Terrorist (4 page)

BetJi is more in touch with things, more willing to bend and change. She had gone along with their City Hall marriage even though, blushing, she had admitted to him that it would break her parents' hearts not to have the wedding in their church. She had not said what it would do to her own heart, and he had replied, "Let's keep it simple. No hocus-pocus." Religion meant nothing to him, and as they merged into a married entity it meant less and less to her. Now he wonders if he had deprived her of something, however
grotesque, and if her constant chatter and her overeating weren't compensatory. Being married to a stiff-necked Jew couldn't be easy.

Emerging from the bathroom with her body wrapped in square yards of bathrobe, she sees him standing silent and motionless at the window of the upstairs hall and cries out, frightened, "Jack! What's wrong?"

A certain uxorious sadism in him protects his gloom, only half hiding it from her. He wants Beth to feel his state of mind is her fault, though his reason tells him it is not. "Nothing new," he says. "I woke up too early again. And couldn't go back to sleep."

"That's a sign of depression, they were saying on television the other day. Oprah had a woman on who's written a book. Maybe you should see a—I don't know, the word 'psychiatrist' frightens everybody who isn't rich, the woman was saying—you should see some kind of specialist if you're so miserable."

"A
Weltschmerz
specialist." Jack turns and smiles at her. Though she too is over sixty—sixty-one to his sixty-three— her face is wrinkle-free; what in a lean woman would be deep creases are on her round face lightly etched, smoothed to a girlish delicacy by tiie fat keeping her skin taut. "No thanks, honey," he says. "I dish out wisdom all day, I have no tolerance for absorbing it myself. Too many antibodies."

He has found over the years that, fended off by him on one topic, she will, rather than lose his attention entirely, quickly resort to another. "Speaking of antibodies, Herm was saying on the phone yesterday—this is in strict confidence, Jack, even I shouldn't know, promise you won't tell anybody—"

"I promise."

"—she tells me these things because she has to vent and I'm out of the loop that's down there—she said that her boss is about to elevate the terror-threat level for this area from yellow to orange. I thought it might be on the radio, but it wasn't. What do you think it means?"

Hermione's boss is the Secretary of Homeland Security, a born-again right-wing stooge with some Kraut name like Haffenreffer, down in Washington. "It means tbey want us to feel they're not just sitting on our tax dollars. They want us to feel they have a handle on this thing. But they don't."

"Is that what you're worrying about, when you worry?"

"No, dear. It's the last thing on my mind, to be honest. Bring 'em on. I was thinking, looking out the window, this whole neighborhood could do with a good bomb."

"Oh, Jack, you shouldn't even joke about it, those poor young men up there on the top stories, calling their wives on cell phones to tell them they loved them."

"I know, I know. I shouldn't even joke."

"Markie keeps saying we should move out to be closer to him in Albuquerque."

"He says it, honey, but he doesn't mean it. Us moving closer is die last thing he wants." Fearing that his enunciating this trutb might have hurt the boy's mother, he jokes, "I don't know why diat is. We never beat him or locked him in a closet."

"They would never bomb the desert," BetJi goes on, arguing as if they are a few debating points away from going to Albuquerque.

"That's right:
they,
as you call them,
love
the desert."

She takes enough offense at his sarcasm to get off his case, he observes with mingled relief and regret. She manages an old-fashioned haughty toss of her head and says, "It must be

wonderful, to be so unconcerned about what worries everybody else," and turns back to the bedroom to make the bed and, on the same scale of pillowy exertion, to get herself dressed for her day at the library.

What have I done,
he asks himself,
to deserve such fidelity, such wifely trust?
He is disappointed, slightly, that she hadn't disputed his rude claim that their son, a thriving ophthalmologist with three dear sun-kissed, dutifully bespectacled children and a bottle-blonde, pure Jewish, superficially friendly but basically standoffish wife from Short Hills, doesn't want his parents nearby. He and Beth have their myths between them, and one is that Mark loves them as much as they—helplessly, their nest holding only one egg— love him. In fact, Jack Levy wouldn't mind calling it quits around here; after a lifetime of an old-time industrial burg dying on its feet and turning into a Third World jungle, a shift to the Sun Belt might do him good. Beth, too. Last winter had been a brute in the Middle Atlantic region, and there are still, in the constant shadow between some of the neighborhood's close-packed houses, little humps of snow black with dirt.

At Central High, his guidance counselor's room is one of the smallest—a former long supply closet whose gray metal storage shelves remain, supporting a scattering of college catalogues, telephone directories, handbooks of psychology, and stacked back issues of a no-frills,
Nation-sized
weekly titled
Metro Job Market,
tracking the region's employment needs and its institutions of technical education. When the palatial building was erected eighty years ago, no separate space set aside for guidance was thought necessary: guidance
was everywhere, loving parents innermost and a moralistic popular culture outermost, with lots of advice between. A child was fed more guidance than he could easily digest. Now, routinely, Jack Levy interviews children who seem to have no flesh-and-blood parents—whose instructions from the world are entirely imparted by electronic ghosts signalling across a crowded room, or rapping through black foam earplugs, or encoded in the intricate programming of action figures twitching their spasmodic way through the explosion-producing algorithms of a video game. Students present themselves to their counselor like a succession of CDs whose shimmering surface gives no clue to their contents without the equipment to play them.

This senior, the fifth thirty-minute interview of the weary long morning, is a tall, lean, dun-colored boy in black jeans and a strikingly clean white shirt. The whiteness of the shirt assaults Jack Levy's eyes, his head a bit tender from his early awakening. The folder holding the boy's student records is labeled on the outside
Mulloy (Ashmawy),
Ahmad.

"Your name is interesting," Levy tells the young man. There is something Levy likes about the kid—an unblinking gravity, a wary courtesy in the set of his soft, rather full lips and the careful cut and combing of his hair, a wiry crest that seeks to rise straight up from his brow. "Who's Ashmawy?" the counselor asks.

"Sir, shall I explain?"

"Please do."

The boy speaks with a pained stateliness; he is imitating, Levy feels, some adult he knows, a smooth and formal talker. "I am the product of a white American mother and an Egyptian exchange student; they met while both studied at the New Prospect campus of the State University of New Jersey. My mother, who has since become a nurse's aide, at
the time was seeking credits toward an art degree. She paints and designs jewelry in her spare time, with some success, though not enough to support us.
He
—" The boy hesitates, as if he has encountered an obstacle in his throat.

"Your father," Levy prompts.

"Exactly. He had hoped, my mother has explained to me, to absorb lessons in American enterprise and marketing techniques. It was not as easy as he had been told it would be. His name was—
is;
I very much feel he is still alive— Omar Ashmawy, and hers is Teresa Mulloy. She is Irish-American. They married well before I was born. I am legitimate."

"Fine. I didn't doubt it. Not that it matters. It's not the baby who's not legitimate, if you follow me."

"I do, sir. Thank you. My father well knew that marrying an American citizen, however trashy and immoral she was, would gain him American citizenship, and so it did, but not American know-how, nor the network of acquaintance that leads to American prosperity. Having despaired of ever earning more than a menial living by the time I was three, he decamped. Is that the correct word? I encountered it in an autobiographical memoir by the great American writer Henry Miller, which Miss Mackenzie assigned us in Advanced English."

"She did? My goodness, Ahmad; times change. You used to find Miller only under the counter. You know the expression 'under the counter'?"

"Of course. I am not a foreigner. I have never been abroad."

"You asked about 'decamp.' It's an old-fashioned word, but most Americans know what it means. To break up a military camp is the original sense."

"Mr. Miller used it, I believe, of a wife who left him."

"Yes. Small wonder. That she decamped, I mean. Miller would not have been an easy husband." Those lubricated three-ways with the wife in
Sexus.
Was the English department assigning
Sexus}
Is nothing to be held in reserve, for adulthood?

The young man takes a surprising tangent from his counselor's awkward remarks. "My mother tells me that I cannot remember my father," he says, "and yet I do."

"Well, you were three. Developmentally speaking, you could have a few memories." This is not Jack Levy's intended direction for the interview.

"A warm, dark shadow," Ahmad says, leaning forward, with a jerk, in his earnestness. "Very white, square teeth. A small, neat mustache. I get my own personal neatness from him, I am sure. Among my memories is a sweet smell, perhaps aftershave lotion, though with a hint of some spice in it, perhaps a Middle Eastern dish he had just consumed. He was dark, darker than I, but elegantly thin-featured. He parted his hair very near the middle."

This intent digression makes Levy uneasy. The boy is using it to hide something—what? Jack points out, deflat-ingly, "Perhaps you have confused a photograph with a memory."

"I have only one or two photographs. My mother may have some she has hidden from me. When I was small and innocent, she refused to answer my many questions about my father. I think his desertion left her very angry. I would like, some day, to find him. Not to press any claim, or to impose any guilt, but simply to talk with him, as two Muslim men would talk."

"Uh, Mr.—? How do you like to be called? Mulloy or—" he looks again at the cover of his folder—"Ashmawy?"

"My mother attached her name to me, on my Social Security and driver's license, and her apartment is where I can be reached. But when I am out of school and independent I will become Ahmad Ashmawy."

Levy keeps his eyes down on the folder. "And how do you plan to support this independence? Your marks were good, Mr. Mulloy, in chemistry and English and so on, but I see you switched last year to the voke track. Who advised you to do that?"

The young man lowers his own eyes—solemn black lamps, long-lashed—and rubs as if at a gnat by his ear. "My teacher," he says.

"Which teacher? A course switch like that should have been checked with me. We could have talked, you and I, even if we aren't two Muslim men."

"My teacher is not here. He is at the mosque. Shaikh Rashid, the imam. We study together the sacred Qur'an."

Levy tries to suppress his distaste, saying, "Yes. Do I know where the mosque is? I fear I don't, except for the huge one on Tilden Avenue that the Black Muslims put up in the ruins after the 'sixties riots. Is that the one you mean?" He is sounding bristly, and doesn't want to. It wasn't this boy who had woken him up at four o'clock, or who had fouled his brain with thoughts of death, or had made Beth oppressively fat.

"West Main Street, sir, about six blocks south of Linden Boulevard."

"Reagan Boulevard. They renamed it last year," Levy says, making a disapproving mouth.

The boy doesn't pick up on it. Politics for these teen-agers is an obscurer department of celebrity heaven. Polls show they think Kennedy was the next-best President after Lin-

coin, because he had celebrity quality, and anyway they don't know any of the others, not even Ford and Carter, just Clinton and the Bushes, if they can tell die Bushes apart. Young Mulloy—Levy had a mental block with the other name— says, "It is on a street of stores, above a beauty shop and a place where they give you cash. It is not easy to find, the first time."

"And the imam of this hard-to-find place told you to switch to the voke track."

Again the boy hesitates, protecting what it is he is protecting, and then says, staring boldly from those great black eyes, in which the irises are hard to distinguish from the pupils, "He said the college track exposed me to corrupting influences—bad philosophy and bad literature. Western culture is Godless."

Jack Levy leans back in his squeaking old-fashioned wooden swivel chair and sighs, "Would that it were." Fearing trouble with the school board and newspapers if they got wind of his saying this to a student, he backtracks: "That slipped out. Some of these evangelical Christians get my goat, blaming Darwin for the sloppy job God did, creating the universe."