John Updike - Terrorist

"Me, too. And I got to be at work by six." "Six?"

"The early shift at Saint Francis's. I'm a nurse's aide. I never really wanted to be a nurse, it was too much chemistry and then too much administration; they get to be as pompous as doctors. Nurse's aides do what nurses used to do. I like hands-on-dealing with people right down there at the level of their real needs. Bedpan level. You didn't think I made a living out of these}" She gestures, with those short-nailed hands that do things, at her gaudy walls. "No," he admits.

She breezes on. "It's my hobby, my self-indulgence-my bliss, as that man on television used to say a few years ago. Some get bought, sure, but I hardly care. Painting is my passion. Don't you have a passion, Jack?"

He backs off; she is beginning to look possessed, a priestess on her tripod with snakes in her hair. "Not really." He gets out of bed in the morning as if pushing aside a blanket of lead, and bulls head-down into his day of waving kids good-bye as they slide off into the world's morass. "Have you ever thought," he can't help adding, "with your nursing, of urging Ahmad to become a doctor? He has a dignity, a presence. I'd trust him with my life, if I were sick."

Her eyes narrow, turning shrewd and-a word his mother used to use, mostly of other women- common. "It's a long expensive haul, Jack, a medical education. And the docs I know do nothing but complain about the paperwork and being pushed around by the insurance companies. It used to be a profession where you got a lot of respect and made a fair amount of money. But medicine isn't the field it used to be. It's going to get socialized one way or another eventually, and doctors will be paid like schoolteachers."

He laughs at this little kick. She has a number of nimble moves. "And that's not good," he acknowledges.

"Let him wait for his passion," she counsels the guidance counselor. "For the moment it's trucks, getting on the move. He says to me, 'Mom, I need to see the world.' '

"As I understand the Commercial Driver's License, all he'll see until he's twenty-one is New Jersey."

"That's a start," she says, and nimbly slides off the stool. She has left undone the two top buttons of her paint-smeared man's work shirt, so he sees the tops of her breasts bounce. This woman has a lot of yes in her.

But the interview is over; it is eight-thirty. Levy lugs the three unwanted college catalogues back through the room where the boy is still studying, and halts at the heavy old dark round table-some kind of inheritance, it reminds him of the heavy sad stuff his parents and grandparents had in the house he grew up in, out on Totowa Road. Approached from behind, Ahmad's neck looks vulnerably thin, and the tops of his tidy, tight-whorled ears show a few freckles lifted from his mother. Levy gingerly sets the catalogues on the table's edge and touches the boy's shoulder, through the white shirt, to get his attention. "Ahmad, look these over sometime when you have a chance, and see if anything here piques your interest enough to discuss it with me. It's not too late to change your mind about applying."

The boy feels the touch and responds, "Here's something interesting, Mr. Levy."

"What?" He feels closer and easier with the boy, having met his mother.

"Here's a typical question of the kind they're going to ask."

Levy read over his shoulder:

55. You are driving a tank truck and the front wheels begin to skid. Which of these is most likely to occur?

a. You will counter steer as necessary to maintain control.

b. Liquid surge will straighten the trailer out.

c. Liquid surge will straighten the tractor out. d.You will continue in a straight line and keep moving forward no matter how much you steer.

"Sounds like a pretty bad situation," Levy admits.

"Which do you think the answer is?"

Ahmad has felt the man approach, and then the presumptuous, poisonous touch on the shoulder. Now he is aware of, too close to his head, the man's belly, its warmth carrying out with it a smell, several smells-a compounded extract of sweat and alcohol, Jewishness and Godlessness, an unclean scent stirred up by the consultation with Ahmad's mother, the embarrassing mother he tries to hide, to keep to himself. The two adult voices had intertwined flirtatiously, disgustingly, two aged infidel animals warming to each other in the other room. Mr. Levy, having bathed in her babble, her insatiable desire to press upon the world her sentimental vision of herself, now thinks himself entitled to play with her son a paternal, friendly role. Pity and presumption prompt this unseemly, odorous closeness. Yet the Qur'an urges courtesy upon the faithful; this Jew, though self-invited, is a guest in Ahmad's tent.

The intruder lazily responds, "I don't know, my friend. Liquid surge isn't something I deal with very often. Let me opt for 'a,' the counter steering."

In a quiet voice that conceals the small surge of triumph within him, Ahmad says, "No, 'd' is the answer. I looked it up on the answer sheets they give you."

The belly next to his ear gives off a rumble of disquiet, and the unseen face above it grunts. "Huh. Don't bother to steer. That's sort of what your mother was just telling me. Relax. Follow your bliss."

"After a while," Ahmad explains, "the truck will lose speed on its own."

"The will of Allah," Mr. Levy says, trying to be funny, or friendly: trying to insert himself where Ahmad's insides are clenched shut, filled with the All-Encompassing.

The interface of Central High and its formerly extensive grounds with the city's private property has grown more complicated in the years since its playing fields stretched behind it, unfenced, toward a street of Victorian houses so varied and widely spaced as to be suburban. This area, to the northwest of the spectacular City Hall, was a domain of die middle class that pulled its money from the mills along the river, a short walk from the working-class tenements on the lower side of t_he then-bustling downtown. But the near-suburban houses became, as Jack Levy diinks of it, housing. Cost-cutting contractors broke them into apartments and subdivided their wide lawns or else tore them down to make room for solid blocks of low-rent row houses. The pressure of population and the encroachments of vandalism bore upon the grassy vacancies of school property and eventually caused the football field, which in the spring became a track-meet site, and the baseball grounds, whose outfield became in football season a junior-varsity gridiron, to be moved, in what seemed to various city boards a shrewd and profitable rearrangement, a fifteen-minute bus ride away, to the purchased land of an old dairy farm, Whelan amp; Sons Dairy, whose milk had contributed calcium to the bones of generations of New Prospect youngsters. The inner-city fields became congested slums.

The great high school and its several outbuildings were then walled off by Italian bricklayers whose work was later topped by glinting coils of razor wire. The immurement was piecemeal, a running response to various complaints and incidents of damage and explosions of spray-painted graffiti. The defaced, rusting fortifications created areas of unintended privacy, such as some square yards of cracked concrete alongside the half-buried yellow-brick edifice housing the giant boilers, originally coal-burning, that send steam, furiously knocking, into every classroom. One yellow-brick wall holds a basketball backboard whose hoop has been bent at a nearly vertical angle by boys imitating the dunk-and-hang style of NBA professionals. Twenty paces away, in the main building, double doors equipped with crash bars inside are in warm weather left propped open; they give onto steel stairs leading down to the basement floor with its locker rooms, boys' and girls' on either end, and, in between, die cafeteria and the wood and machine shops for the voke students. Underfoot, the cracks in the concrete hold crabgrass and mullein and dandelions and ridges of the minute particles, shining like coffee grounds, of the underlying earth which ants have brought to the surface. Where the concrete has been thoroughly undermined and pulverized, taller weeds, purslane and snakeroot and bedstraw and a species of daisy, have taken root and extend spindly stems up into the lengthening daylight.