by Mark Powell
That night he thought for the first time in months of the way they had laughed at him in New York, the way they had mocked him. Stone, the Voice of Reason, all of them. He put that life against the now of his being and what he came out with was a sense of the great power residing within him. He thought: now, now, your real life has started.
And it had.
*
They screened the film in the abandoned convenience store. Zeitgeist: The Movie. You want a conspiracy theory, it had it. It had them all, from Jesus to the Federal Reserve Bank. The Protocols of the Elders of Zion to 9/11. Reed watched on the floor with the other men of ShariaNow! Watched the towers come down and thought of his childhood in Manhattan, walking to St. John the Divine. Just a boy alone in a church basement of old white ladies with costume jewelry and clouds of silver hair, a few younger dark-skinned mothers nursing babies papoosed in bright scarves.
They sat in metal folding chairs and spoke of the Bad Men who had crashed the planes. This was the time of the Bad Men, the time of the Towers. The Bad Men had been killed, but there were more bad men and they too must die. This was the imperative: to kill the Bad Men wherever they might be. His father said this. The Bad Men, everywhere the Bad Men. Over and over and about how there would be new dangers now, but new opportunities, too. They would kill the Bad Men and what else might manifest itself? The world had cracked open, the world was new.
Meanwhile, his mother sat at home watching the president speak. His father off to his office or taking the train to New Haven to teach. The Quiet Car down to DC to consult. When the boy got back his mother would be on her way out the door to somewhere, always his mother and the door.
He didn’t know his father, not really, and sometimes imagined his father might also be one of the Bad Men. An unpleasant idea that seemed corked with the Chardonnay his mother drank in the evenings.
“What are you thinking, baby?” His mother’s question.
And how he never responded, simply waited for her to leave him alone with the Filipino help so he could slip out and walk to the church, the days raw with wind and sleet and his mother, somewhere ahead. How she seemed to gather about her all the darkness of the broken city. Blue sawhorse barricades. Police in riot gear. It all came back. The signs in the subway: IF YOU SEE SOMETHING, SAY SOMETHING.
When they were finished they filed out onto the street so that the women could watch.
“Is this really true?” Suleyman quietly asked Reed once they were outside. “All that they have said?”
He was drinking a Coke, but had it in a plastic cup so no one would know.
Reed said nothing.
*
On New Year’s Day he met the professor a few blocks from the duplex and rode with him out toward the airport. They parked by a fenced lot of paving stones and concrete angels. Fountains the size of satellite dishes. It was a cold, bright day, and airliners kept lifting in and out of the sky, close enough to see the landing gear as it tucked insect-like beneath the silvered wings.
They walked through the rubble piles and garden trolls and the professor asked about Reed’s studies, about his Arabic. Finally, he asked about Reed’s father.
“Soren Sharma.”
“Yes.”
“Or Dr. Sharma, as I knew him. Would it surprise you to know that I once took a course with your father?”
“He doesn’t teach anymore.”
“Of course not. He’s on to other things. Do you know by chance the book he wrote?”
“He’s written several.”
“How about Economic Stability in Unstable Times?”
“No.”
“He advocates—are you familiar with his positions, Reed?”
“Broadly.”
“Broadly. I see. But you do know a man named James Stone. Your father certainly does.”
It came out as a statement so Reed didn’t bother replying. Not that he would have known what to say. Even with the professor he felt the need to keep something in reserve. Not that he could say why. Only that secrets are what we are made out of. He believed this. What we hold back is ultimately all we hold. The whole world spitting out their lives in 140-character bursts, but no, not Reed Sharma. You wouldn’t catch him casting his pearls before swine. The professor let the question, the statement, whatever it was, go.
“Have you ever heard of something called Global Solutions?”
“Of course.”
“Of course?”
“They’re a consulting firm.” He was relieved to finally say yes to something. “My father served on the board for years.”
“Seven years. Do you know what Global Solutions does?” He looked at Reed. “Among other things—among many, many things—they broker arms deals. Patriot missiles for the Israelis. Aircraft for the House of Saud.” The professor studied him. “Broadly,” he repeated. “I suppose that’s familiarity enough.”
They walked on, the professor’s hand on Reed’s shoulder, guiding him.
“I want you to talk to me, Reed. I want us to be in dialogue. You still have the phone I gave you?”
“Yes.”
“Memorize the number. Then throw the phone away and buy a new one, and then call me, all right? I want to hear everything.”
He did everything he was told, memorized the number, threw away the phone, bought a new one. Told the professor everything except New York. That was his single lapse. Nothing about James Stone, nothing about the Voice of Reason, the elevator girl with her pale legs. The little gilded Buddha that churned in his stomach like a seed. He didn’t mention Aida either.
One day he almost mentioned the book of Goya prints—it was in his room at that very moment—but in the end kept that to himself, too.
*
They all wanted to be in Raqqa, in Aleppo. This was what they said. Buy a ticket to Istanbul, cross the border at Antakya. Don’t be surprised if you don’t see me tomorrow, brother. Don’t be surprised if I go. I might go. I shall go, inshallah. But there was no going. It was winter—January, February—and what could they do but dream of other places? They studied their Krav Maga to get inside the Jew fist. Do you know the history, brother, the logic behind it?
Ear, eye, instep.
Don’t be surprised when you wake up and I’m gone.
They attended the same mosque, said the same prayers. There were others there, refugees from war-torn Iraq, from battle-ravaged Syria. You combine a descriptor with a geographical location. The violence of a place, a people, an entire way of being. Whosoever shows enmity to a friend of Mine, then I have declared war against him.
He went with them to the mosque, sat with them while they spoke with the imam, went with them to the gym, and then slipped away to be with Aida. Four, then five nights a week, arrived early, stayed late, and then slipped away to be with Aida. Attend class, struggle through the workbook. Pray to Mecca from the wrestling mats. Shrimp out of holds. Keep your chin to your chest. Protect your eyes. It was all drills—rolling, striking, bowing—and then they sparred in foam body armor. He could feel himself growing stronger, growing agile. There were two pit bulls so gray as to be almost silver, and they padded around the gym though not in any violent way. They were old and arthritic with the patchy skin on their joints beginning to open into sores. He watched them with gathering admiration, the muscled jaws, the thick haunches. They were made for a single thing. As was he.
His Arabic was improving and some days he felt like a sapling, growing but not yet grown, supple, able to bend and whip. He watched his brothers. They were all a little ashamed, Reed knew, these soldiers against the West, against the Jew, these soldiers not in the greater Levant but here, safe, eating Satan’s food, masturbating to Satan’s women. The only response was to develop a rhythm to life. The way was to bury the shame in the drills, the prayers, the repetition.
Reed worked on growing his beard. It seemed a task that required presence of mind, staring at his face, touching it. The hair came in black tufts and he knew people hated him f
or it, it’s patchiness an affront to stability, to cleanliness. Something about good manners he never quite articulated. But Aida liked it, Aida touched it.
His mother hated it. He would catch her watching him from across the dinner table, gauging, he thought, the growth of her distaste.
“I’m going to the salon Tuesday, honey.”
And he would look at her flatly, unamused.
“Want to go with me?”
“No.”
“Please? I’d love the company.”
“I don’t think so.”
“Oh, come on, Reed. We never do anything together. What do you say?”
“He said no, Sharon.” This his father weighing in.
And if the look on Reed’s face was the absence of amusement the look on his father’s face was the presence of disgust. That thing you call a beard, it seemed to say. You think I don’t know? Your bullshit trips to that bullshit mosque. Living on a nylon sleeping bag with a room full of acid-throwing, knuckle-dragging cavemen fully capable of joining the world and actually doing something useful. But too scared, too lazy. Too holy—until, of course, you wake up in the middle of the night and forget Allah just long enough to beat your dick to whatever Asian porn you’ve bothered to download. They were blowing up temples in Syria and you were supposed to cheer. They were cutting off heads and you were supposed to laugh. And he did, he cheered, he laughed.
You are becoming everything your grandfather fled.
You are becoming everything I have worked to deliver you from.
You have become the other.
These, Reed knew, were the complaints lodged against him. And if he was honest, when he was honest—because he was striving for honesty—he knew there was some truth to it.
“I want to tell you something, Reed,” his father said on one of the rare occasions they were alone. “You think you’re doing something incredible, this renunciation, and I will tell you, son, that on some level I admire it. But the vanity,” he said, and at that moment he touched Reed’s beard, more than touched it: he pulled it. “The vanity is adolescent. So too the ideology.”
Aida touched it, too. But in a different, gentler way. Aida stroked it, smoothed it. He told her everything about his past, the boarding school, his time in New York. Jimmy Stone and the elevator girl. A few evenings they watched the sermons of al-Awlaki’s the professor had given him on the thumb drive, and she wanted to know all about the professor, all about the imam and Suleyman and his cousins. Reed loved her curiosity, the way she listened. He was taking her to his parents’ house three or four times a week, timing it so that mostly no one was home, but occasionally making sure someone was home, his mom especially, because he wanted her to know her little boy wasn’t a little boy anymore.
They spent one languorous afternoon in his bed, kissing and touching atop the underwear Aida wouldn’t remove—she had taken a vow of chastity until the caliphate was realized—then had come downstairs half-dressed to run into his suddenly blushing mother. But her embarrassment had quickly given way to interest, even enthusiasm. A girlfriend! Reed could see her thinking. And they’ve been upstairs doing what? He hoped his mother thought they had just made love, he hoped she realized how unafraid of her he had become, how unafraid of his father. But he couldn’t quit reading the growing smile on her face: does this mean my son is normal? A girlfriend! Does this mean everything is going to be okay after all? Reed became drunk with her wondering, listening as Aida lied beautifully about her family and past, as Aida charmed his mother to such an extent he felt his own power wane and wilt.
They were still in the kitchen when his father came home, and his mother introduced Aida to her husband as if they were long-lost sisters. Reed’s girlfriend, dear! He saw the surprise on his father’s face, his father’s quick appraisal of how attractive she was, how desirable, Aida standing in his expensive kitchen in shorts and tank top, bed-headed and—he badly wanted his father to believe—well-fucked. See what your boy has brought home, he wanted to say. You see, Daddy? See that I’m a man now?
But too soon his parents had glided back into the welter of their lives, and suddenly bold in a way he had never been Reed had led Aida back to his room where she had allowed him to dry-hump her until he came.
So here was this double life, or if not exactly a double life at least a new life growing within the husk of the old. He was his father’s son, the stuttering, possibly stupid twenty-one-year old with no designs on a future that seemed to extend no further than the four walls of his bedroom. But he was also a key operative in the struggle. A trusted foot soldier, righteous and brave, who sat watching his beautiful girlfriend smile at him while she swabbed his cum from her stomach.
A part of him wanted to tell Suleyman.
A part of him wanted to tell the professor.
But to what extent was it real? A foolish question, and he had this sense that to speak of it would precipitate its evaporation. It would cease to exist.
Then in July he took Aida to his father’s office Independence Day party, both glowing with purpose, Aida’s hair blowing free and Aida not caring, Reed not caring because there were days he felt the righteousness of Allah in him like light and then there were days he just wanted to play Madden NFL on the Xbox.
That day the lounge was maybe two-thirds full of good-looking couples clustered around banquettes. He recognized them as the mindless drones of the great corptocracy, no different from the ones he’d known in New York. The men looking like they had stepped out of Calvin Klein ads, the expensive grooming, the bottle service and tax-deductible contributions to obscure ashrams. The women simultaneously thin and buxom. Ivy Leaguers. MBAs. Former interns with the World Bank. From across the room, an economist slathered over Aida, and Reed liked that, knowing that this powerful man wanted nothing more than to stand where Reed stood. He watched his father’s secretary pose for a cell phone photo at a far table, fake smile, fake breasts, red heels, and black leggings.
Beside her, Aida appeared made from wire or string, a fragile construction that betrayed itself in every joint. Nothing at all like this woman who was all muscle and adipose, well-developed biceps and a spray-on tan. She came over and leaned against the bar beside them, drunk.
“You two,” she said in her slurred voice, “you two are so cute. What’s her name?” she asked him.
“A . . .”
“What? A?”
“Ah . . . Ad . . .”
It was the only time he had ever stuttered in front of Aida and he hated this woman for it, hated his father, hated himself for coming here. It was meant to be a joke—look at the worker bees!—but it was a mistake, a form of arrogance he had spent the previous months working to eliminate.
He felt the old anger rise up, the humiliation.
He felt something in him harden and set.
He doubled down on his training, on his life. Take off your shoes. Stay off the Internet. Despite the waning of Bashar al-Assad in Syria there was the possible sense not of the imminence of the caliphate but that history had already left them behind. They heard it on TV. Good Muslims one and all stood against jihad. They were relics. Their moment—Bush, Iraq, Bin Laden at Abbottabad—their moment was over. History would note a passing madness.
The smell of this was on their skin as surely as were the chemical astringents used to clean the mats at the gym. Reed came home exhausted, slept at the Kirkwood duplex on an inflatable mattress that kept deflating. Jew made, someone said. Jew this. Jew that. His skin was less prickled with mat burns, but still hurt. There remained nights he felt as if he lived in the tumbling of a clothes dryer. But he stayed with it. Studied. Learned. Prayed. Pushups and pull-ups. Ring dips. Long early morning runs along the Big Creek Greenway.
We are not relics.
We are not a madness that has passed.
There is no madness. There is no passing.
They were truth. He was truth, nearing fluency in Arabic, the best fighter in the gym. He was near it. He was making trut
h out of the everyday. He felt this in the numbing consistency of the hours, how truth came not from revelation but repetition, the ceremony of living, a contemplative strength found in readiness. When his brothers talked about capital markets or the godless drive of modernity he would cease to listen. All the talk—the endless abstraction of talk over the endless cups of tea—when it was something you could only know through the body, and what he was coming to understand was that the body was all. He kept this to himself—how could they fail but to misunderstand him?—but knew the Prophet had revealed such.
He didn’t need the world. The kebab shops downtown. The agencies with red-haired secretaries who assist you in being a dog. Handouts. Pity. If the state didn’t kill him soon he would kill the state. Bury it to its neck and then let the tide come in, just as he had seen done on YouTube to Ethiopian nonbelievers.
Do not doubt this book.
Do not doubt me, brother.
He was a soldier now, a follower of the Prophet drinking his Pu-erh tea and finding curling beard hairs in his mouth, his clothes, stuck to the Cloroxed wrestling mats. He called the professor on the burner phone to tell him he had renounced Aida.
Do not be hasty, the professor counseled.
Called the professor to tell him he wanted to go to Syria and fight.
Wait for the call, the professor told him. Wait for the summons. It may be that your work is here.
But he didn’t want it to be here and he surely didn’t want to wait. He was anxious. Nothing satisfied.
He started training mornings before prayer. Three sessions a day. He’d shower at the gym, shiny and wild-eyed, spend the day praying and studying and trying to stay away from Aida. Fish, vegetables, water, creatine—the Prophet had said nothing regarding supplements—whey protein. If he scared his brothers then that was all to the good. He saw now not just the impurities of their hearts, but their unwillingness to cleanse themselves. Amazing, Reed’s deference, his actual fear when he had first arrived among them. He had thought them warriors, but saw now only he was pure of heart. He looked at Suleyman and saw weakness, not a human, not a brother, but an insect.