Jihadi

by Yusuf Toropov

  It isn’t so much that he started writing this book in order to keep himself from going crazy, which is what AbdulKarim, who smuggles him paper in the Yard, always says. Everybody goes crazy somewhere down the line. Writing a book won’t stop that. Writing a book can repay a debt, though. Writing a book can confirm one’s guilt.

  The dead guy telling this story remembers two human bodies of contrasting sizes, face down on busy Malaika Street. A spreading pool of mingled blood. The sound of an approaching siren. A gun in Thelonius’s hand.

  Thelonius made a promise, not to Fatima, but to himself. To cut through the bullshit. To plead guilty. The book does that. ‘Hi, Becky,’ he writes now.

  The dead guy telling this story remembers redflowinghaired Becky recruiting him into the Directorate in 1992. Smiling green eyes from behind the barrier of her desk. His certainty that she would soon touch him. That she would take good care of him. That there was no shame in that. That there could be honour in being taken care of, a home in that. Becky came from a long line of caretakers. Her mother, Prudence, had been a caretaker. Prudence’s husband had needed taking care of, too, having been raised by alcoholics.

  Becky’s caring, green eyes smiling at Thelonius. Making everything okay. He only killed people when specifically instructed to do so by the United States of America.

  See how the small white milk carton on that breakfast tray is vibrating?

  2 In Which Liddell Engages in Fashionable Howling

  During the first hour of September 9, 2005, he showered, dressed, ate his breakfast in the middle of the night, gathered his things, stared out the window to make sure his limousine was there, and, after a suitable delay, climbed into the back. He enjoyed making the limousine wait, then making it hurry. He told the driver he preferred to do at least eighty on these predawn jaunts to Logan.

  When his plane touched down in the Islamic Republic, nineteen hours later, Wafa A––, a twenty-one-year-old pregnant mother-to-be, had not yet begun her breakfast. Wafa happened to live in a disputed region of the Islamic Republic. She did not have an appetite. She was thinking about her sister Fatima.

  Wafa reminded herself that she must call Fatima and congratulate her for being hired as a translator for the Bureau of Islamic Investigation. Wafa sat on a plastic lawn chair in an overgrown green area, at a bone-white plastic table she shared with her husband and mother-in-law, drinking tea with them in the sun, thinking this thought of reaching out to her sister Fatima, of warning her again about the dangers of working with men, when hundreds of tiny metal darts, their points tight and sharp as needles, tore into her flesh and the flesh of her unborn baby.

  According to Wafa’s husband, the tea drinkers heard a strange collapsing sound. Almost an inhalation.

  PLOOF.

  Followed by screams. He turned in his chair, intending to see whatever it was that had made the odd noise, but never had the chance. He only heard the sound of metal projectiles finding their way, at high speed, into his body, leaving him in a state of shock.

  THWOCK.

  There were not enough darts embedded in Wafa’s husband’s flesh to kill him. Nor was Wafa’s mother-in-law hit by enough darts, in the necessary points, to lead to major organ damage or blood loss. Wafa, however, facing that wave head-on, strafed by that barrage of tiny darts, saw herself and her unborn, unnamed daughter shredded.

  The miniature metal darts were called flechettes. Flechettes are less than an inch in length, about the size of a finishing nail. Pointed at the front, they carry four fins in the rear, designed to accelerate their speed. To the casual observer, they resemble small sporting darts.

  On that warm, pleasant morning in the village of D—, seven thousand five hundred flechettes had been packed into a shell which was fired from a tank rolling behind a stand of trees near Wafa’s home. The shell disintegrated in midair with that PLOOF sound, the sound of air sucking into itself.

  The shell scattered its darts in a conical pattern over an area about nine hundred feet long and three hundred feet wide. Only about four feet of that three-hundred-foot-wide arc had disrupted the tea drinkers.

  Flechettes are designed to maim and kill concealed enemy soldiers: soldiers hiding in dense vegetation, for instance. Flechettes will pierce a pine plank or a thin sheet of steel. Once they reach high velocity, they curve and hook into every available surface, including human flesh. When flechettes reach maximum speed, they travel with such force that sometimes only the fins at the back are left sticking out from walls.

  At the moment Wafa and her unborn child were being peppered with flechettes, Thelonius Liddell was not yet ready to deplane. His aircraft was coasting to a stop on a runway no one was supposed to know about. He was reading, scribbling in the margins of a long briefing about his mission in the Islamic Republic. Thelonius, uncertain about this mission and preoccupied with it, read his brief for the third time. He found something in it unpersuasive, and suspected it contained factual errors.

  A few miles away, Wafa and her daughter were preoccupied with dying.

  As Wafa died, another shell from another tank penetrated the room where laughing Hassan D., aged two and a half, sat with his taciturn eight-year-old brother, whose given name will not be repeated here.

  Their father, Atta D., an attentive man, had spotted two American soldiers on a hillside, gathered up both boys, and escorted them inside for safety’s sake. When Thelonius Liddell’s unnumbered plane touched down on its unnamed runway in support of its classified mission, Atta’s boys were preoccupied with learning a new board game. Atta was teaching this game to them when he noticed a large hole in the side of his home.

  The shell that made that hole in Atta’s home disintegrated and released its own thousands of flechettes, hooking into the toddler, his brother, and his father.

  KA-THOK.

  Little Hassan, who resembled his late mother, was the closest person to the brand-new hole in the wall. Despite being the smallest one in the room, he accumulated the largest number of flechettes. Hassan, who was Atta’s favourite, was preoccupied with dying, too.

  Of the three, Atta, the father, took the fewest hooks. None of his flechettes was fatal.

  Much later, investigators from the United Nations examined the bloody wall near which Hassan was killed. They noted that it was studded with flechettes, but that there were some blank spots. Some of the investigators conjectured that these blank spots on the wall corresponded to the positions of the two boys as they had crouched on the floor.

  The game they had been playing there was called Sorry!

  Sorry! is an American board game adapted from something Muslims invented and started playing in about the year 1400. Sorry! was first sold in 1940 by Parker Brothers, a company based in Salem, Massachusetts.

  v. Sorry!

  And awake. Here, the first of many fatal discrepancies. There are scores, hundreds of examples of Liddell’s clinical disregard for plain fact from which to choose, but the one offered here, his embarrassingly verifiable ignorance of the datum that the British version of the board game Sorry! was patented in 1929 and marketed in the UK under that title the following year, is worth examining closely. Sorry! was first sold, under licence, in the United States in 1934 – not 1940, as Liddell claims. On such slips empires fall. The sheer volume of such factual errors in the manuscript, many of which take the form of seditious libel, gives rise to a host of grave security concerns. Note that Liddell used verifiable names for all his main characters, and then, lacking internet access, simply made up whatever information he could not research properly in captivity. I operate under no such constraints. This telling Sorry! slip is brought to you by our Wi-Fi-enabled Motel 6, to which we are warming. Here, inexhaustible white stacked sugar packets attempt to atone for the execrable coffee. Clean white sheets, clean white sink, postcard-perfect view of the pool: loving shades of aquamarine and deep blue, colours Mother favored.

  At the moment Thelonius’s plane landed, sixteen-year-old Islam D., Atta’s thi
rd son, was walking home from a friend’s house. Islam knew the road well and was staring into space, not attending to where he was going. He was preoccupied. Focused as he was on the physical beauty of the female human form, he did not hear the PLOOF or notice any of the nearby tanks.

  Islam happened to be standing at the very furthest edge of a vast wave of incoming metal projectiles. At the moment he was struck by his flechette, he was thinking of a pretty girl he liked. That girl was Fatima A—, Wafa’s sister, the one who had just gotten that job at the Bureau of Islamic Investigation. She had visited yesterday. Islam had seen her. He had never spoken to her.

  Fatima was out of Islam’s league and he knew it, but he liked thinking about her just the same. He’d been thinking about her a great deal lately. The very last thought he had before getting hit by his flechette took the form of a question mark and an exclamation point about Fatima.

  Islam had posed a question to himself, and answered it for himself, in less than a hundredth of a second. The question concerned the quality and placement of Fatima’s hair. Because she wore a headscarf, usually gold, Islam had never seen it. That was the question mark.

  vi. Islam

  Presumably Islam Deen, eldest son of a known terrorist leader. Liddell’s straight-faced claim to have insights into this (dead) young man’s amorous longings during his final moments suggest the scale of his, Liddell’s, broadening problems with schizophrenia.

  Islam imagined Fatima’s hair as fine and silky, straight black and very long, extending down to the precise midpoint of her back. He imagined a small mole on the small of Fatima’s back, just below the point where her hair stopped. That was the exclamation point. He happened to be right about all of that, which was remarkable.

  In Islam’s case, there was only one wound. A single flechette struck a vulnerable spot in his neck. He began the process of bleeding out from a tear in his jugular vein, which takes less time than you might think. Within just a couple of minutes, Islam was preoccupied with dying, too.

  There was something different about this mission. Something wrong with it. Thelonius couldn’t quite put a finger on what it was. He got off his plane.

  3 In Which Liddell Hallucinates

  On the morning of October 14, 2005, Thelonius Liddell, having just returned from the last overseas assignment of his career, noticed that the milk carton on his dining-room table was vibrating.

  This was forty-three years, three months, and seven days after Thelonius Liddell was born – thirty-six days after the unpleasantness with the flechettes – and exactly two months before he would be escorted into the Beige Motel.

  Thelonius tried not to think about why a gallon of milk would be vibrating all by itself.

  Ever since he’d returned from the Islamic Republic the previous day, things had been vibrating inexplicably. In the garage, a clear, tightly capped plastic jug of antifreeze had shaken long after he kicked it away. He saw it waver for ten full seconds, heard it shiver, still half-full and still insistent, from behind a rake that had fallen in front of it. Becky walked right past. Antifreeze is not supposed to vibrate at any time. He took a deep stress breath and walked away.

  And a framed photo of Child the Cat. That had been vibrating, too.

  Tough it out, kid. Tough it out. Stick with Sarge.

  Becky did not need to know about the vibrating. Not yet. He recorded these incidents in a tiny book he might or might not decide to show Becky.

  I know something is happening, Thelonius wrote.

  vii. I know something is happening

  A ludicrously inappropriate Bob Dylan reference.

  He wrote a sentence with quote marks, ‘Where then are you going???’

  He scratched that last sentence out. Then he put the little book in his back pocket.

  In the kitchen, Becky could be heard but not seen. She was on the phone, negotiating something complex. Becky was good at negotiating complex things.

  The dead guy telling this story wants you to imagine Fatima’s neighbours.

  He never met them. He has to imagine them, just like you do. Every day, he writes this book you’re reading. Today he wants you to imagine them drinking tea, opening their discussion about how scandalous Fatima did not spend any time grieving her pregnant sister, Wafa.

  The two had been quite close, her mother always said, but the women on the block insisted that one would never know that. For the neighbours, Fatima’s lack of emotion was troubling, and her lack of propriety more so. She was nineteen, a woman now. Her sister had passed. Her niece had passed. She had obligations to her family. Yet she appeared to live only to mount stairs and close doors. She lived for solitude. Why?

  The neighbours had many conjectures. They settled on a theory put forward by Mrs. H., who lived directly across the narrow street from Fatima: She preferred the company of lustful men, conversed with them online for hours at a time. She sat in her room staring at the computer, no doubt typing out and receiving messages from unwholesome fellows.

  Her typing was visible from Mrs. H’s bedroom window: the distracted girl neglected to close her blinds. The messages themselves were not legible from that distance, but Mrs. H had opinions as to their content. At any rate, no one had seen her weep.

  Fatima had always been regarded as unusual. It was not surprising to them that she would avoid doing what a woman should do.

  viii. Fatima had always been regarded as unusual.

  Now regarded as a captured terrorist and a major operative within Liddell’s network in the Islamic Republic. Bitch.

  Through my window, I note a family of Brazilians congregating by the swimming pool for what appears to be some sort of musical reunion. Barking orders between verses, feigning unawareness of the late hour, their drunken, overbearing paterfamilias sings badly and too loud, and spouts occasional English profanities. Makes passes at the help. Points to where his daughter must sit.

  It is ever thus.

  Abominable.

  Wait until I get him back. Fucking control freak.

  4 In Which Victory Is Defined

  Thelonius was trying to decide whether he wanted Becky’s insights on that rattling milk container, a persistent blur of colour and a wash of sound that was increasing in volume and raising the stakes of his morning, when he saw the word CHANGE writing itself in milk in midair. The word collapsed into a puddle on the dining-room floor. He put down his coffee cup and covered his mouth with his palm.

  Whenever something is vibrating, you’re supposed to stop and look at it, according to the weirdo back in the Republic: ‘Vibration is change.’

  ix. the weirdo

  Another member of Liddell’s cadre. Entered in the prison records as one Abd’al Dayem, ‘slave of the eternal’. Codename Raisin. Died December 2005, of lung cancer.

  The Plum, for instance, is change.

  Complicating everything that follows (the guilty dead guy telling this story acknowledges) is the deepening illness of Thelonius’s wife.

  Becky has a grey tumour, larger than a plum by now, surely, that the Directorate’s physicians isolated. They reported a clear pattern of accelerating growth. This type of tumour mimics schizophrenia with increasing accuracy. It culminates in blindness and, some unknown number of weeks later, death. It is located alarmingly near the centre of Becky’s brain. No one can get at the Plum. It has been expanding with dark purpose, they guess, for about five years.

  Doctors caught the Plum during an MRI for a nerve problem Becky inherited from her mother, Prudence. This was an entirely separate problem that also required periodic monitoring. As it broadens, that Plum, Becky’s behavioural and mood swings become more pronounced. A change.

  What to write next.

  The guilty dead guy telling this story decides he doesn’t feel like writing anything else on this page. He plans to start fresh with a new sheet tomorrow.

  x.

  Dad opted to make Becky’s final years count. Thelonius went along. He justified this silence by thinking, �
��We decided not to tell her.’ But whenever Thelonius thought ‘we’ about that kind of thing, he meant Dad.

  Thelonius called Becky’s father Dad. He could’ve pushed Dad on certain secrets, could’ve objected earlier and harder. But Dad always had the final word on secrets.

  xi. the final word on secrets

  Diagram here of the human heart, wounded.

  The dead guy telling this story notes that Dad is dead now. Another change.

  ‘Everything changes,’ the Raisin said, ‘except the face of God.’

  ‘Whenever something changes, the first moral and legal imperative is to consider the new development closely; simply look at it without preconception,’ Fatima typed in a message box on the website IslamIsPeace.com.

  ‘We must stop and look in order to determine whether that which is new is halal or haram. Not everything new is haram. Not everything familiar is halal.’

  xii. halal, haram

  One means illegal, the other legal. I forget now.

  Ever with the patient and blah, blah, blah. All on your own now, though, aren’t you, bitch?

  The discussion thread in which she posted was called SORRY, SISTERS. A man had started that discussion thread. Fatima was defending her right, as a Muslim woman, to use the internet to organize public protests, a right some members of the group had questioned.