John Updike - Terrorist

Herm asks, shooting her down again, "Is that ever a good idea, to do something because you think your husband wants it? I'm just asking-I've never been married."

Poor Herm, this has to be on her mind all the time. "Well, you're"-Beth stops her tongue; she had been about to say that Hermione was as good as married, to that bull-headed linebacker of a boss of hers-"as wise as anybody else, any other woman. I'm doing it for myself, too. I feel so much better, with just the twelve pounds off. The girls at the library can see the difference-they're very supportive, though at their age I couldn't imagine my figure ever getting out of hand. I said I'd like to help with the shelving instead of just sitting on my fat ass behind the desk Googling for kids too lazy to learn to Google for themselves."

"How does Jack like the change in his diet?"

"Well, I've tried not to change his, still giving him meat and potatoes. But he says he'd just as soon have simple salads with me. The older he gets, he says, the more eating anything disgusts him."

"That's the Jew in him," Hermione cuts in.

"Oh, I don't think so," Beth says, haughtily.

Hermione is then so silent Beth wonders if the connection has been broken off. Terrorists are blowing up oil pipes and power plants in Iraq, nothing is utterly secure any more. "How's the weather down there?" Beth asks.

"Still hot, once you leave the building. September in the District can be still muggy. The trees don't turn with all that color we used to get in the Arboretum. Spring is the season here, with the cherry blossoms."

"Today," Betfr says, as her starved stomach gives a pang that makes her grip the back of the kitchen chair for support, "I felt fall in the air. The sky is so absolutely clear, like"- like the day of Nine-Eleven, she started to say, but stopped, thinking it might be tactless to mention that to an undersecretary of Homeland Security, the fabled blue sky that has become mythic, a Heavenly irony, part of American legend like the rockets' red glare.

They must be thinking the same thoughts, for Hermione asks, "Do you remember you mentioned this young Arab-American Jack had taken such an interest in, who instead of taking Jack's advice to go to college had gotten a license to drive a truck because the imam at his mosque had asked him to?"

"Vaguely. Jack hasn't mentioned him for a while."

"Is Jack there?" she asks. "Could I talk to him?"

"To Jack?" She has never wanted to talk to Jack before.

"Yes, to your husband. Please, Betty. It may be important."

Betty, yet. "Like I was saying, he may be having a nap. We went out walking earlier, to give me exercise. The exercise is just as important as the dieting. It reshapes the body."

"Could you please go see?"

"If he's awake? Maybe it's something I could pass on to him, if he is. Having a nap."

"I don't think so. I'd rather talk to him myself. You and I can have our chat this week, when you're watching your serials."

"I've given them up, too-I associate them too much with nibbling. And they were getting scrambled up in my mind, all these characters. I'll go see if he's awake." She is mystified and cowed.

"Betty, even if he's not-could you wake him up?"

"I'd hate to do that. He sleeps so poorly at night." "I need to ask him some things right now, honey. They can't wait. I'm sorry. Just this once." Ever the older sister, knowing more than she does, telling her what to do. Reading her mind again, over the telephone, Hermione fondly admonishes Beth, in a voice that sounds like their mother's, "Now, no matter what happens, don't you fall off your diet."

On Sunday night, Ahmad fears he will not be able to sleep, on what is to be the last night of his life. The room around him is unfamiliar. It is one, Shaikh Rashid assured him, standing with him in the room earlier that evening, where no one can find him.

"Who would be looking for me?" Ahmad asked. His small, slight mentor-it was strange for Ahmad, as the two of them stood close together in collusion, to feel how much taller he had become than his master, who during Qur'an lessons augmented his height with that of the high-backed chair with the silver threads-gave one of his quick, knifing shrugs. The man this evening wore not his usual shimmering embroidered caftan but a gray Western-style suit, as if dressed for a business trip among the infidels. How else explain his shaving off his beard, the precisely trimmed gray-flecked beard? It had concealed, Ahmad saw, a number of small scars, traces on his waxy white skin of some disease, eradicated in the West, contracted by a child in Yemen. With thiese roughnesses was revealed something disagreeable about his violet lips, a sulky masculine set to them that had lurked unemphasized when they moved so rapidly, so seductively, in a recess of facial hair. The shaikh was not wearing his turban or his lacy white amdma; a receding hairline was bared.

Shrunken in Ahmad's eyes, he asked, "Your mother will not miss you and activate the police?"

"She has night duty this weekend. I left a note for her to see when she comes in, saying I am spending the night with a friend. She may suppose it is a girlfriend. She nags me on the subject, suggesting I should have one."

"You will spend the night with a friend who will prove more true than any disgusting sharmoota. The eternal, inimitable Qur'an."

A copy bound in limp rose-colored leather, with English and Arabic en face, rested on the bedside table in this narrow, barely furnished room. It was the only thing new and expensive in the room-a "safe" room close enough to the center of New Prospect for its one window to provide a glimpse of the City Hall's mansard steeple. The building with its multicolored fish-scale shingles loomed above the lesser buildings like some fantastic sea-dragon frozen in the moment of breaching. The evening sky behind it was ribbed with rolls of cloud tinted a rosy pink by a sun setting out of sight. The solar image, its orange blare of reflection, was caught in the spire's Victorian gills of glass-windows on an interior spiral stair closed decades ago to tourists. As Ahmad strained to see from his own window, the thin old panes dirty and wavy and bearing small bubbles of antique manufacture, he saw the dying sunlight seeming to melt the highest corner of one of the rectilinear glass-skinned civic additions. The City Hall's mansard steeple holds a clock, and he feared its chiming would keep him awake all of the night, making him a less efficient sbahld. But its mechanical music-a brief phrase tolling the quarter-hour, tiie last, upward note lingering like an inquisitively lifted eyebrow, and with every fourth quarter a fuller phrase preceding the doleful count of the hour – proves to be lulling, reassuring him, when the shaikh at last left him alone, that this room is indeed safe.

The previous residents of this little chamber have left few clues to their passage. Some scuff marks on the baseboards, two or three cigarette burns on the windowsills and bureau top, the shine left by repeated use of the doorknob and key-slot, a certain faint animal scent in the scratchy blue blanket. The room is religiously clean, more extremely so than Ahmad's room in his mother's apartment, which still holds unholy possessions-electronic toys with dead batteries, out-of-date sports and automotive magazines, clothes meant to express, in their severity and snug fit, his teen-age vanity. His eighteen years have accumulated historical evidence, which will become, he imagines, of great interest to the news media: cardboard-framed photos of children squinting in May sunshine on the brownstone steps of the Thomas Alva Edison Elementary School, Ahmad's dark gaze and unsmiling mouth embedded in the ranks of other faces, most black and some white, all lumped in the child labor of becoming loyal and literate Americans; photos of the track team, in which Ahmad Mulloy is older and fractionally smiling; track-meet ribbons, their cheap dye rapidly faded; a felt Mets pennant from a ninth-grade bus trip to a game in Shea Stadium; a beautifully calligraphed roll of the names in his Qur'an class before it dwindled to just him; his Class C driver's certificate; a photograph of his father, wearing a foreigner's eager-to-please grin, a thin mustache that must have seemed quaint even in 1986, and shiny, centrally parted hair, obsequiously slicked down where Ahmad wore his own hair, identical in texture and thickness, brushed proudly upright, with a whiff of mousse. His father's face, it will be broadcast, was more conventionally handsome than the son's, though a shade darker. His mother, like televised victims of floods and tornadoes, will be much interviewed, at first incoherently, in shock and tears, and later more calmly, speaking in sorrowful retrospect. Her image will appear in the press; she will become momentarily famous. Perhaps there will be a spike in the sale of her paintings.