Jihadi

by Yusuf Toropov

  lxxxiii. Good and bad are whatever the hell you say they are

  The beatnik ethos. Reality, alas, is starker. It is one of the better-kept secrets of the Directorate – a secret even my late father and my fiercest detractors never disputed in my presence – that good and bad, right and wrong, do not exist. There is only, ever has been only, ever will be only, strategic interest.

  It was well after hours. Thelonius, presumed asleep on the little mat that served as an alternate bedroom, was wide awake, having munched a handful of what he thought was some exotic dried fruit, but turned out to be hallucinogenic mushrooms. He had just been reading a comic book: SERGEANT USA #109, THE HERO THAT WAS.

  lxxxiv. awake

  The Fabs remind me here to note that Sullivan Hand, who worked endless sleepless hours undercover impersonating a newly minted Muslim addicted to offering prayers in the mosque, was essential in bonding with these solemn, bloody insomniacs. Their convictions could not have been secured without him.

  lxxxv. SERGEANT USA #109

  This comic book is now in my possession.

  Thelonius, pondering an impossibly coloured butterfly that had just settled onto Sarge’s troubled red-white-and-blue head, heard his father shouting the unfamiliar phrase ‘knocked up’, then a scuffle and a scream. He ran to investigate. He left the back room, which opened onto FANTASY.

  The sudden undulation of the store’s walls notwithstanding, he made up the distance between FANTASY and PHYSICAL ROMANCE in no time, having long ago memorized the maze. There, in PHYSICAL ROMANCE, he saw his mother’s opened throat spouting blood like wine.

  23 In Which the White Album’s Second Side Begins

  Indelible had been brought in for questioning for one reason: He was the proprietor of a website that featured videos showing American soldiers being shot, incinerated, detonated and beheaded. Truth be told, there was only one beheading video, but it was very popular. ‘Politically extreme’ websites were illegal in the Republic.

  lxxxvi. shot

  This word keys the entire dreary chapter to the first song of the White Album’s second side, track eight. Like Jihadi itself, the song poses as a plea for pacifism and concludes in violence. Charles Schulz’s wildly popular cartoon poster ‘Happiness Is a Warm Puppy’ inspired track eight. In 1968 the National Rifle Association circulated a clumsy, ineffective advertisement (which my father, a sportsman, framed and hung). It retained the familiar image of Snoopy, and replaced the word ‘puppy’ with ‘gun’.

  Asked whether he would do all Murad Murad ordered, and thus avoid a prison term, Indelible swallowed hard and replied: ‘Insha Allah.’ His new handler smiled.

  lxxxvii. Insha Allah

  ‘If God wills it’. A phrase employed to avoid assuming the personal responsibility that accompanies either ‘yes’ or ‘no’. One never gets a straight answer out of these people.

  Indelible’s site would have to be shut down, of course, and it was assumed from this point forward that he accepted that. The site having existed, though, provided the perfect cover for the work he would now be doing for the BII. Something he could boast about once having created.

  Murad Murad opined that there was no limit to where this might go.

  Indelible insisted that there was only one online source for his videos: a foreign site he suspected was affiliated with Al Qaeda. He quickly volunteered its details, including his own login and password information, so that the BII could track down who ran it before the Americans did. Insha Allah. He shot Murad Murad a suitably servile glance, then supplied the email address of the unknown person who had advised him of the site’s existence.

  That address was fabricated. It ended up connecting to no one.

  Standing naked in his cell in the Islamic Republic, Thelonius examined his surroundings.

  A window, barred from the inside with iron grating, suggested vaguely either that dawn had risen or that the sun was about to set. A hole cut dead centre in the floor issued a smell that said ‘toilet’. His roommate was sitting and coughing between pleas for forgiveness.

  ‘Allah la firullana.’

  Racking cough.

  ‘Allah la firullana.’

  Another racking cough, but longer.

  ‘Allah la firullana.’

  The longest racking cough yet, followed by a deep, nicotine-scarred inhale.

  Thelonius shared this musty, pungent space with an old, transparent-looking being whose face was wrinkled like paper, who huddled in a gold blanket smoking two cigarettes at once, who gestured toward a cot on the other side of the cell. Another blanket, grey, and a set of yellow prison clothes lay folded there. The being exhaled a long jet of smoke. Thelonius sat on the cot, wrapped himself and shivered.

  Slight brightening at the window. So sunrise.

  It probably wouldn’t be all that hard to get through the day. The thing would have to stop smoking eventually.

  The usually taciturn local official whose bribes had been set at thirty-three percent was named Jamal, but Mike Mazzoni called him Jimmy, a nickname this official disliked. Whatever one called him, he got more chatty late in the evening over illegal Heinekens. While Bobbler pursued shovel duty outside, Mazzoni heard this local official announce, without warning, ‘the new terms of agreement’.

  He now expected, he announced in English, to be called by his actual name, preceded by the word Mister.

  He expected a cut of fifty percent from Mike Mazzoni from that night forward on all earnings, including the illegal wagers.

  He expected weekly written reports.

  Mike Mazzoni inquired as to what the hell all this was about.

  Jamal shared some income figures he could only have received from Bobbler.

  Disagreement followed.

  Outside digging, Dayton Mazzoni heard each man offer his own colourful metaphors and emphatic predictions as to how the conflict would be resolved. Somebody took a swing at somebody. The place was empty by the time Dayton made it back in, having buried another dog.

  lxxxviii. buried another dog.

  This passage evokes not only the butchered tiger of a previous song, but also the original National Rifle Association advertisement that dominated my father’s study and inspired the present track.

  The next morning, in the mess hall, the brothers discussed, at some length, a controversial question: what the fuck was wrong with Bobbler. It was resolved, not without acrimony, that he would stop answering questions from ragheads. It was further resolved that his primary skill set out here was keeping his mouth shut and doing what he was told and that he would continue to cultivate and expand those skill sets, inasmuch as they had kept him alive so far.

  The loss of his eldest and youngest sons had changed him.

  Before that loss Atta had (like everyone else in his family) been only intermittently religious, praying on the two major holidays and during the month of Ramadan. He now walked the streets of Islamic City in rags, reciting the Koran. He fasted three days a week. He made his ablutions in public fountains and he slept according to the model of the Prophet, peace and blessings be upon him, upon his right side with both hands placed below his head as a pillow. He ordered his sole surviving child to sleep likewise, despite the open wounds on his arms.

  They slept in alleys. The boy woke often, choosing always to let his father sleep.

  Before the flechette attack, Atta had worked sixty to seventy hours a week as a chemical engineer and had created a colour-coded printed schedule for the four babysitters he engaged. Now his chief, and for all anyone in his family could tell, his only obligations were religious. The Prophet said to be as an itinerant, and so Atta was no longer fond of houses.

  He awoke well before dawn, in time to make both the extra prayers and the obligatory prayers. He learned to avoid police, who had a habit of preventing him from reciting and telling him to go home. His little boy, he insisted, did not want them in a house. They were home.

  He began by giving a loud speech to his son at around t
he time of the midday prayer. The next day, Atta renamed himself the New Imam and called the city to prayer, proving, if nothing else, that he still had a vigorous set of lungs.

  A few vagrants came to listen.

  The next day, there were a few more vagrants and they stayed to pray. The next day, there were a dozen men. The day after that, there were about seventy. And the day after that, it looked like four hundred, most of them better dressed than the vagrants.

  The following day, they started to dress in white because he told them all to do that. The white they used to dress themselves was as empty as a politician’s promise, as empty as Becky’s eyes staring him down between compliance blows, as empty as the rest of this guilty dead guy’s page.

  Having slept a dreamless morning, Thelonius awoke and regarded his shrivelled, inscrutable cellmate. Was it possible the little heap had stared at him, chain-smoking two cigarettes at a time, since sunrise?

  They inspected each other. Without warning, the figure in the blanket extinguished the latest pair of cigarettes and stood in preparation for the noonday call to prayer. How it had anticipated the squawking ‘Allahu Akbar’ of the speaker system by ten or fifteen seconds was unclear.

  lxxxix. unclear.

  Not to me. Simple coincidence is often misinterpreted.

  Thelonius counted twenty orange linoleum floor tiles. Some of them were fractional, though. The squares surrounded the pungent hole in the middle of the floor.

  A tasteless lunch – rice and disintegrating, overcooked lamb on a metal plate – slid through the slot at the bottom of the cell door. Thelonius ate it and slid the plate back again at the barking of some foreign word or other from the guard. Time passed.

  A bland chicken dinner on a similar, but not identical, metal plate slid through the slot. Thelonius ate it.

  In between those meals, several dozen pairs of cigarettes had illuminated and extinguished themselves, using his roommate as a kind of bellows, and several prayers had come and gone. Not a word was spoken in the cell, beyond the occasional dull mutterings of the prayers, until Thelonious, having delivered his latest plate to the unseen barking voice, turned to his cellmate and said: ‘So. Were you asking for God to forgive me, or to forgive you for being in the same room with me?’

  The little wrinkled figure stared back at him from beneath the blanket, which covered everything up to the chin. The two cigarettes kept glowing in the dark and the smoke from them kept rising in twin clouds that played in synchronous, complementary pirouettes above the spindly prisoner’s shaved head.

  Tired of waiting for an answer, Thelonius limped across the room and checked the window. It was bolted shut. The glass was thick and shatterproof. Late evening drew itself in.

  Half an hour later, night had taken over the city completely, and the sharp, insistent chord of the fluorescents hummed on and on overhead. The endless smoke was getting ridiculous.

  ‘That’s not good for you, you know,’ he said. ‘Sucks you dry. If you’re not careful, it will make you look like a raisin. Well. More like a raisin than you already look.’

  The prisoner across the room ignored the insult, or perhaps occupied a dimension where nothing had been said, and kept staring, blowing more smoke.

  ‘Look,’ Thelonius said, ‘I’m a patient man.’

  ‘Not from what I’ve heard.’

  That raspy, acid voice again. So: it spoke English.

  ‘Regardless,’ Thelonius said. ‘This window doesn’t open. We’re likely to be here together for a while, and I’ve been more than fair about the smoke so far. But if you don’t lay off those cigarettes, we’re going to have to have ourselves a problem. Now, do you think you can take a break so we can clear the air in here, Raisin?’

  It was hard to tell with the blankets, but Thelonius guessed that the Raisin could not have weighed more than a hundred and ten pounds. Someone that size, and unarmed, would not last more than a few moments in a toe-to-toe with him. If it came to that.

  Which it might. The Raisin blew a long jet of smoke, stared at Thelonius and frowned.

  ‘I don’t like repeating myself,’ Thelonius said, ‘but I’ll do it this once. Just for you. Because you’ve got a lucky face. Suppose you were to put those goddamned cigarettes out for just a few minutes, chief? And spare yourself a hard time? What do you say?’

  The Raisin stood, removed both mouth-bound cigarettes with a scrawny hand, held the half-smoked filters at a distance, cupping their orange embers gracefully to one side, looked the opponent over, and said: ‘I had a dream about you …’

  ‘Really. Did your dream tell you how long it would take me to clean the floor of this cell with you?’

  ‘… and about your mother,’ he continued as though Thelonius had not spoken. ‘The dream was about you and your mother. You miss her a great deal now, I think.’

  Wreaths of smoke rose from the two palmed cigarettes. The Raisin brought them back and began to suck on them deeply.

  ‘In my dream, you were both in San Francisco. It was some time ago. You were a small child.’

  Thelonius looked away, held himself immobile. He listened to the Raisin drawing yet more mouthfuls of smoke out of those two foul death-sticks. He listened to the expulsion of the smoke, to the purposeful sound of someone breathing uneasily, someone with a great deal of time to waste. The smoke danced upward. He took a stress breath and then looked back, with purpose, toward the figure behind the two glowing cigarette-ends.

  ‘What about my mother?’ he said, his voice more raw than he intended.

  ‘I dreamt that you saw her die when you were a child. You watched something kill her in your presence. Your father, I think. Or a beast. Or both. There was a great deal of blood.’

  More smoke. More silence.

  ‘I dreamt that when you saw her die,’ the Raisin continued, ‘you began a period of trial and hardship and pain. I dreamt that delusions followed you through childhood, that you fought them off through sheer force of will. I dreamt that you convinced others that you were healed. I dreamt that your wife, alone, suspected you might not be.’

  The room began to writhe.

  ‘It was not an unpleasant dream at all,’ the Raisin remarked.

  xc. not an unpleasant dream

  Dozed off there at my little desk. You dear dreamer, you awaken yourself to history, you kick within me now.

  In the aftermath of his disorderly discussion in the Wreck Room with Mike Mazzoni, Jamal filed a formal written complaint with a representative of the Council of Elders. The letter set forth piously and movingly against what Jamal believed to be an illegal dogfighting and alcohol ring being operated out of D— Base.

  He pleaded with the elders to take action. From such pits of corruption sprang vipers of secular influence, eager to spread their poison throughout the state. His own faith and that of his fellow believers, he warned, indeed their entire way of life, was under direct American assault.

  Testimony concerning these vipers and their low desires came from Jamal and several pious associates, all of whom happened to be male members of his own family. They all swore that numerous bets had been placed, that numerous dogs had died and that much alcohol had been consumed. They all proclaimed their love for and allegiance to the Republic and all repented any past association and/or familiarity they might have had with such vipers.

  The dead guy writing this ponders the fatal mistake of defining love for country by identifying the people one hates.

  ‘Yeah, the man waiting out there in the car looks pretty important,’ Noura said.

  ‘Mm hmm.’

  ‘Pressed suit. White shirt. Dark tie. Good hair. He asked me if you lived here, and I said yes. He asked me if you got home late last night, and I said yes. He asked me if Mother had gone to work, and I said yes. He told me he wanted to have a cup of tea with you. It’s fine with him if I serve as chaperone.’

  ‘Mm hmm,’ Fatima said, still perusing job openings on her computer. ‘What kind of car? Purple, I suppose.�
��

  ‘Hmph. The car is big and black, like all those limousines, and he’s sitting all alone in the back seat. I think a driver must be in the front seat. The glass is dark. I wouldn’t have seen the man in the back seat if he hadn’t unrolled the window and called to me. He said he was from BII.’

  Fatima looked up. ‘What?’

  ‘B.’ (Pause.) ‘I.’ (Pause.) ‘I.’

  ‘Noura, are they real? The man and his driver?’

  Noura’s face darkened. ‘You and Mother tell the entire universe,’ she said, ‘that everyone I meet is a hallucination, but what does that make you?’

  Fatima scoffed, approached the window sidelong, spotted a black limousine.

  ‘What does he want, Noura?’

  xci. What does he want …?

  The very question that provoked and bemused me last October. Conversation with T, already strained, was even grimmer than usual upon his return from the Islamic Republic. Eros, or the promise of it, had historically brought about denouements to such melodramas. (Yes, sex was a reliable coping tactic for each of us.) At that point, I was still willing to consume what was man of him, a favour I could not recall him ever declining. Yet he declined. The arrogance. The contempt.

  ‘Well, how should I know? Nobody I ever talk to is really there, are they?’