Jihadi

by Yusuf Toropov

  Records were burned. Death threats were issued. Opinions were shaped. In August of the same year, with George and Irene on the outs, Wiley Clare, a lanky, itinerant North Carolina advertising man visiting San Francisco on business, encountered Irene in the bohemian restaurant where she earned a meagre income as a waitress. Was she one of those hippies? Had she ever seen those English boys with the long hair? Was she a fan? Did she know that one of them had said he was more important than Jesus? Did she believe that? Would she like two tickets to their concert, tickets that he had gotten straight from the record company and couldn’t dream of using, since he had promised his wife he wouldn’t, after what that boy had said about Jesus?

  (So the guilty dead guy writing this book reconstructs the event, which he did not witness.)

  That afternoon, with you still at the babysitter’s, your mother began an affair with Clare. She accepted his tickets, visited his motel room, and took his seed, which struck home.

  (Nor that event, of course.)

  She attended the Candlestick Park concert, with you in tow. Swore you to silence about the trip. Introduced you to Wiley, who, having somehow materialized in the parking lot after the performance, tried and failed to make you laugh. He smelled of too much cologne. On the way back, in his car, he kept talking to you and you kept on not answering. Irene turned to you from the front seat and insisted you make an effort to be nice to Mr. Clare. Which made you say a coarse word or two about his history of maternal incest, right out loud, with him right there in the driver’s seat.

  xlviii. the Candlestick Park concert

  As it turned out, the band’s final gig before paying customers.

  She turned away from you.

  It could not possibly have been your last discussion with your mother, but it is the last one you remember.

  ‘It wouldn’t be prudent to tell me how my cat got sick?’

  ‘Mr. Liddell, I have been directing traffic here at the shelter for some time. Long before this incident.’

  ‘I beg your pardon? It’s not an incident.’

  She scowled.

  ‘Nineteen years,’ Melanie Del Rey went on, ‘and in that time I have learned never to involve myself in domestic disputes. This being a litigious community.’ She raised her eyebrows meaningfully. ‘That means people sue each other around here over these incidents.’

  ‘I know what litigious means.’

  ‘I see. Then tell your wife the law is not on her side. One more such encounter as we are having today, and she might find herself dealing with a visit from Animal Protection. Nobody wants that. Such cases are sad for all involved. Couples may be prosecuted for animal abuse as a single legal entity in Massachusetts, you know. Do you want her to go to jail?’

  Here she left a meaningful hole in the conversation, one that he could not fill. The pain in his throat returned with special vigour.

  ‘Take a seat.’ Thelonius did not move. ‘I will check to see how Child is for you. Touch and go, frankly. There is going to have to be a regimen of medication, if he pulls through. And as I say, no one knows for sure what happened to this cat.’

  xlix. what happened to this cat

  In my defence, I quote from the Centers for Disease Control a passage outlining the wholly unacceptable risks I faced at this point: ‘Cats do play a role in the spread of toxoplasmosis to humans, and are a cause for concern among pregnant women. For women newly infected with the toxoplasmosa parasite during the early months of pregnancy, consequences include miscarriage, stillbirth, and fetal deformity.’

  l. parasite

  The ambulance bearing it has gone, and that gauche squad car has at last ceased its flashing. A long day. Time for a lie down.

  There was a faint but unmistakable accusation in her tone. Thelonius put his fists on the glass.

  ‘Hold it. Are you, what? Are you saying my wife poisoned our cat?’

  Melanie Del Rey said nothing.

  ‘Are you calling us murderers?’

  He didn’t get an answer for the longest time and soon found himself staring at a different place. He kept waiting for the reply, but Thelonius, who had only killed people when specifically instructed to do so by the United States of America, did not see Melanie Del Rey anymore. He saw two bodies, one grown and one small, lying face-down in the street of the Kareem, a business district of Islamic City.

  li. a different place

  And back. Settled the account for this month with talkative Clive, who has arranged for a significant, and fortuitous, discount. As I calculate it, we have enough cash on hand to pay for this place until at least the end of September if it comes to that. But it need not. We are on the comeback trail! I do aim to finish all the annotations, submit this via a secure, anonymous server, and thereby restore the honour of this House, before you arrive. But that imposing stack of index cards! We must accelerate.

  The street is called Malaika Street. Malaika means ‘Angels’. Each of the bodies had been struck in the head. Cars weaved carefully around their pool of mingled blood. Collateral damage.

  ‘We are not murderers, you know,’ Thelonius persisted.

  lii. not murderers

  Clive asks with a practised gasp whether or not I heard about the murder last night in the pool area. No! ‘Well. Apparently …’ No! ‘Yes!’ No! Fifteen unreclaimable minutes of mutual clucking and sighing. I only tolerate such distractions because he has promised, persuasively and on multiple occasions, to protect my privacy.

  Although she did want to save her job, this desire was not what kept Fatima from disclosing all she had seen inside the gates of the embassy compound. She also had a sense – sudden, impossible to overlook – that something ugly, beastly, rough and relentless would find its way through to her if the marine’s actions were to become widely known.

  Fatima did not have a name for whatever it was that wanted to be born, and she did not know of any way to stop it wanting that. Perhaps it was built into the city and impossible to stop. Perhaps it was going to be born anyway. She only knew she did not want this thing to be born on account of something she had done, or failed to do.

  She had not, from a formal point of view, lied to the imam. He had asked her whether she could recall certain details. She had replied that she could not recall them. She believed recalling them to be dangerous to herself and others. So she could not.

  Walking back home, Fatima pondered the imam’s delicate situation. The heavyset woman had no doubt told many other people what she had seen, which meant the imam would likely be under pressure to do something, issue a fatwa perhaps. Yet how could he? When two women cannot come to agreement about a key fact, their testimony cannot be admitted. And the two of them stood as the only witnesses.

  Fatima watched the beginnings of darkness seeping into the city. She stopped at a park where Wafa had often brought her and Noura, saw Wafa’s familiar trees illuminated, saw the gilded cityscape less unsightly now in the approach of sunset. Fatima found a point in the sky that was secure and beyond human structure. She felt brave.

  The memory of playing here, sparked by the movement of the upper limbs of those trees, settled her. She enjoyed the memory of climbing them. Of Wafa saying when to stop climbing. Of obeying Wafa.

  She stared up at the trees.

  Fatima had a habit, one that Wafa had remarked upon and often parodied, of looking upwards when she was deep in thought. She might be studying for an exam, trying to compose herself, avoiding an unpleasant consequence. At the dinner table, Wafa imitated Fatima pondering how best to tell her mother that she had forgotten something, some essential item during a trip to the market, say (a common occurrence). Wafa stared up towards the ceiling, counting the cracks, her eyes crossed, mumbling.

  ‘Whenever she has to think, she looks towards heaven,’ Wafa said.

  Before Wafa died, a family joke cast Fatima as the daydreamer. It had brought the four of them closer somehow, that joke, despite the feigned anger of her denials. Now neither her mother nor her si
ster joked about that.

  She had meant to be home before sunset. This was the ruling: Women were not to walk alone after dark. Fatima looked down again, stared at the pavement for a moment, then resumed her walk home. The city was descending into shadow, so she quickened her pace.

  On the walk back home, Fatima wept for Wafa behind her veil. She wept in a way visible and audible to no one, her steps slow again, despite the steep decline of the sun. She remembered a story Wafa had read to her: a story about birds who said poo-tee-weet? Her sister had used this book to make time pass on the long airplane flight to America.

  What kind of man, really, could pull the trigger, launch those projectiles. Or do such a thing to the Holy Koran. She saw the urine splashing upon the Word of God. Her insides churned.

  Fatima wondered how those people could look into their mirrors each morning.

  She entered her apartment building with four minutes to spare, and said Bismillah, which means ‘With the name of God’. Time to pray soon.

  Fatima ended up killing Mike Mazzoni. It wasn’t murder, though.

  lii. Mike Mazzoni

  A patriot and distinguished staff sergeant who served with honour in the United States Marine Corps – until Terrorist Bitch murdered him out of religious furor and a pathological hatred of our nation. A hero, he was subjected after death to a shameful torrent of anti-American rhetoric, much of it within these pages. His brother was the victim of a suicide bomber.

  15 In Which Liddell Has a Nervous Breakdown

  Thelonius said: ‘Don’t you dare call us murderers. You’re the murderer.’

  The little girl’s hand. The pool of blood. The sound of a woman clearing her throat.

  ‘Mr. Liddell,’ she said, loud enough to make him see her, ‘some of us have been down this road before, and some of us have not.’

  ‘“Put him down”. Jesus. What bullshit. Why don’t you say it. You want to kill him. Murderer!’

  Melanie Del Rey rose slowly, like Justice roused, behind green-tinted glass. Her eyes narrowed.

  ‘Some of us, Mr. Liddell, are familiar with the relevant symptoms. Some of us have been called as witnesses in divorce proceedings and sued for slander and defamation of character, on the theory that a lawsuit along those lines might somehow rescue a relationship doomed and broken beyond all possibility of repair. Some of us have heard tell that pools of antifreeze sometimes form beneath automobiles, entirely by accident. Cats, some of us have learned from experience, have a taste for the stuff. Just a day or so of lapping at it can kill them. And some of us have heard it reliably reported that infidelities do occasionally take place, down here on Earth I mean.’

  Icy hailpricks inside him again.

  ‘Antifreeze kills cats. So we have heard. Sometimes, we have heard, people actually pour pools of antifreeze onto the pavement, beneath their radiators, just to be rid of a cat that a spouse loves, but they, perhaps, do not.’

  Stress breath CONSCIOUS.

  ‘My wife did not feed antifreeze to our cat.’

  ‘I never said she did.’

  ‘Hold it. I saw a green puddle in the garage. That must have been it. There must be a slow leak in my radiator.’

  ‘Yes. An accident. That is the best explanation. Now take a seat.’

  Something in Thelonius’s chest gave way. He was breathing too hard.

  ‘Don’t “best explanation” me, bitch. Don’t “accident” me. You will go to hell. You will burn there. It was you. What did you do to him?’

  Melanie Del Rey grimaced, apparently intending her expression to pass as a smile, and disappeared.

  Thelonius, his chest heaving, made his way to the waiting room, avoiding the row of orange plastic seats near the dormant Keurig coffee dispenser. One Life to Live was still playing on the television mounted high for the benefit of abandoned animals or people.

  Thelonius was the only one in the place.

  His late mother’s favourite show spoke to him from a spot six feet or so above the floor, its dense colours playing around the glass rectangle, forming faces and voices that called him home to Llanview. Victoria Lord was in a restaurant, waiting for her oil tycoon husband Clint to arrive. Clint was late, as usual. The phone in Thelonius’s jacket pocket vibrated. Both Thelonius and Victoria flinched.

  Do not bring that animal 2 the house, Becky’s text message read.

  Thelonius brought a shaky right hand to his forehead, felt time stop and pucker.

  He shook himself free, then saw his left hand fling the phone hard onto the carpeted floor. It didn’t shatter. The text message was still visible.

  liv. text message

  And yet he did bring it into the house! Then buried the filthy thing in the backyard! Fortunately, no danger of infection post-mortem, given a six-hour window. Which there was.

  On the evening following Fatima’s first day on the job as a translator, the corpse relating this tale insists, her sister Noura made dinner.

  Noura was thirteen and too eager to be fourteen: young enough to be excited about the prospect of cooking a real meal at the end of her sister’s first full day at her new job; old enough to mind adult interference. Fatima, who had been doing the cooking for years, was glad to be rid of the responsibility and the maternal culinary lectures that always came with it.

  Noura ignored her mother’s counsel and, from time to time, said unusual things: ‘I hear people screaming in the bathroom.’ ‘There’s someone out there shouting about razors. I think it’s Nine.’ ‘That baby has a stench.’

  In fact, there was no shouting, no razor, no baby. There was only chicken. Ummi continued her running commentary on Noura’s various procedural errors. Fatima just watched. That was the Plan for Coping: Ignore all references to Nine or any of Noura’s other Intimate Companions.

  Intimate Companions: Fatima’s euphemism for the ever-expanding roster of hallucinatory figures influencing her sister’s social life. The Companions had made themselves known back in the States, emerging with Noura’s first spoken words: ‘Uh-oh!’ (To some unseen friend.) And a few days later, this shout: ‘It’s a trap!’

  The Islamic City psychologists had been useless. Eight expensive, pointless sessions that only made things worse. The Plan for Coping had been Fatima’s idea, an innovation – of five or six years’ standing now – that worked more often than not, if working meant fewer angry episodes, fewer crying jags. The Plan for Coping had only one rule: no debates. That meant no arguments about whether there really were invisible people in (for instance) the bathroom. No disputes about reality. One moved on.

  ‘At least Nine looks at people while they’re here at the table, Fatima,’ Noura shouted without warning. ‘At least Nine asks people how their day went!’

  Ummi reached out and smoothed her daughter’s hair, but Noura’s eyes brimmed with tears.

  Noura’s chicken curry with rice was more than passable when finally served, and it was natural Noura should yearn for Fatima’s approval of it. As the three sat down to dinner, however, Fatima found herself preoccupied and disinclined to speak. Ummi, who lived to fill such conversational gaps, praised the dish in extravagant terms. Wafa, she pointed out, had always enjoyed chicken curry. Fatima only looked up at the cracked light fixture.

  ‘Nine says they’re arguing about missing diapers up there,’ whispered Noura around a mouthful of her own chicken. Her eyes widened. ‘The husband says the woman stole them, and then sold them. He says the woman made those cracks in the ceiling on purpose.’

  ‘You haven’t told her how much you liked her chicken, Fatima,’ Ummi observed. Her eyes said: A compliment calms her.

  ‘The chicken is delicious, Noura.’

  Noura swallowed, shook her head. ‘You don’t mean it,’ she said, bitter. ‘You should mean it.’

  ‘Okay, it’s good. Not delicious. Good.’

  Noura grinned, nodded, took another bite, worked her jaws, showed them both the half-chewed food, concealed it again, nodded again. ‘Crazytown says they�
��re going to make you look at a nudie-butt.’

  Ummi grimaced. Fatima stared up at the ceiling again and thought of Wafa. This time she did not cry, or even come close to it. Some kind of commotion did seem to be taking place upstairs.

  lv. ceiling

  A leitmotif for her (imagined) spiritual aspirations. Why do you torture me with this, T? Knowing full well that I would have to catalogue each of these masturbations to this poster of a saint? Because I wanted to take care of you? What the hell did you marry me for, T? If not to take care of you? Delete this, keep saint thing somehow.

  On One Life to Live, Clint was shouting, mid-argument, in a crowded restaurant; Victoria turned away from him in disgust, told him not to make a scene.

  Thelonius pocketed his cell phone, closed his eyes. When he opened them again, it was 1992 and he had just met Becky for the first time. He held in his hands the application form he’d filled out with the primary goal of impressing her, because he knew damn well she would read it in his presence, based on how well their initial chat had gone.

  When would she touch him?

  He scanned the sheet a final time, looked up, found a face behind a desk, a face already familiar to him, bordered with intricate locks of cayenne and flame and alive with the morning light. He handed her the sheet, and her long index finger grazed his with intention, and lingering with that touch of hers was possibility and stability and certainty. A direction home.

  Here (the dead guy telling this story recalls verbatim) is what Thelonius wrote when asked, on that form, to describe his ‘life philosophy’. ‘Thelonius Liddell loves swimming and self-improvement. Protecting his country is important to him. He first served in the Third Ranger Battalion and eventually became a member of the Special Forces, also known as the Green Berets. He is a big admirer of President Bush and cannot even conceive of a Clinton presidency. That may not be appropriate to state on a document such as this, but hey, it says “life philosophy”. He believes we only go around once in this life. One life to live. Before that, zip. After that, zip. In between, we either eat or we get eaten. No regrets and no apologies. His country eats, and so does he.’