“Little things.”
“They are small. But they move fast, they hit hard, they do real bad damage. So to load it, you have to lock in the magazine, the bullet part up, the bullets facing down the barrel. Look how I do it. Think of it as a kind of hinge. You sort of wedge the front part of the magazine into the front part of the magazine well, until it catches. See?”
He showed it to her two or three times. Then she took the mag and the small-framed, tinny, even toylike weapon, and mimicked him, ending up with the mag forward lip lodged into the mag well until it lightly clicked.
“Good. Now that it’s set, you pivot the magazine back, or up, all the way into the well. There, that’s right, pivot it in, see how it fits? And sort of force it or shove until-”
It locked.
“Okay, turn the gun over.”
She did so.
“See that lever, that piece of rotating metal on the right side of the receiver, see how it goes up and hooks over this open slot in the gun?”
“I do.”
“That’s the safety. In that condition, up, the gun can’t be fired or cocked. It blocks the bolt. See that?” and he pulled the bolt back about an inch until it hit the safety obstruction and would go no farther. “Bet you can figure out what to do.”
“You push it down.”
“You got it.”
With her thumb, she rotated the long safety lever downward, so that it no longer blocked the bolt raceway.
“Now you have to cock it, set the bolt back, allow a cartridge to come up into the chamber.”
“Okay,” she said. She rearranged the gun so that she controlled it more efficiently, its stock against her hip, secured by her tightened elbow.
“Now see that latch or prong thing?” he asked, pointing to the bolt handle.
“Yes.”
“Pull that back and let it go.”
She pulled it back without trouble and then let the bolt fly forward and seat itself after having moved a 5.45mm cartridge into the chamber.
“Okay, now you’re ready to rock. It’ll fire each time you pull the trigger. You know how to shoot it, like the movies. Just don’t hold it sideways. Look over the top, line up the rear sight with the front sight, put it on target, watch the front sight, and press, don’t yank, the trigger.”
It reminded him of a time he’d taken Molly to a civilian rifle range. Molly tried gamely. She pretended she cared. She pretended the gun was interesting.
“Will it hurt?” Molly had asked him.
“No, not if you do it right. I’ll show you how to do it.”
He’d seated her behind a bench, fiddled with wrist and arm and upper body, aligning the barrel, her head, focusing the scope for her, tidying the sandbags.
“Okay, what are you thinking of?”
“What we’re going to have for dinner.”
He laughed. “You’re hopeless.”
“I’m not hopeless at all. I’m full of hope. I’m hoping this will be over soon.”
And it was. And they went out and had a nice dinner and laughed their way through it, and now he wondered if he’d ever get back to that simple peacetime ritual of just hanging out with a woman you loved. Was it that big a deal? It seemed the whole world had managed it.
They made it to the top of the stairs.
“Okay,” he said, “beyond there is enemy territory. I’m going to shoot open the door just like I did before and jump into the hallway. I’ll be low. We’ll check left, we’ll check right. Then I’ll dash across the hallway and cover for you. Then we’ll move into the store, it’s just seventy-five or so feet down to the left on that side.”
Lavelva suddenly said, “No. Don’t do it.”
“What?”
“You’ll be killed.”
“What’re you talking about?”
“They waiting for you.”
“They don’t even know I’m here.”
“Yes, he do. That boy, he knows.”
“Lavelva, what’re you talking about?”
“Don’t you see? It’s in the game.”
“I don’t-”
“It’s a game. This boy, he turned this whole place into his own giant-size game. You said he run First Person Shooter? I been there. All these geeky little E.T.-lookin’ motherfuckers, black, white, yellow, it don’t matter, they all be trippin’ on killing and blowing shit up. It’s so real to them, they don’t remember they sittin’ in a mall surrounded by gal underpants stores. And he’s the king of all that. And what do a king do? He spread his empire, right?”
“Yeah, he’s nuts, but why do you-”
“I play the game too,” she said.
“We’re wasting time.”
“You get killed, you won’t waste no time anymore. You listen to me. I play the games a lot. I like to leave my thing too. I don’t want to be no girl in the projects with a brother dead and another nailing carpet and no prospects for nothing. I want to be Alex in Wizards of Waverly Place, and I’m all the time trying to get through the maze, you know. I like that story. I don’t like the boy shit, which is all blowing up, but I like the girl shit, the Wizard Alex shit. And so I know the rule of the game. It’s you never go in the first way.”
“What?”
“That’s the way the game work. Some people get it, some never do. But there is always another way into it. Always. That’s the way you win. You look and look and look and find that other way in, ’cause if you go in the first way you find, you get whacked.”
He looked hard at her.
“Ray, please,” she said. “I’m telling you straight: through that door, death, sure enough.”
7:35 P.M.-7:55 P.M
That is it, my brother,” said the imam. He was weeping. He had been so moved by the three young fighters in their orange suits leaping up the stairway into the plane, and now, all were aboard, and the hatch door was secured. The plane had to taxi to position at the head of the runway and then roar airborne. It was a triumph beyond his imagining.
He looked at Andrew. The young man, handsome enough in the Western way with his blond, short hair, his little ski jump of a nose, his sweatshirt and blue jeans and hiking boots, his baseball cap on backward, was lit by the glow of the news feed. His face showed nothing. He was not weeping at all. He showed no trace of joy or liberation, no sense of the meaning of the great thing he had accomplished, a thing no jihadi, not even the Holy Warrior himself, the martyred Osama, had come close to achieving.
He had actually freed prisoners from the American prison system. The Kaafi brothers, innocents, naifs, idiots, who had bumbled into an American bank on the day after Osama’s death and, in a fit of Islamic passion, attempted to rob it with airsoft pistols with the idea of contributing to the cause. It was perhaps the stupidest robbery in the history of crime, more farce than threat, as the idiots had not even bothered to cover the orange rings appended to the gun muzzles to signify nonlethality. They were arrested by a smiling sixty-three-year-old security guard.
But some prosecutor decided to ride the prank as far as he could, and the three emerged six months later with massive sentences and were quickly shipped to the pen, where their frailness, their gentleness, their Somali beauty and grace got them fucked savagely every night by the depraved of America. The imam could not stand it. It hurt him so much. And now the boys were free, thanks to this American of dubious faith and principle named Andrew.
“We are so badass,” Andrew finally said flatly.
“Andrew,” the imam asked, “I have to know. Why? No virgins await you, only nothingness by your own beliefs. If there is no afterlife, this life is meaningless, so it must be so for you. But I cannot abide that. Please, now, on the cusp of your greatness, tell me your reasons.”
Andrew didn’t bother to repay the earnestness with eye contact. Clearly the W-word- why — wasn’t of much interest to him. He’d been asked it a thousand times, by teachers, deans, cops, shrinks, counselors, parents, short-term girlfriends, everybody, anybody. He prefer
red not to hassle with it. It was psychobabble Muzak to his ears. He shrugged his shoulders.
“One reason I did it for you is because everybody hates you. That is so cool. I love the way you guys feed on that hate and it makes you bigger and stronger and more intent on your cause, which otherwise makes no fucking sense at all to me.”
In fact, he really didn’t give a shit about the dumb-bunny Kaafis. Anyone that stupid was doomed, and the rational functioning of natural selection had worked within design specifications to cull them from the herd, and what the Crips and Bloods did to their asses in the dark of a jungle penitentiary night was of little concern to him. Empathy was not one of his gifts; he actually thought the idea of the thin and beautiful and young and tender Somalis being gangbanged was pretty funny. The point of the prisoner release had really been just to stall things out for three hours or so, in order to let the networks set up so that the final act would play out in prime time before a world audience.
He thought a bit-meanwhile, the majestic jet had made it to the end of the airstrip and was rotating on its tires to orient itself for the long surge to liftoff-and finally applied himself at last to the conundrum that was Andrew Nicks.
Ideas, abstractions, conceits, causes-all were more or less hazy to him. He had no sense of nation or state, none whatsoever of “American interest,” and to him the government was simply the entity that prevented the Osama kill shot from making it to Fox.
The game was everything. It superseded all. It provided framework, a set of rules, a rising litany of satisfied expectations, level by level, until the ultimate moment, and that moment was the point. Didn’t they get that? Come on, assholes, I want to see the ultimate moment, the kill shot, when the SEAL operator double-taps pieces of flying steel at three thousand feet per into the famous mug of the Tall Guy, and he spasms backward amid a sudden atomized mist of Cuisinarted plasma and brain cells. I want to see his eyes go all cue ball as the pupils rotate upward in the split second before his knees give and he notices his brains now decorate the wall and the ceiling. But no. We’re so delicate all of a sudden. You have violated the rules of the game. You have set up the greatest narrative since World War II and demanded our attention, and when the climax arrives, you demurely avert your eyes, you assholes. You unbelievable pansy jerkoffs. You have violated the rules of the game.
How could he say to this guy, Hey, dude, I just transformed America, the Mall, into the greatest massively multiplayer online game. It will support thousands of players simultaneously, and players can be on the same side or play against each other in large-scale combat simulations set in a real place. They can be me or the SWAT hero who takes me down, and I bet a surprising number choose to play me. I am creating the scenes for a new game. Rather than using computer-generated images and sounds, I will be the first to use actual pictures and sounds from actual slaughter and carnage, in a real place, in a real time, with real characters, real life, real death. The stories! The miraculous mistakes, the brave moms, the gay waiters who give up their lives to protect their customers, the teenaged killers, the dedicated if hopelessly fucked-up imam, Maahir the killer of Santa Claus, it just don’t git no better!
I believe that this will provide the realism lacking in the other games and in my world, which is the only one I care about, the only one I succeeded in, the only one where I found respect and loyalty and love and my ideal self, that is, immortality. No, it’s more: it’s god-hood. And they will understand, the generations of players who are absorbed into the culture of my creation and become its heroes and villains. So-am I crazy or what? And it’s all on disc. The finest first person shooter in history. Get the disc to WikiLeaks and it’ll astound the world. It is first person shooter as art, as The Odyssey or War and Peace. Not only did I have the imagination to conceive it, I had the will to engineer it. All before the age of twenty-five.
But the imam would have not even begun to grasp the conceit that if art was creation, then it also had to be destruction. Instead Andrew settled on a trope that seemed to satisfy most people, and in which he himself even slightly believed.
“I have always liked to wreck things,” he said, more to end the conversation than to explain anything. “It may be a drive as human as sex or greed or fear. Think about it. A certain tiny portion of the population has since time immemorial had a hunger to destroy so deep, so consistent, it has to be chromosomal. A gene for destruction. The DNA theory of anarchism. Maybe Allah or possibly the Wonderful Wizard of Oz, whichever one is really behind the curtain, he seeds each generation with a few of us natural-born blowers-up-of-shit because he knows someone’s got to wreck all the crap so that someone else can start over and rebuild and have something to do on Monday. Else what would we do all day, year after year? Make cuckoo clocks?”
The imam, of course, didn’t catch the refs to Wizard or to Welles’s chilly speech in The Third Man, but he caught the gist of it.
“I think,” he said, “Allah has touched you. He just forgot to whisper his name into your ear.”
“See,” Andrew said, “ everyone makes mistakes.”
EARLIER THAT DAY
The truck pulled into the sublevel loading dock for the Rio Grande corridor at 11:30 a.m. and Andrew was there to greet it. As usual the place was deserted, as the deliveries that kept America, the Mall, running came in late afternoon, between morning and evening crowds, even on Black Friday.
Andrew watched them unlimber from the truck interior, twelve Somali youths, ragged-looking and bewildered, in poor men’s clothes, Pakistani copies of designer jeans, Malaysian Men’s Club clone jackets, and Chinese-made athletic shoes; the boys were clearly overwhelmed by what they saw, which was nothing more than a large warehouse space in the mall’s dark underground, far removed from the consumerist glories of the place itself. The imam barked orders and got them quickly herded into a freight elevator, where all fourteen men, crowded together, rode to the fourth floor and found themselves in another dark tunnel that ran behind the retail outlets on the Rio Grande corridor. Andrew led the way, and a hundred or so feet later, he popped the computer lock on his store, opened the door, and admitted them to his stockroom. He had industriously cleared it out for them, so there’d be plenty of room. Moreover, six ten-piece buckets of Popeye’s fried chicken and a cooler full of Cokes awaited the jihad warriors, who-even the oldest, called Maahir-at this point seemed in a kind of sloppy daze, unsure where they were, what their mission would be, what fate lay ahead. They had been told that this was a martyr operation, about which they had no doubts, that this day would end in paradise, that even before paradise they would serve the Faith more spectacularly than Mohamed Atta and the holy nineteen of 9-11, that they would enjoy every single second of what lay ahead, and that their job was to obey Allah as represented by the will of the imam. Who the white boy was held no interest at all to them compared to the chicken, which they found delicious, as they did the Coca-Cola, though one wondered aloud, in Somali, if there was Diet Coke available and seemed disappointed when he found it was not.
The imam bade them rest. He knew the travel had been overlong and uncomfortable, and he himself was quite agitated as, unblooded, martrydom was not something a certain part of him welcomed, the part that had turned him into a chronic masturbator (three times last night!), secret imbiber, and occasional whoremonger.
What sustained him was not his faith in Allah or his love of fallen Osama but his belief in Andrew. Andrew knew everything, had foreseen everything, was calm, decisive, kind, just, decent, and sensitive to the iron mandates of Islamic culture, particularly as regarding infidels, though he himself was an infidel. That fact could be overlooked: such a gifted boy, such a committed warrior. He loved Andrew in a way that was almost unhealthy, though of course he was not a deviant-the holy text is quite explicit on the fate of men who love men-but he saw now how such a thing was at least possible. He loved him, then, as the Arab leaders had loved Lawrence in the Great War decades ago and could give themselves to the care of an
infidel, knowing that in his heart, this white man rode with the Bedu.
Andrew’s theory was to keep the boys occupied in these last few hours and far away from bigger questions of fate and duty and faith. Too much thinking was inappropriate now, so late, so close. Thus, through the stern guidance of the imam, he had three of them drag out the eleven crates of Soviet 5.45?39 ammunition, knife open the tins, rip the ammo out of the cheesy Russian military cardboard boxes, and all gather about to load the orange magazines. This was no easy task, and the boys didn’t enjoy it, but Maahir, the oldest, was rough on the loafers and commanded them to their task, even though fingers soon grew sore forcing the cartridges into the narrow slots in the magazines, through the sharp lips that abraded or even cut their skin and stiffened in resistance as the boys loaded more and thereby increased the spring pressure against which they worked. All, of course, had loaded Kalash mags before, but never in such abundance. They usually carried but two or three with them and, barring conflict, they could have those tucked into pouches for days, sometimes weeks. Now, suddenly, they were loading twenty magazines apiece, and it was not enjoyable duty, even if it portended a big killing and much glory ahead. Then, to break the misery, Saalim told a funny story about the time his goat had been hit by a lorry and he had defrauded the driver out of three times the animal’s worth. Punch-line: it wasn’t even Saalim’s goat!
Through all this, not a word was said about plans. The actualities of what lay ahead were as mysterious as ever. And time was passing. Finally, at around two o’clock, when the last of the mags had been topped off, each boy had made sure his shoes were tied tight and had visited the pail in the little room to the left and made an ablative contribution, when prayers had been said again, finally, it was time.
The imam asked the boys to separate into self-selected twosomes, and there was some unanticipated difficulty here, as Ashkir was irritated because Saalim had already teamed with Asad. For Urgaas, the idea of spending the last hours of his life on earth with Ashkir was especially annoying, but finally Maahir grabbed Ashkir as his partner, which left Urgaas to buddy up with Madino, whom, though he had nothing in common with him, Urgaas at least did not actively despise.
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