his hands and face caked with earth from tending the garden.

  Hashim watched him wash away the dirt in the basin outside the ochre kitchen walls. He recalled the years he’d lived here and how he’d loved to work with his grandfather along the river in the rice and wheat fields. Fields that have since turned to baked dirt.

  Hashim had cherished the old man for giving him an identity. It was a complex identity forged not only by Qadir, but also Hashim’s father, whose selfish ambitions had lured his son from this hillside, and immersed him in the evil of cultures of domination and greed. His father’s influence had created in Hashim the need to destroy these infidels. It had become easy to believe in the power of destruction, but Hashim had been bled of those opiates since the occurrence in the desert.

  Qadir saw his grandson.

  Hashim had a softness in his eyes and face. A softness that had disappeared in the years of violence.

  “You saw the writing,” Qadir said.

  “Yes. And the butterfly, grandfather.”

  Hashim remembered, as a young boy, staring for hours as the insect struggled against the walls of the isolated cocoon hanging from the branch of a date palm tree. He remembered his grandfather told him not to interfere with their birth. If he did, he would cause the creature’s death. His eyes were sore from straining to see every movement in this extraordinary act. The silk pad from which the cocoon had hung moved as the chrysalis tore open, and glimpses of color edged into the light. A luminescent multicolored wing stretched through the breach, expanding itself and pushing away on the remains of the shell that still held it within its world.

  Hashim saw the butterfly emerge, sit atop the empty casing and expand its dry wings. Magnificent colors lengthened into the sunlight, as if drawing power from its heat. And there within the wings, the same script in Arabic as he had seen written in the sunlight of the warehouse. Nahn wahid. We are One.

  The newborn lighted like a feather onto young Hashim’s hand and looked at him as if it expected something in return. And Hashim heard the same words he heard in the warehouse. The air spoke, “Nahn wahid.”

  Tears filled Hashim’s eyes. He told Qadir of how the sand beneath them had opened and how he saw the butterfly, and reached out to the woman, and they survived.

  “You have been devoured by hate.”

  “What am I to do, grandfather?”

  Qadir touched Hashim’s face.

  Hashim opened his eyes.

  He wasn’t in his grandfather’s house.

  His clothes were disheveled and dirty.

  A large moon climbed the sky.

  He was in a back street of Mosul.

  He made his way out of the alley and walked among the people, unnoticed. Head bent. Eyes covered by a nervous hand. The last thing he remembered was getting Nazir home alive.

  16

  South of the war-torn center of Mosul, in the shadow of the Al-Nabi Yunus Mosque, in a modest home, on a tiny street, in a skintight kitchen with bullet holes and battered concrete walls as a constant reminder of war, Nazir stood, shaking and wounded before his grandmother.

  She wore a nutmeg colored headscarf. It softened the wrinkles on her face—a face toughened by the sun, the desert wind, and life.

  She applied ointments and a gauze dressing on the wound in her grandson’s arm. Shrapnel from the drone had sliced a gash across his bicep. She’d stopped the bleeding. She told him she was concerned with infection now.

  The adrenaline from the event still rushed through Nazir, making it impossible to stand still. But his grandmother was strong, and tugged at his waist until he stopped pulsing with energy that made it difficult for her to do her job of healing him.

  Her firm yet gentle hands reminded him of how she had cared for him after his parents were killed. She’d left the gashes in the wall as a reminder of the attack that killed her daughter and son-in-law—a reminder for her of the sorrow and uselessness of violence. Nazir had a different take on what it represented.

  She placed a hand on his cheek.

  “You were spared for a reason, Nazir.”

  “Yes, grandmother. To continue on.”

  “Jihad is wrong.”

  “How many times must I tell you?” he shot back. “Others hear you speak like this it will not be safe.”

  “You won’t bring your parents back with blood.”

  “No,” he said, pressing his opened hands onto the section of wall where they died, “but their voices will rise through the death of our enemies.”

  “Blood for blood is not God’s way.”

  “Yes it is, Grandma.”

  He knew she would never stop trying to impart the futility of war, or relinquish her vow to infuse in him the love of all men, which she believed Allah spoke. But after he witnessed his parents’ murder, Nazir had been on a different course, following a different reading of that love.

  But the occurrence in the desert, and being with his grandmother, who had given him nothing but love, flushed him with an awareness he didn’t want to have. That maybe life wasn’t as black and white as he believed. He wondered if she could see the sudden conflict in his eyes.

  He turned away, and grabbed the shirt she’d placed for him on the back of the rocking chair.

  “Nazir,” she said, in a voice sweet and gentle.

  He turned back to her.

  He saw sorrow in her eyes, sorrow he’d seen reflected there most of his life. But it was a sorrow that held love. The paradox terrified and moved him. She’d never backed away from expressing what she believed—that even through grief we must know we are loved and can love in return.

  He’d strong-armed his heart against that love for so long in order to survive, but his grandmother’s devotion reached deep into that heart. And, it terrified him.

  Nazir walked through the busy night streets of Mosul in hopes of finding Hashim. A new world had exploded inside him, a world at odds with the young man he’d forced himself to become.

  Hashim had trained him well. Trained him to question and to think. But question and think within the world of jihad. That process fed his dreams, and those dreams fed his reality: a mysticism that served violent ends. He was a mujahid, a soldier to jihad. Allah’s undying vessel. And jihad had begun with the Djinn.

  His grandmother knew all about the Djinn. But she’d told him another side of those stories when he was a boy—of these mystical creatures who were virtuous in the sight of Allah. Male and female, equal in every respect, one no greater than the other. She’d kept that belief from all but him, for she knew it went against the core creed that jihad was born of the Djinn.

  She also knew Nazir’s heart was good, and that he would one day understand the truth of how love, not hate, was the irreplaceable center of their theology.

  17

  Hashim gazed into the mirror in the basement of an abandoned storehouse on the outskirts of Mosul. It was the place he had taken Nazir when he first began to teach him. They spent many nights here. Hashim saw greatness in the young boy and wanted to instill in him a confidence that would sustain him.

  The secret meetings were the beginning of the darkest part of Nazir’s trajectory. They were illuminated by Hashim’s vision, dominated by the bloated figure of the United States that he was resolved to rupture.

  That resolve had become dust, and blew through Has
him’s mind now, as quick as the earth he’d scorched.

  In that emptiness—heartache.

  Hashim had come here from the alley he’d found himself in. The dream with his grandfather had unbolted his memory. And in the mirror, the warm eyes of his dead mother appeared and stared at him.

  He knew she’d hated his being sent away by his father to study under the dark cloud of jihad. He knew she had loved him and wanted him to be a good man. He had loved her, too. But his father had been enamored by the power of the shadow. And that’s the path Hashim followed.

  It broke his mother’s heart.

  She died soon after Hashim returned from his first jihad in Saudi Arabia. This was another memory unearthed as he looked into the mirror. What his mother feared had become true. The sweet boy he’d been had become a dark savior. But at what cost? He heard her implore him to answer.

  Hashim stared at the straight razor in his hand. A litany of sins he once thought were victories now ripped open his mind. And in answer to his mother’s haunting memory, he placed the edge of the razor at his throat.

  18

  The clock struck midnight inside Adana Airport in southern Turkey. A boarding announcement was made for Turkish Airlines, Flight 1269 to Washington, D.C.

  At the sink, in the men’s room, across from the gate, Hashim splashed ice-cold water to his clean-shaven face. He was burning up—his forehead hot with fever.

  He dried his face with a paper towel.

  When an elderly man entered the bathroom, Hashim stood up straight and buttoned the middle button of the dark blue jacket he wore.

  Hashim exited the men’s room and walked to the attendant taking boarding passes. He took his boarding pass out of his jacket pocket. He was nervous. He wasn’t used to not being in control. But it was his choice to be here. His choice to escape.

  He closed his eyes and rubbed his forehead. He was dizzy.

  “Are you all right, sir?” the young man in line behind him asked.

  At first Hashim didn’t know the young man had addressed him.

  “Are you all right, sir?”

  Hashim regained his balance, and turned to the young man. “Yes,” he answered, with a smile.

  The woman in line before him boarded the plane.

  Hashim showed his passport to the attendant. It was a Greek passport. The name on it, Nicolas Sandor.

  He handed her the boarding pass. She scanned it and gave it back. He boarded the plane.

  Hashim found his seat on the aisle in the last row. The other two passengers had already been seated.

  Hashim’s eyes went to the elderly woman next to him. He found himself intrigued by the beads she ran through her fingers.

  “Such a simple thing can give such peace,” she said, when she saw his eyes on her rosary.

  “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to—”

  “That’s all right. They were a gift from a friend. Do you pray?”

  He stared at her, unsure what to say.

  “Now, I’m sorry. That was too personal a question to ask.”

  He wasn’t sure how much he wanted to engage with her. But his heart beat in a different rhythm now, and had opened a place for strangers.

  “Yes. I do pray. Five times a day.”

  “I love the Qur’an. But I don’t understand how…”

  “What?”

  “I’m sorry, it’s not my place.”

  “Tell me.”

  He could see she was troubled with what was on her mind. He knew the Qur’an raised many questions. He also saw she knew she could talk with him about it.

  “I don’t understand the violence that comes in its name.”

  His answer was a tender question, not an accusation.

  “That same violence has also come from readings of the Bible, has it not?”

  He saw her take in what he said, and hold her rosary tighter.

  “Yes. I’m afraid so.” Her voice was quiet and thoughtful. “We all have so much to learn.”

  The announcement came over the speakers that the doors had been shut and the plane was about to take off.

  They each smiled to the other, buckled their seat belts, and went back to their inner lives.

  In his relating with her, he’d forgotten he had a fever. But his forehead still burned.

  19

  Friday, September 11

  Julian stood at Dominique’s door. Her tiny apartment was in the Mosul Green Zone. It didn’t mean insurgents wouldn’t send in missiles from time to time. There were no safe zones in war. His rumpled clothes and bloodshot eyes let her see he hadn’t slept.

  She smelled the booze.

  “You need to sober up and take a shower.”

  She moved back into the apartment.

  He followed her inside.

  “Got anything to drink?”

  “Like you need it.”

  “I do.”

  “There’s nothing much here in the way of anything. Take a look.”

  He took in the space.

  “Jesus, you’re spartan.”

  She went into the kitchen, and opened the freezer door. The only thing there was a bottle of vodka.

  “Anything in these boxes you’re packing?” he called from the living room.

  “Nothing you’d be interested in.”

  He rummaged through an open box. It contained books on the Middle East, an Atlas, some small bags of spices, a few pieces of locally made fabrics, a worn copy of the Qur’an.

  “You’re taking back memories. How quaint.”

  “Fuck you, too, Julian,” she said from the kitchen.

  He saw the day’s calendar on the living room table.

  September 11.

  She came back into the room and saw him staring at the calendar.

  She raised the glass of vodka she’d brought for him, toasted the memory of that day, took a sip, and handed him the glass. He toasted the memory as well.

  “Heard you pissed off General Miles in your debriefing,” he said.

  “Heard you didn’t piss off anyone in yours.”

  “And they’re still sending me back home.”

  “Your father arrange that?”

  “I’d bet on it. I can see it now, the fucker. I have no doubt he’s already manipulating my run for senate.”

  “I’m going back, too,” she said, looking for a trace of enthusiasm in his eyes. There was none.

  He paced the room with an unsteady gait.

  “It might help, you know,” she said.

  “What’s that?”

  “To talk about it.”

  “Shit happens. You never know why.”

  “I’m not that sure.”

  “Have you told your boss at The Post what happened?”

  “No.”

  “I’ll tell you why. Because you know he’d think you’re crazy. Fuck. Maybe we are. One thing I learned here. You want to survive? You want to stay sane? You move forward. You move fast. You never look back. And never talk about the weird shit.”

  “So why are you here?”

  He slumped down onto the floor. She put a hand on his shoulder. He rested his head there. The heat from his cheek seeped into her fingers. She wanted him to tell her what he saw in the warehouse. But even alcohol couldn’t seem to break him. That didn’t stop her.

  “What did you see in there?” she asked.

  “You’re relentless.”

  “No more than you when you want something.”

  “And what is it you want, and why is it so fucking important?”

  He struggled to stand. The booze played with his equilibrium.

  He stared out the dusty, half-opened blinds. The afternoon sun scratched its way across his face. She could see he was debating something.

  “You really want to know?” he asked.

  “Yes.”

  He turned to her, as sober as a baby.

  “A young girl.”

  “What?”

  “There was a young girl. She got in my line of fi
re. Came out of nowhere. Her head exploded not five feet from me. Happy?”

  He downed the vodka and slammed the glass on the counter, almost breaking it.

  She saw he was about to vomit.

  “Use the bathroom,” she said, and helped him there.

  He dashed in, kicked the door shut, and retched.

  The staccato of artillery burst like firecrackers in the distance.

  She listened to hear if it continued.

  It got quiet.

  “Hey. You alright in there?”

  “I’ll take that shower now.”

  She grabbed the thin bar of soap off the kitchen counter, zipped open her carry-on, grabbed a travel-size bottle of shampoo and knocked on the bathroom door.

  “Come on in.”

  She opened the door.

  He was naked, his taut body flecked with scars.

  She handed him the shampoo and soap.

  “I’ll make coffee.”

  “Thanks. I’ll make sure we’re on the same flight, if that’s okay with you.”

  “I’d like that.”

  She left the bathroom and closed the door. How long their connection would last once they landed in D.C. was an unknown for her.

  Julian let the spray of water from the shower cleanse him. He was in desperate need of cleansing.

  Word came there was no one in the insurgent’s house. But he saw movement. What he didn’t see was the girl. It was a mistake and it haunted him. Was she pushed into the room? Used as a decoy? He’d never know. For once he’d pulled the trigger and she was blown away, bullets from everywhere rained like thunder.

  He’d planted that so far deep inside, he thought he was safe. But whatever happened in the desert brought that young girl back like lightning.

  He got out of the shower and looked at himself in the mirror.

  “What the fuck are we doing here?”

  His tortured eyes reminded him of the men under his command—drunk on the rush of firefights and the nearness of death, and the horror, lack of sleep, and desperate need for forgiveness.