Man of the Hour

by Peter Blauner

  “Where have you been?” She stared at him strangely, as if he’d caused her great concern. “I called you four times yesterday.”

  He was about to ask why when the rest of the mob came storming across the sidewalk after him, knocking aside an old woman with a cart full of secondhand vegetables from upscale Dumpsters. He pushed through the front door and into the building’s narrow alcove with the rain of voices at his back.

  He could still hear them when he reached the second floor and brought the morning papers into his apartment. They were calling up from the street.

  “Hey, David, why’d you do it?!”

  “Hey, creep, show your face!”

  And then he saw it. The “exclusive” on the front page of the Trib by Judy Mandel.

  TERROR TEACHER WAS ABUSIVE, SEZ EX.

  He staggered into the living room, tearing off the plastic and reading:

  In an exclusive interview with the Trib yesterday, the former wife of alleged school bus bomber David Brian Fitzgerald described her ex-husband as an erratic, unpredictable personality who once gave her a black eye and may have touched their seven-year-old son “inappropriately.”

  He fell back on the couch and read the sentence twice, realizing that he had reached the final destination on the road to sorrow.

  He forced himself to go on to the end of the piece, where the denial from his lawyers sat like an irrelevant footnote. The rest of the story was just too devastating. It described someone familiar, yet completely strange. Renee described his father’s war record, his own interest in the literature and mythology of heroism, his dark moods, his occasional intemperate drinking, his youthful arrest in Atlantic Beach, and his inability to communicate with her. She even mentioned his unpublished novel, The Firebug, neglecting to explain that the title was a metaphor for the unreliability of memory and not a reference to pyromania. Pulled together in print, the plainest and most mundane of details seemed sinister and incriminating. Especially “the inappropriate touching,” which clearly referred to his tickling of Arthur, and the mysterious black eye, which occurred when he tried to break down the bathroom door.

  “He wasn’t always the person he seemed to be,” said Renee Fitzgerald, a leggy redheaded actress and former ballet dancer. “Was he capable of doing what he’s accused of? I don’t know. How can you know anyone? What if everything you thought was wrong?”

  It was all true in small ways and absolutely false at the same time. But the distinction was absolutely meaningless. The story had destroyed him.

  The room revolved as he tried to stand. He steadied himself on the couch arm, but it was too late. He was already falling, falling inside and falling though space and nothing would stop him.

  What if everything you thought was wrong?

  This was it. This was the abyss. This was the worst that could happen. There were few things pure in modern life, but this was pure despair.

  He tried to grab hold of something, anything, to stop the falling. This wasn’t the way it was, was it? He’d never hit Renee, had he? Never laid a finger on her. Except for that time she locked herself in the bathroom and he whacked her with the door—the old trying-to-get-in, trying-to-get-out—but that was an accident. Or was it? Perhaps, maybe, possibly there’d been a quarter second when he’d realized she was standing there and kept pushing anyway. It was possible, wasn’t it? Anything was possible.

  He was falling faster now, trying to grasp on to certainties, but the ground was dropping away.

  Had he ever touched Arthur in an inappropriate way? No. Had he ever hit the boy? Certainly not. Was it possible he’d raised his voice? Of course, all parents yell sometimes; childhood is never as pristine and idyllic as we’d like it to be. Had he struggled to get Arthur into the bathtub? Hundreds of times. Had they fought over getting dressed? Hundreds more times. So was it possible there’d ever been a slip and a hand had struck flesh and the boy had wound up sitting on the floor crying as his mother walked into the room?

  He tried calling his lawyers but they were out. So instead, he went into the kitchen to pour himself a drink. What could he be sure of anyway? The ball in his baseball glove. The one Coach Samuels described on television. He tried to project himself back into the moment of being ten years old again, lying facedown in the outfield. The grass stains on his face and his pants. Had he held the ball up to show what a great catch it was? Probably he had. He’d never caught a ball in a real game before, and perhaps a surge of boy-pride had overtaken him. So who the hell was he, anyway? How could he be so sure everyone else was wrong about him? These little moments added up and after a while you had an identity in other people’s eyes. That’s what his mother always told him. Who cared how you saw yourself? Perception was an amusement park with fun-house mirrors. And Hitler thought of himself as kind to animals.

  David finished the quart bottle of Smirnoff he’d been keeping in the refrigerator and started on the Gilbey’s gin, neat with no ice. But still the falling wouldn’t stop. Black space surrounded him, roared around him. If a body catch a body. He was plummeting through time. He’d been turned into a monster. What was there to say? Should he go out there and try to talk to the reporters again? Shielding his eyes from the lights and murmuring, “I didn’t do it,” as they chased him down the block? Who would believe him? He wouldn’t believe somebody else in the same position.

  He put the bottle down for a second, thinking he should stand and fight. The judge said he had less than a month to get his job and reputation back if he wanted custody of Arthur. Come on, you can do it. You have the heart.

  Or maybe he didn’t. He thought he’d glimpsed something better about himself—some character, even—amid the oil smoke and the tumbling fireballs from the school bus. But that was just a fluke, he realized, an almost involuntary muscular reaction. He was low, base, and vile, even if he wasn’t a child abuser. And once the accusation was repeated often enough, the truth wouldn’t matter either. Arthur would lose ownership of his memories, just as his father was losing them. He’d forget that wonderful weekend of the workmen coming out of the hole and the subway riders jumping up to shake his father’s hand. Instead, he’d grow up brainwashed, thinking his father had hurt him, with no chance of ever learning the truth. Even if he didn’t believe his mother (who was going through her own confusion), he’d go to the library and look up the stories on microfilm or CD-ROM or hologram or whatever it would be in ten years, and he’d see those ugly words and they would wound him all over again.

  What could David do to erase them? At the moment, he wished he could erase himself, his whole life. No, that wasn’t true, was it? He’d done some good in the classroom, hadn’t he? Just the other day, Elizabeth Hamdy had come up to him in the parking lot, desperately wanting to talk. There were a few of them every year. Wasn’t that right? Kids who’d connected with him. He got a letter or two every month from a former student, thanking him for something he’d said or done in helping them get into college. What about that Jean La Roche? The Haitian kid from a family of eleven, another one whose mother worked two jobs and had only two sets of clothes to send him to school in. David had helped him get into SUNY at Purchase, called the admissions officer over and over until he’d memorized the number, and now the kid was going on to Cornell Medical School. Didn’t that count for something? And there was Arthur himself, a beautiful child, and David at least contributed half his genetic material. But maybe that was as far as he should go. Maybe the heroic thing to do would be to disappear before he gave the boy any more sad memories. Maybe a real man would end it all, he thought drunkenly.

  No, he couldn’t consider suicide, that was the coward’s way out. On the other hand, why not? There were some pills in the house and enough booze left to wash them down. He could end it all and leave a note saying he didn’t do any of the things they said he had and he couldn’t live with the lies. Who would argue with a dead man? It would be clean and final and it would be over all at once. Yes. Papa himself did it. Hemingway in Idaho.
Holed up in Ketchum with a shotgun to his head, sure the FBI had him surrounded.

  And Hemingway was merely delusional. The FBI really did have David surrounded. He thought of Robert Jordan at the end of For Whom the Bell Tolls. His body broken, his heart beating against the pine needle floor of the forest, trying to hold on to himself and his submachine gun as he waited for the fascist troops to descend, trying to decide whether to finish himself off before they arrived. Oh, let them come. Let them come. Stop that, David told himself. You’re acting badly. You’re drunk. You should be good at this. You should. You should be good at something. You should be good at least at ending things. That way you can keep it under your own control. A man should be able to complete something.

  He went into the bedroom and found one of the duffel bags of his mother’s things that Ralph and Judah had forced the FBI to give back. She had a three-year-old Valium prescription and several dresses wrapped in plastic from the dry cleaner. It would be easy. Taking the pills, finishing the gin, and wrapping plastic around his head. Lying there with his heart beating against the bare parquet floor. Let them come, let them come. He opened the pill bottle, finished the gin, and sat on the end of his bed facing the window. Waiting for night to fall and the television reporters’ klieg lights to rise.

  He woke up perhaps six hours later with the phone ringing. He stumbled, fell, and hit his head on the end of the night table, trying to pick it up.

  “David, I think you better come to the hospital right away,” Renee said in a preternaturally calm, anesthetized voice. “Arthur needs you.”

  41

  “PUT THE TAPE IN! Put the tape in!” Dr. Ahmed was shouting when Nasser arrived at the 23rd Street apartment with another bag of fertilizer after Friday midday congregational prayers. “Show him what he missed!”

  Youssef went over to the VCR and slid in a cassette. The screen went black for a second and then the CNN emblem appeared. The image wavered, blurred, and then coalesced into something familiar: scenes from a bombing. A device had exploded in a Jerusalem shopping mall earlier in the day and an announcer was saying 147 people were dead. There were overturned fruit stands, young girls in Spice Girls T-shirts with shredded bloody faces crying out in confusion, a pregnant woman with both her legs blown off, a man on a stretcher with half his face gone, smashed watermelons on the ground. Bearded ambulance workers in yarmulkes and rubber gloves scurried by, collecting limbs and pieces of skin for burial.

  “This is Mehdi!” The doctor cried out, limping over and pointing at the screen. “This is totally and completely Mehdi!”

  “Who’s Mehdi?” Nasser looked at Youssef.

  “Mehdi is the doctor’s friend from back home,” the Great Bear muttered, as he sat on the couch drinking orange juice straight from the carton. “They did many operations together. Then a lab blew up and Mehdi’s brother got killed. And after that, Mehdi gets stronger and no one wants to work with the doctor anymore.”

  “This is what we should be doing!” The doctor slapped the top of the TV. “This is exactly what we should be doing! We should have bodies lying in the streets right this very second. Mehdi is probably laughing at me back home.”

  Nasser stepped back a little, changing his perspective. Ahmed seemed anxious all of a sudden. And for the first time, Nasser saw they had something human in common. The doctor was a man with something to prove too.

  “It’s the second time they bomb this mall in two weeks!” The doctor thrust his hands into his pockets and began limping around the room. “And what are we doing? Talking and talking and talking. This is not jihad, this is a talk show. A week I’ve been here and what have we accomplished? Nothing! We sit around watching television and talking. I am working with a bunch of women!”

  Though he was far bigger, Youssef seemed to cower a little from the doctor’s fury. Nasser was beginning to notice a sharpening of differences between them. Youssef was becoming lax and logy, as if he’d eaten too many American cheeseburgers, while Dr. Ahmed was wired and slithery, looking for a place to throw more sparks. Instead of inspiring the Great Bear with his righteous fury, though, he just seemed to be relieving him of the pressure to create all the violence by himself.

  Nasser set down the fifty-pound bag of fertilizer which he’d just bought in Forest Hills. “What else do you want us to do, sheik?” he said defensively. “Every day, we are out, buying material and preparing. Praying. Getting ready to fight.”

  “We have to act. We have to act. I am going crazy with the sitting around.” Again, the doctor was doing everything twice as fast as he needed to: scratching his beard, gritting his teeth, blinking his eyes as though he was transmitting in furious Morse code.

  In the meantime, the picture had changed on the TV screen; it showed an old man lying on the ground with his guts sliding out while his wife screamed in horror.

  “So how much material do we have for the hadduta?” asked Dr. Ahmed, snapping his fingers in Youssef’s face.

  Youssef flinched and read what was written on the side of the fertilizer bag. “Well, this has a nitro hydrogen content of thirty-seven percent, so with what we have already it’s enough for one big bomb or three smaller ones.” He took a sniff inside and then closed the bag. “But we still need to buy diesel fuel and I need to start making the detonators. Also, I’m trying to get hydrogen compressors from Jersey City to use as boosters, and we’re very low on money …”

  “Enough—we should decide what to do immediately.” Dr. Ahmed pulled on his beard, one hand after the other, as if he were trying to lengthen it. “The imam said keep it simple, so we keep it simple. I’ve been thinking. We hit three targets simultaneously, all before Ramadan. I’m thinking maybe to do it in two weeks, before Mehdi acts again.”

  Nasser froze for a second, wondering if he had anything else he needed to do in that time. Any place he had to be. But then the sourness rose in his throat and he remembered that he’d wound up here because everything else in his life had collapsed. “So what do we do?”

  “While you were out, we discussed two possibilities.” The doctor stopped pulling his beard and walked toward the TV screen, as if drawn by magnetic force. “Since soon will be the holidays, we’re thinking one of the targets should be a department store.” He rested his hand on top of the set. “One of the kind they’re so proud of. The Macy’s or the Bloomingdale’s. Jews dead everywhere.”

  Youssef nodded and started playing with one of the kitchen timers he’d bought earlier that day in Connecticut. “It’s a simple idea,” he said, setting it ticking. “Lots of people around, not much security. We go in on the first floor and boom! Out go the store windows. People stampeding each other for the exits. Blood and body parts all over the clothes and jewelry.”

  “Or even better, we put it in a van on the street outside the store and kill all the tourists and passersby,” Dr. Ahmed suggested.

  Nasser sat down and tried to conjure the picture in his mind. But of course, the only image he had of the hadduta he’d planted was what he’d seen on the TV news. He’d missed the actual explosion.

  “The second one is easy too,” Dr. Ahmed continued. “We just put a hadduta in the middle of Grand Central or Penn Station at rush hour. A nail bomb, maybe. Like the one we made in Peshawar.” He took the timer from Youssef. “It kills everyone within a hundred and fifty feet. They’ll be dead before they can run.”

  Nasser had nothing to compare this scene with either. “So what’s the last one?” he asked.

  He realized he was getting tense and prickly, listening to persistent ticking, like an insect in his ear. Yes, he wanted to be part of this, to play his role in jihad. But a small part of him was still terrified.

  “What about inside one of the subway trains?” Youssef was asking. “The containment would make the blast much bigger and disrupt service for hours.”

  “No, it’s too much like Grand Central.” The doctor waved his hand, dismissively. “We need something distinctive, to send a message.”

&
nbsp; “What about one of the bridges or the tunnels, like we said before?”

  “Too impractical.” Dr. Ahmed shook his head in regret. “I’ve explored the possibilities and they won’t work with what we have.”

  “The floor of the Stock Exchange?”

  “Too much security, I think,” Ahmed said, giving it a moment’s consideration. “And it might be popular around some parts of this country.”

  “What about the school again?” Nasser said suddenly as the timer went off and its ringing made his eardrums shiver.

  The two older men turned to face him, their stares like harsh spotlights. He immediately wanted to take back what he’d said, but knew it was too late.

  “Again with the school!” Youssef laughed contemptuously. “You’re making this too personal! This is not about Nasser. This is about jihad.”

  But the doctor was examining him with a more refined kind of interest. “Why do you bring it up again?”

  “I don’t know,” Nasser mumbled, staring down at his feet.

  But the truth was that it had been in the back of his mind since the day at the garden store in Borough Park. He’d never stopped brooding about the mistake at the school bus and Mr. Fitzgerald. Perhaps trying again was the only way he could both redeem himself and stop the teacher from dishonoring his sister.

  “How would you get back in the school?” Dr. Ahmed, clearly intrigued, limped over to sit next to him. “This was disaster last time.”

  “I know.” Nasser retreated back into himself for a moment, chewing a cuticle and remembering the failure, the sense of worthlessness. If he wasn’t a warrior, what was he? He’d gone too far to go back to the way he was, a lost boy playing pinball. He had to will himself into a state of confidence. “This time I’ll say I’m reapplying to come back and graduate, so I have to talk to the principal.”

  Youssef wasn’t convinced. “What if you run into this teacher again, the one who knows you?” he asked, grimacing and belching. “What will you do then?”