“No, John, we created an abyss. And we’re each standing on opposite sides. I want this. I want you, but I’m sorry I started this tonight. Now, I’m stopping it before it consumes us. I can’t … I won’t be left behind again.” She looked off into the distance. “Do you remember where you live? Less than a few football fields from this spot. Do you remember who else lives there? Your wife.”
“She won’t be home tonight.” She heard the pain and longing in his voice, as if it was a physical burden.
“Forget it, John. It ends here, before it begins. I’ll still be your friend, your town council protégé. But you need to go before—”
John didn’t budge. “Answer me one question.” Holly nodded. “Why are you here?”
“I want to build a place for people like Penndel and Maya and—”
“No, why did you volunteer for my campaign? Move to this town? Why are you still in Saluki?”
“I owed it to you. I hate being in debt, but I had been in your debt for a long time.”
A puzzled frown covered John’s face. “I don’t get it.”
She felt the prick of incipient tears and blinked them back. “Of course you don’t. Just forget it. Go home, John.”
In the night, John, aching and restless, kicked and tangled his sheets and blankets. He ground his body into the mattress like he was a sixteen year old, home from splitting a six pack with a cheerleader who gave him a peck on the cheek and a brush of the hand against his jeans before sending him away.
His hands were so entangled in a bra; he went from handcuffs to a straight jacket; his fists balled into the cups, his knuckles poking out from the other side of the fabric. Every time he woke long enough to find a cool part of his pillow, he’d return to the sequence of making out with the girl. But she would not help him. He wrestled the bra again, zipped and unzipped her jeans, but couldn’t figure out how to get her out of either one without her help. Then he ejaculated, but the girl was nowhere to be found. He quickly left to get Pine Sol so he could scrub the area where he thought they had been having intercourse. He scrubbed and scrubbed only to erase every trace of the girl in this dream who had no face, but what remained without the context of its surroundings was the detail of an eye, a beautiful eye, a complexity of colors, tan, green, olive, gray, and faint red, a forest floor, a garden in miniature surrounding a deep black pupil, a black hole where misunderstanding ceased, and something better, something sublime began.
Veranda’s body ever so slowly simmered down to absolute zero on the sexual scale. His mind quit racing ahead to the next romantic encounter they’d have when he’d cup one of her breasts in his palm, thumb on the point of pertinence pushing outward, begging for his lips.
Through a higher power, an act of God, a random convergence of things no scientist could explain, he set those physical sensations aside, and then, rushing in, came the memory of the young woman and her teacher seeking assistance in locating the girl’s father, to learn something, anything, about what had happened to him.
Even though you think you know something, you don’t.
Awake now, John thought about living for decades with no knowledge of whether your father was alive or dead, yearning for him every moment. He had lost his father to cancer, but his departure was gradual, even logical, expected, in the scheme of things. John knew what was happening to his father every step of the way, even if his death was unfair. Cancer strikes. Death eventually takes us all. Families mourn and pretend to move on. But to be uncertain is to be tortured forever.
John wondered how that lack of knowledge infected every thought, affected every action Holly Chicago had to make.
The moment of clarity became confirmation three weeks later when she entered the Egyptian Grounds. He could see in rich detail the likeness. Erase a few years, a few pounds. Extract the blond dye. Make a composite sketch in reverse. An artist’s rendering of what she looked like then, a computer model of aging and its reverse.
He could see her because for once he saw beyond himself, his own physical desires, through the fog around every interaction with a member of the opposite sex, the fear, the competition, the need to push, proclaim, declare, with members of his own sex. The innocence he professed, the flirtations he brushed off like so much lint on his jacket. All of it had consequences.
Why the need for Holly to change her look, change her name, hide her original person from the world? What happened in the interim, and in the interstices of her life, beyond the loss of her father? What had made it easier for her to leave one life and enter another? What would it take for him to do the same?
31
July 4th Weekend, 1972
Paula yelled down at Elias through the open window screen. “Christ, you’re just getting started? We won’t eat until dusk.” Elias, bent over the long table he’d set up in the yard, ignored his wife, and instead concentrated on cutting the rib eye into inch-size cubes and separating the meat from the fat, which was then cut and added to the skewers. Tomatoes and onions wedges followed. The pattern was important. It was how his mother did it. And her mother before her. We’ve been doing it this way forever,” his grandmother would say to his sisters. “And you’ll be doing it this way long after I’m gone.”
Now Elias was doing it. Paula didn’t like to cook, but Elias enjoyed the ritual. The sharpened knife. The well-worn wooden handles of the skewers. The methodical preparation. It connected him to his home and his heritage. And today he was proud he could share his family tradition from Aleppo and continue building a new tradition here in America: the annual Fourth of July picnic featuring the Haddad shish kabob, cucumber yogurt salad, and baklava his family expected, together with hamburgers, hot dogs, potato salad, and corn on the cob. But today the celebration of freedom would, he knew, also be a sad one for his daughter. Her friend, Maya, and her family, regulars at the Haddad picnics, were moving out of the neighborhood.
He smiled at the thought of his daughter. They’d stayed up late making the baklava, re-enacting the ritual they’d been following since Cheryl Halia was old enough to slather butter on filo dough with a pastry brush. And after she’d climbed out of bed this morning, he’d made her breakfast and they watched cartoons together. The Bugs Bunny Show, The Jetsons, and The Flintstones. There were no programs like this back in Syria, and he was fascinated by each ridiculous episode. He finished the last skewer, positioned it atop the heaping pile of shish kabob on the Kabalevsky’s Thanksgiving turkey platter, and wondered what his grandmother would have thought of Saturday morning cartoons.Elias then took the platter inside, washed his hands, and began to prepare the salad. He cored and quartered cucumbers, mixed them with generous dollops of yogurt, and stirred in fresh minced garlic and crushed mint leaves. Then he sprinkled dried crushed mint over the surface, and, after wiping his hands on his apron, brought them to his nose and breathed in. Aaaah. The mix of stale tobacco and mint. This was the Haddad way.
Guests arrived dragging lawn chairs and kids and Elias welcomed every one of them. As they mingled, he tended the grill, chatted with neighbors, and watched Cheryl Halia, Maya, and other children and climb trees. This was what America was all about! He breathed in a lung full of summer air, tilted his head back and looked up, catching glimpses of sky through the trees. Not a cloud visible! His mind wandered, filling the blue canvas with abstract shapes and vibrant colors, painting the sky from a palette made from the music always playing in his head.
It would be sad for Cheryl Halia when Maya moved away. Like the Hammonds, the Kabelevskys had been talking for years about selling the house, getting Grandmother Kabelevsky to a safer neighborhood, moving to the suburbs where the schools were better and kids weren’t put on a bus just so they could sit next to a colored kid. But Paula’s mother saw that as capitulating. Why should she have to move? Her family had lived there for three decades. Elias agreed. The neighborhood seemed just fine to him.
It was mid-afternoon when Father Moody arrived. Cheryl Halia ran around back and found her
father still at the grill. “That man is here,” she whispered. “Why does he always have to come?”
Elias kissed the top of her head. “He is a good friend to my family, Cheryl Halia, and we must always be respectful. Besides, he is a man of the church.” He stripped off his apron and hurried to the front yard to see Father Moody getting out of his sleek, black sedan.
“Father, it is good to see you!” Elias embraced the priest. “You and your fancy car. Why do I see no other priests driving such big automobiles? I think you must have a business on the side, my friend.”
Father Moody laughed. It was a common joke between the two of them. “When a member of your flock owns a car dealership, you are likely to get a good deal.”
“Come, come! I have a cold beer waiting for you in the back yard.” Cheryl Halia tore around the corner. Maya followed behind her, like they were both launched from a catapult. Elias yelled and motioned to them to come and say hello to Father Moody.
“She’ll catch me!” Cheryl Halia called. “We’re playing tag.”
“Tag can wait,” Elias insisted. “Come. I’m going to get my camera.”
Cheryl Halia and Maya came over as instructed, but they stood apart from the priest and did not speak until he did. “And how is school, Cheryl?”
“Fine,” she mumbled through a scowl. She looked at Maya and rolled her eyes.
Elias returned with his Kodak Instamatic and posed the three of them next to Father Moody’s gleaming automobile. Moody smiled and put an arm around both girls. Maya stared into the camera with a blank face while Cheryl looked as if her father had asked her to kiss a poisonous toad.
Paula glanced out the window, saw the priest, and immediately called out to the girls. “Go put more sodas in the cooler!” A look of distaste—and distrust—settled on her face as the girls broke free and bolted toward the back yard.
She dreaded Father Moody’s visits. She didn’t trust him as far as she could throw him, and since he was nearly twice her height, she probably couldn’t even pick him up. For a priest, he always seemed to be on the make. Over the years, the man’s automobiles got larger, more expensive, silver and gem-stoned bracelets replaced his cheap beaded rosaries, and his fashionable clothes looked like they’d been hand tailored. And the crisp bills he presented to Cheryl on every visit grew larger. First a five, then a ten, and one time a fifty-dollar bill. Paula had collared plenty of hustlers like Moody and could not understand why Elias had such a blind spot for the man. “My father trusts him. I trust him. You will trust him, too,” Elias had said when she’d first expressed reservations about him. Like hell I will, she’d said. She watched Moody put an arm around her husband’s shoulders and guide him toward the backyard as if it were Moody’s picnic, Moody’s house. She frowned and shook her head. Someday I’m going to run a background check on that bastard.
32
November, 2010
Rarely in government work did the results of one’s efforts stare back at you. But there it was, on the wall opposite Stuart in the DC metro:
IF YOU SEE SOMETHING, SAY SOMETHING!
Accompanying the admonition was a photograph of a man and a woman, concern written across their faces, talking to and being reassured by an authority, a uniformed police woman taking notes.
After 9/11, when he’d been appointed, along with many others, to work on programs to prevent terrorist acts, Stuart and his team had traveled to London on a fact-finding mission. They’d hoped to mirror Britain’s public awareness efforts, one of which centered on the slogan, If You Have Nothing to Hide, You Have Nothing to Fear. When they’d initially designed the American poster, it gave Stuart comfort. But not anymore.
The team decided the American people needed to be proactive, not reactive. Take action. The informal informant, Stuart thought. The slogan had a ring to it, like The Quiet American, suitable for a sophisticated Broadway play. He was proud to have gotten the cooperation of state and local politicians, law enforcement, first responders, and others in power to buy into the signage program—even though it had more symbolic value than security value. But that was the point. He felt it was the government’s duty to reassure people something was being done. The signage program gave every citizen a role to play in the security of the country.
Identifying and tracking a few hundred bad guys among a population of three hundred and thirty million was the seminal challenge of the Office of National Intelligence, officially abridged to ONI, and spoken as One-Eye. His campaign of citizen involvement was a modest part of the overall mission. It was something he understood. The task of building a detention center for Guantanamo prisoners was also something he understood. The project had a clear mission, a beginning date and a completion date. His prior work pre-screening sites for future government detention facilities had definition and purpose. But the mushrooming ONI had made Stuart skeptical. He couldn’t wrap his head around developing legal surveillance programs for the entire country. It all began to feel eerily totalitarian. One-Eye was taking things too far. The unintended consequences could be legion.
Conducting surveillance on every individual, so that every individual believed they were under surveillance went against everything he believed. Whether intended or not, that had become the goal of One-Eye. Whether intended or not, the most important objective had become to incite every person to mistrust every other person, so that everyone had no choice but to bow to the will of the state as protector. That was textbook tyranny, and he wanted no part of that slippery slope. He stopped himself from shaking his head in frustration. This was America, dammit. One-Eye could easily turn the land of the free and home of the brave into just another totalitarian country, a country too much like those places around the world America was trying to turn into democracies.
The doors whooshed closed behind him and the Metro car began to move. Stuart wrapped his hand around a pole to steady himself and studied his fellow commuters. He wondered what all of them thought of the poster. If they saw something, would they say something? Would they willingly go along? Some passengers read newspapers. Some gazed absently out the windows. Some had noses in books, others had their eyes glued to smart phones, earphones dangling. He wanted to shout: Are you paying attention? Do you understand the threat? Did you even bother to vote?
The train slowed to a stop, and as he exited along with the throng, he glanced at the security camera in the corner and wondered who was watching. At street level, he bee-lined to the Starbucks and ordered a regular coffee.
Among the crowds, he walked the several blocks to his office. How many of the people he passed thought about 9/11, about the plane that crashed into the Pentagon, the plane that, destined for the Capitol, was taken down tragically—and heroically—in Pennsylvania? Did they think about the billowing smoke that enveloped the whole of southern Manhattan as the towers fell? Did it occur to them daily, weekly, or at all? Or had the cataclysmic event simply disappeared from the collective consciousness? Hell, he thought, half the country didn’t even know the names of their elected representatives in Congress.
Throwing his empty coffee cup into the trash, he waded through the security line at the DHS building’s entrance and made his way to his office. He punched the answering machine. The first voice mail was from David Sugarman. While listening, he scrolled through his email to the one from Sugarman explaining his voice mail. He dialed Sugarman’s extension.
Now that Sugarman had a handle on where the new detention facility would be built, DHS, cooperating with Defense, FBI, One-Eye, and about two dozen other government entities, had to figure out who was going to be repatriated and who was going to be incarcerated.
“Morning, Shug.”
Sugarman cut to the chase. “Stuart, this menagerie we’ve got at Gitmo . . . I keep going back over the files and it looks like most of the detainees were clearly in the wrong place at the wrong time, swept up during operations not well-documented or not documented at all. But we have to get past that.”
“To parap
hrase Rumsfeld, we have to build a prison with the prisoners we’ve got, not the ones we wish we had.”
“It’s a nightmare.”
“So you keep telling me.”
“Have you gone through my report?”
Stuart looked at the folder on his desk. “I’ve got it right here. I’ll try to get to it this week.”
“Bottom line is, early on, we seemed to have picked up transients and random criminals, to say nothing of the isolated persons of interest from other far-flung countries. Some are probably stateless, maybe petty criminals, and a few appear to be victims of human trafficking.”
“Tell me something I don’t know.” Stuart remembered learning that early on in the War on Terror, the CIA paid bucket loads of cash for leads to possible terrorist suspects in Afghanistan and Iraq. Now those buckets were actual human beings locked in geopolitical hell.
“I wish someone would admit,” Sugarman said, “that we were duped by some pretty unsavory players into taking prisoners their governments didn’t want. Or, they were part of clandestine operations that we’ll never have the intel to sort out.”
“Well, how we got them isn’t our responsibility, “Stuart said. “What happens to them next is our business. We know the few really bad guys are, of course, going nowhere. We have to deal with them. And, as I understand it, all extradition options have been exhausted for the rest of them. So they’re our problem, too.”
The ethical and moral morass was an unintended consequence, Stuart thought. Focusing on it this early in the morning was already giving him heartburn. The only consolation he could find in the entire fiasco was that the majority of the detainees would be treated more humanely in America than anywhere else, as long as they could be reclassified and no longer considered enemy combatants.
Sugarman went on. “And, there’s the whole question of holding trials for the ones we know are bad actors. I suppose I shouldn’t have been surprised that so many people went apeshit when it was even hinted that Gitmo terrorists would be given the privilege of a fair trial.”
The Moment Before Page 24