by Mark Powell
He looked at his children and their toys, the angular eyes and puffed muscles. All the beauty was there, whatever rightness existed in his life embodied by his two sons and infant daughter. But something had changed, some brute force seemed to have entered their world. Button-eyed toys, little rabbits or bears stitched back from blindness. Nobody had those anymore, a tiny four-hole button sewn to the face. Where had those gone?
He looked around as if he might find them in the crowd, looked around at the faculty, the parents. The service was meant to mark the beginning of the new academic year and all the usual folks were here, the president of the college, the dean. He didn’t see Professor Hadawi and that seemed significant. Hadawi had spent the last year teaching on a fellowship in his native Yemen and there was a rumor that he had decided not to return. People were talking about it. There was another rumor—this one only whispered—that he was under investigation by the FBI. Whether it was public knowledge that Hadawi’s office had been emptied, or whether John alone had witnessed it, he couldn’t say.
He knew Hadawi only in passing. He was—or had been—a full professor in Global Studies, a hybrid of political science, modern languages, and theory. He was outspoken, said to be angry, said to be the hardest grader on campus. Had almost come to blows—so went the story—with a former marine taking Hadawi’s required first-year course in political identity.
John had met him on the college Values Council, a mix of faculty and students who came together to plan the twice-a-year Values Day wherein classes were canceled and students were urged—begged, bribed—not to sleep in, but to attend forums on diversity and citizenship. LGBTQ rights. Sustainability. Islamophobia—that had been Hadawi’s, and the last Values Day had been given over to a visit by an Atlanta-based organization that worked to foster a better understanding of Islam. That day Hadawi hadn’t seemed angry or impassioned. He had seemed grateful, shaking John’s hand, introducing him to the visiting imam. John surprised and a little flattered Hadawi knew his name.
Behind the administrators and faculty sat the students.
John had spent the last few days walking among them as they moved in and attended various workshops. Campus engagement. Fostering cultural diversity. Combating sexual assault. Here in his fourth year he had become numb to a certain type, the wealthy kids, the sons of privilege straight out of prep schools in Nashville and Asheville, walking campus with their lacrosse sticks and well-groomed entitlement. The daughters of the rich, mamma the social butterfly with an addiction to sleeping pills. Daddy a Pioneer for the last Bush campaign, writing a tuition check and grumbling that his daughter went to school with a bunch of trust-fund socialists.
John preferred the ones on scholarship, the poor kids winged up from Southern ghettos, the projects of New Orleans, the trailer parks of South Carolina. That they had walked out of one world and into another never failed to register on their faces. Natural Light and beauty pageants for the white kids. Hennessy and smoothbore .38s for the occasional blacks. Their hand-me-down Jordans years past expiration. But all scrubbed now, gleaming, these brilliant bookish anomalies that never quite fit in at home.
He touched the Orthodox prayer rope that hung around one wrist and stared up at the stained glass behind the pulpit.
With Jesus and John the Baptist were Lincoln and King and John Brown.
Harriet Tubman.
Dorothy Day.
And, of course, the benefactor, William Lloyd.
There was a certain blinding quality to so much moral light, and John had made it through his first winter at Garrison hunkered in his office listening to Levon Helm, still to some degree in the shadow of his and Tess’s time on St. Simons Island and all that had entailed—his breakdown, his failure to confess. The looming specter of Hassan Natashe and what John had done to him. As if his past were this living thing never quite on the verge of dying, as if John dragged its damaged form behind him.
Which, of course, he did.
Just that morning he had woken to the fingers of his once four-year-old daughter tracing figures on his back. His first wife, Karla, had died in a wreck that left a filament of scar tracing his daughter Kayla’s nine-year-old face. Kayla was grown now, twenty-one and living in east Tennessee. She wrote letters, actual paper-and-ink letters to which John failed to respond because—in his defense—what could he possibly say?
There was a way in which you could squander things, toss them aside in the most careless of manners. But careless or not, the manner was irrelevant. When something was gone, it was gone. That, perhaps, was the lesson of Site Nine, and Site Nine, both what had happened there and what had not, had become the central tenet of John’s being. That it was nearly a decade behind him was meaningless. That until yesterday when Stone reappeared he hadn’t seen any of them in years—not Jimmy, not Ray Bageant—mattered not at all. That Peter Keyes was dead meant nothing.
It was different with Karla, and he often wondered what had happened to his wife. Besides the actual dying—he understood the dying.
The dying wasn’t what he meant.
What he meant was that the first thing you noticed about her was how contingent she was, how it would all end in flames, or tears, or simply how it would all—probably sooner rather than later—just end. But this was hindsight; these were the conclusions of the man after. For eleven years John considered little more than the light slap of their stomachs as they made love. Standing in the bathroom after, both naked, and she names something.
“I hadn’t thought of that in—”
“I know, right?”
Except he could no longer remember what she named.
They stood for the Benediction, and from the distance of years he thought he would trade everything to know what she was thinking in that moment. Or any moment.
4.
He had lost the kid.
Sunday morning Jimmy Stone sat outside a shitty duplex in the even shittier Kirkwood neighborhood of Atlanta and admitted as much. The kid wasn’t here. The kid was gone. The kid being a twenty-two-year-old dumbass named Reed Sharma, son of the CEO of the Reliance Corporation, yet another Keyes Group subsidiary and of late a major player in that great American game of domestic whack-a-mole. A game also sometimes known as let’s entrap some sad-sack kid and call it justice.
Which was fine—it was a game Jimmy played even if he didn’t particularly like it—but he’d come to think of Reed Sharma as particularly ill-suited and the operation as particularly predatory, even by the standards of the bureau. There were kids who it was just a matter of time before they got violent and they were fair game. You go after those kids, charge them with material support, lock ’em up. But then there were kids who would never get violent were they not groomed for it, kids like Reed you had to coax and coach, stoking their isolation and boredom until it grew into something like hatred. Technically speaking, it was called entrapment, it was called ruining a life, and Jimmy had a problem with this, even if it was Jimmy who had belt-fed him all the Goya and Dostoyevsky. Even if it was Jimmy who had handed him Demons, for God’s sake.
Shall we discuss the moral possibilities of violence, Reed?
What say we sit around and debate the godlike power of suicide, you wanna?
He sat in his car stewing in sweat and regret.
Not that it was completely Jimmy’s fault. True, the kid had been in his little black book for years, but turns out he was in Professor Hadawi’s book, too, and this was a serious problem, getting himself on too many bucket lists. Stone had tried to intervene. He had met with Reed just over a week ago at a McDonald’s off I-75, given him a phone to keep in touch.
There was a camp—this was the kid talking. It was up in the mountains somewhere.
“Where?”
“I don’t know. North.”
“North,” Jimmy reminded him, “north is a cardinal direction, Reed. Would you care to narrow it down for me?”
“Shit, I told you. I don’t know.”
All Reed knew was th
at Professor Hadawi had taken him there and was planning to take him back. He was joining the struggle. He would kill for the caliphate, the umma. Strap on some lovely hip-hugger of a suicide vest and turn himself into hate and light. After his time in New York, after the way you mocked me, Jimmy, now it was happening, finally it was happening. Poor Reed. When Jimmy had known him in New York he had been straight bridge and tunnel. Yet smart enough to know another life was out there. Jimmy thought of him alone in Queens hearing rumors of guys with waxed mustaches getting laid in Park Slope, the bumps of coke taken on old Motown album sleeves salvaged from this cousin or that uncle, the morning-after CoQ10. The families with golf carts and people employed for the express purpose of driving those carts. But poor little Reed was stuck at home with his IKEA furniture, a universe of pressboard and bullshit wooden dowels, cracking the Fabergé egg of his head against the block walls. Poor little Reed alone with his Internet conspiracy theories about the Federal Reserve Bank and his used copy of The Autobiography of Malcolm X.
But lately he seemed changed, and Jimmy thought it had something to do with being in Atlanta, and something to do with Hadawi’s attention. Reed talked liked he’d never heard mention of the Patriot Act. As if the war on terror was a video game and Bin Laden a mechanical engineer in Riyadh. The kid had every reason to lie, but Jimmy didn’t think he was, at least not on this. The professor had spent the last three years at Garrison College and if there was a camp it would be there, tucked into some forgotten corner of the forest, back where only the meth chefs and the Christian Identity folks roamed. Deep in some pine forest where the sun don’t shine. The problem was, Jimmy had lost track of the professor, which had sent him running to his old pal John Maynard. Which, Jimmy thought, talk about your desperate moves. John sitting around with a regret that bordered despair, how useful is somebody like that?
Now he had lost track of Reed, too. Nothing coming through the telescope app on the phone since Jimmy had been treated to a close-up of a Chick-fil-A milkshake. Peach it might have been.
This was Jimmy’s third day staking out the place and not even Reed’s scrawny pal Nawaf was to be seen.
He sat another ten minutes, window down because though it was only morning it was morning in Georgia which meant it was hot. A big, steady heat, a genuine end-times heat—eight A.M. and blazing, light jumping off the metal of a shopping cart pushed into the kudzu and trash. Skullcapped winos on the busted stoops of Section 8 housing. There were birds in the median along the sidewalk, egrets, eating garbage from the uncut grass. They’d be gone by nine. It would be suffocating by ten, past time to swallow a Xanax and slip into the morning siesta which—explain this to me—how is that a bad idea?
Jimmy had always had a thing with heat, and there were moments when he could almost believe in his own self-immolation. That God would take him up in a column of fire, Jimmy reconstituted as a pillar of ash and smoke and deposited at the right hand of the Father. They had talked about it in New York. Prague in ’68. The Arab Spring. The end to the Vietnam War. They all started with it, Reed. The burning, the body as a pyre. You soak the flesh with accelerant, transform anger into political will, and voilà: you’re lifted out of the mortal realm. Think of Yahweh taking Elijah in a whirlwind. Think of Enoch, Reed. Or maybe my theology’s off here, my history. Jimmy had made a study of it, self-immolation, and even if his facts were not exactly facts there were still laws of attraction involved. That if you thought about something long enough it began to gravitate toward you. That sitting in the warm car was just an early tempering for what was to come.
He was dozing off when the door of the duplex opened. Except it was the left door of the duplex, not the right, and it was the woman who was calling herself Aida, and not Reed, coming down the stoop and up the street toward him. She came around the car in what seemed an impossibly slow transit and then flattened her badge against the windshield, eye level before she let it slide and scrape a bit toward the wiper.
“I don’t even know what I’m supposed to call you,” Jimmy said. “It’s Aida, right?”
She was in her headscarf, but only just. It appeared more piled on her head than tied around it. A paisley thing. A white girl, very plainly a white girl, in a paisley headscarf.
“You need to stay off this street, Jimmy.”
“Like you wouldn’t miss me if I was gone?”
“People are starting to think this is your show,” she said. “And you know good and well it is most definitely not.”
The badge had the brass eagle with its brass wings, the raised letters cut deep enough for even the blind to read. Kind of a ballsy thing, really. Whipping it out right there in naked view.
“You’re out of the game,” she said. “So time to pack up your shit and leave.”
Jimmy tapped one knuckle against the inside of the glass. “Maybe so. But you shouldn’t have cleared his office. That was a stupid move.”
“That wasn’t my decision.”
“You want unnecessary scrutiny, sure, go clear out his office. You only get two thousand students talking, then their parents, then the State Board of Regents.”
“I told you that wasn’t my call.”
“Whose was it then?”
“It was his.”
“Christ. Are you serious?”
“Clear the fuck out, Jimmy. And yes, I’m completely serious.”
“Are you, now?”
“I will fucking—I give you my word—I will put a hole in your ass.”
“A hole in my ass? This flair you have.”
“You think I’m joking.”
“You know I’m really into the badass vibe.”
Her lips spread, but not into anything approaching a smile.
“I thought you were only into the boys,” she said.
“Who, me?”
“Even the dead ones.”
“I’m ecumenical in my way, but dead”—he put his knuckle back up to the inside of the glass and tapped at her badge—“I draw the line at dead.”
“Really? ’Cause I heard otherwise.”
“All right, my dear. Time to get your tin off my windshield.”
“I heard you get all hard for this guy Hassan Natashe, bring in your best people. Rolodexed some psychologist out of retirement. But then—whoops—you got a dead motherfucker on your hands, right, Jimmy? Time to start forging signatures, time to start shredding reports ’cause here comes the inspector general. Here comes the Obama administration and turns out we aren’t quite as thrilled about enhanced interrogation as we used to be. What a surprise, right?”
“Get your shit off my windshield, Aida.”
“Don’t come back, Jimmy.”
“Get your shit,” he said, and started the car.
“Don’t come back here.”
He dropped the car into drive.
“Don’t worry about it.”
“This isn’t your show,” she called.
“Never you fucking mind,” he said, and drove off with her standing there, pressing the badge flat to her body with one hand, waving goodbye with the other.
5.
They had Sunday dinner with John’s parents. This was Tess’s thing, Tess’s insistence. Her own parents so far away, but John’s parents so close. Why would we not go see them, honey? It’s like a half-hour and it means so much to them? Part of it was that they were old, not merely aging like Tess’s parents. John’s father sat in a lift chair paid for by Medicare. The right side of his mother’s face betrayed the slightest of heaves, that pinch of grief that was the remembered slide of Bell’s palsy, barely perceptible beyond the nagging sense that something in her jaw that was once very vital had died. But when they saw their grandchildren something came alive in them.
It’s good for them, John. It’s good for us.
It was also a way to get John to spend time with Wally and Daniel, something he didn’t do so much anymore. At least not to the extent that he once had. That he’d had an entire life before her she understood
, she accepted. She knew that there would always be a part of him closed as much to the world as it was to Tess. She had made peace with this. But in exchange she asked for his presence. Not just his physical presence, but his emotional presence, his attentiveness. She asked for him to hold his daughter, to play with his sons. His singing in the morning—was it wrong to say she detected something false in it? The holdover of what had been happiness having evolved into habit.
Visiting was also a way to get Tess out of the house, out of her own head, which God knew she needed. She kept seeing these Middle Eastern men who both were and weren’t there. The Syrian family that ran the Quik Stop on the farm-to-market. The guy in the Microtel off I-75—he was Iranian, or maybe Indian? One day she saw a man of indeterminate origin sitting behind the counter of the 7-Eleven past the beef jerky and capsules of XXX Herbal Enhancer playing chess with what appeared to be his grandson. She bought a bottle of water in order to get a closer look and turned out they were playing with actual pieces, not the handmade scraps of rooks and knights she’d half-expected. Then she walked out the door and ran into another. They were everywhere, these men. She was even seeing women, women in hijabs shopping at Lenox Square mall in Atlanta, women wearing headscarves and surgical masks on the MARTA as if they were in Beijing and not Georgia. She’d be out shopping and see them, the children bored, Laurie hungry, and would you like to donate a dollar to the Boys and Girls Clubs, ma’am? The St. Jude Children’s Hospital? The Make-A-Wish Foundation?