John Updike - Terrorist

"What a friend, what a friend," Joryleen pants lightly, in imitation of the way the choir broke up the hymn's phrases suggesting the repetitive (as he understood them) motions of sexual intercourse. "He just is, that's all," she insists. "People feel better, thinking he's right there. If he isn't there caring, who is, right? The same thing, I 'spect, with your Mohammed."

"The Prophet is many things to his followers, but we do not call him our friend. We are not so cozy, as your clergyman said."

"Hey," she says, "let's not talk this stuff. Thanks for coming, Ahmad. I never thought you would."

"You have been gracious to me, and I was curious. It is helpful, up to a point, to know the enemy."

"Enemy? Whoa. You didn't have no enemies there."

"My teacher at the mosque says that all unbelievers are our enemies. The Prophet said that eventually all unbelievers must be destroyed."

"Oh, man. How'd you get this way? Your mother's just a freckle-faced mick, right? That's what Tylenol says."

"Tylenol, Tylenol. How close are you, may I ask, to this fount of wisdom? Does he consider you his woman?"

"Oh, that boy's just trying things out. He's too young to get fixed up with any one lady friend. Let's walk along. We're getting too many looks."

They walk along the northern edge of the empty acres waiting to be developed. A painted big sign shows a four-story parking garage that will bring shoppers back to the inner city, but for two years nothing has been built, there is only the picture, more and more scribbled over. When the sun, slanting from the south above the new glass buildings downtown, comes through the clouds, a fine dust can be seen lifting from the rubble, and when the clouds return the sun becomes a white circle like a perfect hole burned through, exactly the size of the moon. Feeling the sun on one side of him makes him conscious of the warmth on the other, the warmth of Joryleen's body moving along, a system of overlapping circles and soft parts. The bead above her nostril-wing gleams a hot pinpoint; sunlight sticks a glistening tongue into the cavity at the center of her scoop-necked blouse. He tells her, "I am a good Muslim, in a world that mocks faith."

"Instead of being good, don't you ever want to feel good?" Joryleen asks. He believes she is sincerely curious; in his severe faith he is a puzzle to her, a curiosity.

"Perhaps the two go together," he offers. "The feeling and the being."

"You came to my church," she says. "I could go to your mosque with you."

"That would not do. We could not sit together, and you could not attend without a course of instruction, and a demonstration of sincerity."

"Wow. That may be more than I have time for. Tell me, Ahmad, what do you do for fun}"

"Some of the same things you do, though 'fun,' as you put it, is not the point of a good Muslim's life. I take lessons twice a week in the language and lessons of the Qur'an. I attend Central High. I am on the soccer team in the fall-indeed, I scored five goals this past season, one a penalty shot-and do track in the spring. For spending money, and to help out my mother-the freckle-faced mick, as you call her-"

"As Tylenol called her."

"As the two of you evidently call her-I clerk at the Shop-a-Sec from twelve to eighteen hours a week, and this can be 'fun,' observing the customers and the varieties of costume and personal craziness that American permissiveness invites. There is nothing in Islam to forbid watching television and attending the cinema, though in fact it is all so saturated in despair and unbelief as to repel my interest. Nor does Islam forbid consorting with the opposite sex, if strict prohibitions are observed."

"So strict nothing happens, right? Turn left here, if you're walking me home. You don't have to, you know. We're getting into worse neighborhoods. You don't want to be hassled."

"I wish to see you home." He goes on, "They exist, the prohibitions, for the benefit less of the male than of the female. Her virginity and purity are central to her value."

"Oh, my," Joryleen says. "In whose eyes? I mean, who's doing this valuing?"

She is leading him, he feels, close to the edge of betraying his beliefs, just in responding to her questions. In class, he observed at the high school, she talked well, so that the teachers became engaged with her, not realizing that she was leading them from the set lessons and wasting classroom time. She has a wicked streak. "In the eyes of God," he tells her, "as revealed by the Prophet: 'Enjoin believing women to turn their eyes away from temptation and to preserve their chastity.' That's from the same sura that advises women to cover their ornaments, and to draw their veils over their bosoms, and not even to stamp their feet so their hidden ankle bracelets can be heard."

"You think I show too much tit-I can tell by where your eyes go."

Just hearing the word "tit" from her lips stirs him indecently. He says, staring ahead, "Purity is its own end. As we were discussing, it is both being good and feeling good."

"What about all them virgins on the other side? What happens to purity when those young-men martyrs get there, all full of spunk?"

"Their virtue enjoys its reward, while remaining pure, in the context God has created. My teacher at the mosque thinks that the dark-eyed virgins are symbolic of a bliss one cannot imagine without concrete images. It is typical of the sex-obsessed West that it has seized upon that image, and ridicules Islam because of it."

They continue in the direction she indicated. The neighborhood grows shaggier around them; bushes are untended, houses unpainted, sidewalk squares in places tilted and cracked by tree roots underneath; the little front yards are speckled with litter. The rows of houses lack a few, like teeth knocked out, the gaps fenced in but the thick chain-link fencing cut and twisted under the invisible pressure of people who hate fences, who want to get somewhere quick. The row houses in some blocks become a single long building with many peeling doors and four-step stairs, old and wooden or new and concrete. Overhead, high twigs interlace with electric wires carrying electricity across the city, a sagging harp that dips through gaps lopped by tree crews. Spatters of blossom and unfolding leaf, in color between yellow and green, appear luminous against the cloud-blotched sky.

"Ahmad," Joryleen says with a sudden exasperation, "suppose none of it is true-suppose you die and there's nothing there, nothing at all? What's the point of all this purity then?"

"If none of it is true," he tells her, his stomach clenching at the thought, "then the world is too terrible to cherish, and I would not regret leaving it."

"Man! You are one in a million, no kidding. They must love you to death over at that mosque."

"There are many like me," he tells her, both stiffly and gently, half rebuking. "Some are"-he does not want to say "black," since the word though politically correct does not sound kind-"what you call your brothers. The mosque and its teachers give them what the Christian U.S. disdains to- respect, and a challenge that asks something of them. It asks austerity. It asks restraint. All America wants of its citizens, your President has said, is for us to buy-to spend money we cannot afford and thus propel the economy forward for himself and other rich men."

"He ain't my President. If I could vote this year I'd vote to kick him out, in favor of Al Sharpton."

"It makes no difference which President is in. They all want Americans to be selfish and materialistic, to play their part in consumerism. But the human spirit asks for self-denial. It longs to say 'No' to'the physical world."

"You scare me when you talk like that. It sounds like you hate life." She goes on, revealing herself as freely as if she is singing, "The way I feel it, the spirit is what comes out of the body, like flowers come out of the earth. Hating your body is like hating yourself, the bones and blood and skin and shit that make you you."