John Updike - Terrorist

"They are enemy soldiers," Habib Chehab says sulkily, wishing tlie discussion to end but unable to surrender. "They are dangerous men. They wish to destroy America. That is what they say to reporters, even though they are better fed by us than ever by the Taliban. They think Nine-Eleven was a great joke. It is war for them. It is jihad. That is what they say themselves. What they expect, Americans to lie down flat under feet and make no self-defense? Even bin Laden, he expects being fought back."

"Jihad doesn't have to mean war," Ahmad offers, his voice shyly cracking. "It means striving, along the path of God. It can mean inner struggle."

The elder Chehab looks at him with new interest. His eyes are not as dark a brown as his son's; diey are golden marbles, in watery eye-whites. "You are good boy," he says solemnly.

Charlie claps his strong arm around Ahmad's thin shoulders as if to express solidarity among the three of them. "He doesn't say that to everyone," he confides to the new recruit.

This interview takes place at the back of die establishment, where a countertop separates some steel desks and, beyond diem, a pair of frosted-glass office doors from the rest of die building. All the rest of the space serves as a showroom-a nightmare room containing chairs, end tables, coffee tables, table lamps, standing lamps, sofas, easy chairs, dining tables and chairs, footstools, sideboards, chandeliers hanging thick as jungle vines, wall sconces in various metallic or enamelled finishes, and large and small mirrors from stark to ornate, their frames gilded or silvered amalgams of leaves and chunky flowers and carved ribbons and eagles in profile, with lifted wings and clasping talons; American eagles stare back above Ahmad's startled reflection, a lean boy of mixed parentage in white shirt and black jeans.

"Downstairs," says the short, plump father, widi his gleaming arched nose and pockets of tired dark skin below his golden eyes, "we have the outdoor furniture, lawn and porch, wicker and folding, and even some aluminum cabanas, screened to set yourself off from the bugs in the back yards, for when the family wants a change of air. Upstairs is for bedroom furniture, the beds and bedside tables and bureaus, dressing tables for the lady, armoires for where there aren't enough closets, chaise longues for the lady to put up her feet, upholstered side chairs and stools for the same relaxed mood, little table lamps softer, you know, to go with what should happen in a bedroom."

Charlie, perhaps seeing Ahmad blush, says gruffly, "Used, new, we don't make tfiat much of a distinction. The price tag tells die story, and die condition of the piece. Furniture isn't like a car; it doesn't have a lot of secrets. What you see is what you get. Where you and I come in is, anything over a hundred dollars we deliver free in any part of the state. People love that. It's not like we get many drop-in customers from Cape May, but people love the idea of free."

"And rugs," says Habib Chehab. "They want Oriental rugs, as if Lebanese are from Armenia, from Iran. So we keep selection downstairs, and any on floor you can buy and we clean. There are special carpet places along Reagan, but people believe in our bargains."

"They believe in us, Papa," Charlie says. "We have a good name."

Ahmad smells arising from all this massed equipment for living the mortal aura, absorbed into the cushions and carpets and linen lampshades, of organic humanity, its pathetic six or so positions and needs repeated in a desperate variety of styles and textures between the mirror-crammed walls but amounting to the same daily squalor, the wear and boredom of it, die closed spaces, die floors and ceilings constantly measuring finitude, the silent stuffiness and hopelessness of lives without God as a close companion. The spectacle revives a sensation buried in the folds of his childhood-the false joy of shopping, the tempting counterfeit lavishness of man-made plenty. He would go with his mother up the escalators and through the perfumed aisles of the last, failing emporium downtown or, trotting to keep up with her energetic strides, embarrassed by the mismatch of her freckles with his own dun skin, across tar parking lots into the vast spaces of hastily slapped-up hangars in the "big box" style, where packaged goods were stacked up to the exposed girders. On those trips, narrowly aimed at replacing a certain irreparable home appliance or some boys' clothing his relentless growing demanded or, before Islam rendered him immune, a long-coveted electronic game obsolete within a season, die motlier and son were besieged on all sides by attractive, ingenious things they didn't need and could not afford, potential possessions that other Americans seemed to acquire without effort but that for them were impossible to squeeze from the salary of a husbandless nurse's aide. Ahmad tasted American plenty by licking its underside. Devils, these many gaudy packages seemed to be, these towering racks of today's flimsy fashion, these shelves of chip-power expressed in murderous cartoons prodding the masses to buy, to consume while the world still had resources to consume, to gorge at the trough before death closed greedy mouths forever. In all this wooing of the needy into debt, death was the bottom line, the counter where the diminishing dollars clattered. Hurry, buy now, since the afterlife's pure and plain joys are an empty fable.

There were goods for sale in the Shop-a-Sec, of course, but mostly bags and boxes of salty, sugary, deleterious food, and plastic fly-swatters, and pencils, made in China, with useless erasers; but here in this great showroom Ahmad feels himself about to be enlisted in the armies of trade, and despite the near presence of the God of whom all material things form the mere shadow, he is excited. The Prophet himself was a merchant. Man never wearies of praying for good things, says the forty-first sura. Among these good things the world's manufacture must be included. Ahmad is young; there is plenty of time, he reasons, for him to be forgiven for materialism, if forgiveness is needed. God is closer than the vein in his neck, and He knows what it is to desire comfort, else He would not have made the next life so comfortable: there are carpets and couches in Paradise, the Qur'an affirms.

Ahmad is taken to see the truck, his future truck. Charlie leads him beyond the desks, down a corridor dimly lit by a skylight strewn with the shadows of fallen twigs and leaves and winged seeds. The corridor holds a water cooler, a calendar whose numbered squares are scribbled solid with delivery dates, and what Ahmad will come to understand is a dingy time clock, with a rack for each employee's repeatedly punched time cards on the wall beside it.

Charlie opens another door and there the truck waits, backed up to a thick-planked loading porch beneath a projecting roof. A tall orange box with each edge reinforced by riveted metal strips, the truck shocks Ahmad, coming upon it for the first time; his impression from the loading platform is of a great blunt-headed animal that is coming too close, nosing up against the platform as if to be fed. Its orange side, dulled a bit by road dirt, bears in a slanting indigo script outlined in gold the word Excellency and then, beneath, in block capitals, home furnishings, and, smaller, the store's address and phone number. The truck has double tires behind. Its bulky chrome side-mirrors protrude. Its cab is attached to its box of a body with no space between. It is grand, but friendly. "It's a trusty old beast," Charlie says. "A hundred ten thousand miles and no major problems. Come on down and get acquainted. Don't jump, use these steps over here. The last thing we need is you breaking an ankle your first day on the job."

Ahmad feels this area is somehow already familiar. In the future he will come to know it well-the loading platform, the parking lot with its cracked concrete baking in the shimmering summer heat, the surrounding low brick buildings and cluttered backs of row houses, a rusting Dumpster in one corner from some long-defunct enterprise, the half-heard oceanic sound of traffic waves swishing by on the four-lane boulevard. This space will always have something magic about it, something peaceful not of this world, a strange quality of being under magnification from some high vantage. It is a place God has breathed upon.