by Mark Powell
He brought it up one evening with his mom, but all she wanted to talk about was what was the deal with the bruises?
“I want you to let a doctor look at those.”
“M-m-m-om.”
“That’s a sign, honey. I think that’s how leukemia starts.”
“J-Jesus, Mom.”
He could have told her about the gym. It would have pleased her, he thought. But he didn’t want to please her. He said nothing.
He let her worry all week and that Friday he went to prayers. Not to pray so much as to simply bow, to be part of the mass of humanity, the bent knees, the outstretched hands. The imam spoke but in the wash of emotion Reed didn’t hear him. He didn’t need to, content to be a face in the faceless sea. But when he rose from his last prostration he found the imam staring directly into his eyes.
The following Monday at the gym one of the men—boys, whatever they were—spoke to him. It was a piece of practical advice, he needed to keep his arms closer to his body when he was on the ground, but it was the first time anyone beyond the instructor had spoken to him and he was grateful for it. The instructor seemed to hate Reed, stuttering and soft Reed. But then again he seemed to hate the other boys too. They were all skinny and underfed and wore what might generously be called starter beards. The ex-military guys seemed to take a particular pleasure in knocking them on their asses.
Reed went to talk to the guy again after class but the guy—the kid, whatever, Reed didn’t know how to think of him—cut him off. He had to pray. They all had to pray. And in the burned grass beside the hangar the four boys kneeled on yoga mats and touched their foreheads to the dirt.
“I’m sorry,” the boy said on rising. “What did you want to talk about?”
He walked with them west into the night, eventually to a tea shop in the immigrant corner of Kirkwood. Three were cousins born and raised in Atlanta though their parents were from Yemen. The fourth, the older one, the quiet one, had come from Iraq when he was thirteen and didn’t talk about it. They lived together in a duplex near Bessie Branham Park. Did they like it? Of course not. The blacks were everywhere, the drugs, the noise. The women want only to distract you and there is the way to perdition. But their mosque was near and they could see the imam every day. They were in training. Soldiers in the service of Allah, blessed be his name.
Where was Reed’s mosque?
He had no answer.
Why did he not wear a beard, did his father wear a beard?
He didn’t say and the boy—Reed thought him no more than eighteen—didn’t push.
“We are each of us fighting our own battles,” the boy said, and if it sounded a little stupid to Reed, a little obvious, he couldn’t exactly refute it either. He asked what battle, exactly?
“Against the state, against the nonbeliever. But also within the heart.” He made a broad gesture that was perhaps encompassing, but might also have been dismissive. “We are the ones preparing against the onslaught of the West.”
“And that’s what the Krav Maga is for?”
He smiled here, the boy. He was an American teenager—they all were—but he was trying so hard not to be Reed couldn’t help but appreciate the effort. “Partly yes,” he said. “But that is only one small part. Do you know the history of Krav Maga, the logic behind it?”
“No.”
“The logic is to kill Palestinians with your fingertips. Your thumbs. Eye, ear, instep. We study Krav Maga to get inside the fist of the Jew. But this is only one small part.”
They drank their tea and Reed walked east. When they were out of sight Reed took a cab home.
That night he made his first attempt at prayer.
It was maybe a success, but he didn’t really have the metrics to say.
The next Friday he met the boy—his name was Suleyman—outside the mosque. It was Suleyman who introduced Reed first to the imam, and, weeks later, to Professor Hadawi.
Eventually, Reed would meet Aida back at the duplex Suleyman shared with the others, but he was still months from that.
Reed’s present tense was his training, his present tense was Suleyman and his cousins. Soon enough it became the imam. He was no more than thirty, Reed thought. Or perhaps he was forty, or fifty. He wore a full beard, but his face was brown and unlined and it was impossible to guess his age. He had come from Yemen to study engineering, staying on after completing his degree at Georgia Tech, as Allah willed it. The mosque was Salafist, a school of thought that believed Muslims had strayed from their roots. All must be rooted. All must flow from the holy Koran, the hadith, the Sunna. The imam explained it over a series of meetings, first with all of the brothers and then with Reed alone. He taught Reed to pray, gave him books and literature and hope.
Most importantly, he gave him something to fill his head.
Something besides, of course, the memory of laughter.
*
One afternoon Reed and Suleyman took the bus out to a Dick’s Sporting Goods so that Reed could buy his own equipment. He was sick of wearing the communal headgear of the gym with its flaking foam padding and greasy feel and had asked his father for money—so far as Reed could tell the single reason for his father’s continued existence. They walked through aisles of indecency, the women made from molded plastic, headless and large breasted in their jog-bras and running tights. Yet no one was weeping, no one beat their chests in outrage. It was shameless, and it was their shame.
“It is an offense that we must enter such a den of iniquity to purchase that which Allah accords us.” This was Suleyman talking, stilted and ridiculous, Reed thought. Refusing to use contractions as if English wasn’t his first language. No doubt parroting what he had heard the imam say. But then again, could Reed refute it? Could he say that it wasn’t an offense? Could he discount what Suleyman said simply because he was thumbing through his Facebook newsfeed as he said it?
He bought the headgear and a black mouth guard and they walked out into the bright sun. When they were in the car Suleyman told Reed how impressed the imam was with him.
“He thinks you might begin formal study in Arabic.”
“He told you this?”
“The spoken Arabic of Yemen is said to most closely resemble that of the Koran. Most people do not know this.”
“He really said he thought I should study?”
The next day Reed asked his mother for money: he wanted to enroll at Atlanta Metropolitan State College. She seemed thrilled and wrote out the check on the spot. It was only after she handed it over that she asked what he intended to study. Arabic, he said. And then she wasn’t smiling anymore, and he wasn’t enrolling at AMSC. Instead he drove to the World Language Study Center, an annex behind the mosque that had once been the basement fellowship hall of a Baptist church. The open space of block and tile had been divided into narrow classrooms and within one the imam taught classical Arabic to a few students, Reed and Suleyman among them.
The class began after morning prayers, two hours, and then exercises in a workbook. Reed did the work, a capable learner even if his script was sloppy and leaning, and then jogged to the gym where he got in a ninety-minute workout before he returned to pray. By now he was spending at least half his nights in the duplex, showing up with his mother’s money. She gave it in spurts, swearing one day he would get no more until he devised some sort of plan—something, anything, my God, this is your future I’m talking about—but the next day passing over a wad of crumpled twenties and tens he would shove in his pocket before she could change her mind. Stuttering his fuck-you-moms as he eased out the door.
It was somewhere around this time that the imam introduced a guest instructor, Professor Edward Hadawi. Professor Hadawi wore an open-necked shirt, Italian loafers, his dark hair a wave of gel. As the imam introduced him, Reed watched his glasses clear. There was a name for it—transition lenses—but sitting there that day it seemed more like magic. After class, the imam asked Reed to stay a moment. When the others were gone the imam introduced hi
m to the professor.
“So this is the one?” Hadawi spoke with a slight British accent. “I’ve heard good things about you,” he told Reed, “such promise.”
“Thank you, sir.”
“Not that promise is always fulfilled. Promise is simply potential. This is my thinking,” he said. “Promise is often an impediment. Do you believe that’s true, Reed?”
“I don’t k-know.”
“There’s no reason you should. But think on it.”
A few weeks later Reed was hurrying from class to the gym when he was approached by a young white woman in a hijab who stuck a flier in his hand and said, you should come. The flier read SHARIANOW! and on it was a website, below that a place and time.
“What is this?” he asked her.
“A meeting.”
“About what?”
“Come and find out.”
“All right.”
She smiled, flirting. “You will?”
“Yeah, I will. What’s your name?”
“My name? Aida.”
“All right. I’ll see you there, Aida.”
She laughed and said maybe.
It was only later that he realized he had spoken with perfect clarity.
*
He attended as much out of duty as curiosity. Except that wasn’t true: he attended because of the girl, because of Aida. Aida before she was his Aida. It turned out to be more of a religious service than a political rally—but he was only then coming to learn that there was no true difference between the two. He entered through a shuttered convenience store beneath a banner marked SHARIANOW! Shelves dusty and mostly empty. Passed through a heavy security door into a crowded room of block walls and metal folding chairs. A fan that failed to oscillate. The squat heat thick with the smell of the thirty or forty young men packed into the airless space.
They watched a video of some distant imam, cross-legged on the floor, speaking flawless English as Arabic blocked across the bottom of the screen. The feed, the recording—Reed didn’t know if this was some live event—but whatever it was, was shaky. The talk was of the rising caliphate. To replace what was democracy with shura councils. To expel nonbelievers. To execute homosexuals. Reed tried to listen but it was embarrassing, really, a cawing of anger and paranoia. Railing against Obama and the godless West while a bunch of teenagers sat in the boxed stink of poverty.
When the video ended a man stepped forward, the professor stepped forward—it took Reed a moment to place him—dressed again in the open-necked shirt, the black coif, the pointed loafers. He was smiling, the lenses of his glasses brightening, clarifying as he stood before the room.
“How many of you,” he began, “know who that was?” He waited a moment, clapped his hands, paced. “No one? Or no one willing to speak. It’s all right. A wrong answer and I’m not going to strike you down.” He smiled again. “But that man was struck down. That man was Anwar al-Awlaki and he was born here in the United States of America, just like many of you. He was killed by that same country. A drone strike in Yemen. I suppose you might have heard something of these drones. I think now and then they might get mentioned on the Internet.” Another smile here, a hint of laughter—nothing was more reviled on jihadi websites than the drones, even Reed knew this. “I suppose, too, that might have all sounded—I don’t know. Perhaps a bit extreme. Perhaps a bit—how would you put it?—harsh?
“Well, my brothers—”
And now the smile was gone, and did Reed imagine it, or were his glasses, right there in the unfailing fluorescent light, were his glasses going dark? It didn’t matter. Reed was trying to make his body as still as possible and as he did there emerged an invisible world of careful construction, a world that existed wholly in the fold of his unmoving. Everything shifted a half inch and through the crack centered in his vision he saw the world as it was, the angels and demons and the way this world is guy-lined to the next. The professor batted his eyes and around his head Reed saw a great mechanism of wheels and cranks, a system of pulleys making their intricate turns, and watching them he felt the darkness within him. He was uncertain if beneath it burned some buried light.
That was the moment Reed began to pray. Not to any god, but to himself. Which is to say he began to think, to attempt to convince himself that he had found his people, his cause. They were against his father, against his father’s world, and whatever they asked, he would do. Wherever they led, he would follow.
“—my brothers, I am here to tell you that if what the martyred imam says sounds harsh, that doesn’t make it any less true.”
*
It was only after the service ended that he caught sight of Aida in the adjoining room—the women were kept separate—and only then he remembered she was the reason he had come. He stood to go to her and she caught his eye, turned into the crowd, and was gone. He couldn’t find her in the street and walked home sweat soaked and heady with something he couldn’t yet name. He collapsed in the foyer of his parents’ home and woke in bed, his fever—103 his mother would later tell him—having finally broken.
When he woke in a hazy limbo he found his body emptied and waiting to be filled. His mother told him he had the flu, but what he came to possess—what came to possess him—was the disease of martyrdom. He lay in bed, attended by his mother, and dreamed the coming caliphate into being, drifting into long trancelike sleeps he understood not as fatigue but as a form of mysticism.
Three days later when he returned to the gym, Suleyman pulled him aside. Did Reed know, he asked him, that as the professor spoke Reed had floated on a cloud of air, suspended a full foot above the ground?
*
He finally saw Aida again at the duplex. She and two other women were in the kitchen designing fliers on a laptop. Reed waited until they were finished and then followed her out into the street. Even in her hijab he could see she was as white as him, whiter, perhaps. Which meant she would get the usual questions, the ones he couldn’t yet answer. When did you convert? Why did you convert? So he didn’t ask, and neither did she. She asked his name as they walked together around the perimeter of the park. She was a student at Emory, or had been before dropping out of the religious studies program to immerse herself in Islam. Her parents lived in Virginia and wouldn’t speak to her. He would later learn that her Arabic was excellent and that her understanding of theology extended far beyond that of Reed’s.
“We shouldn’t be out like this,” she said finally.
They had completed a loop of the park and started on another.
“Like how?”
“Without a chaperone,” she said, but kept walking.
He told her of his parents, of his father’s disapproval, of his mother’s quivering neediness, speaking all the time just as he had the day she had approached him: with perfect clarity.
Two days later he took her to the movies out at the Mall of Georgia, far enough out of the city that they wouldn’t see anyone they knew. She wore her hijab, but it was a flouncy thing of lavender flowers and mourning doves and seemed to signal that while she was devout her piety had limits. Two days after that they drove to Lake Lanier and he put his fingers in her hair as they made out on one of the floating docks.
Meanwhile, he went to the mosque and the gym and studied his Arabic. In between it all, he saw Aida.
It was August when, with Suleyman and the cousins as his witnesses, Reed recited the shadada and officially converted to Islam. The imam gave him a Yemeni riyal as a gift. The professor sent a note with his congratulations.
*
One fall day the professor showed up at the duplex and took Reed, Suleyman, and the cousins to play putt-putt at a course in Druid Hills. It was October but no cooler for it, the day dry and still, the sun flashing off the conical mountain that rose from the shallow pond that marked the course’s limit. The theme, it appeared, was Golden Age Hollywood. The lettered sign. Godzilla vs. King Kong. The professor walked Reed up above the course with lagoons and giant papier-mâché cameras o
n tripods, their feet just above the blanched face of Marilyn Monroe.
“All are Muslims, though some refuse Allah’s will,” Professor Hadawi said. “Do you believe this?”
Down below Suleyman putted toward the open mouth of Humphrey Bogart.
“I do,” Reed said, and the professor patted his shoulder and then left his hand there as if he were a father showing a son what would someday be his.
“You are in a privileged situation, my son. You can have everything. Do you know this to be true?” He motioned at the sea of cars, the high-rises in the smoggy distance. “All this. Do you see how much could be yours, Reed? All of it. But the question is, do you want it?”
Reed felt something gather in him, almost anger, but not quite. Resolve, maybe.
“No,” he said finally.
“What’s that?”
“I said I don’t want it.”
“Do you not?” A squeeze of the shoulder. “Say it again then.”
“I don’t want it.”
“A third time and it’s true.”
“I tell you”—and he was almost yelling now—“I don’t want it.”
And all the while the professor squeezing his shoulder, soothing him, saying good, good, that’s good, Reed. I’m so happy for you.
*
When they got back to the parking lot the professor gave him something, a gift, he said, a study aid. A thumb drive containing the teachings of Anwar al-Awlaki called “Constants on the Path to Jihad.” Something to light your path. And something else, he said. It was a throwaway cell phone, a burner, they were sometimes called. Hadawi’s number was preprogrammed. So we can stay in touch, the professor said.
That Friday after prayers he and Aida drove back to the lake and kissed for hours.
It went on like that until sparring one Monday evening just before the infidel holiday of Thanksgiving, Reed knocked the instructor on his ass and a look of wonderful surprise burst in the man’s eyes. Behind that came a look of fear that said to Reed: now your real life has begun.