Jihadi

by Yusuf Toropov

  Thelonius said he’d do his best, but he wasn’t sure what the rest of the day looked like. He thanked the man and hung up.

  Thelonius went back upstairs to the bathroom and did the water thing, which involved saying ‘Bismillah’ and washing your hands and your mouth and your nose and your forearms and your feet. He figured out which direction Mecca was, made an intention to pray for forgiveness in an attitude of repentance and accountability, and prayed in the bedroom. He wept when he was finished, wept down on his knees. Then he felt angry at Becky.

  He decided to do the water thing again.

  As he did that, he noticed there was still some black cat-hair in the tub, and heard Becky downstairs. And he felt the anger again and slowed himself and calmed it down and started the water thing once again.

  ‘You’re not turning into a Muslim, are you?’ she called from below, laughing.

  He had left the open Koran on the dining-room table.

  He finished, turned off the water.

  ‘That was my idea, you know, that whole conversion,’ her voice called. ‘You could at least say thanks.’

  He dried his hands and feet on a HERS towel. He was okay seeing her face now.

  From the bottom of the stairs he heard her call again, closer this time: ‘T?’

  A note of concern.

  ‘T, you know you have a home here. You’ll always have a home here. You aren’t going to turn into a Muslim on us, are you?’

  A big nothing rested on the stairway after that.

  ‘Are you?’

  ‘Yeah, I was thinking I might,’ he called down finally, overloud but at least not angry.

  There was another big nothing. The sound of the rain outside. He opened the window all the way, the better to see a new flock of geese trailing away beneath the clouds, the better to hear the unfaltering rain. Over the rain, from behind, came her footfall. He turned. She was standing right there in the doorway, her red hair askew and her eyes tight slits – an expression that had, historically, sent the not-to-be-disobeyed message, ‘Don’t speak’. He looked into them now but did not fall in.

  ‘Becky, I let you down.’

  She looked at him as she would look at a specimen.

  ‘I didn’t know I was letting you down, but I was. That must have hurt you, left you feeling alone. And I am so, so sorry I couldn’t give you what you needed.’

  Not a twitch of any muscle.

  ‘I assume it’s Dick Unferth’s baby. I want a divorce.’

  Not a blink.

  ‘You and your secrets,’ she hissed at last. ‘You weak men with weak minds with all your secrets. You’re not the only ones with secrets, you know.’

  ‘I’ll leave tomorrow,’ Thelonius said.

  She went into the bedroom and slammed the door. The rain kept up outside, steady and clean.

  He heard familiar music playing from behind the bedroom door.

  He took to the couch that night. So far as he could tell, she did not come out. The same album kept playing, over and over.

  The next day he started packing and looking for another place to stay. For a direction home. He couldn’t reach Dad, but that was normal enough. He called Adelia.

  ‘Things,’ Dayton said right out loud – although there was no way for his brother or anyone else to hear him over the surging ocean of people – ‘are happening way too fast.’

  The dead guy sharing this story imagines Dayton and Mike Mazzoni as two of the dozen or so marines standing at what was supposed to be attention, but was much closer to shock. Dayton was up on the helipad. His older brother was near the front gate of the embassy.

  Although he could barely see his brother’s lips move from that distance, Mike Mazzoni also believed all of this was happening too quickly. It had to have been organized ahead of time. The ragheads had come together for the latest Freak Show so hot and so sudden there was no time to call in water cannons or anything else. At twelve forty there had been a few hundred white-robed ragheads, maybe a thousand. At one o’clock it was Raghead Freak Show City.

  They were everywhere. All worked up about someone taking a common piss.

  It did not exactly fill Mike Mazzoni with warm fuzzies to know that he had been assigned to stand in front of them all like a fucking bull’s eye.

  By the time the Raghead-in-Chief started his latest prerecorded speech in some damn language that wasn’t English, Mike Mazzoni had downed about a fifth of gin from what looked like a water bottle, but wasn’t. Hajji dangled comfortably from the index and middle fingers of his left hand. The back of that hand had accumulated a total of seven black tattooed stars: one for the teenager whom he now referred to as Asshole A, and one each for Assholes B, C, D, E, F, and G.

  ‘Getting full,’ Bobbler had remarked that morning. ‘Just saying it doesn’t look so great on a sergeant, maybe. Maybe time to stop adding stars.’

  ‘Oh, hell no,’ Mike Mazzoni had said.

  He kept the back of his hand facing out now, toward Freak Show Squared.

  There it was, right in front of him, a crowd like fucking Woodstock, but all white, shaped like an O that extended out forever, a sea of white surrounding the embassy from every side. The gates around him marked out the hollow of that O, where a crew of armed, uniformed personnel drew together in the courtyard like it was a little mosh pit. On top of the embassy, looking down at that mosh pit, looking down on everything, there was Bobbler, rifle drawn, circling in a constant, slow three sixty, targeting everyone in white and a target to everyone in white. Mike Mazzoni muttered, ‘Don’t fuck this one up, bro.’

  A pinprick in the middle of the O, Bobbler had his own AK-47, not Hajji, nothing with a name, but nothing to be messed with, either. Men screamed themselves red in the face like they were getting paid for it and damned if they didn’t dare Bobbler to shoot them. In English.

  No way Bobbler could hear that, though.

  Crowd or no crowd, it was lonely in the hollow of that O. Who the hell screams at a sniper and waves his hands up in the air, all SHOOT ME SHOOT ME SHOOT ME? These people were in love with death. You couldn’t get ESPN or anything worth having in a country based on death. There’d been potential here once, he’d felt it himself in the Wreck Room, he had met a lot of them personally, before the Freak Show began, before this Raghead-in-Chief shit. But once upon a time, man…

  Mike Mazzoni wished he had a cigarette. He breathed in a deep lungful of air instead.

  Once upon a time you might have seen a mall here and some goddamned satellite dishes or some other signs of fucking civilization. Over the past month somebody had obviously been pumping crap into their heads in the mosques or the madrassas or maybe in the streets, while they were bowing their ragheads to Allah, getting hard-ons over their black box off in Mecca. Someone was pumping this death crap into them. Now they had all gotten on this insane wavelength of just wanting to die.

  There was nothing to say to that. So the next lesson would have to be a lesson in respect, and that lesson, if it were ever given, would have to come through families, not through the individual assholes. They were each happy to go down for a dirt nap. But family. Family, they cared about. Family, they would negotiate for. Family was the key.

  That, Mike Mazzoni had determined, was the only thing these people took more seriously than death. Family.

  Some white-robed idiot tried to climb over the gate.

  Over razorwire. You could see the stupid son of a bitch bleeding from the hands and forearms. And he just kept on fucking climbing.

  Mike Mazzoni called, ‘Bobbler!’

  Bobbler heard him, or heard something, from the helicopter pad atop the embassy – a brother thing, maybe – and spun around.

  49 In Which the Band Celebrates

  clvi. Celebrates

  Track nineteen, checking in at a world-changing four minutes and one second, was laid down in the dead of night in a closet (charitably dubbed an ‘annex’) at EMI Studio Two. The final version features minimal overdubs, and the ‘liv
e’ feel of the recording is emphasized by the occasional joyous shouts of the band members celebrating, thirty-seven years ahead of time, your conception.

  Ouch.

  Motorola was loud and unclear.

  There was no internet connection out here anymore. Someone had bombed something. That left Fatima in the kitchen, slicing potatoes. The day off. Time to relax. But Motorola, a small American handheld radio – the only electronic communication of which Baba ever approved – was not relaxing her. Motorola had been a member of the family for years. It crackled an update about the huge demonstration at the American embassy. The static that she loathed, but had come to accept, cut in and out.

  God Defended. Peaceful so far. Unprecedented gathering. A slander upon the nation. A quarter of a million people at least. Those following this New Imam. His location unknown. Rumours of a return tomorrow midday. Crowd growing. His clear instructions. A national day of justice. Of reckoning. That murderer and desecrator of the Koran. Intensified. Rage in our hearts. Intensified. A man at the front of the crowd, very near the gate. Some shouts to encourage him.

  And so forth.

  Fatima put down the knife, washed her hands, ran them wet through her long, black hair, recalled that Baba did that with fingers spread in the same way, missed Baba again.

  A national day of justice? Of reckoning? For whom? ‘That murderer and desecrator of the Koran’. A fiction, a composite she knew to be two human beings. Did the nation deserve this demagogue who created such paper villains, who made up the religion as he went along? Had it come to that?

  A shriek from upstairs – nothing unusual.

  It was a familiar academic shriek. It culminated in a shouted NO. Fatima switched off Motorola.

  Noura, unlike Fatima, had always been home-schooled due to socialization issues. Lately, Mother could not get her to focus on her assignments for more than a few minutes at a time. These shrieks had been standard operating procedure for months, but they had become more brash and more common since Noura had smelled the mysterious ripping thing, that invisible, approaching wave of metal and gasoline.

  ‘I want to help with the potatoes! I don’t want Galileo! I already know about Galileo!’

  Fatima called upstairs: ‘Let her help, Mother.’

  Noura padded downstairs, her smile too wide.

  ‘Think you’re so clever,’ Fatima said.

  Noura tornadoed in and stole a hug, which Fatima returned, then eased out of when it became, as most of Noura’s hugs did these days, too tight for too long.

  ‘Get to work,’ said Fatima, drying her hands on a towel.

  Noura took up the knife with glee, set to work upon a helpless peeled potato.

  ‘What do you know about Galileo, then?’

  Cornered, Noura grimaced. ‘He’s boring. I know that.’

  ‘Back upstairs, then?’

  ‘No.’ Lips tight, eyes set on her moving knife.

  ‘Actually, he’s one of the least boring people ever. In the whole history of the world. Oh I do mean it, though. Because. Listen. Because. Galileo found people telling a big lie: The sun goes around the earth. Now, it looks like that’s what happens. But it’s not what happens. Actually the earth goes around the sun. And he proved that with math and telescopes. People thought he was crazy. They were used to the lie. He had to hold on to the truth. No other way out.’

  Inspired, Fatima seized a small and a large potato from the bowl, orbited the small one around the large one. Noura stared, rapt.

  ‘Sun. Earth. Got that?’

  Noura nodded.

  ‘So. Did he win a prize? For telling the truth? What’s the matter? Well, did he?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘No?’

  ‘No. They threatened to torture him. They made him stand up in front of everyone and say the sun went round the earth, made him say the earth didn’t move at all. But under his breath he still said, “It moves.” Now move the earth.’

  ‘Crazy.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Somebody,’ Noura said, watching the two potatoes hold still. ‘I don’t know. All of them. You. Who cares? What was the point?’

  Fatima furrowed her brow. ‘Earth moves around the sun. Fool. Is the point. No matter what. Whether we’re crazy or not. Earth moves. Will you move the earth, please?’

  Noura moved the earth around the sun. Fatima ran her hands through her long hair again and stared out the window at nothing.

  ‘That’s enough. I’ll do the rest. Go get the oil and the pan and an onion. We’ll make dinner together.’

  Noura spun off. Fatima unplugged Motorola, took it off the shelf and placed it in the little cupboard beneath the sink.

  The lights were all out again, except for his computer screen.

  Indelible settled into the same chair in front of the same monitor, connected to the same keyboard, using the same internet connection, with his wife asleep in the same bed. He drank Darjeeling tea from the same cup.

  Back on the night the Islamic City dogs took him into custody, Indelible had received two unexpected messages from two unfamiliar email addresses. Tonight, Indelible knew both of those people were Sullivan Hand.

  Indelible, whose hacking skills far surpassed those of his new American friend, knew Sullivan Hand’s full name. Indelible knew that Sullivan Hand was working in Langley, Virginia, and he knew how long Sullivan Hand had been working for the Directorate, and he knew Sullivan Hand’s social security number – all without Sullivan Hand sharing so much as a word about any of that.

  In pursuit of a blessed goal – blowing himself up along with as much of the U.S. embassy as possible – Indelible was about to start his very first real-time, voice-to-voice conversation with Sullivan Hand. He took a tiny sip of Darjeeling, thought of a certain typhus patient who had passed in the night, and logged on.

  Sullivan Hand had determined, to his own satisfaction at least, that Indelible was the real thing. He said as much in his report, which was well received by everyone except the dead guy writing this book.

  He’d convinced his superior that he was pretty damn good at pretending to be multiple people online, pretty good at figuring out who was who, pretty good at flushing people out of their hidey-holes, pretty good at covering his tracks, pretty good at saving the Directorate money, and so forth.

  He was the future. If you didn’t believe him, you could ask him.

  He was building his fast-track career path in the Directorate, working all hours. All of twenty-three years old, skinny, underpaid, he was eager to continue an affair with an assertive older woman who was reading all his reports, an affair he supposed would keep him on the fast track and keep him sane. Sullivan Hand liked assertive women.

  The dead guy telling this story knows more than he ever wanted to about Sullivan Hand’s career. He turned up everything that Sullivan ever submitted to the Directorate, the FBI and local law enforcement. All the sound files, all the memos and the one massive transcript illuminating the process by which fabricated evidence was produced for use in the prosecution and conviction of the Oldburgh Jihadi Ensemble. Three simpletons, it will be recalled, were supposed to have coordinated a complex, scary plot to shoot up a shopping mall and bomb a synagogue, in obedience to the hypnotic death-chants of the Koran.

  In reality, the three improvised a scene, two minutes and nine seconds in duration, about three Al Qaeda stooges who spend most of their waking hours smoking pot.

  During this impromptu sketch, Al Qaeda Stoner A mentions to Al Qaeda Stoners B and C that he, Stoner A, took the bus out to Watertown’s Northway Mall aiming to shoot up the place … but forgot his machine gun. Having arrived at the mall unarmed, he changed his mission, headed to a nearby balcony, and dropped stolen loaves of Panera bread on unsuspecting passers-by. Then, on his way home, he encountered a rasta-obsessed Jamaican rabbi eager to confirm Bob Marley’s status as the literal reincarnation of Moses. Having scored from this person an ounce of a particularly potent strain of weed, nicknamed Matzoh-Bal
l Missile Boy, Stoner A explains how to reach the synagogue in question by public transport.

  ‘Far out, Abdul,’ croaks Stoner B, handing an invisible roach to the companion to his immediate right.

  ‘Far out, may Allah accept,’ hisses Stoner C on an inhale, taking a long toke from the proffered roach and forwarding it to Stoner A.

  ‘Far out,’ say all three Al Qaeda stoners in slow unison, on a communal inverted hiss, to avoid the premature release of precious molecules of THC.

  At this point in the recording, Sullivan Hand laughs. Another voice asks: ‘Should we record it, Brother Daoud?’

  (As a freelance informant for the FBI, Sullivan Hand called himself Daoud Hand for the benefit of his targets. He liked such subterfuge, saw his role as Daoud as evidence of his capacity for upward mobility into the exciting world of espionage. His only mobility, as it turned out, was downward. He ended up tied to a filthy bed, naked, attempting to explain himself to local law enforcement.)

  (It might be asked why the dead guy writing this story came to learn so much about Sullivan Hand. The answer is a simple one. He was under orders to find out. Enter Adelia.)

  50 Rishikesh

  clvii. Rishikesh

  Regarded (online sources confirm) as the single holiest city of the Indian subcontinent. Terminus of the Fabs’ aborted pilgrimage. Site of the Maharishi’s ashram, and thus of most of the White Album’s composition.

  Ouch.

  Adelia would not look at Glass, ever, but she led him to it, and she expected him to follow. She said ‘Dad will see you now’ while she walked, but only as a formality. If she escorted people to Glass, that already meant Dad would see them.