The Terrorist’s Son (7 page)

I'm free from my father's influence, but my education in violence—its ravages and its pointlessness—is not over, thanks to an awful new school and a vicious stepfather who's about to appear on the horizon. I'm not going to pretend that, as a thirteen-year-old, I've already internalized Martin Luther King, Jr.'s teachings—that my enemies are suffering too, that retaliation is a dead end, and that pain can redeem and transform you. No, I simply hate getting hit. It makes me furious and fills me with self-loathing, and I fight back every single time. But everything I experience contributes to the day when I will finally understand that nonviolence is the only sane, humane response to conflict, whether in the hallways of a high school or on the global stage.

I'll call my new school Queensridge Junior-Senior High. I'm one of the only “white” kids—my whole life I've been considered a Caucasian by minorities, and a minority by Caucasians—and I'm not Southern, so bullies have their choice of reasons to beat me up. Only one teacher tries to protect me. The rest all but encourage it. When my mother calls the police after a particularly violent attack, they refuse to even take a report. The school is a nightmare. There are drugs
changing hands in the hallways. There's gang violence. One day, during social studies, the teacher steps out and two students start having sex in the back of the classroom.

In the middle of all this, my father calls from prison, sounding angry and agitated. He rushes through the usual questions with my sister, my brother, and me, then tells me to put my mother on the phone. She hasn't spoken to him since the divorce. When I hold out the receiver, she recoils. I don't know what to do. I make a pleading face and shake the phone:
Take it. Please, just take it?
Finally, she relents. For me.

My mother can't even get a word out before my father launches into his latest scheme to get out of prison. There's an important Pakistani diplomat visiting Washington, D.C., he tells her. She must make contact with him. She must convince him to trade an Israeli prisoner for
him
.

“A prisoner exchange—it is the only hope,” he says. “You must do this and you
must not fail
like you have failed before.”

My mother is silent.

“Sayyid,” she says finally. “I am not your wife anymore—and I am certainly not your secretary.”

For the next few minutes, I sit at the kitchen table dumbstruck, as my mother tells my father that he has destroyed our lives, that it sounds like he's
losing his marbles
, and that she never wants to hear his voice again. She doesn't say that she suspects he's guilty of everything
he's ever been accused of—maybe because she knows I'm listening. In any case, my father is seething now, and he says something that removes any doubt of his guilt: “I did what I had to do, and you know that very well.”

•  •  •

My mother doesn't outright tell me that my father
is
a murderer after all, but I must suspect it because I get angrier at him with every passing week. After Kahane's death, I could comfort myself with the fact that my father had been found not guilty of murder and that, at worst, he would come home to us a free man in 2012. But by conspiring to bomb the World Trade Center, he has not just participated in a heinous act, but also seen to it that we will never be a family again.
Life plus fifteen without parole
. My father will never play soccer with me again. And he chose that fate himself. He chose terrorism over fatherhood, and hate over love. Forget the fact that our family is more infamous than ever now—the WTC bombing has polluted America's opinions of
all
Muslims. When we're in the station wagon, other drivers notice my mother's headscarf and veil and give her the finger, or swerve at us and try to drive us off the road. When we're shopping, people recoil at the sight of her. People shout at my mother, often in broken English, to
go back to her own country
. And I'm ashamed every time—not because I'm Muslim, but because I can never summon the courage to shout back, “She was born in Pittsburgh, idiot!”

I'm a teenager now, and, even before the WTC bombing, my self-esteem was shot through with holes. The bullying at school is never going to stop, my stomach hurts
all the time
, and I bang my head against my bedroom wall at night for the same reasons that girls my age cut themselves. I think about how easy, how peaceful, it would be to be dead, and now there's this horrible new realization: My father chose terrorism over
me
.

•  •  •

Not long after my father's call, my mother gets a scary, lung-rattling cough that turns into bronchitis. She's sick for so long—and so underwater emotionally—that one night I overhear her praying to Allah for guidance. Two weeks later, there seems to be a parting of the clouds: The wife of our sheikh calls and announces that their family has a friend in New York City who's looking for a wife. Because of everything that's about to happen, I'll change the man's name and call him Ahmed Sufyan.

Ahmed was born in Egypt, like my father. He works in an electronics store, and he's an amateur boxer—lean and wiry, his arms ropy with muscles. Like my mother, Ahmed has three children. And he says he is
also
escaping a dreadful marriage: As he tells it, his ex-wife was a prostitute before he met her, and he'd been forced to divorce her when he found her in her former pimp's house, a crack pipe in her hand and their youngest child in her arms. For two weeks, Ahmed and my mother get
to know each other over the phone. He tells her that he considers my father to be a heroic servant of Allah, and that he'd always hoped to meet my family and help us out however he could. My mother invites him to Memphis, so they can talk face-to-face.

The night Ahmed arrives, my mother makes baked chicken, rice, and salad for dinner. I am so starved for a father that I'm ready to love him before he even sits down. He appears to be a good Muslim—he instructs us to pray before we eat—and because he's a boxer I'm already imagining late-night lessons where he teaches me how to fight back at school. I've never had much luck with hope before. But we all deserve a happy chapter, my mother more than anyone. My eyes fill with tears when this man who met my mother three hours ago looks around the table at us and says something that
should
seem ominous: “Don't worry, children. Your father is here now.”

By the end of the summer, we've moved back to New Jersey and met Ahmed's kids. After our parents marry, the whole Muslim Brady Bunch shares a motel room in Newark while Ahmed saves enough money to rent an apartment. I'm trying to get along with his family, but it's difficult. Eventually one of his sons and I have a scuffle over what to watch on TV. Ahmed takes his son's side. I've been punished before—my father would sometimes spank me with a flip-flop—but never by someone who enjoyed it and never with a belt buckle.

•  •  •

Ahmed turns out to be a poor excuse for a Muslim. No, he doesn't drink or eat pork, but he also doesn't fast or make his prayers or invoke Islam at all, unless there's someone he wants to impress or control or hate. He is petty, paranoid, and vengeful. He trusts his own children blindly—particularly the son who lies to him repeatedly—but he lays in wait for the rest of us, desperate to catch us doing something wrong.

We find a place in Elizabeth, New Jersey—a small attic apartment where we live without much in the way of furniture. Ahmed's behavior becomes more and more bizarre. He pretends he's going to work but instead stands outside our building for hours, watching us through the windows. He makes me walk miles to school every morning, and secretly follows me in his car. There's practically no money for food, but he takes his own children out for pizza and brings nothing back for us. One weekend, my brother and I wind up in the emergency room because we're malnourished. The doctor's so furious that he's about to call Child Protective Services when my mother—sick from malnutrition herself—begs him to put down the phone. The episode doesn't bother Ahmed. He thinks I'm disgusting because I'm chubby. He spends an entire two-week period calling me
cow
in Arabic.

Ahmed punishes my brother and me for every infraction, whether real or imagined. He uses his fists, his belt, a hanger. Because he's a boxer and goes to the gym obsessively, his punishments are often full-on beatdowns, and I can tell he's testing different
combinations of punches. Ahmed's favorite maneuver, though, is a weird sort of fake-out: First, he rushes at me from across the room, his face full of rage. Then, when I've covered my face with my hands, he jumps in the air and stomps on my unguarded foot.

My mother looks out the window when she can't stand to watch anymore. Ahmed's been so abusive to her that she can hardly think straight. He's convinced her that we've become morally corrupt since my father went to prison, and that only he can redeem us. Once, when she tries to intervene on my behalf, he hits her in the head with a vase.

Ahmed is not a murderer like my father, but within the walls of our apartment—among people he claims to love—he is every inch a terrorist.

•  •  •

When I turn fourteen, I start stealing money from him. First, it's just pocket change. Then it's five- and ten-dollar bills that I find under the mattress while making the bed. Usually, I take the money because there's no food in the house, and there's a Dunkin' Donuts on the way to school. Sometimes, I just want to buy a CD by The Roots like everybody else. It amazes me that Ahmed has no idea I'm stealing from him. Gradually, I get bolder and bolder.

Ahmed, it turns out, knows damn well that I'm stealing. He's just choosing the right moment to pounce.

One morning, I pocket a twenty-dollar bill from under the mattress and buy a cool laser pen. That night Ahmed finally confronts me in my bedroom.

I confess. I apologize. I reach into the top drawer of my dresser where I've been hiding the money. Ahmed has a habit of rooting through our belongings, so I've been unscrewing the bottom of my deodorant and hiding the bills inside.

Ahmed steps closer to me. My room is so tiny that there's barely enough space for the two of us. His proximity is terrifying. But he hasn't laid a hand on me yet. In fact, when he sees me unscrew the deodorant and remove the money, he nods as if he's impressed.

“Sneaky,” he says.

He doesn't look angry as much as
overjoyed
, which seems strange—until I realize why.

That night, Ahmed takes me into the master bedroom and beats and interrogates me about the thefts from midnight until well into the next day. He asks me how stupid I think he is. He asks me if I've forgotten whose house I'm living in—if I really imagine, in my puny cow brain, that there's anything that goes on that he's not aware of
before it even happens
. He tells me to take off my shirt, and do one hundred push-ups. As I struggle through them, he kicks me in the stomach and ribs. Later, he whacks my palm with a hanger so many times that, for weeks, I'll have cuts and scabs in the precise shape of the hanger's hook—it will look like a question mark on my hand.

All the while, my mother lies on the sofa in the living room, sobbing. She comes to the bedroom door only once and, before she can even beg Ahmed to stop, he shouts at her, “Nosair would be
disgusted
by the way you raise his children! You are lucky I am here to correct your mistakes!”

I've experimented with bullying myself. Back when I was eleven, there was a new kid in school. He was Asian and, with nothing but stereotypes to rely on, I assumed that all Asians knew martial arts. I thought it would be awesome and Ninja Turtley to do some karate stuff, so I goaded him all day long into fighting me. As it happened, this particular Asian kid
did
know martial arts: He pretended to punch me in the face and, when I ducked, he kicked me in the head. I fled school in tears, but was stopped by the crossing guard, who sent me to the nurse's office, where I was given a frozen peanut butter and jelly sandwich to press against my eye.

All in all, it was a humiliating experience. So it's not until after Ahmed beats me for stealing that I try my hand at bullying again. I'm walking down the hallway at school and come upon a bunch of younger kids playing keep-away with a boy's backpack. The boy is crying. I grab the backpack and slam-dunk it into a trash can. For a moment, the sensation is gratifying. There's no denying that there's a rush to being on the other side of the equation. But then I see a look on the poor, tormented kid's face that I recognize so viscerally—it's bewilderment as much as fear—that I pull the bag out of
the garbage and hand it back to him. No one's ever sat me down and taught me what empathy is or why it matters more than power or patriotism or religious faith. But I learn it right there in the hallway: I cannot do what's been done to me.

I'm fifteen the last time Ahmed lays a hand on me. We've moved to Egypt because it's cheaper and because my stepfather has family who can help my mother with us kids. There are six of us living in a two-bedroom apartment in a massive concrete building in a neighborhood called Smouha. The place is dingy and in disrepair. It's also freezing cold now that it's the winter, because the concrete doesn't retain heat. Still, there's a mall nearby and a supermarket under construction. It's not the worst place we've ever lived.

One Saturday, a friend from the neighborhood and I are just messing around in the street, sword fighting with sticks, when Ahmed's son and a bunch of other kids rush over because they think we're really fighting. Some of the kids start throwing rocks at us. Not hard, really—they're just playing. But they get more and more aggressive, so I shout, “Stop!” I'm the oldest one there, and the biggest. Everybody stops. Except for Ahmed's son. He just has to throw
one
more rock—right at my face. It breaks my glasses and cuts my nose. Everybody panics and scatters.