The Good Son

by Michael Gruber

  Sonia remains silent. She can hear her own breathing and Theo’s and the faint sounds of the village night, someone coughing, the distant rumble of a truck, a night creature calling, the wind. It goes on, this silence, for a long while, it is almost a contemplative silence, she thinks, waiting for God to speak, but at last it is Wazir who speaks.

  “You know, Theo, I’m not sure you understand your mother. She’s a very strange person, and I say this as someone who has met some very strange people indeed. Did you know she followed a Sufi pir all through the trip to Central Asia? She didn’t put that into the book. An odd brand of Islam, really. They believe that everything written about God is in some sense wrong, because if you propose a complete picture of God, it’s not God by definition, because God is beyond all human description. And it follows that Saint Paul was somewhat wrong and the Gospels are somewhat wrong and the Prophet, peace be on him, was somewhat wrong too. God doesn’t make deals with His creatures. He’s always a surprise, and trying to chain Him to a human religion is folly. That’s what she taught me and I believe it, because otherwise the world does not make a bit of sense.”

  He laughs, a little hysterically, Sonia thinks, but Theo doesn’t even smile. Grimly, still covering Wazir with his pistol, he rummages in his pack and pulls out a coil of rope and what looks like a cheap portable radio.

  “What are you doing, Theo?” she asks.

  “I’m going to tie up Wazir, Mom. And then I’m going to call my control and tell them I’ve located the nuke and for them to come and get it. And us. Wazir, put your hands behind you.”

  Theo moves behind the chair with his rope, and the moment he is thus distracted, Sonia stands, snatches up the AK, and points it at her son.

  “Let him go, Theo.”

  He looks at her blankly. “What’re you doing?”

  “I’m letting Wazir escape. The Americans will lock him up forever. They’ll torture him.”

  Again she sees the emotions wash across the screen of his face. He really is a sweet boy at heart, she thinks; there is no real guile in him, or meanness. He says, calmly enough, “And if not, what are you going to do, shoot me?”

  “I will certainly disable you. I’m a very good shot, as you know, and I am not going to have Wazir rot in an American prison. I would do exactly the same if the situation were reversed.”

  Theo nods and backs away. Wazir rises and speaks a few words to Theo, so softly that Sonia cannot hear them, and then he picks up the duffel bag.

  To Sonia he says, grinning again, “I presume I can’t take my bomb.”

  “Just go, Wazir,” she says, “and may God protect you.”

  “And you also,” he says and goes to the window. He tosses the duffel bag through it and climbs out.

  Sonia watches her son raise his pistol and point it at Wazir. She puts the front sight of the AK on her son and her finger on the trigger.

  They stand that way for a second or two, like a diorama of some awful historical event, and then Wazir is gone. They can hear his feet scrabbling as he descends the rough wall and the thump as he lands.

  Theo clicks his pistol to safe and tosses it on the table.

  “Would you really have shot me?” he asks.

  “Of course not,” she says. “Would you have shot Wazir?”

  “No,” he says, and shrugs helplessly. “Then what the hell was all that about?”

  “Reflexes to satisfy our various codes of honor. Insect responses. What will you do now?”

  “Like I just said, get on the radio, tell them I’ve secured the nuke, and call in the Rangers. They’ll be here before dawn.”

  “They’ll do a lot of damage.”

  “That’s what they’re for,” he says, and fiddles with his fake Chinese radio. In a few moments it crackles with voices and Theo speaks cryptic words and numbers into it. He signs off and leaves the thing on the table, a green light glowing on its face.

  He says, “This is the safest house in town as long as that beacon is on. They’re going to be very, very careful with our gadget here.”

  They both look at the metal case. Sonia shudders and turns her eyes away from it. Theo says, “Yeah, the mind can’t quite grasp it. Two thousand tons of TNT, did he say? It’s like something from another universe. It shouldn’t exist, but there it is. And he built it. I can hardly look at the fucking thing, and Wazir built it! Tell me, do you think he really has five other bombs out there somewhere?”

  “I have no idea. I was astounded that he had even one.”

  “Uh-huh,” he grunts: an unbelieving noise.

  She sits on the charpoy. Suddenly, in the afterwash of violent emotion, she is exhausted. She would like to be far away from people now, even people she loves. Especially people she loves. Her son, who has done prodigies to rescue her, now leans against the wall, looking out the window from time to time, like a man waiting for a bus. He doesn’t look at her. She knows he is thinking about Wazir, and what Wazir has done, and how she arranged for him to do it. It is a lot to take in; she sympathizes, she hurts with her boy, but her therapeutic skills do not help her now, the wonderful gearing of her empathic faculty will not turn in the thick gel of familial love. Still, there is the instinct to reach out.

  “Theo,” she says, “come sit by me. I want to talk with you.”

  He clumps over and sits, sullen.

  “What are you thinking about?”

  A shrug. He has regressed to sixteen.

  “No, really, Theo,” she presses.

  “Really? Okay, I was thinking about Hughes.”

  “Who?”

  “Wally Hughes. You know, from Special Forces. We went through jump school at Benning together and all through SFQC at Bragg. There was me and Buck Claiborne and Billy Olin and Hughes. I think you met him once, at Benning that time you came down, when I graduated.”

  “Oh, yes?”

  “Yeah. Anyway, Hughes had a wife, Laura, and two little girls, one of them three years old and the other just a baby, and he was crazy about them: he had the picture in the helmet, he e-mailed every day when he could, the whole nine yards. This was in the early part of Iraq, the goat fuck. He kept getting extended. They’d give him fifteen-day leaves, but they wouldn’t let him rotate home, because they were so short they were using Special Forces joes as regular line infantry, just to keep the lid on. Well, in the early part of ’05, I think it was, Laura cracked. She wrote him a dear john, sorry and all that, but she’d met someone and she was moving away. She was frightened of him, frightened about the way he was when he came home. She was scared he was turning into one of the guys she’d heard about, who comes home and kills his family and himself. Hughes didn’t say shit to any of us, just kept on trooping, except he started to volunteer for dangerous stuff. He was always on point, always the first one through the door. He got a Silver Star and a DSC.”

  “He was trying to commit suicide?”

  “I don’t know. I think he was going after the Medal of Honor, because that was the only way they’d let him out of the war. Anyway, we were in the area listening in on some al-Q comm, and we located a command center. This was in Samarra, and they tasked Hughes and his team to get them out of where they were, which was the top floor of a four-story apartment house, full of families, and the insurgents, of course, wouldn’t let anyone out, because they kind of like it when we kill a lot of women and kids; it’s good for their business. I think they were going to call in an air strike, but Hughes just runs in there all by himself with maybe twenty guys blazing away at him and he clears out the whole bunch of them. He must have been hit a dozen times, but he got them all. The damnedest thing you ever saw.”

  “Did he get his medal?”

  “Posthumously, yes. And the reason I was thinking about him, which is what I know you’re going to ask, is that I finally know how he felt when he lost the pin.”

  “The…?”

  “The pin that holds the wheel on the axle. Or the spoon on the grenade, whatever. Except for a few guys w
ho are just stone killers, everyone who does war needs a pin: family, your buddies, ambition, honor, or… or something, because regular people aren’t supposed to do what we do or see the stuff we see. Or no, I’m not saying this right: there has to be a place you can hide-what’s the word? Existentially. You need an existential hide. Religion’s a good one, it’s real traditional, what those assholes out there have but we don’t. We have our families, or a sense of the way things are, that defines us as not guys who blow innocent people up. For Hughes it was his family, and for me it was you and Wazir, even though I practically never saw you and I thought Wazir was dead. It was a set of memories that told me who Theo Bailey was. You know? And now I find that the base of my life was like a fantasy, a dream, that those people never existed.”

  “That’s not so, Theo. People change.”

  “Oh, no kidding? People change! That’s a terrific insight, Mother. Let me write that down so I don’t forget. No, people don’t change, not like that. I don’t change like that, and Gul Muhammed doesn’t, and Farid doesn’t and Nisar doesn’t. The only people who change like that are people who never were what they seemed in the first place. I had a friend, a brother, my brother-in-arms in a just war, and it turns out he was somebody else, because the Wazir I knew was not some crazy half-American nuclear-genius bomb builder; and my mother was a writer and a Sufi mystic and someone who did therapy in a charity clinic, not some fucking rogue CIA mastermind plotting to blow up the world.”

  “It must have been a real shock, seeing him again.”

  “She says in her calming therapist voice. It didn’t work when I was seventeen and it’s not working now. Because I want to know. I want to know my role in the game, because, you know, I can’t believe that all this-all this plotting-was the result of them giving you help getting me out of Afghanistan. It doesn’t compute, Mother. Because I’m not that important to you.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous, Theo! Don’t you think that, having lost two children, I’d do anything at all to protect you? Even this?”

  She means the thing in its silvery casing on the table that neither of them can bear to look at; but now they look at it.

  “Didn’t you do what you had to do to find and rescue me?” she asks, in a gentler voice. “We’re the same, we’re mad in the same way, and Wazir makes a third. That’s why you didn’t shoot him and that’s why you’re not going to tell anyone about him being here or what his plans are.”

  “I won’t?”

  “No. Because your love is only for your family. You’ve already betrayed your country and your army to organize this rescue. The fact that there happens to be a real bomb doesn’t signify. And you’ll do it again, as will I. We do everything for each other, because that’s all there is for people like us, it’s the curse of us primitives, it’s why the bureaucracies lord it over us, why the earth is ruled by people whose loyalties are to abstractions. I had a dream about this on the flight over here, and I just this minute realized what it meant. Would you like to hear it?”

  He nods, and she tells him about the warped little boy in the circus yard and about smashing the nests of baby birds or squirrels and the stern woman in spangles and her horrible magic.

  “What does it mean?”

  “It means that in a world ruled by violence, you can’t protect love without becoming warped and injured in some way. My mother taught me that, which is why she-or rather her introject-is in that dream: it’s the lesson of her glorious but unsuccessful nation. When I was a girl we had a poster in our trailer, one that had appeared all over Eastern Europe, first in Prague during the Soviet suppression and then in Warsaw and Budapest and East Germany. Ours was in Polish, of course, and it said:

  “We have not learned anything, we don’t know anything, we don’t have anything, we don’t understand anything, we don’t sell anything, we don’t help, we don’t betray, and we will not forget.

  “I was a just a kid, so that even though my mother translated the words, I didn’t understand what they meant. But I think I knew the meaning in some deep way and that it would be a guide for my life; I was to be a resistant, a subversive. And perhaps if my mother had lived I would have been a respectable subversive, like they have in America, educated and in the chattering classes, but this was not my fate, as you know; she died, and my father was weak. Did you know he actually sold me to Guido Armelini for cash? Even I didn’t know it for years; I had completely suppressed it until it came out in therapy, in Zurich, after the girls died. I remembered then how Guido used to feel me up-I was sixteen at the time-and whisper about what he was going to do to me when I was legal. He was very afraid of jail, old Guido, at least he was afraid of jail for statutory rape. For card-sharping not so much. Then I found Farid and made him fall in love with me, and I took the money and made sure Guido’s gangsters would think it was Guido who took it, and they killed him; and I told Farid I had to get out of the country right away, which might even have been true. Yes, well may you stare! All these revelations! Did you ever read a story by Flannery O’Connor called ‘A Good Man Is Hard to Find’? No, of course you didn’t, you’re not a reader. But there’s a line in it that goes something like She would’ve been a good woman if someone had held a gun to her head her whole life.”

  She looks again at Wazir’s shiny case.

  “I feel that way now. It’s that bomb, it’s hard to tell lies in its presence; it’s what the West has instead of God; it’s what America really believes in, despite our constant churchgoing.”

  She sighs heavily, it turns into a sob, she clutches at her son, and they stay that way for a long time until gradually, without really understanding when it began, they become aware of a sound.

  “That’s them,” says Theo, gently breaking her grip. He removes a night-vision scope from his pack, adjusts it over his right eye, slings the AK, and extinguishes the oil lamp. In the darkness she hears him say, “You should get back to that room. It’d be better if they discovered you by accident. You’ll be Sonia Laghari. There’s no reason anyone on the mission should know you’re my mother.”

  He takes her back down the hallway, pistol at the ready, but as they pass a door she hears a familiar cough.

  “I want to go in here for a minute and check on Dr. Schildkraut.”

  “Yes, but make it fast,” he says, and as if to confirm the urgency of the moment they hear shouts and warning gunshots from outside. The mujahideen have also heard the thrumming of massed helicopters.

  Sonia goes into the room. It is lightless and she follows her ears to where Karl-Heinz is huddled against the wall.

  “Sonia, is that you?” he wheezes.

  “Yes. How are you feeling?”

  “Wonderful. Sonia, will you do me one last favor? On the next draw of cards, use your tricks so that I am low card. Can you do that, please? Because I wish to use the last gasp of my inhaler now. I wish to feel like a human again and not a pathetic coughing wretch when they cut my head off. I should have demanded it before, but I was a coward.”

  It comes into Sonia’s mind, like a reflex, to lie, to pretend she has not fixed the drawing of the cards, but of course Karl-Heinz, the old friend, has known all along.

  “There will be no more drawing,” she says. “We are being rescued. You can hear the helicopters. But Karl-Heinz? I would appreciate it if the others were not told.”

  He says nothing to this. She feels him move and then hears the hiss of the inhaler and a deep sigh, and then shouts and heavy footsteps. The sound of helicopters also increases.

  She feels a motion in the doorway and hears Theo’s voice shouting, “Everyone down on the floor, get down!”

  After that, the sound of automatic fire at close range, colossal, penetrating the body like the promise of wounds. By the flash of his weapon she sees for the first time her boy practicing his profession. He is fighting off Wazir’s Arab team. Her ears grow numb, but oddly she can still hear the snap of the return fire, the thud of bullets hitting, and the tinkle of brass falling
. Theo is firing the AK now, but in another minute all the sounds of gunfire are drowned in the roar of a he li cop ter directly overhead. Theo stops firing and pulls the door closed, but the gunfire does not cease, it grows, she can see bright flashes come from under the door and through the many bullet holes pierced through it, like red and green lasers in the dark.

  The nearby firing fades. The door to the room is kicked open. By the faint ruddy glow of some distant blaze arriving through the window of the room down the hall Sonia sees the shapes of armed men, she hears urgent shouts to lie down and put their hands behind their heads.

  So she is captured one final time, now by her fellow countrymen. Theo makes himself known to the Special Forces officer in charge, he tells about the bomb and explains the hostage situation. The officer insists that the hostages be removed immediately; only certain people can stay in the house of the bomb; he has his orders, no exceptions. The former hostages are led out of the building, surrounded by a protective cordon of elite troops. Sonia supports Schildkraut and Annette, who has endured the recent firefight alone and in the dark and is shaking uncontrollably. Theo is not with them.

  Outside, there is war. The night sky above Paidara is studded with aircraft of all types, the Americans are not stinting on the Invasion of Pakistan. Sheets of fire rain from above, overwhelming the few feeble green tracers that rise from the guns of the mujahideen. They pass exploded, burning houses; by the light of one of them Sonia sees Amin’s stunned expression, his mouth gapes open.

  “What are they doing?” he cries out. “This is insanity. They are killing everything.”

  “It is the bomb, Amin,” she says. “There was a nuclear bomb in the village, made with material stolen from Pakistan. It gives them all the excuse they need.” Amin, that strong confident man, bursts into tears.

  They are hustled into an intact house some streets away, the door forced open, the terrified family confined to one room, and the hostages are examined by a Special Forces medic, who recommends the immediate evacuation of Dr. Schildkraut. The old man is carried off and flown away.