by Mark Powell
There was time for prayers, but he wasn’t praying much. Maybe touch his head to the earth and wake ten minutes later with a kinked neck. Suleyman across the room eating green pills and staring blankly at the wall.
“Get down and pray with me, Suleyman.” And Reed would wait, but there was no answer forthcoming. “Get down and pray, my brother.”
And Reed would wait, but Suleyman would never move.
It didn’t seem to matter. There was a time to cut off such, to do nothing but grow stronger. And he was growing stronger, a great carapace over his heart so that it was rare he thought of his mother or New York or Aida. The day he and Aida walked past MLK Jr. High to Coan Park. The old Victorian houses, the porches with sofas and wool-headed black men. Shopping carts in the meadow like grazing sheep, you saw them in pairs, two here, two there. Three together down near the trickle of stream. The spilling trashcans and yellow jackets. Glassine baggies like translucent petals, stepped on, flattened. Everything flattened. They had kissed just past the picnic tables but he didn’t think of that, never did he think of that.
He watched Suleyman fall on a morning run and almost drown in a puddle.
His friend was weak, sick, thus he was no longer his friend.
The weather turned cold and they built fires in the pit. There were still no names, but some stories now. Time in camps in Afghanistan or fighting in Fallujah. Not the boys themselves—they were not old enough—but stories passed down reverently from fathers and uncles and older brothers martyred for the caliphate. He could sense Ahmad’s disapproval. Now, he seemed to say, was not a time for talk. But outside of the pain, the talk was the only thing real. Perhaps the snow or the smell of cordite. The bright scent of Ahmad’s winter-green Copenhagen, his one concession to his time with the American army.
One evening Jimmy Stone drove up after dark and sat around the fire pit with a metal canteen of J&B.
“Nine-fucking-eleven,” he said. “Let me tell you about it.” It was dark and outside the ring of light the night had grown cold. “Where were you when it went down, Ahmad?”
Ahmad was staring into the fire.
“At home,” he said.
“But after, when you were over there.” Stone looked at the circle of faces. “Ahmad here was in Iraq. A terp. He saw shit, did shit.”
Ahmad did not look up when he spoke, his voice soft. “Mostly saw shit.”
“What was it like, do you remember?”
“I remember the same as you.”
“Yeah, but tell the boys.”
“You go out, drive out, and then you see something.”
“Like dead bodies,” Stone said, “torture rooms.”
“More like garbage. Dead animals, goats.”
“You’re disappointing me here.”
“Sometimes bodies, I suppose.”
“You’re bringing me down, Ahmad. I thought we were going to tell these boys some stories.”
His eyes were still on the fire.
“I found it to be a country very unclean,” he said.
He took them on runs, homemade obstacle courses where they climbed trees and jumped streams. Drove to town and took them dumpster diving in the hours before dawn and they climbed out with sheet cakes and vegetables and loaves of bakery bread, declaring what American waste! What American arrogance! But it was a pose, a line, because with the exception of Ahmad they were Americans each and every one and it was their waste, their arrogance.
Meanwhile, it turned cold. October, Reed thought, though he had no way of knowing exactly. He judged he had been in the camp two months, eating oatmeal and amphetamines and losing weight. Though he slept beside Suleyman who snored and farted and slept, Reed felt loneliness float above him until one night it coalesced like a weather pattern, a storm against which his skin prickled.
He returned one day to find two of his brothers—if that was what they were—gone. Suleyman and another boy, the youngest in the camp. There was no talk of it, no explanation. They were simply no longer there. Still, the training went on, mindlessly, endlessly, and Reed worked hard thinking Allah, Allah, because sometimes he thought God. Not because he had ever given any thought to Him. It was just the language he’d heard as a boy, those twice-yearly masses with his mother. A linguistic tic he had to get past. But maybe—he might think this in the last miles of one of the trail runs—maybe it was only that: just a linguistic tic he had to get past.
Allah.
God.
The entire construct.
Some nights he would lie in bed and repent, tearing up with an overwhelming nostalgia for the person he had been. The absence of people—you could feel these things, come to know them as intimately as you knew presence. He missed the gym, the cousins. Didn’t dare allow his mind to drift toward Aida or his mother, the elevator girl in New York. That deep focus the Voice of Reason had spoken of—Reed had that once. But no longer. Now he was only tired. He jogged the trails in a hoodie, face down, because the truth was, he had lost interest in jihad, and Allah had gone as missing as everyone else.
When they filmed his life this would be the moment of struggle, something to overcome, and he would overcome it. In the movie of his life this would be the moment the professor would return to send Reed into the world as an avenging angel. And not in the name of Allah or the umma. The professor would return and send Reed out to do damage to Reed’s father’s world because that, Reed had come to understand, was the world most in need of damage. The world without mercy, the world without forgiveness.
But instead of the professor it was Stone who returned, carrying a grocery bag of clothes, shampoo, Docksides. He even had a belt, a woven thing like you associated with afternoon sails on the harbor. Been to the neighborhood T.J.Maxx, partner. Godless capitalism sends its regards, by the way. Reed had run for hours that morning and felt hunger in him like a set of teeth. Natural then that he associated the moment not with a new stage of life but a possible meal.
“Get dressed. Put everything you have in the bag, all right?” Stone said. “And I mean everything. Have you written anything down here?”
“Have you seen the professor?”
“Anything at all. Notes, doodles. Scratched your initials into a tree? Try to focus, Reed.”
“No, nothing.”
“Get dressed then.”
“You haven’t seen the professor?”
“Use the cologne. Do you have any Spanish?”
“Not really.”
“Gracias. Sí, señor? Nothing?”
“I think dog is perro.”
“Forget it. Go on and change. But be thorough packing,” Stone said. “And no, I haven’t seen the good professor. No one has. That’s the reason I’m here.”
The clothes were too big, but he had nothing else and so he pulled them on, slipped out to the supply shed and took one of the target pistols, an antique Walther P5 he stuffed in his bag.
“Could we eat something?” he asked Stone when they were driving.
“You hungry?”
“I haven’t eaten yet, no.”
“What are you running on, pills?”
“One pill. Green.”
“Allah’s little helper.”
They were in a knockoff Econoline van. The rear seats were torn out and the interior smelled of 3-in-One oil and body odor.
“How far did you run this morning?”
“I don’t know.”
“Ballpark it.”
“Maybe ten or twelve.”
“Miles for Muhammad.”
“You aren’t a believer.”
“Neither are you.”
“You say that at your peril.”
“What’s that?” Stone cupped an ear. “You sound like a dying robot over there.”
They stopped at a Stuckey’s an hour north of the camp and Reed ordered waffles and sausage and then a hamburger steak with gravy, hunched over his plate shoveling the food for a half-hour until the hunger was replaced by the sort of exhaustion you carried
in the bones.
“I guess you know you aren’t going back,” Stone said when they were on the road. “You might remember two of your fellow campers walking off the reservation.”
“Suleyman. I didn’t know the other’s name.”
“Their names are Saddam and Osama for all it matters. They’re now in the custody of the FBI.”
Reed was silent.
“That would be the Federal Bureau of Investigation,” Stone said.
“I know what it is.”
“Just trying to judge your silence.”
“They were captured?”
“Here’s a scenario, all right?” They were in another small town, probably Tennessee by now. “Imagine this,” Stone said, “the feds get word of a small training camp in the hills, put their eyes on it. Eventually send in a couple of agents, very deep cover. They collect info and disappear. At some later point as yet to be determined a SWAT team descends in helicopters. They do the raid at night. Fast-rope in. Bind ’em and gag ’em. You get a bag of peanuts and a complimentary promethazine suppository for the ride to Gitmo.”
“They were spies? I don’t believe you.”
“Here’s another one: the man you call Ahmad is actually an officer with U.S. Special Operations. Again, deepest, darkest cover. He runs you boys until total exhaustion, and then one quiet night strangles each and every one of you in your sleep. Piano wire ’cause those JSOC boys don’t give a fuck.”
“You’re a liar.”
“Or here’s one more—last one I swear—for your due consideration. You want to hear it?” They were out of the town now and paralleling the shoreline of a lake. A Sea-Doo dealership. Real-estate offices. Ornate stone gates leading to whatever it was they led to. “Let’s say there actually is a plan afoot for a major action. An attack let’s say—speculatively—it’s going to take place in Atlanta. But the heat’s on, the feds, the Georgia Bureau of Investigation. So what do you do if you’re the professor? You set up a little training camp in the hills. Send some boys up there. Upstanding brainless jihadis just dying to strap on a nylon suicide vest and blow up a few soccer moms, all to the glory of the Prophet. Velcro, Reed. You sew the vest right it fits perfectly under your jacket. Not so much as a panty line. Are you listening to me?”
“I’m listening.”
“Good because I’m not shitting you now. You send these boys up to the hills and train them in a bunch of antiquated shit. You really think you need to run eighteen miles and make a bomb out of paper clips to praise Allah? This ain’t the OSS, Reed. Nobody’s going to parachute you into occupied France. It never occurred to you that maybe you were training for the sort of war they fought seventy years ago?”
Reed said nothing.
“You were swinging on goddamn monkey bars and you never thought: huh, this is oddly antiquated and why are my palms so goddamn blistered?”
Stone looked at him, back at the road, back at Reed.
“We’re the most watched society in human history. Observed, intercepted, spied on. They got satellites and server farms and microwave arrays that do nothing but. I don’t care how deep you get in the woods someone is watching or listening or something. You believe me?”
“What happened to Suleyman?”
“Do you believe me or not?”
“Yeah.”
“What’s that?”
“I said I do.”
Stone nodded but it was a solemn act, as if in disappointment.
“I don’t know where he is, but if he’s not in federal custody already he will be soon enough. Sounds like he just flaked.”
“His k-knee.”
“What’s that?”
“Something was wrong with his knee.”
“Yeah, well, shit like that happens, don’t it?”
They rode a few miles in silence before Reed asked then what?
“Then what?” Stone said. “Exactly. Get the boys in the hills, train ’em up big and strong, and then what? Simple. Keep ’em around until the feds catch wind of it. Bunch of ragheads ultra-marathoning their way through cracker America. How long you think it takes? Keep ’em around, Reed, and then the feds catch on and eventually they raid the place. Here again you get the helicopters. You get the night-vision goggles. Some Yemeni-American teenager dying in a stress position. And that whole Atlanta plot they kept hearing rumblings about? Well, shit, there it was. Busted. Beautiful work, gentlemen. Time to e-mail the good news to Director Comey. Time for a celebratory drink because it’s a great day for truth, justice, and the American way. Back-slapping all around. Now wouldn’t that take a lot of pressure off the real plot, the one that’s actually going down?”
“Where’s the professor in all this?”
“Things got too hot for the professor.”
“He’s gone?”
“He’s cooling his prayer rug for a bit. Patient man, the professor.”
“Where am I in all this?”
“Where are you?” Stone slapped the wheel with the heel of one hand. “Shit, son. You’re in dead center. You’re the real in the real plot.”
*
They stopped at a motel off I-24 just outside Chattanooga. A horseshoe of concrete and potted cacti. The pool long since filled, only a few deck chairs scattered as if misremembering their lives. Stone told him to sit in the car. He came back a few minutes later and slid back into the driver’s seat.
“He’s going to take a picture now. You don’t say anything, all right?”
“What are we doing here?”
“He thinks you’re an illegal. Up from Mexico or El Salvador or wherever they come from so don’t open your mouth, you hear me?”
The man was grievously overweight, waddling around the motel room in athletic shorts and a T-shirt that read VOLUNTEER NATION. He took the photograph and told Stone and Reed to sit on the bed while he cut the light. The back of the room was set up as a makeshift darkroom, stop bath and hardening agent. A fishing line of prints. The chemicals smelled like his mother’s nail polish remover. When it was dry he went to work with an X-Acto knife.
“Whatever happened to the film you were making?” Reed asked Stone.
“Shut up.”
“Pacifism, right?”
“Anarchism.”
The man heated a credit card, pressed the new name, cooled it.
“I have heart issues,” Stone said. “I’m easily constipated.”
“I’m the r-r-real in the real plot.”
“I thought I asked you not to talk. I thought that was the single bit of instruction I gave you.”
It took no more than an hour to establish Reed’s new identity—credit card, driver’s license—and then they were riding again.
“What now?” Reed asked.
“I’m taking you somewhere we can debate things,” Stone said, though not with any enthusiasm. All at once he appeared tired, suddenly and irrevocably exhausted. “Sit on the back porch and count the angels on the head of a pin. Theological nuances the imam might have skipped right past.”
“Where are you taking me?”
“Where do you want to go, Reed? Why don’t you tell me that?”
“I want to go wherever I’m supposed to go.”
“I think that might be a high-security U.S. detention center in a third-party state. A nice fenced enclosure with dogs and guards and a release rate of less than zero. They call that a black site. So how about try again?”
“I thought I was the chosen one.”
Stone’s face was pink and splotched, his breath catching in his nose. He appeared about to speak but then stopped himself. “There’s a place I can take you for the time being,” he said. “A little lake house up in the mountains. A safe house. Relatively safe, I think. When you get there I’ve got somebody for you to meet.”
“Who?”
“Wait and see.”
“The professor?”
“An old colleague of mine.”
“This is part of the plan?”
Reed waited
for some answer and finally it came in the form of Stone nodding his weary head.
“All right then,” Reed said. “Take me there.”
They drove another half-hour and then Stone turned onto a one-lane road.
“This is the place?” Reed asked. “This is the safe house?”
“Be patient.”
“How did you know who Ahmad was? You worked with him?”
“Ahmad? Goodness, you’re just full of questions, aren’t you?” The road turned to gravel and here and there were signs for horse trails. “Difficult ones too. This question, this is more a metaphysical question, I think.”
“You worked with him?”
“Are we talking vocation versus avocation here? ’Cause if so I’d like to quote the scriptures.”
Ahead was a small house, shingled and quaint and completely empty. Beyond it the teardrop of a mountain lake. An old Toyota Camry sat beneath a shed.
“The Lord is a man of War,” Stone said. “The Lord is his name.”
He parked the van and they stepped out onto the gravel. The day was cold and gray, the sun risen, but without conviction.
“What I’m trying to say here, Reed, what we know, is that the known is never as powerful as the unknown. What is always bows to what isn’t, to what could be.”
“Who is we?”
“Secrets are power, sir. Do you believe me?”
“Why should I believe anything you say?”
Stone laughed. “You say that as if you don’t already.”
“Answer the question.”
“The question?” Stone blew into his hands for warmth. “How ’bout the answer? The answer is that this whole little setup is nothing more than an excuse to get to you. First, the professor—”
“What do you know about the professor?”
Stone made the motion of zipping closed his lips and when he was finished Reed reached out slowly, almost gently, and put his fingers around Stone’s throat. It seemed an exhausted gesture, but no less necessary.
“Give me one reason not to kill you,” he said.
Stone unzipped his mouth. “You’re letting your attachment to the professor cloud your judgment. Let me assure you that the professor is not suffering from the same blindness.” He leaned toward Reed as best he could. “They even sent someone to watch you.”