He’s expected to arrive in an armored vehicle, one journalist offered. And we are not to expect to speak with him.
Any family members present? Barbara asked.
Only an uncle, with a lawyer.
A limousine pulled up to the gate, and a suited man stepped out to speak with the guard, but the vehicle would not be allowed through. The lawyer opened the door and escorted a thin wiry man out. The uncle, presumably. Which meant there was a Yasir Hamdi. Which meant he wasn’t John.
Desperate, Barbara moved quickly. This was her only chance. She had to know whether this kid had met John, knew John. She had to ask him. She separated herself from the journalists and walked toward the two men, stepping between them. She kept her eye on the young straight-backed marine leading the way toward the gangplank that led onto the brig. He didn’t turn around.
Who are you? the lawyer asked, taking her arm.
A journalist who wants to bring this story to the public, Barbara murmured. A mother suffering the absence of her son. Mr. Hamdi? she asked, bending her head to bring it closer to him. Is there a Mrs. Hamdi? she asked, but got no response.
I need to talk to your nephew, she persisted.
A-hem, the lawyer said, taking her elbow, though he kept walking. For whom are you covering this story?
That remains to be seen, Barbara said. The more access, the better the story; the better the story, the higher the odds of selling it. Publicity could be useful to your case.
The lawyer nodded. He’d already thought of that. FYI, he said. We haven’t been guaranteed access to the boy ourselves. Decisions—or perhaps I should say indecisions—are made case by case, which means they’re taking their time. In the meantime, the boy remains in lockup. In the meantime, his parents are losing sleep, losing their health, losing everything they have. And this is taking place in the United States of America.
I know all about it, Barbara said.
The young marine stood aside and ushered them onto the brig and into a bare inner chamber. Wait here, he said and left.
She was in. She’d made it in. She waited. They waited. They were made to wait long enough for Barbara to have second and third thoughts.
Half an hour later, the marine returned to say not today, and Barbara exploded. What do you mean, not today?
The navy isn’t prepared, the marine said. They need time to set it up. The meeting might be rescheduled to take place off-site.
It means, the lawyer translated, that they’re not allowing a face-to-face. They want some kind of screen, the standard prison setup.
She’d gotten so close, she was inside, standing with those closest to the prisoner, and inside, close as she was, she had missed Yasir Hamdi’s arrival outside. As a journalist huddled outside, she would have at least seen the boy. Even the crowd outside the gate had seen more. Somewhere in her stomach a strange rumble gathered and came up her throat and emerged hysterically. She laughed. She cried. She laughed and cried.
Hamdi’s uncle backed away. The lawyer escorted her. Get ahold of yourself, he said.
He directed her down the plank, onto the pier, and onward, through the gates. The familiar clack of her heels on metal comforted and calmed her. Reminded her of who she was. She’d gotten in once; she could do it again. The limousine pulled up and the lawyer handed her in, not so gently.
Now, he said, tell me who you are.
Barbara reached into her bag for a tissue and noted that her hands were shaking. She couldn’t talk. This strange hysteria was still in her throat, choking her. She’d come so close. Hamdi must have met John Jude. Of this she was certain.
My son, she hiccuped, is missing. I’m doing everything I can to find him.
She heard Hamdi’s uncle exhale. He seemed to have been holding his breath. She turned to speak with him, but he turned away. He has nothing to say to a fellow sufferer, a hysterical woman, Barbara thought.
Where’s your car? the lawyer asked. We’ll drop you off.
————
BARBARA CAME ACROSS a story reporting on the interrogation of John Walker Lindh. Included in the story were a number of Radack’s e-mails. Phone calls and e-mails to and from the reporter were traced to the Hawkins law firm, and the Department put Radack under investigation.
This is good for us, Bill said. And good for this country. There are also rumors of illegal detentions. These stories will start turning public opinion against Ashcroft and the Bush administration. Which could help us. Now we just have to wait for John to turn up.
He will turn up, Bill said, for which Barbara kissed him.
OUTER BANKS (OBX), NORTH CAROLINA—MAY 2002
MAY 1, 2002. Every age, the Hegelian theory of history goes, is a progression toward better, an improvement over what came before. This is May 1, of A.D. 2002. This is the age of oil, the age of the corporation, the age of terrorism, the age of martyrdom. It is surely not an accident that I am describing one and the same age. This is the Virginia Correctional Facility of Alexandria City, VA, 1212 Alexandria Station, cell block P. On a cot in his cell, John Walker Lindh awoke at dawn without the muezzin call, without an alarm, with only his inner clock borne of faith and passion, and washed his hands and face at his urinal of a sink and kneeled on number two of two towels provided by prison housekeeping. He knows the way to Mecca and prays toward it. Twenty years minus six months already served minus three years for good behavior, that is, sixteen and a half years from now, in the year 2019, perhaps he will make the pilgrimage in person, in body as well as mind. That is, if his lawyers get what they hope for. He will be thirty-eight years old. By then it might be the Muslim era: M.E. 2019.
From another cell down the hall, and another cell around the bend, and from the next hall, and the next cell the voices of other Muslims in prayer echo, altogether twenty Muslims praying, giving voice to belief, la illaha il’allah, no god but god, et Muhammed rasulu, twenty Muslim men bearing witness to the God of the prophet of Islam in, lalalalala, an American facility—
Prison Guard: Where do you think you are? Where DO they think they are? This is no mosque in Medina, this is an American prison goddammit paid for by the American people, so keep it down, shutthefuckup—
in an American facility nine miles from the White House, where our president worships his own God.
IT IS MAY 1, 2002, early morning on visitor’s day at the prison in Alexandria, and Barbara is already in line, hoping to meet Lindh’s mother, hoping to one day be a mother waiting to see her son, knowing he is alive. She is preparing herself for this future, for this false incarnation of her baby, her John Jude, in baggy prison jumpsuit and shuffling slippers, ears made prominent by a close prison shave, and in the extreme bareness of his head and face, temples overwide and eyes too close, LYING FACTS. They will remake him in the common image of the common criminal housed in a maximum-security facility, though he is her beautiful, her gentle son. His crime: an ability to immerse himself in the new and other and become, a selfless ability to other himself, though he’d started life as her baby, though he was her scholarly John Jude, her Goofy-Foot John, summa cum laude graduate of John Harlan High. By the time he turned sixteen, he’d already been collector of various things collectible, rapster, songwriter, skater, and honor student of world cultures. At eighteen, he was a surfer, mystic, student of Arabic, and more. He was known online as Sun-T for Ice T, as Attar for the Sufi poet Fariduddin Attar, as Ibrahim for the father of Ishmael, as Abdul for—she couldn’t remember for whom. He was perhaps unduly influenced by books. Reading, he became hero, narrator, adventurer, and walked and talked the parts. In Psych 101, this is known as role-playing; in literature, empathy. Also the source of Shakespeare’s genius. But in the twenty-first century, genius has become a crime, and for this crime he will be sentenced just as he is coming of age as a man, a danger to non-man, the system.
It seems to Barbara now that John had been thrust into this mode of becoming through no fault of his own when she and Bill named him for their favorite Beatle
. On December 8, 1981, the first anniversary of Lennon’s death, the day she learned she was one month pregnant. She was on her way home from the doctor in her old orange Datsun 510 with only AM radio, because Bill had an afternoon meeting at his firm’s Baltimore office and needed the Toyota to get there. She was driving and praying that this Datsun on last legs would give her another year, though it had always been something of a lemon and she’d long suspected that its first owner, her long-haired professor of economics, had replaced the Japanese parts on this car with cheaper American ones which were constantly cracking and breaking; she had broken down on every street and street corner in the area, and she and this orange lemon were notorious for toxic spillages of every kind, motor oil, gas, fatally sweet green radiator fluid. You don’t need this heartache, the mechanic advised. Get yourself a reliable little Honda and dump this bad job somewhere. But they had put all their savings on the house in Adams Morgan and taken out a mortgage and now they were bringing a child into the world, and she wanted not to work its first three years. On the radio Hey Jude came on just as the car stalled at the light on California and Eighteenth Streets, and the honking behind her threatened to drown the music, and she turned up the volume and placed her hand on her soon-to-be-kicked belly and didn’t care that she was draining the battery. After which she might just get out and abandon this orange turncoat. In college she’d played the song over and over and over again until Caitlin her roommate threatened to smash the LP. So they’d middle-named John for it, Hey Jude …Take a sad song and make it better. MAKE THIS SONG BETTER INDEED. Better better better better—
MAY 1, 2002. Border skirmishes between India and Kashmir have resulted in a breakdown of diplomacy, and the threat of nuclear war is high. Pakistan plans to start testing missiles and is preparing to shift troops from the border with Afghanistan to the front in Kashmir, where tensions with India are quickly rising. Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee told Indian soldiers along the tense frontier in Kashmir to prepare for a decisive battle against terrorism.
IT IS STILL MAY 1, and still more than 2 million are starving to death in South Africa. May Day. May Day. MAYDAY—
Also today, in what will become the largest bankruptcy case ever, WorldCom prepares to file for Chapter 11.
Also today, the president reminds us, that is, as of last Thursday, no suicide bombers managed to blow themselves up on buses, subways, in markets, or in front of falafel stands. We are doing something right, he says. God loves America, he says.
UNABLE TO SIT STILL, desperate to do something, to act, to move mountains, Barbara packs a change of clothes and drives down to the Outer Banks. And all the way down, she listens to John’s music. She begins with the Ensemble Ibn ’Arabi, a meditative set of songs, moves on to Shankar, to Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan. She is surprised by some of the CDs in her son’s collection: Steve Reich’s Music for 18 Musicians, which she didn’t know John liked. The Kronos Quartet, and of course Dylan.
Dylan chants. Barbara drives. And sobs. She turns left on Wright Memorial Bridge and remembers last night’s dream. She’d been flying. She’d been airborne and exuberant, and now she can’t remember why or where, whether she’d flown over anywhere in particular, seen anything. She is here now, crossing the Wright Brothers Memorial Bridge, to the Outer Banks, where man first flew, and she knows. That the Outer Banks has been expecting her. That the house has been waiting. She opens the windows and inhales the saline air. She feels John in the air. The Saab is in the driveway. His long board leans in its place in the garage; his short board clutters the front hall. So she changes into a swimsuit and a pair of aloha board pants, an old gift from John. She finds and slips into one of his rash guards, and though too long, it’s snug. She loads his short board into the Saab and drives up Byrd to the surfers’ stretch of beach. She finds a spot on the corner of Byrd and Lindbergh, beside a blue jalopy she recognizes. Sylvie’s car. She unloads. She walks to the beach. She looks. She watches the waves.
So she sees the waves collect themselves, gather meaning, heave over, and disperse to nonmeaning. Two sides of the same thing, rising, dropping. What John wants her to know.
She looks up, sees the girls bobbing in the water. So she waves. So the girls see her and ride toward her. So she walks toward them, enters the water, with Katie and Sylvie at her sides. She does as they do. Rushes the water, surfboard in front of her, and then with the board supporting her, keeping her afloat, with the girls encouraging her, giving her a hand, she paddles with them toward the depths. They paddle past the third breaker and move toward the fourth. They duck under and come out past the fifth. They keep paddling, past the sixth and the seventh, where it’s finally quiet. They are beyond the crashing waves, beyond the noise. She pulls her knees up under her as they do. She waits.
Thus three boards bob in the water, thus three wahines wait for a wave. They pass on the first one. They duck under the second. And then the third one begins to build, and Katie signals. Sylvie gives the sign. This is yours, a good beginner’s wave. They push her board into it. So she crouches on her toes, hands on the sides of her board, balancing. She breathes and waits, feels the water build under her, heave and lift her. So she unbends her knees halfway, stands, and gives herself to the wave, to the pleasure of giving herself, a surrender. Her weight shifts to match the water’s weight. Her knees bend and unbend. One and two. One and then two, left shift, right shift, left shift, right. She moves with the wave, with the rhythm of the wave. And she understands. It’s all continuous movement, no standing still, no holding on. There is only becoming. Being doesn’t exist. So she keeps moving, shifting her weight right, shifting her weight left, right left right left right. And the wave lifts her, the wave carries her, and she rides. It is awesome, it is extraordinary, it is absurd, and, yes, glorious. She feels Jilly with her, holding her up. She feels John beside her, keeping the rhythm: left, right, left, right—she is a fifty-two-year-old mother on her son’s board. She is fifty-two years old and becoming. She rides for a long half minute, the fullest thirty seconds of her life.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This work is indebted, as all books are, to the many texts that informed it. First and foremost, Henry Corbin’s astounding Alone with the Alone: Creative Imagination in the Sūfism of Ibn ’Arabī escorted me into Sufism. Harold Bloom’s introductory essay on Corbin showed me how the mystical ideas and myths of the Kabbalah expand into this wider system of thought. Idries Shah’s The Sufis introduced me to the founding Sufis and their work.
Several books and articles offered insight into the education and psychology of martyrs, among them Whistleblowers by C. Fred Alford; Kamikaze Diaries by Emiko Ohnuki-Tierney; Jane Mayer’s “Lost in the Jihad,” for The New Yorker; Laurie Abraham’s “Anatomy of a Whistleblower” for Mother Jones; Mark Kukis’s “My Heart Became Attached”; and William Dalrymple’s “Inside the Madrasas,” for The New York Review of Books. The notion of Islamabad as D.C. dropped into the foothills of the Himalayas is from Dalrymple’s “Days of Rage,” published in The New Yorker. From Charles Seife’s Zero came the idea of Zero Point as a cosmic/spiritual starting point. The translation of the Tao is by Ron Hogan, editor of Beatrice.com. The lines of poetry at the end of part three are from Poems of Arab Andalusia, translated by Cola Franzen and published by City Lights. Edward Rice’s biography Captain Sir Richard Francis Burton provided me with an example of a scholar-adventurer and the mixed motivations that inspired him.
Several publishers generously allowed me to excerpt from published work, and I am grateful for their permission. Special thanks to Eddie Hirsch for his “I Am Going to Start Living Like a Mystic” from Lay Back the Darkness, published by Knopf. The translation of the ’Arabi poem “My Heart Is Capable of Every Form” is from Corbin’s Alone with the Alone, published by Princeton University Press. Faiz Ahmed Faiz’s “Don’t Ask for That Love Again,” from The Rebel’s Silhouette: Selected Poems, was translated by Agha Shahid Ali and published by University of Massachusetts Press. APA Publication
s GmbH & Co. Verlag KG, Singapore Branch, provided permission for the excerpts from its Insight Guide to Pakistan, 3rd Edition. And Appleseed Music, Inc., allowed the reprinting of the lines from Arlo Guthrie’s “Alice’s Restaurant.”
I’m deeply grateful to the following people: my first reader, Stephanie Grant, whose close readings and nuanced comments made this a better book, and whose friendship serves me as a rock; Patricia Chao and Jonathan Freedman, who read early, sketchy beginnings; my luminous agent, Mary Evans, whose capacity for optimism and desire for transcendent life shaped this story. David Ebershoff’s tireless editing helped sculpt the book into its final form.
Finally, I’m indebted to Stephen Spewock, who continues to tolerate the tortuous writing process, the long years from happy conception through to the torment of publication.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
PEARL ABRAHAM is the author of three novels, The Seventh Beggar, Giving Up America, and The Romance Reader, and the editor of the anthology Een sterke vrouw, wie zal haar vinden? Her stories and essays have appeared in literary quarterlies and anthologies. Abraham teaches literature and creative writing at Western New England College.
This is a work of fiction. All incidents and dialogue, and all characters with the exception of some well-known public figures, are products of the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Where real-life public figures appear, the situations, incidents, and dialogues concerning those persons are entirely fictional and are not intended to depict actual events or to change the entirely fictional nature of the work. In all other respects, any resemblance to persons living or dead is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2010 by Pearl Abraham
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