John Updike - Terrorist

"Do it," Jack Levy urges. "I'm going to just relax. Jesus, I've been tired lately."

"For you there will be no pain."

"No, but there will be for plenty of others," the older man responds, slumping way down. But he cannot stop talking. "This isn't the way I pictured it."

"Pictured what?" The echo comes on its own in Ahmad's cleansed and hollowed state.

"Dying. I always thought I'd die in bed. Maybe that's why I don't like being in it. Bed."

He wants to die, Ahmad thinks. He taunts me to do the deed for him. In the fifty-sixth sura, the Prophet speaks of the moment when the soul of a dying man shall come up into his throat. That moment is here. The journey, the miraj. Buraq is ready, his shining white wings rustling, unfolding. Yet in the same sura, "The Event," God asks, We created you: will you not credit us? Behold the semen you discharge: did you create it, or We? God does not want to destroy: it was He who made the world.

The pattern of the wall tiles and of the exhaust-darkened tiles of die ceiling-countless receding repetitions of squares like giant graph paper rolled into a third dimension-explodes outward in Ahmad's mind's eye in the gigantic fiat of Creation, one concentric wave after another, each pushing the odier farther and fartlier out from the initial point of nothingness, God having willed the great transition from non-being to being. This was the will of the Beneficent, the Merciful, ar-Rahman and ar-Rahim, the Living, the Patient, the Generous, the Perfect, the Light, the Guide. He does not want us to desecrate His creation by willing death. He wills life.

Ahmad returns his right hand to the steering wheel. The two children in the vehicle ahead, lovingly dressed and groomed by their parents, bathed and sootlied every night, gaze toward him solemnly, having sensed the something erratic in his focus, the something unnatural in the expression of his face, mixed with the glaze of his windshield. Reassuringly he lifts the fingers of his right hand from the steering wheel and waves them, like the legs of a beetle on its back. Recognized at last, the children smile, and Ahmad cannot but smile back. He glances at his watch: nine-eighteen. The moment for maximum damage has slipped by; the bend in the tunnel is slowly being pulled into a widening rectangle of daylight.

"Yeah?" Levy asks, as if he has not quite heard Ahmad's response to his last remark. He sits up from his slouched position.

The black children, similarly sensing rescue, make faces through the back window of the Volvo, pulling down the corners of their eyes with their fingers and wagging their protruding tongues. Ahmad tries to smile again and repeats his friendly gesture of finger-waving but weakly; he feels spent. The tunnel's bright mouth grows to swallow him and his truck and its ghosts; together all emerge into the dull but brightening light of another Monday in Manhattan. Whatever was making the traffic in the tunnel so balky, so maddeningly sticky, has dispersed at last, dissolved on an open paved space among apartment buildings of modest height and billboards and brick row houses and, several blocks distant, fragile-looking glass skyscrapers. It could be a nameless spot in northern New Jersey; only the silhouette, dead ahead, of the Empire State Building, once again the tallest building in New York City, signifies otherwise. The bronze station wagon speeds to die right, south. The children are distracted by metropolitan sights, their heads swivelling this way and that, and they do not give Ahmad a farewell wave. He feels snubbed, after die sacrifice he made for them.

Beside him Mr. Levy says "Man!" in stupid imitation of a high-school student. "I'm drenched. You had me convinced." He senses that he has not assumed the right tone and adds, softer, "Well done, my friend. Welcome to the Big Apple."

Ahmad has slowed and tben stopped, not quite in the middle of the great wide space. Cars and trucks pushing into freedom behind tbe halted white truck swerve and blast their horns; side windows slide down and insulting gestures spit out. Ahmad spots the accelerating midnight-blue Mercedes and smiles to think diat for all its angry attempts to pass it had been still behind him, with its presumptuous and unwordiy investment thief of a driver.

Jack Levy realizes that he is in charge now. "So," he says. "The question becomes, What do we do now? Let's get this truck back to Jersey. They'll be happy to see it. And happy to see you, I regret to say. But you committed no crime, I'll be the first to point out, except drive a load of hazmat out of state on a Class C CDL. They'll probably lift your license, but tbat's O.K. Delivering furniture wasn't your future anyway."

Ahmad eases the truck forward, less in die way of traffic, waiting for an instruction. "Straight ahead, and left when you can," he is told. "I don't want to go back into any tunnel witJi you and this thing, thanks. We'll take the George Washington Bridge. Could we put the safety catch back on, do you think?"

Ahmad reaches down, fearful now of disturbing the carefully rigged mechanism. The little yellow lever says snap; the ponderous payload remains quiet. Mr. Levy in his relief at still being alive keeps talking. "Turn left at tbe light up there, that should be Tentii Avenue, I think. I'm trying to remember if the West Side Highway takes trucks. We may have to get on Riverside Drive, or just work up to Broadway and stay on it all the way up to the bridge."

Ahmad lets himself be guided, taking the left turn. The path is straight. "You're driving like a pro," Mr. Levy tells him. "Feel O.K.?" Ahmad nods. "I know you're in shock. Me, too. But there's really no place to park this crate. Once you get to the bridge we're almost home. It turns into 80. We'll go right to police headquarters, behind City Hall. We won't let die bastards intimidate us. Your turning this truck back in one piece makes them look good, and if they have half a brain they know it. It could have been a disaster. Anybody tries to bully you, remind them you were set up by a CIA operative, in a sting operation of very dubious legality. You're a victim, Ahmad-a fall guy. I can't imagine the Department of Homeland Security wants the details out in the media, or hashed over in some courtroom."

Mr. Levy is silent for a block or two, waiting for Ahmad to say sometbing, tben says, "I know this may sound premature, but I wasn't kidding about you making a good lawyer. You're cool under pressure. You talk well. In tbe years to come, Arab-Americans are going to need plenty of lawyers. Uh-oh. I guess we're on Eighth Avenue, I thought I had us on Tenth. Keep going-this'll take us onto Broadway at Columbus Circle. I rbink they still call it that, though the poor wop isn't p.c. any more. The Port Authority Bus Terminal on your left-I'm sure you've been there once or twice. Then we're going to cross Forty-second Street. I remember when it was real raunchy, but the Disney Corporation has cleaned it up, I guess."

Ahmad wants to focus, amid the yellow taxis and the traffic lights and the pedestrians clustered at every corner, on this novel world around him, but Mr. Levy keeps having thoughts. He says, "It'll be interesting to me to find out if that damn stuff was really connected, or if our side had managed a double cross and it wasn't. That was my hole card, but I was just as happy not to have it played. Thank God you chickened out." This sounds crass in his own ears. "Or relented, let's say. Saw the light."

All around them, up Eighth Avenue to Broadway, the great city crawls with people, some smartly dressed, many of them shabby, a few beautiful but most not, all reduced by the towering structures around them to the size of insects, but scuttling, hurrying, intent in the milky morning sun upon some plan or scheme or hope they are hugging to themselves, tlieir reason for living another day, each one of them impaled live upon the pin of consciousness, fixed upon self-advancement and self-preservation. That, and only that. These devils, Ahmad thinks, have taken away my God.