Jihadi (23 page)

The boy began spending less time with his father, due to two circumstances. The first: His arms had finally healed over, though there were still dozens of fearsome scars. The second: Abu Islam’s list of responsibilities as an imam had grown, and the days were full.

The heavyset woman wanted nothing to do with motherhood. She grunted at the boy and ate meals in his presence only at Abu Islam’s insistence. The boy was assigned to a quiet, sallow-faced
brother who had emerged as the first among equals within the fraternity of the Bearded Glarers. His face was harsh and thin like a skull’s.

In conversation, this man referred to himself as ‘Your father’s friend’. The boy thought of him as Skullface, though he had never spoken this nickname aloud.

During a meeting with the New Imam, Skullface made certain strategic proposals and certain suggestions concerning the content of the daily and weekly sermons. Skullface made a point of raising these issues during his one-on-one meeting, so that none of the other Bearded Glarers heard. The boy got the impression that his father was uneasy about the possibility of some of the other Bearded Glarers objecting to these proposals. He heard his father promise Skullface that he, Skullface, would have an answer to relay within twenty-four hours.

Skullface warned the boy to say nothing of what he had heard. The boy nodded.

The next day, Abu Islam confirmed everything that had been discussed the previous evening, and instructed Skullface to fit the boy for a vest.

Her evening prayer not yet made, Noura was missing again.

Fatima, having noticed Noura’s absence after making her own sunnah prayers – her little sister excelled now at sneaking off while one was praying – gave thanks Mother was napping. She wrapped a
good shawl around her shoulders, flicked on her key light, made her way outside, into the deepening brush. And spotted her.

By the weak light of the keychain’s tiny bulb, Noura’s angled body twisted and danced in the water of the pond. Fatima hissed Noura’s name, saw the silhouette crouch and freeze. She hissed the name again.

Nothing came back.

Then her sister’s eyes gleamed for a recognizable instant through the mist, and beneath them, no doubt, the smile that Noura used when negotiating terms of surrender. Fatima ordered her to remain still. Noura meowed. Fatima advanced her tiny light. The fool had no clothes on.

In the house, her hair damp and awry, a flower within the big shawl, Noura said she found the water quite calm. ‘The whole world reflects back. The pond knows that everyone but me who’s a person is sleeping.’

‘Well, I wasn’t sleeping. There could be vehicles going by on that road, you know.’

As Fatima ran a towel over her dark, unruly hair, Noura explained that there were numerals in the water who swam with her. The numerals, Nine for instance, watched over her, and would alert her to any danger. Fatima scoffed at that, quiet but firm. She glared to signal that this was serious.

There were times she wished she could hit Nine and Crazytown and all the rest of them. Noura too. Noura most of all, actually. Perhaps she should slap Noura now.

Fatima did not slap her sister. Instead, she stood and said it was time to get dressed and pray. Noura, wrapped in the big shawl, remained seated, counted her fingers.

‘I know what I’m going to be when I grow up. A cat. Then I could swim whenever I want. There are cats who swim in that pool, Fatima. Grey ones, gold ones, little kittens. Eight or ten of them.’

Fatima assured Noura that the place she had been splashing around in like a lunatic was not a pool. That cats did not swim.

‘These do.’

Fatima stood Noura up and reminded her that, whether cats could swim or not, she was not to go outside without permission. They had discussed this. Did Noura remember her promise, the promise she had made with hands held? When they’d left the city? To do as she was told? To be a good girl?

Noura sat down again in a heap and said nothing.

‘I’m disappointed in you. Don’t go to that pond again. I’ll know if you do. It would be different if the road weren’t there, but it is. Next time, Mother will hear of it.’ Fatima meant it, too, or thought she did.

‘Tell her. I don’t care.’

Again, the urge to slap her. As though her sister were daring her to strike.

‘It’s time to pray now.’

But Noura only sat there, counting again. Fatima placed her cupped hands in front of her eyes and prayed the day would end.

‘I bled between the legs today,’ Noura said finally. ‘I only
went
to the pool to wash myself.’

Mother had awoken, and was making sounds in the bathroom. Noura would not be praying. That would be interesting to explain.

Later that night, Mother was talking on the phone to relatives about Noura’s cooking skills, and about other matters pertaining to Noura. Noura was sleeping. Fatima walked, alone, toward the pond.

When she reached the pond, this time with a proper flashlight, she saw a few grey flashes in the brush. Cats. Who was to say whether or not they swam? She made her way up the embankment to check the road. She wanted another good look at it.

It was just too close. The road came in grey and empty and severe, and too straight. It cut in too far, too unnaturally toward the natural border of the pond and its surrounding green. Had obviously disturbed that border. The road made her insides constrict. As she turned to make her way back home, the beam of her flashlight
settled on a tiny wide mouth by the shoulder: the intact corpse of a grey kitten, perhaps struck by a car.

What on earth had she been thinking?

‘I feel safe there,’ naked Noura had told Fatima as they’d walked back toward the house in double-time, Fatima holding the shawl secure around her. Noura turned her head for a moment and stared back toward the pathway she and Fatima blazed through the wet grass. ‘I like it.’

‘I know you do,’ Fatima answered, pressing her forward.

‘Crazytown says the ripper is either a bad man or a bad smell. Nine says it’s definitely a man. Here comes a blanket to put him to bed, Nine says, and also a chopper to chop off his head. I’ll never pray again, Nine says.’

Thelonius was lost in thought, considering the meaning and derivation of his own first name, when the Raisin told him, with what appeared to be subdued satisfaction, that an American had been killed outside the embassy.

The man in question – a grey-haired public relations liaison, according to the Raisin’s sources – had been standing on a car, trying to say something to a crowd while using a megaphone. Thelonius was pretty sure he had known this man.

If he was the liaison Thelonius was thinking of, he had started working in the embassy about three months ago. He was a Directorate man who came from Massachusetts. Thelonius had gone bowling with him back in the States. As part of his job in the embassy, he had written press releases, composed social media messages, crafted radio and television talking points about the American commitment to democracy and justice and human rights and so forth. He had loved the Red Sox and rejoiced in 2004, as Thelonius had. With Thelonius, in fact. He had been a friend. Now, if he was the man Thelonius remembered, he was dead.

The capital had leaked away almost all of its visible light. Through the little window in the far wall, Thelonius watched Islamic City erase its own outlines, until it seemed to deny all existence.

Whatever home was, Thelonius was now in the opposite of that. There was not even a direction home in Islamic City. If it ever found him, this anti-city, it was all over.

Long after lights-out, in the well-darkened cell he shared with the Raisin, Thelonius saw, without meaning to see, the darting, rat-like eyes of Dick Unferth.

Dick Unferth was, and doubtless still is, a senior American intelligence official whose career was dedicated to the proposition that everything is very, very simple.

Becky Firestone’s last remaining ally in the Directorate, he began an affair with her at some point during July, 2004. This fact remained, in September of the following year, a kind of crisis in suspension for Thelonius. Once, during a hot, late-summer evening right before the collapsing point, during the last phase of a long period of distance, of evasion, of overreliance on to-do lists and ritualized humour, Becky called Thelonius by the wrong name while they were making love. She called him ‘Richard’.

With the escape of that word from her lips, Thelonius felt everything in him still and go cold. What he had suspected. What he had feared. Thelonius’s soul shrivelled, his erection died. A sob caught in his throat. Above him, Becky sniffed, shook her head as though activating some kind of mental rewind button, tensed and slid what was left of him out of her. She strode out of the bedroom, made noises in the bathroom next door and peed or pretended to pee. He thought the sound came from her pouring a paper cup full of water into the toilet and then flushing.

She returned, and he pressed the matter, demanding to know when he had first disappointed her. She met this challenge with
silence. When he persisted, he heard a stony ‘For both of our sakes, T, I don’t want to answer that question.’

He got up, showered, dressed, grabbed his phone, left the house, and peeled out of the driveway in the middle of the night, opting to take consecutive personal days and sleep in the Siena.

This prolonged absence got Becky’s attention. It also appears to have coincided with an expansion of the Plum.

No direction home.

Thelonius awoke, to his surprise, alert and refreshed. Perhaps he had slept a full day through. It seemed just as dark in the cell as it had been, but nothing hurt.

If he continued to lie immobile on the cot, that knee might feel better when he finally decided to move it. The possibility of approaching the world with sufficient rest settled over him like a long embrace. He held his breath and listened. There was no noise of crowds outside.

The Raisin, lively as a robin in springtime, sat chanting on the opposite cot. Not a problem. That could be tuned out.

He lay still. It was sunset: a dying glare visible through the window. Thelonius recalled his first encounter with rat-eyed Dick Unferth. It was during a meeting Dad had put together. A similar dying glare had draped grey Langley as Thelonius stared out the broad window of the conference room.

During that brainstorming meeting, newly hired Dick Unferth had said: ‘America as a whole does not do messaging well. As a result, we are getting crushed, shut out, stomped on in the marketplace. Our anti-Americanism problem abroad has nothing to do with our behaviour. Nothing. Quote me on that. Our messaging is the issue. And we can actually control that.’

To make the memory of this discussion go away, Thelonius began reading. When the glare died and the fluorescents snapped off, he read in the total darkness of lights-out.

Thelonius could read by smell alone, without the help of the fluorescent hallway tubes that pretended to illuminate his cell from time to time, because his reading material was
SERGEANT USA #109
.

The cover, he knew, read as follows: THE ORIGIN OF SERGEANT USA! It featured Sarge bursting through the front page of a newspaper. Twelve cents. 109. Jan. Marvel Comics Group.

The cover had a distinctive welcoming smell, predictive of, but not identical to, that of the pulpy sheets inside. He had, by now, read this story at least a dozen times in his cell, several thousand times over the course of his life. He could easily have recited it from memory, word for word, or at least the twenty illustrated pages of it that had no advertisements. He knew the sequence of pages as he knew the alphabet, knew the details of the bright panels on each page as well as he knew how to spell ‘Thelonius’. The act of turning pages and inhaling faint, decades-old inks brought an ancient, familiar comfort. The narrative – frail, scrawny Roger Stevens is transformed by a 1940s brain trust into an all-American superwarrior – was so deeply worn into his mental grooves, in both word and image, that Thelonius usually finished reading without meaning to.

I’ve got a secret, kid. Everybody’s got a secret.

When the sun rose, he promised himself, he would move on to the material he had not yet memorized: the ads with their tiny print, which he now considered, a little guiltily, the most rewarding part of the volume.

In the dark, Thelonius could recall the details of only one ad: page four; STAMP COLLECTING OUTFIT; a packet of worldwide stamps, nine triangles, two diamonds; L. W. Brown, Department Something, Something, Michigan, a zip code beginning with the number four. With his mother’s help, he had sent away for it. Never received it.

To be fair, that might have been because of the sudden move to his grandparents’ following her death. In Oregon, he read and reread the ad. Imagined he longed for his stamps. All he really longed for, though, was to go home.

This must be page four. The scent of old paper said to Thelonius, ‘On the opposite page, there is a full-page drawing of Roger Stevens a few seconds before he became Sergeant USA.’ Zapped by a gleaming, just-invented machine, Roger looked as though he were being burned alive. Or, having accidentally detonated something in his heart, was in the process of exploding.

That was Roger’s secret. He had had to catch fire in order to turn into Sergeant USA.

Thelonius had read this story over and over again for nearly forty years, had memorized all details of that odd image of Roger Stevens, and every word connected to it. More than memorized: That picture of a man aflame was part of him now.

The pictures in the old ads were part of him, too. And so was the scent of decaying newsprint. Something was getting in the way of that smell, though. What the hell was that? Chlorine?

Some cleaning agent sloshed around in some bucket down the hall. Thelonius clenched his fists. Unclenched them. Took a stress breath.

Chlorine had confirmed the existence of the first demonstrable line of bullshit he’d received about Dick Unferth. Long before Becky had said ‘I don’t want to answer that question’, Thelonius had a funny feeling about this guy. One afternoon, from the upstairs bathroom, she shouted that he should answer her phone if Langley rang. She was expecting a call. She’d be in the shower. Langley needed to talk about a legal memo Justice was preparing. Her phone was in her purse.

The water drowned out the rest.

Becky’s phone sang the first few seconds of ‘Respect’. Thelonius opened the purse and grabbed the phone.

The display said, ‘Richard’.

Thelonius let it ring through. A text message from Unferth materialized:
Swimming, etc. here = yes
.

Only 30 min
. A photo of his upper torso.

Dozens of messages from that number.

Thelonius put the phone back.

Becky swept downstairs, checked her phone. Said she had to go shopping. Vanished.

A voice said,
I’ve been telling you to take her out for years, kid
.

At dinner that evening, having smelled chlorine on her when she gave his cheek her usual welcoming peck, Thelonius recited the message, knocked a pitcher of ice water to the floor, and called Becky a liar to her face for the very first time.

‘People lie,’ Becky said. ‘Welcome to grown-up world. So I went swimming. Sorry.’

And went on eating.

Thelonius began to think about killing Dick Unferth.

‘Boy, I wish I was Sergeant USA. I wonder if we’ll ever learn who he really is?’

‘Not as long as he keeps winning,’ said cagey Roger Stevens on page nineteen.

After she called him Richard during sex, after he left the house, Becky phoned him again and again. Thelonius did not answer. He kept the phone in his overnight bag and shut the ringer off.

He realized he could not recall a time, in the entire history of their relationship, when she’d had no idea of his whereabouts. She’d always been responsible for placing him in various positions on the chessboard – in a meeting, or at a dinner party, or overseas, or off to Langley for a day, or down in the study – and then placing him somewhere else. As though there were no other way for either of them to live: Thelonius being moved around on the squares.

She had gotten him into the Directorate that way. Placing him on the correct squares. In the correct rooms. With the correct people. And she had always gotten him out again safely. He had to give her that. For as long as he could remember, he’d been able to count on her getting him out of trouble and pointing him homeward.

Until Dick Unferth came along.