My Accidental Jihad (2 page)

A few weeks later, a purple bruise spread across the horizon and gusts of wind blew the leaves skyward, revealing their green undersides like flashes of a pale thigh when a skirt catches the wind. There was a hurricane warning. Long lines of nervous shoppers snaked through the aisles of the grocery store: people stockpiled water and batteries or shuttered their homes and made arrangements to stay with friends. I was at home, packing an overnight bag so I could stay at a friend’s house outside of town, when the phone rang. It was Ismail.

“Let’s go for a run,” he suggested in a daring tone of voice. For weeks we had been meeting at the trailhead in the evenings; running with him had become a comforting and predictable part of my routine. I glanced out my window at the street: glistening wet asphalt, swaying trees, a warm wind pressing against the windows. I loved nothing more than to run in a downpour: to explore deserted streets, drenched with rain and sweat; to stomp through puddles in muddy socks and waterlogged shoes. I left my bag yawning open on the bed, slipped off my pants like shedding skin, changed into shorts and a T-shirt, and jogged down the block. We met on a street between our houses, a gust whipping at our faces, and began to run down the middle of the empty street just as the warm rain began to fall. He matched my pace for a while, then darted ahead like a dog let off the leash, tucking his legs beneath him and sprinting for the pure joy of being alive. He doubled back to check on me, then darted out ahead once more. Drenched by the rain, I followed him through town and back to his house, where he promised me a towel and a glass of juice.

We made our way along the narrow shoulder of a busy street. Only a few feet away cars sped through puddles, spraying our shins with mud. Turning down a steep driveway, we crossed the front lawn of a white clapboard house. I followed him up sagging stairs, into a sparse attic apartment whose slanted ceiling forced me to duck unless I was in the center of the room. The tiny living room was decorated with garage-sale furniture and the dark, narrow kitchen could only contain one of us at a time. A faded square rug the size of a bath mat was laid out in one corner. A small bookshelf contained a few books, and along one windowsill, fossils were lined up neatly like a little boy’s rock collection. But the room was mostly empty. If the contents of his entire apartment had been hauled out to the curb, the whole pile would have looked ready for the dump.

Poor
was the word that came to mind when I looked around at the shabby space—but when he handed me a glass of cold fresh-squeezed juice, and we went outside and sat on the landing to drink it while listening to the patter of the rain on the roof, I realized this was not an accurate assessment. The apartment looked out on a lush green tangle of woods. Quiet and spare, it lacked none of the essentials: fresh food, good books, privacy and natural light. It was just that it contained so little else. Humble and clean, it felt more welcoming than my own rental, where the bed was unmade and the sink was piled high with dirty dishes. Each item in his apartment—the shiny rocks on the windowsill, the clean-swept linoleum and oak floors, the worn bedspread smoothed tight—seemed to glow from his loving touch. Images of my previous boyfriend’s spacious home flashed through my mind: brand-name clothing strewn across the floor, CDs precariously stacked on a pricey music system, liquor bottles spread across the kitchen counter. The absence of clutter or excess in Ismail’s small apartment made it feel far more spacious to me than much bigger homes.

Seated shoulder to shoulder on the top stair of his apartment, holding our juice glasses, we stared out at the woods. The wet hurricane wind reminded me of ocean spray.

“I miss the ocean,” I murmured.

“Me too,” Ismail said. I told him about wading into the steely gray Pacific ocean on misty overcast mornings, paddling out to contemplate the endless horizon while the swell of gathering waves rolled gently beneath me. He described the azure water of the Mediterranean that lapped at Libya’s barren, rocky coast. He told me about spearfishing along a reef for hours at a time on blistering summer days, returning home only when he had caught enough fish to feed his entire family. He described the dusty road he walked each day to the one-room madrassah where he went to school, and his village’s closetlike library where four boys crowded around the same book, waiting patiently to turn the page until each had read the previous one. He told me about the packs of wild dogs that roamed the desert perimeter of his village—how one night they had surrounded his father as he walked home alone in the dark, snarling and baring their teeth. The biggest one had lunged, and Ismail’s father had grabbed for the animal’s throat, howling and slobbering like a madman and clutching at that matted fur, and when he finally released his grip the animal dropped lifeless to the ground and the rest of the dogs scattered. The world he described was to me as fantastic and remote as a fairy tale. I was riveted.

As he spoke I studied his face close up for the first time, taking in unsettling details I had not noticed when we ran side by side: Fine wrinkles spreading from the edge of his eyes. A receding hairline. Yellow stains on his teeth. I glanced down at his threadbare T-shirt with faded lettering advertising a race from a decade ago.
No,
I said to myself.
No way
. None of the details I took in matched up with the mate I had imagined for myself.

For as long as I could remember, I had understood life to be a game of acquisition, much like the board game I had loved to play as a child. The key to winning the game of Life was to start with a college education, because it meant receiving a bigger fistful of colorful bills each payday I passed on my way to the finish line. The next step, after a short bend in the road, was to get married: to add a little blue peg beside my pink one in the front seat of a car whose backseat allowed up to four children. Each passing year would bring more: a starter home, twins, a pay raise, a family cruise vacation. I would spin the wheel of chance and count my steps forward, and my life would progress as an unbroken series of expanding opportunities. At the end of the game, when I reached retirement, I would reside at Millionaire Estates or Countryside Acres—each of which had its own distinct appeal. Then it was time to count the money. The one with the most cash always wins.

An older, darker, poorer man was not part of this game—especially not this middle-aged man with his thick accent and tiny apartment he rented for three hundred dollars a month, to which he invited me without a trace of shame or self-consciousness, as if his possessions had nothing to do with who he was. Perhaps this aspect of him felt more foreign than anything else.

The only piece missing from the board game, its past and future laid out in tidy squares, its neat calculation of the dollar value of major life events, was unbidden emotion. When Ismail laid his hand over mine at his kitchen counter, my heart was not troubled by the cheap wood paneling on the walls behind him or the chips in the mismatched cups on the linoleum counter. The heat from his palm passed through my skin and into my bloodstream, then flowed straight to my grateful heart, which received it without criticism or judgment.

Ismail lived alone, but like the boy who made the velveteen rabbit real by loving it until it was threadbare, he brought his shabby belongings to life through loving attention. He slept beneath a worn cotton blanket as soft and familiar as an old T-shirt. He wore a twenty-year-old down jacket covered with carefully sewn patches. He brewed his coffee in a ten-year-old machine, its white plastic streaked brown where steam had scalded it for the past decade. The machine no longer allowed us to pour a cup until the entire pot had brewed, at which point it emitted a phlegmy cough and a long sigh, like an old man clearing his throat in the morning. That sound was our cue to wait a few more minutes while the last of the coffee dribbled into the carafe. Ismail stood in his small kitchen waiting—not while eating or surfing the Internet or occupying himself in other ways. He just stood before the machine as if politely waiting for it to be done speaking. Once he had poured and drunk a cup, he returned to his machine and began to carefully dissemble it piece by piece, like a boy with a model airplane, lovingly wiping its stained surface with a cloth and digging into each crevice to draw out grounds, which would otherwise clog its old arteries.

His bedroom window looked out onto his vegetable garden, which was overgrown with pungent basil, crisp skinny cucumbers and fat red tomatoes. Fragrant pink peonies exploded like popcorn along the walkway to his door. He waded knee-deep into the flowers with a pair of scissors, bent slender stalks gently toward him, and selected three blooms, which he arranged on his kitchen counter in an old glass bottle he had found in the ravine. He had a passion for music and a vast record and CD collection—blues, country, rock, the traditional music of his homeland—but he loved silence just as much.

I spent the night with him. In the morning we watched the sunlight dance over his oak floor. The only art adorning the blank white walls of his bedroom was the window itself: a walnut tree drawn sharply against the blue palette of the sky. When I got out of the shower, a cup of steaming coffee waited for me on the bathroom counter. Chipped paint tickled the bottoms of my feet as I sat out on his porch steps in the morning, letting the sun warm my face. A stillness settled over me. He was like a deep pool into which I dove without a second thought, not realizing how thirsty I had been.

S
oon after we started dating, I began to call Ismail “Turtle.” The name slipped unexpectedly from my mouth, surprising us both. He flashed me a bewildered smile, one that said I was a mystery to him—not an ominous one but a delightful one, one he wanted to investigate further. Perhaps he thought the name came from the small, bloodred turtle that sat on the windowsill in his bedroom—a gift from a former student, he told me—the first thing I saw each morning I awoke at his house, with its glossy shell and tiny, bobbing head on a spring that seemed to nod an almost imperceptible
good morning
.

Or perhaps he thought the nickname came from his deliberate ways that made my skin prickle with irritation, and I had to walk away to stop myself from complaining. In the mornings I slipped on my shoes and buckled my belt as I bounded down the stairs, balancing an overfull cup of coffee in one hand. He stood in front of his closet, blinking at shirts buttoned and starched and lined up like a military procession. In the car as I waited for him I fiddled impatiently with the air vents or the stereo, sighing and peering up at the apartment. I could see him moving from window to window, checking each one to confirm it was closed, then disappearing to wipe down the kitchen counters one last time. When he finally emerged he sat down on his porch steps and loosened the laces of his shoes like a musician tuning an instrument, adjusting each string as if it needed to be in perfect pitch. By the time he reached the car, I had swigged the last of my coffee and was tapping my fingers impatiently on the dashboard.

But his nickname had nothing to do with the turtle on his windowsill or his slow, maddening ways. Instead it came from lazy weekend mornings in bed when he propped up on one arm beside me, and the late-morning sun bounced off his bare white walls, illuminating his hooded eyelids, the fan of wrinkles around the edges of his eyes when he smiled, the folds of skin gathering at the base of his neck. I had never seen the effects of aging on a lover’s face. I studied a faint age spot on his forehead like a brand marking him as part of the mortal herd. He spoke tenderly to me, but I couldn’t hear what he was saying; my ears were craning for the inaudible crinkle and pop of wrinkles forming, the slow, inexorable slipping of skin down his neck. The
whoosh
of passing time was a distant hum in my ears that I had never heard before.

If life was like a long run down a winding trail, I now had the unsettling feeling that it was nowhere near as long as I had imagined. He was somewhere far ahead of me on the path; all I could see was his receding back as he approached our common destination. Sometimes I felt a sudden panic that I would never be able to catch up with him, that I would ultimately be left alone. When that panic arose on those bright mornings in bed, I turned away and studied the faded sheets instead of his face, only shrugging when he asked me what was wrong. In the shade of the woods or the dim light of a restaurant, he looked young, but on bright sunny mornings he looked weathered, like a sea turtle emerging from the deep, with its mottled shell and leathery skin, its hooked nose and ancient black eyes. I felt embarrassed on his behalf, as if no one had told him that in this culture aging was in poor taste, as if he simply failed to realize it had gone out of fashion.

I had always assumed that the unwritten exchange between younger women and older men was power and security in exchange for sex and youth. The only man I knew with a much younger wife was my neighbor Chuck in California, who had left his wife after falling in love with one of his high school students. The year she turned eighteen she walked down the aisle twice: first to graduate and then to marry her science teacher. On their wedding day Chuck stood beaming at the altar, his full beard already speckled with gray, fine wrinkles spreading from the edges of his moist, hungry eyes, watching her walk shyly toward him in a strapless white sundress. With her pale, skinny shoulders and blushing, plain face, she looked more like a girl at her confirmation than a bride. Her father wore an expensive suit and a pinched smile, and afterward at the reception he and his wife huddled close to one another and glanced around like they were in hostile territory, like something precious had been stolen from them. In a show of masochism disguised as new-age tolerance, Chuck’s ex-wife attended the wedding and sat in the back row beneath a floppy sunhat that hid her sad brown eyes. The lower half of her face was frozen into a brittle smile. I remember the very air at the wedding being singed with scandal, like the acrid aftermath of a fire.

Ismail was not old; he was a fit, handsome, energetic man in his forties. But for the previous ten years I had lived in a Southern California beach town teeming with tan, perfect bodies. From my apartment it was only a short walk to the shoreline, where beautiful people preened on colorful towels that framed the glistening bronze artwork of their bodies. Day and night, toned athletes jogged up and down the boardwalk like spandex-clad sentries guarding this oasis of youth from the assault of time, which loomed like a slow-gathering storm cloud in the distance. Every storefront, every magazine, every television commercial promoted a new weapon in the battle against aging—from dieting to workouts to fashion to plastic surgery—and everyone I knew was fighting on the front lines. Our modest paychecks from our minimum-wage jobs were just enough to cover cheap ammunition, and we staked our claim to youth and beauty with the fierce determination of the fanatical. I had come to see growing older as a weakness of character, an inexcusable slothfulness, a crass disregard for style.

I shared a tiny beachside apartment with a hairdresser, a striking Latina woman named Lorena who had movie-star looks and never missed a workout, whose closet overflowed with designer clothes she’d bought on credit. She took over an hour to get ready each morning, changing several times and flawlessly applying makeup and drying her hair with a roller brush with the circumference of a salad plate. Her boyfriend came to our house to watch football, drink our beer, and tease Lorena for being scatterbrained. When he pontificated about life, she widened her big brown eyes and put her index finger to glossy pink lips. With her lush black mane swept up off her neck, her cocked hips and her doe-eyed stare, she looked like she had just stepped out of a scene from
Breakfast at Tiffany’s
. Five years older than I, she warned me of the pitfalls of life after thirty, reminding me that soon I would have to buckle down and get serious about my looks, that my flippant attitude about makeup and hair and diets would no longer suffice. Even though she made it look easy, she told me, it took real focus and determination to stay beautiful.

The littered sliver of coastline where I lived was crowded with bars and surf shops and rundown apartments. To the east it was bordered by the I-5 freeway, which was clogged morning and night with commuters, unfortunate souls who had traded youth and freedom for mortgages and health insurance. Some of the first cars to pull into the beach parking lot each morning with surfboards strapped to their hoods sported bumper stickers that read
TH
ERE’S NO LIFE EAST OF THE I-5
,
and this was exactly how many of us felt. East of the freeway were station wagons and malls like concrete islands in a glittering sea of chrome; tract housing developments that ate away the desert like a fast-spreading virus. East of the freeway were crow’s-feet and receding hairlines, potbellies and polyester pants. East of where I lived was the neighborhood of middle age, with its mown green grass and identical houses crowded onto cul-de-sacs. I never wanted to move inland.

Ismail was not the first older man I had become involved with. In California I had briefly dated a wealthy doctor in his forties who had a deep tan, a muscled chest, and expensive highlights. He filled his sprawling oceanview home with people decades younger at raucous parties like those I had attended in high school, except that people passed out on expensive Italian leather couches instead of in the rusty beds of pickup trucks. Though he was fifteen years older than me, I felt strangely like his mother, checking my watch as night slipped into morning, mentally counting the drinks he had emptied, pursing my lips in disapproval and flashing him warning looks. He treated aging like influenza—terminal for the indigent but curable for those with enough resources—and he seemed to have driven his own aging into remission.

But Ismail was aging differently—as if aging were an epidemic that ran rampant in the poorer, darker parts of the world. As if one year spent slathered in sunscreen, watching the waves roll in from behind a hundred-dollar pair of sunglasses, was equal to two spent spearfishing for dinner for the entire family on the impoverished North African coast. As if he didn’t even consider time his enemy.

It made no sense for me to fall in love with this older, foreign man who rented a tiny, sparse apartment in which he collected nothing but old things. He did not have a perfect, muscled body. He did not buy me expensive jewelry or silky lingerie or whisk me away to a hotel to drift through long weekends on bedding as white and pillowy as clouds. But there was something about him that made me feel like I could finally exhale and embrace silence; opening up to him, I was also opening up to myself. It seemed to me I had been running for a long, long, time: achieving, avoiding, learning, growing, consuming. In all my striving I had missed out on one simple thing: the fact of being here, in my body, at this very moment, on this faded bedspread and these worn cotton sheets, with his thrift-store lampshade glowing like the setting sun.

ONE
LATE FALL
afternoon I lay in his bed watching leaves float by his window like tiny magic carpets. Fingerlings of sun stretched out across the bedspread and our bodies. Stroking the back of my arm, he began to describe the dark, narrow store in the local souk, or marketplace, where his illiterate father had spent each day behind the wooden counter selling goods to neighbors: a deck of cards, a pack of cigarettes, a bar of soap, a bag of rice. Some paid on the spot for their purchases, but most kept a tab, returning to settle their debt when their luck changed and they could afford to. Friends and neighbors emptied items from the narrow wooden shelves and slipped out the door, while Ismail’s illiterate father murmured their names and purchases over and over again under his breath and waited impatiently for his son to arrive. Just as the accumulated weight of the day’s transactions was becoming too heavy for his tired mind to carry, Ismail burst through the door, threw his school books down, and opened the ledger, pen in hand. His father spilled out an urgent summary of the day’s transactions, which Ismail transcribed furiously onto the page.

“Let me show you something,” Ismail said, rising from the bed and moving to his closet, where he reached up to retrieve a package from a high shelf. Pulling down the paper-wrapped bundle and laying it on the bed, he carefully unfolded a black
jalabiya,
or floor-length robe. He slipped it over his naked body. His skin disappeared beneath black cloth and shimmering gold thread, and with an expert sweeping motion of one arm, he twisted and wrapped his head in a gauzy white strip of cloth. He turned to face me, a shy, uncertain expression on his face.

I gasped. I had only seen him in American clothing—jeans and T-shirts, shorts and running shoes, baseball caps and fleece jackets—and even then his foreignness clung to him as persistently as the pungent spices that lingered in his clothes. There was always something to remind me he came from a different world: the way his tongue tickled the roof of his mouth every time he made the sound of an
r,
the Arabic books that filled his shelves, whose script looked so much to me like a child’s pretend game of writing. His loud, animated phone conversations with his family in Libya, exchanges that sounded to me like heated arguments but which he insisted were only friendly chats. Standing before me in traditional clothing, he became someone I barely recognized. Beneath the brilliant white turban his face seemed a richer brown, his eyes a more intense black. In the robe, with gold thread running in rivulets from his shoulders to the floor, he looked as regal as a prince, more noble and imposing than a man in pants could possibly look. Feeling suddenly exposed and vulnerable, as if in the presence of a stranger, I drew the covers over my body.

“You look like a genie,” I said nervously.

He lifted his arms skyward, his fingers fluttering, his loose black sleeves billowing like wings.

“
Shubbaik lubbaik, ana bain edaik
,
” he chanted in a low, melodramatic voice, furrowing his brow and widening his eyes at the same time, pinning me in his gaze.

Y
our wish is my command.

Suddenly the regal Arab before me was gone, replaced by a cartoon Arab, a Disney character on a magic carpet. Now he was a dark bad man in an Indiana Jones movie, part of the hypnotized throng who prayed on all fours to the evil lord of fire, chanting mumbo jumbo and raising their backsides into the air. Or he was the bloodthirsty Libyan hell-bent to slaughter the brilliant scientist in
Back to the Future,
the one who careened through the mall parking lot in a VW bus, his checkered head cloth snapping in the wind as he sprayed gunfire like rain onto the asphalt.

His laugh was contagious. I drew my knees up to my chest and began to giggle, but his spell over me was only partly broken. He was no genie; he was my friend and my lover, and we were laughing together in his small apartment on a late Sunday afternoon. But part of me was still caught up in a feverish dream in which he was a genie sprung from a bottle, whose only purpose was to grant me my heart’s desire. He was the tall, dark stranger who with a word or gesture could make me beautiful and happy, make my life meaningful and whole. I had been in search of a savior and dreaming some version of this dream for as long as I could remember, sleepwalking through every romantic relationship I had ever had. I took a deep breath. This time I would take responsibility for my own happiness; all I needed was a companion to join me on the adventure.