She was stepping fast, as usual, well ahead of Thelonius on the familiar walkway of grey stone that snaked behind the main house and led to Glass.
The nominal maid (and actual Dad-concubine) whom Thelonius followed wore her ebony hair pulled back in a tight bun, obscuring the tiny kinked ringlets Dad was said to favour. Aloofness was a friend of hers. Adelia knew, like her predecessors knew, not to make lingering eye contact with anyone summoned to Glass. Her unseen face, being unseeable now, in the Beige Motel, must, alas, be recalled as a composite. Adelia had the same tawny skin, the same aerodynamically sound facial features, the same light glance, the same avoidance of even the possibility of physical contact with strangers, as those who had come before her. Ryan Firestone had sought and found these traits in a now-uncountable succession of employed mistresses, Adelia the latest of these. The reigning monarch of the Cloisters, she appeared to have at least a few years to go as the representative of her graceful, well-compensated dynasty.
This dynasty’s origins were best not probed, but it preceded the attack on Ryan Firestone’s wife Prudence by several years.
Glass, the structure to which Adelia led Thelonius, was a private space. Like its occupants, it was not for civilian inspection.
‘You’ve spoken to him today?’ Thelonius asked, still well behind her.
The back of Adelia’s head nodded.
‘You know what this is about?’
The back of Adelia’s head shook.
‘Any advice?’
Even walking behind her, he sensed the chuckle she suppressed.
‘Tell him the truth.’
‘I knew that.’
‘They all say they know it, then they lie to him.’
‘Not me.’
‘Up to you, I suppose.’
‘Is he better?’
‘No.’
They reached Glass.
She stepped aside as he opened the door. She did not look at it. The door closed and she was gone, as the outer world was gone and the time of day was gone. The air was hot and close and things hissed.
Dad preferred this greenhouse for private meetings. Thelonius had suspected for some time this was due to the constant whisper, the vapour and the humid embrace of the perpetual watering system. One emerged damp and changed. Dad seemed to believe that he had created an environment with a plausible liberty from listening devices.
Glass was square and contained eight plant-lined corridors, the central two of which were separated by an empty row. Dad was in a wheelchair directly in the centre of Glass, in a clearing about which philodendrons and wisteria and maidenhair hovered and crawled at a speed undetectable to anyone but Dad. His careworn, ravaged face told all who cared to ask that he was dying.
‘Hello, Dad.’
‘Yes, you made it back,’ Dad said, raw-voiced but casual, as though Thelonius’s presence had been a remark in an ongoing conversation. He held up the African violet he’d been inspecting, put it down. ‘I am glad for that, and so, so sorry for the trouble we got you into, T. How about a drink to celebrate your homecoming?’
The only feature recognizable from the portrait of Dad that hung in the living room were the warm eyes, eyes that still spoke of possibility, alliance, connection, innovation, shared benefit. They spoke of past excess and present secrets, those quiet old eyes. They were watered, as ever, with liquor.
Thelonius shook his head.
‘No? The rumours are true?’
Thelonius nodded.
‘Well, with your permission, I will.’ Dewar’s and a glass and ice from a wooden compartment in the stone, to which he reached down.
The whisky and ice and glass assembled, Dad gestured for Thelonius to sit on the stone bench, which he did.
Dad watched him.
‘Hrothgar toasts you,’ Dad said, and grimaced as he swallowed, but kept watching. A classicist. Always.
‘I’m not Beowulf, Dad. What’s this about?’ Thelonius asked, trying to sound patient.
‘High D as always, just like me. Yes, so we’ll get to the point. You’re thinking about quitting.’
Always a step ahead of you, Dad was.
‘I am. I want out, Dad. I need to do something else with my life. This isn’t home for me anymore.’
The warm eyes, saggy and bloated now, behind their grey walls of sunken flesh, said: Please wait. Out of respect, Thelonius stood by for the next move.
‘Have you ever heard of a fellow named Sullivan Hand?’
‘No.’
‘T,’ Ryan said, sipping his Scotch and placing it on the stone table near his right armrest, ‘the lucidity problem has ramped up faster than either of us imagined. She’s been cooking up trouble with the FBI. Operating a little sub-unit entirely on her own. Becky has to be brought out of the Directorate.’
Thelonius breathed in a lungful of wet, warm, settling air, took in the green. ‘Yes. Of course. That makes sense.’
‘And in order to bring her out well and carefully, we have to know what kind of damage she may have caused already.’
Always well and carefully. Not just to do something. To do something well and carefully. And that subtle transition to ‘we’.
‘Dad. I’m tired. I feel like I’m in jail still. I’ve felt like that for a while. I wouldn’t be much use to you.’
‘Oh, that’s where you’re wrong.’ And his patented silence.
‘Waiting.’
‘The erratic behaviour. The instability in her sleep patterns. The patchiness in her ability to concentrate. You’re quite familiar with all that. You know what it leads her to, how she thinks. The various professional networks she’s created. You’re familiar with those, too.’
‘Yes. So are you.’
‘You’re the one with an axe to grind, though. You’re the jilted husband. Ex-husband, I mean. You’ve got a reason to go digging. In the event things ever come into the light.’
‘Don’t you have a reason to go digging?’
‘No, T. I don’t. I’m above it all.’ Dad smiled a weak smile. ‘Why you’re here: We need you to give us a damage assessment before you quit. Before I let her go. Letting her go will likely be ugly. We need to know what’s gone wrong, if anything, and where wrong, and how badly wrong. Over the past year. Just as thorough as you can make it, please. Delivered personally. Not committed to text. Memory, boy. Or if you do keep written notes, keep them in code. You will appear to report to Unferth, who is to know nothing of this. I need all you can get me on what she’s got this Hand person doing. Along the way, you may be able to solve that other riddle that’s been on your mind.’
Dad smiled.
Thelonius’s chest tightened with the pain of not quite being in control, a sensation peculiar to conversations with Dad. Another deep breath.
‘What riddle would that be, Dad?’
51 Postcards from India
clviii. India
In the White Album’s first postcard from Rishikesh, McCartney summarizes the Maharishi’s simple theory of enlightenment – ‘follow nature’. This is track twenty, a lovely ballad in plain D. Lennon’s two explicitly Rishikesh-themed offerings follow.
‘I said, what riddle is that, Dad?’
‘Well, for one thing, whether it’s Dick Unferth’s baby growing in that dark place – or somebody else’s. Do let me know what you figure out on that front. A man has a right to be curious about who’s fathering his grandchildren.’
The bastard had bugged their house. More chest constriction. Breathe again. Look at the plants.
Dad lifted a frail hand to his eyebrow. The little shadow of his movement drew Thelonius’s angry stare away from a long row of African violets.
The weathered hand descended, shook. The old man’s eyes were still pleading for help, still begging, like someone who had been stranded somewhere, waiting a long time for family to come. But the sandpaper-rough words that came out of his mouth were as firm, as purposeful as ever.
‘And actually, T, there’s another riddle
for us to solve.’
‘Is there?’
‘I’m afraid so. It’s about your most recent trip. I have come to suspect she knows more about what happened to you in the Republic, and why, than we initially thought. You and I need to find out how much more. Well and quickly. Before she’s decommissioned, you see. To protect all the other soldiers out there. So I do thank you for not quitting just yet. We’ll get you out of all this soon enough.’
He poured himself a refill. He took another sip, set down his ice-laden glass. A second or so later, the stacked ice shook and fell.
‘Bobbler!’ Mike Mazzoni shouted again, so loud his lungs hurt, pointing at the gate. His brother spotted the bleeding lunatic who’d elbowed his way right through the razorwire. Bobbler looked back for an order. Theoretically, no live shots were to be fired until there was an actual perimeter breach. And theoretically, rounds of tear gas were supposed to prevent any bleeding lunatic from getting as high as this one had, as fast as he had.
So much for theory.
A stone sailed over the gate from some anonymous asshole deep within the Freak Show. The climber Mike Mazzoni had spotted was still moving fast, nearing the top.
Mike Mazzoni nodded.
Bobbler, up on the helicopter landing pad, nodded back and took aim.
‘Just wing him,’ shouted Mike Mazzoni, though the crowd noise was louder now, and his brother could not hear.
The raghead’s face exploded. He pulsed, then sagged like crucified Jesus. He hung there on the razorwire.
Shit.
The crowd howled as one.
There were actually two notes to the big howl it gave out. The ragheads in the very front were all screaming the high note. The larger, deeper crowd was moaning the low note.
Three more white-robed ragheads started clambering up the fucking gate.
Bobbler looked again to Mike Mazzoni with eyes that said What do I do?
Mike Mazzoni nodded again, then masked up and called for twenty rounds of tear gas. By the time the smoke cleared, four white-clad bodies, each streaked with red, hung from the razorwire. The crowd tore at itself, and the high note raged over the low note.
‘Brother!’
Well after sunset in the village of D––. Night in her darkened bedroom. Daylight on her computer screen.
One of the videos which bedded, blanketed Fatima now scrolled through on her laptop showed the two and a half chaotic minutes leading up to that afternoon’s massacre at the embassy. Shaky and washed out, the images and sounds came from the concealed camera of a BII plant. Ra’id had couriered a thumb drive with a dozen such scenes to her. He had asked her to review them all and call him in the morning. Ra’id was unavailable now, in meetings with his father and his father’s circle.
‘Brother!’
Rewind.
The video Fatima watched panned across a limitless horizon of shoulders within the uncountable throng that had gathered around the American embassy compound that afternoon. The horizon rocked and churned and shook for its initial ninety-one seconds, gathering its seemingly infinite crowd into itself, very nearly making the close observer nauseous with the constant jostling and shifting of people’s white backs. After that roller-coaster ride, the lens settled on the front gate, and the unknown videographer’s movement ceased, more or less, for the remaining forty-seven seconds. The audio was intact and clearer than one might have expected.
The shout that rose over the murmurs and prayers trailing through her white earbuds made the hair on the back of Fatima’s neck stand up.
Its voice was sharp. High. Male. Angry.
‘Brother! Brother!’ The rest only half clear, thanks to the crowd noise. Islam? We must what? He is not what?
She clicked the rewind icon again.
She hit play. Increased the volume. Settled her earbuds in.
‘Brother! Brother! My dear brother in Islam! We must plan such things! He is not even in the embassy!’
Replay.
The same thing. No doubt about any word. Someone had said that.
Once again. Rewind. Play. Watch for moving lips to match.
There.
She had found the face of a small man in the upper right-hand corner of her screen. His face twisted and glared. He called upward to the first man, the one climbing the fence in front of the compound:
‘Brother! Brother! My dear brother in Islam! We must plan such things! He is not even in the embassy!’
Ra’id needed to know of this remark’s existence. She thought of calling him despite his instructions, but concluded that the phones were no longer trustworthy. She would have to go into the city again. Tomorrow. Early.
Time caves in again, for old time’s sake. The dead guy collecting and concealing these stacks of scribbled paper warns her, across time and space, not to call her driver. Oblivious, she calls him anyway.
52 John Triumphant
clix. Triumphant
‘Evuhbody Gots Sumpin’ 2 Hyde ‘Cept Maharishi,’ the original title of track twenty-one in its handwritten foul copy, showcases the highest vocal note of the composition, via Lennon’s deliberately misspelled ‘2’. The song is structured on this elated vocal climax, which prefigures your neo-Trinitarian conception by occurring three times in the final recording, at 0:29, 1:10, and 1:50.
A city may be wounded and stagger about in shock, just as a human being may do, without quite realizing its status as a wounded thing. Indelible braved a return to the embassy. It was time to evaluate the patient, acquaint him with his circumstance, speak words of recovery if such could be found. Words of encouragement.
He found his way back toward the scene of the massacre he had, through the Grace of Almighty God, witnessed and survived. It was night, and the curfew would be enforced in less than a quarter of an hour. The streets were almost deserted. The soldiers paired off on the street corners of the major intersections, a reminder that the city now operated under martial law. It was past dawn in the United States, where people roamed as they wished and followed their vain desires.
The square outside the embassy was empty. Two helicopters cast spotlights on a few litter-strewn squares of blood-stained pavement. Indelible found himself in the double beam of that twin spotlight. He meant to keep walking until he was out of it, but it followed him.
Kafirs in uniform, kafirs with submachine guns, had reasserted control of the streets surrounding the embassy. Not all kafirs were Americans: A kafir used his own language now to bark out an order, Move on, go home, curfew in nine minutes. In the United States, people were no doubt gathering in orderly fashion for the working day. They had subways there. And huge highways. They worshipped Jesus, peace be upon him, there. God forgive us. They filled their tanks with gasoline and rode the subways and sat in their offices or their shops. They constantly listened to music. Shaitan pissed in their ears.
‘Move on!’
Just as the kafir speaking the native tongue put his hand to his gun, Indelible nodded and walked away from the embassy.
Five men had died here. Six at least had been gravely injured. People had fled from the kafirs as they fired. Indelible looked up as he walked. The bodies of the four martyrs who had climbed, without orders, onto the razorwire still hung there on the gate, trophies for the Americans. Lights from the helicopters passed across the men’s bodies from time to time.
Another man, a man with only one leg, had died in the tear-gas-driven stampede away from the embassy. Indelible had seen feet crush this man’s face and chest as he writhed on the pavement. Indelible had found a safe nook, an angled part of the embassy gate near a dumpster, and watched the crowd’s shameful, leaderless, lethally chaotic retreat. He had watched that man die under the feet of his countrymen. His body must have been collected since the attack.
Chaos. The city dying.
In America, people paid to not have such experiences in their cities, and to not know of them when they occurred elsewhere. In America, Indelible thought, people would speak of those
outside the gate throwing stones and rubbish, not of the uniformed men firing into the crowd. Or not speak of this at all.
And all for nothing. The desecrator of the Holy Koran had not even been in the embassy.
No one to encourage here. No one in need of encouragement. Only the martyrs, already victorious. He walked faster, and though it was cool tonight, a sweat broke out on his forehead.
There was no compromising with kafirs. Kafirs meant to obliterate everything. A new strategy was in order.
Not out yet, still working for Dad, dammit. Thelonius kept his mouth shut, signed the auto rental agreement, left the little, grey-carpeted room, warmed himself in the sun and felt stronger somehow, holding the car key beneath the open morning sky.
Having opted not to fly from DC to Salem, having cancelled his ticket in person, he guided the sleek new-smelling rental out of the airport parking lot and threaded his way toward 95. He headed north, but kept an eye out for detours. He wanted to see how long he could make this trip last.
Creative, reckless truckers sped past. They had all defaced the safety-first signs embedded on the backs of their vehicles by contractors and/or employers. Countless variations on the signs, countless variations on the defacements. HOW IS MY DRIVING? CALL 1–800–9, and the rest of the plastic burst away in shivers. WE ARE PROUD OF OUR PROFESSIONAL FLEET OF DRIVERS – TO COMPLIMENT THEM, CALL US AT – what?
On some signs, the number was entirely obscured with black paint or ink. On others, only certain carefully chosen numbers were transformed: from a 3 to an 8, or a 4 to a 9, or what might have been an 8 to a black void. On one such sign there was no text at all, only grey paint where the message should have been. Men – he had yet to see a female trucker – who were unwilling to be traced, men unwilling to be held accountable. All those numbers had been rendered useless for the identification of excess. Whenever they settled into their vehicles, these men reserved to right to conduct their journeys according to their own guidelines. They hurtled around him, as though he were one of them, but slow to catch on.
Jihadi Page 27