So maybe she could work it through Max. Except . . . Max didn’t know about the id-kay, and this was no way to find out, especially since he’d been avoiding her ever since, well, you know. So who else did she know who might be willing to help? Hell, who else did she know to even talk to about all this?
3
There was a reason Marcus didn’t go by his first name (Mohammad) or his last name (Haddad) anymore. His reason, and his name change, both happened right around the same time as the whatever-it-was. He hadn’t changed them in an attempt to pass in a part of the world where Muslims didn’t happen to be the majority; when he changed them, he’d already become a majority of one—could start his own caliphate if he wanted to. He just didn’t want to anymore.
It started back when Mohammad Haddad went by Mo, wearing his faith so lightly he could pull a football jersey over it. Despite living in a state full of cowboys and cowboy wannabes, he was popular in school because he was good at something more important than skin color or what direction he chose to pray in. He was a good quarterback—a winning one, which was the best kind.
He was also popular, partly because of the football, partly because he was handsome, but mainly because he listened, and not just so he’d know when his next turn to speak was. Mo mirrored people—a world-class pro tip if you want to be popular. Pay attention to what people say, and reflect them back to themselves. It’ll either scare the shit out of them or make them fall in love with you—sometimes both.
One of the reasons Mo was good at reflecting other people was because when he looked inside himself, he didn’t see a lot there. It didn’t help that he was unclear on what kind of Muslim he was. His parents were mixed in that regard—one Sunni, the other Shia, earning Mohammad the label of Su-Shi—or it would have, if there’d been another Muslim family within criticizing distance of the Haddads. His parents believed this distance from fellow Muslims was good; no one to dredge up their respective sects’ deeper divisions. Instead, they teased one another about the proper number of times to pray a day, whether to use the word amen after namaste, whether their heads touched the floor or a wooden plank while praying with their arms folded or not. What neither parent fully appreciated, however, was that by raising him as a hyphenate, they’d left Mohammad feeling like nothing so much as what the label Su-Shi implied: a fish out of water.
They’d purposely left him in the dark about which was which, focusing instead on the five (or six) pillars that all Muslims had in common: the belief that only God is God, that Mohammad was his last messenger, and that daily prayers were required, as was fasting during Ramadan, giving alms to the poor, and making the hajj to Mecca before they died. The theory was Mo could choose for himself when he was ready without being biased by loyalty to one or the other parent. In practice, though, his parents’ sectarian détente left Mo feeling like nothing, like neither Su nor Shi, and even more out of water than he already was.
Which might explain his attraction to zero.
Mo had learned in a world history class that the number zero was an Arabic invention. Until then, he’d just assumed that all numbers had always existed. Yes, he knew they got written differently sometimes—Roman versus the kind they used nowadays, which were, yes, Arabic. And come to think of it, his entire knowledge of the Roman numbering system started with I, for one. So he decided to google it, prepared to be ethnically fascinated into a career in mathematics—teaching, maybe, or accounting. After all, people were starting to ask him what he wanted to be when he grew up. His joke answer—taller—had played well in the beginning, but more recently was being countered with “No, seriously . . .”
So Mo typed, “Did Arabs invent the zero?” into the search bar. And that got it started. Through some perverse combination of cookies, personal information, data farming, Russian attempts to hack Western civilization down to size, and targeted advertising algorithms—all those you-might-also-likes—Mo, a.k.a. Mohammad Haddad, was routed to exactly the wrong websites for someone named Mohammad Haddad. Sure, he didn’t have to take the clickbait presented to him—clickbait tailor-made to trigger the index finger of a male Su-Shi first-generation Arabic American between the ages of fifteen and twenty within the 405 area code whose interests included football, porn, the history of Arabic numerals, and careers in mathematics—but what good’s clickbait if it can’t hook a fish already out of water?
And so, like Alice, Mo tumbled down the rabbit hole, clicking and also liking, chatting with bots, and watching video recs until he found himself snapping with someone somewhere who started out their chat—quaintly and ever-so-politely—using the first-person plural pronoun to make the addressee feel like he was already part of a group:
“May we call you Mo?”
They started by making Mo think the world he lived in was in a state of upheaval, not just spiritually, but physically—geologically, even. This wasn’t too hard, especially for a boy living in Oklahoma, in the epicenter of the state’s petroleum extraction industry.
“The only thing okay about where you live is the state abbreviation,” they typed.
“What’s so wrong with it?” Mo typed back.
“Man-made earthquakes. Tap water catching fire.”
“The state says those are natural.”
“A natural result of injecting billions of gallons of wastewater into basement rock—yes. Earthquakes are ‘natural’ when you do that.”
“There’s no scientific proof,” Mo tried.
“Do you know how many earthquakes there were in your state before they started disposing of wastewater in injection wells?”
“How many?”
“One to two per year. Now? Over a thousand in Stillwater this year alone.”
Mohammad didn’t type a response. He didn’t have one. He’d been woken up by a lot of those quakes. And thus the first hook was set.
“After the Cuyahoga River caught fire in 1969, your President Nixon started the EPA,” the other side continued. “Now, when tap water catches fire, they tell you to buy the bottled kind.”
Mo looked at his own bottle of Ice Mountain, sweating next to him.
“Bottles made out of plastic. Plastic made out of—do we need to go on?”
“No,” Mo typed.
“Have you ever seen that ad where everything made out of plastic disappears? You can find it on YouTube. You know what that’s about?”
“Advertising?” Mo guessed.
“No,” the other side typed. “Blackmail.”
Mohammad’s eyes widened; it was like they were sitting across from him at the Haddad dinner table. He’d heard his own father make similar threats about what the petroleum industry could do to teach those eco brats with their iPods a lesson. “Don’t like oil? Okay, no more oil!” Mohammad Senior had worked as a control-valve technician for Saudi Aramco before coming to the States to work on something the rumor mill predicted was going to be big—just as soon as the “right people” were in charge. All it was going to take was a little change in energy policy to outlaw suing over silly things like poisoned groundwater or man-made earthquakes.
By the time Mo was little, the “right people” were apparently in charge. There was also a Bush/Cheney magnet on their refrigerator, used to hold up a drawing of a Thanksgiving turkey the size of Mohammad’s first-grade hand.
“The founders of our feast,” his dad said whenever he went to the fridge, tapping a knuckle on the magnet. There was also a picture of W holding hands with a sheikh, like they were going to prom together even though the 9/11 hijackers who forced his dad to stop wearing his skullcap to work had been Saudis, mostly.
The yellowed turkey, the magnet, and the photo were all still on the family’s refrigerator when Mo struck up his online conversation with the handlers hoping to convert him. He’d asked his new snap buddies about these connections between his family’s way of life and what it all meant. But the people on the other end were observing radio silence, perhaps letting him think about what he’d learned, letting him
go online to find out more.
Then one Saturday while Mo was sleeping in, an earthquake tossed him out of bed and cracked the foundation of their house. Later that afternoon, he saw uniformed men in his backyard. He thought maybe his dad had already called somebody about the foundation.
Nope.
They hadn’t knocked. They hadn’t left a doorknob sign. They were just there, with a surveyor’s tripod, a measuring tape, a bunch of little flags on plastic poles they planted around Mo’s childhood swing set based upon a series of mysterious hand signals from the guy squinting next to the tripod.
Mohammad broke open his father’s shotgun to make sure it was loaded before snapping it shut and stepping out the door, prepared to fire one warning shot to get them off his family’s property.
“Put that away, son,” one of the uniforms said. “You don’t want that kind of trouble.”
“Get off my land,” Mo shouted.
“It’s not really your land,” the man who called him son said before doing it again. “Not what’s underneath this lawn, at least.”
“Do you have a warrant?” Mo asked, not knowing what else to say.
“We’re not cops,” the talking uniform said. “Here. Try this.” He handed him a pamphlet from the American Petroleum Institute. There was a derrick in silhouette, over which ran the title, “Know Your Mineral Rights.” The n and o in Know were a different color from the rest—red instead of blue—and the word rights was surrounded by one of those slashed circles, also red.
According to the pamphlet, the uniforms were in the right and Mo wasn’t. Turned out they didn’t need to ask permission to come onto someone’s property and start drilling. They used to, but the state legislature took care of that.
“That swing set’s gonna need to come down,” the talking uniform said. “We can do it, but then there’s gonna be a charge.”
There used to be a joke during one of the Bushes’ Gulf Wars: “How’d all our oil get under all that sand?” Two days later, when the people on the other end of the internet broke their silence to tell Mo that “joke,” their timing couldn’t have been better. When their snap snapped, he was ready to agree with them about whatever they had to say about how not-okay Oklahoma was. But after taking his temperature about the nefarious ways of the fossil fuels cabal, it turned out they had a different topic in mind: Mo. Just like the state he was living in, Mohammad himself was pretty messed up. They introduced their new topic this way: “Congratulations on being beloved by infidels.” It was like they’d reached through his phone and slapped him.
“What do you mean?” he thumb typed, the beeping of construction equipment cutting through his bedroom window, the rumbling of its digging shaking the whole house—assuming it was the machines, that is, and not another earthquake.
“You’re popular. A popular boy. You play with the skin of swine, and other swine cheer you on.”
“You mean football?”
“We mean a game. You play games that mean nothing and are beloved for it.”
“My dad thinks I can get a scholarship.”
“Because it costs money in America not to be stupid. That freedom they speak of—it means you’re free to be dumb; everything else costs money. Jesus saves; Moses invests. In America, even prophets must profit. But what about the Prophet, little Mohammad who plays football?”
This time, the discussion—a lecture, really—was cutting much closer to the bone. His parents were devout, he just wasn’t clear on which flavor was which. Mo himself was first-generation, Su-Shi devout, meaning he was embarrassed when his mother went out in public wearing her burka. Even so-called friends teased him about his mom being “one of those beekeepers.” But when he pleaded with her to “act more American,” she compromised precisely once, going outside to tend her garden in a burka and cowboy hat. The neighbors who saw her were deeply offended, and she was offended by their taking offense.
“That’s how compromise works,” she explained. “Both sides are angry.”
Other than having to apologize for his parents, it was true about Mo’s being popular. He was, especially among the other students, “the Americans,” as his father put it, distinguishing them from “our American,” as both parents referred to their son. They didn’t say it sneeringly, but rather as a point of pride—as immigrant parents have from back when the Statue of Liberty still welcomed them.
What made Mo popular was the opposite of what made Dev a weirdo: empathy. Mohammad had too much. If the recording computer in the sky ran an analysis on the words Mo used most often, the phrase “I know what you mean” would come out right on top. And he meant them, every time he used those words, proving it often with an anecdote from his past that showed he’d heard, he’d understood, had been there too.
There are, of course, some people one shouldn’t empathize with if one can help it. Unfortunately, Mo couldn’t. Once his head started nodding, it became like one of those toy dogs with the bobbing head: it would keep going until somebody stopped it. And it was even worse when the people demanding your empathy beat you to the punch.
“You feel like a fraud, yes?” they typed.
“Yes,” Mo typed back.
“We can help you with that.”
It’s not hard making someone living with their parents feel pampered. And it’s not hard turning someone who feels pampered hard, especially when you pose it as a challenge they’re too soft to face. And once the hardening starts, it can become diamond-like, common coal squeezed to a matrix of molecular perfection. Mo’s football coaches knew this and used it to make him worthy of scholarships. And his other coaches used it, too, though the muscle that needed work was spiritual. And so Mohammad read the Koran for the first time, absorbing the words of the Prophet—the one not spelled with an F. His internet coaches helped decode what Allah through his last Prophet meant by this and that, correcting any misunderstandings, especially with regard to the issues of killing others and martyrdom. Allah, it seemed, could be tricky sometimes—almost sarcastic—meaning the opposite of what his words seemed to say on the page.
Mo’s parents noticed the change and secretly approved, though they had no idea what they were approving. That he was showing a greater interest in the practice of Islam seemed like a good thing; the same went for attending mosque and eliminating Western temptations, one after the other. He even surpassed his father, who wore a shirt and tie to work, once Mohammad adopted more traditional Islamic dress at the cost of several so-called friends.
Stung by a case of spiritual one-upsmanship with his own son, Mo Senior quipped to his wife that “We’re never as ideologically pure as when someone else is paying the bill.”
To which his wife responded, “When a prayer is answered, don’t ask to see its teeth.”
Unfortunately, Mo’s parents really should have asked to see the teeth, getting set to bite the hand that fed them. Not that he’d already decided to become a suicide bomber; he just hadn’t ruled it out. And while he wasn’t ruling it out, he assembled what he needed, should the calling come. Parts like PVC pipe and endcaps from Home Depot, a hunting vest and shotgun shells from the Walmart sporting-goods section. Plans for a dead-man’s switch and pipe bomb off the interwebs. The prayers to say for guidance. The prayers to say just before.
Meanwhile, his invisible coaches started adding PowerPoint slides to the pitch: waist-high shots of fat-gutted SUV drivers standing next to gas pumps; dead Iraqi children lying in rubble, their faces clowned in dust and their own blood; open-carry ammosexuals parading with their guns in Walmart; more dead kids that could have been Mohammad; Bush playing golf; Cheney telling Congress to f-off; more dead kids; gas pumps; Donald Trump showing his signature on one or another Muslim ban; dead kids; and finally, the last slide, ISIS members clad in black, looking like ninjas, no voice-over, saying, “We’re the Islamic State and we approve of this message.” But it really didn’t need it, now, did it?
Still deciding, Mohammad asked, “Why a high school in the mid
dle of nowhere?”
“So they know,” his coaches typed, “that there’s nowhere to hide.”
“Are your parents’ papers in order?” they asked.
“What papers?”
“The ones that prove they’re legal, little Mohammad.” And before he could reply, they snapped in again. “Oh, but what does it matter? Their skin—your skin—is all the proof they’ll need.”
“They who?” Mo typed, though he already knew. He just didn’t want to believe it.
“The ones making your country great again.”
“They’re saying we should give him a chance.”
“For what, little Mohammad? To preheat the ovens?”
Mo didn’t respond right away. He was too busy throwing up—as he explained once he was able to type again. “That shows it’s working,” their words came back, followed by the barfing emoji.
At school, they were experiencing an “uptick” in swastikas and chants of “build the wall.” And Mo was spending more and more time in the bathroom, to lose breakfast, then lunch. Even the sip of water he’d had to wash the bad taste out of his mouth came back up. He thought about changing his clothes back, to make him less of a target. The thought stopped him from doing it, made him feel ashamed for the shallowness of his commitment. And that—that shame—that showed it was working too.
PART TWO
4
As it turned out, Dev wasn’t smarter than anybody—Leo least of all. Becoming friends had been a strategic mistake. The only smart thing he’d done was not telling Leo about the bunker he’d found sophomore year. Deep down inside, he must have known that he’d need someplace at school where he could be completely alone—including and especially from Leo.
Happy Doomsday: A Novel Page 4