American Taliban (29 page)

IT IS STILL MAY 1
, and still more than 2 million are starving to death in South Africa. May Day. May Day. MAYDAY—

Also today, in what will become the largest bankruptcy case ever, WorldCom prepares to file for Chapter 11.

Also today, the president reminds us, that is, as of last Thursday, no suicide bombers managed to blow themselves up on buses, subways, in markets, or in front of falafel stands. We are doing something right, he says. God loves America, he says.

UNABLE TO SIT STILL
, desperate to do something, to act, to move mountains, Barbara packs a change of clothes and drives down to the Outer Banks. And all the way down, she listens to John’s music. She
begins with the Ensemble Ibn ’Arabi, a meditative set of songs, moves on to Shankar, to Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan. She is surprised by some of the CDs in her son’s collection: Steve Reich’s
Music for 18 Musicians
, which she didn’t know John liked. The Kronos Quartet, and of course Dylan.

Dylan chants. Barbara drives. And sobs. She turns left on Wright Memorial Bridge and remembers last night’s dream. She’d been flying. She’d been airborne and exuberant, and now she can’t remember why or where, whether she’d flown over anywhere in particular, seen anything. She is here now, crossing the Wright Brothers Memorial Bridge, to the Outer Banks, where man first flew, and she knows. That the Outer Banks has been expecting her. That the house has been waiting. She opens the windows and inhales the saline air. She feels John in the air. The Saab is in the driveway. His long board leans in its place in the garage; his short board clutters the front hall. So she changes into a swimsuit and a pair of aloha board pants, an old gift from John. She finds and slips into one of his rash guards, and though too long, it’s snug. She loads his short board into the Saab and drives up Byrd to the surfers’ stretch of beach. She finds a spot on the corner of Byrd and Lindbergh, beside a blue jalopy she recognizes. Sylvie’s car. She unloads. She walks to the beach. She looks. She watches the waves.

So she sees the waves collect themselves, gather meaning, heave over, and disperse to nonmeaning. Two sides of the same thing, rising, dropping. What John wants her to know.

She looks up, sees the girls bobbing in the water. So she waves. So the girls see her and ride toward her. So she walks toward them, enters the water, with Katie and Sylvie at her sides. She does as they do. Rushes the water, surfboard in front of her, and then with the board supporting her, keeping her afloat, with the girls encouraging her, giving her a hand, she paddles with them toward the depths. They paddle past the third breaker and move toward the fourth. They duck under and come out past the fifth. They keep paddling, past the sixth and the seventh, where it’s finally quiet. They are beyond the crashing waves, beyond the noise. She pulls her knees up under her as they do. She waits.

Thus three boards bob in the water, thus three wahines wait for a wave. They pass on the first one. They duck under the second. And then the third one begins to build, and Katie signals. Sylvie gives the sign. This is yours, a good beginner’s wave. They push her board into
it. So she crouches on her toes, hands on the sides of her board, balancing. She breathes and waits, feels the water build under her, heave and lift her. So she unbends her knees halfway, stands, and gives herself to the wave, to the pleasure of giving herself, a surrender. Her weight shifts to match the water’s weight. Her knees bend and unbend. One and two. One and then two, left shift, right shift, left shift, right. She moves with the wave, with the rhythm of the wave. And she understands. It’s all continuous movement, no standing still, no holding on. There is only becoming. Being doesn’t exist. So she keeps moving, shifting her weight right, shifting her weight left, right left right left right. And the wave lifts her, the wave carries her, and she rides. It is awesome, it is extraordinary, it is absurd, and, yes, glorious. She feels Jilly with her, holding her up. She feels John beside her, keeping the rhythm: left, right, left, right—she is a fifty-two-year-old mother on her son’s board. She is fifty-two years old and becoming. She rides for a long half minute, the fullest thirty seconds of her life.

This work is indebted, as all books are, to the many texts that informed it. First and foremost, Henry Corbin’s astounding
Alone with the Alone: Creative Imagination in the Sūfism of Ibn ’Arabī
escorted me into Sufism. Harold Bloom’s introductory essay on Corbin showed me how the mystical ideas and myths of the Kabbalah expand into this wider system of thought. Idries Shah’s
The Sufis
introduced me to the founding Sufis and their work.

Several books and articles offered insight into the education and psychology of martyrs, among them
Whistleblowers
by C. Fred Alford;
Kamikaze Diaries
by Emiko Ohnuki-Tierney; Jane Mayer’s “Lost in the Jihad,” for
The New Yorker;
Laurie Abraham’s “Anatomy of a Whistleblower” for
Mother Jones;
Mark Kukis’s
“My Heart Became Attached”;
and William Dalrymple’s “Inside the Madrasas,” for
The New York Review of Books
. The notion of Islamabad as D.C. dropped into the foothills of the Himalayas is from Dalrymple’s “Days of Rage,” published in
The New Yorker
. From Charles Seife’s
Zero
came the idea of Zero Point as a cosmic/spiritual starting point. The translation of the
Tao
is by Ron Hogan, editor of
Beatrice.com
. The lines of poetry at the end of part three are from
Poems of Arab Andalusia
, translated by Cola Franzen and published by City Lights. Edward Rice’s biography
Captain Sir Richard Francis Burton
provided me with an example of a scholar-adventurer and the mixed motivations that inspired him.

Several publishers generously allowed me to excerpt from published
work, and I am grateful for their permission. Special thanks to Eddie Hirsch for his “I Am Going to Start Living Like a Mystic” from
Lay Back the Darkness
, published by Knopf. The translation of the ’Arabi poem “My Heart Is Capable of Every Form” is from Corbin’s
Alone with the Alone
, published by Princeton University Press. Faiz Ahmed Faiz’s “Don’t Ask for That Love Again,” from
The Rebel’s Silhouette: Selected Poems
, was translated by Agha Shahid Ali and published by University of Massachusetts Press. APA Publications GmbH & Co. Verlag KG, Singapore Branch, provided permission for the excerpts from its
Insight Guide to Pakistan, 3rd Edition
. And Appleseed Music, Inc., allowed the reprinting of the lines from Arlo Guthrie’s “Alice’s Restaurant.”

I’m deeply grateful to the following people: my first reader, Stephanie Grant, whose close readings and nuanced comments made this a better book, and whose friendship serves me as a rock; Patricia Chao and Jonathan Freedman, who read early, sketchy beginnings; my luminous agent, Mary Evans, whose capacity for optimism and desire for transcendent life shaped this story. David Ebershoff’s tireless editing helped sculpt the book into its final form.

Finally, I’m indebted to Stephen Spewock, who continues to tolerate the tortuous writing process, the long years from happy conception through to the torment of publication.

P
EARL
A
BRAHAM
is the author of three novels,
The Seventh Beggar, Giving Up America
, and
The Romance Reader
, and the editor of the anthology
Een sterke vrouw, wie zal haar vinden?
Her stories and essays have appeared in literary quarterlies and anthologies. Abraham teaches literature and creative writing at Western New England College.