John Updike - Terrorist

"Fine. I didn't doubt it. Not that it matters. It's not the baby who's not legitimate, if you follow me."

"I do, sir. Thank you. My father well knew that marrying an American citizen, however trashy and immoral she was, would gain him American citizenship, and so it did, but not American know-how, nor the network of acquaintance that leads to American prosperity. Having despaired of ever earning more than a menial living by the time I was three, he decamped. Is that the correct word? I encountered it in an autobiographical memoir by the great American writer Henry Miller, which Miss Mackenzie assigned us in Advanced English."

"She did? My goodness, Ahmad; times change. You used to find Miller only under the counter. You know the expression 'under the counter'?"

"Of course. I am not a foreigner. I have never been abroad."

"You asked about 'decamp.' It's an old-fashioned word, but most Americans know what it means. To break up a military camp is the original sense."

"Mr. Miller used it, I believe, of a wife who left him."

"Yes. Small wonder. That she decamped, I mean. Miller would not have been an easy husband." Those lubricated three-ways with the wife in Sexus. Was the English department assigning Sexus} Is nothing to be held in reserve, for adulthood?

The young man takes a surprising tangent from his counselor's awkward remarks. "My mother tells me that I cannot remember my father," he says, "and yet I do."

"Well, you were three. Developmentally speaking, you could have a few memories." This is not Jack Levy's intended direction for the interview.

"A warm, dark shadow," Ahmad says, leaning forward, with a jerk, in his earnestness. "Very white, square teeth. A small, neat mustache. I get my own personal neatness from him, I am sure. Among my memories is a sweet smell, perhaps aftershave lotion, though with a hint of some spice in it, perhaps a Middle Eastern dish he had just consumed. He was dark, darker than I, but elegantly thin-featured. He parted his hair very near the middle."

This intent digression makes Levy uneasy. The boy is using it to hide something-what? Jack points out, deflat-ingly, "Perhaps you have confused a photograph with a memory."

"I have only one or two photographs. My mother may have some she has hidden from me. When I was small and innocent, she refused to answer my many questions about my father. I think his desertion left her very angry. I would like, some day, to find him. Not to press any claim, or to impose any guilt, but simply to talk with him, as two Muslim men would talk."

"Uh, Mr.-? How do you like to be called? Mulloy or-" he looks again at the cover of his folder-"Ashmawy?"

"My mother attached her name to me, on my Social Security and driver's license, and her apartment is where I can be reached. But when I am out of school and independent I will become Ahmad Ashmawy."

Levy keeps his eyes down on the folder. "And how do you plan to support this independence? Your marks were good, Mr. Mulloy, in chemistry and English and so on, but I see you switched last year to the voke track. Who advised you to do that?"

The young man lowers his own eyes-solemn black lamps, long-lashed-and rubs as if at a gnat by his ear. "My teacher," he says.

"Which teacher? A course switch like that should have been checked with me. We could have talked, you and I, even if we aren't two Muslim men."

"My teacher is not here. He is at the mosque. Shaikh Rashid, the imam. We study together the sacred Qur'an."

Levy tries to suppress his distaste, saying, "Yes. Do I know where the mosque is? I fear I don't, except for the huge one on Tilden Avenue that the Black Muslims put up in the ruins after the 'sixties riots. Is that the one you mean?" He is sounding bristly, and doesn't want to. It wasn't this boy who had woken him up at four o'clock, or who had fouled his brain with thoughts of death, or had made Beth oppressively fat.

" West Main Street, sir, about six blocks south of Linden Boulevard."

" Reagan Boulevard. They renamed it last year," Levy says, making a disapproving mouth.

The boy doesn't pick up on it. Politics for these teen-agers is an obscurer department of celebrity heaven. Polls show they think Kennedy was the next-best President after Lincoln, because he had celebrity quality, and anyway they don't know any of the others, not even Ford and Carter, just Clinton and the Bushes, if they can tell die Bushes apart. Young Mulloy-Levy had a mental block with the other name- says, "It is on a street of stores, above a beauty shop and a place where they give you cash. It is not easy to find, the first time."

"And the imam of this hard-to-find place told you to switch to the voke track."

Again the boy hesitates, protecting what it is he is protecting, and then says, staring boldly from those great black eyes, in which the irises are hard to distinguish from the pupils, "He said the college track exposed me to corrupting influences-bad philosophy and bad literature. Western culture is Godless."

Jack Levy leans back in his squeaking old-fashioned wooden swivel chair and sighs, "Would that it were." Fearing trouble with the school board and newspapers if they got wind of his saying this to a student, he backtracks: "That slipped out. Some of these evangelical Christians get my goat, blaming Darwin for the sloppy job God did, creating the universe."

But the boy is not listening, pursuing his own point. "And because it has no God, it is obsessed with sex and luxury goods. Look at television, Mr. Levy, how it's always using sex to sell you things you don't need. Look at the history the school teaches, pure colonialist. Look how Christianity committed genocide on the Native Americans and undermined Asia and Africa and now is coming after Islam, with everything in Washington run by the Jews to keep themselves in Palestine."

"Whew, " Jack says, wondering if the boy recognizes that he is talking to a Jew. "That's quite a bill of particulars, to get you off the college track." As Ahmad widens his eyes, staring into so much injustice, Jack notices that his irises are not plain black but with a greenish tinge in their brown, a pinch of the Mulloy in him. "Did the imam ever suggest," he asks, letting the chair's recoil lean him confidentially across the desk, "that a bright boy like you, in a diverse and tolerant society like this one, needs to confront a variety of viewpoints?"

"No," Ahmad says with surprising abruptness, his soft lips bunching in a pout of defiance. "Shaikh Rashid did not suggest that, sir. He feels that such a relativistic approach trivializes religion, implying that it doesn't much matter. You believe this, I believe that, we all get along-that's the American way."

"Right. And he doesn't like the American way?"

"He hates it."

Jack Levy, still sitting forward, braces his elbows on his desktop and his chin thoughtfully on his intertwined fingers. "And you, Mr. Mulloy? You hate it?"

The boy shyly casts his eyes down again. "I of course do not hate all Americans. But die American way is the way of infidels. It is headed for a terrible doom."

He does not say, America wants to take away my God. He protects his God from this weary, unkempt, disbelieving old Jew, and guards as well his suspicion that Shaikh Rashid is so furiously absolute in his doctrines because God has secretly fled from behind his pale Yemeni eyes, the elusive gray-blue of a kafir woman's. Ahmad in his fatherless years with his blithely faithless mother has grown accustomed to being God's sole custodian, the one to whom God is an invisible but palpable companion. God is ever witJi him. As it says in the ninth sura, Ye have no patron or helper save God. God is another person close beside him, a Siamese twin attached in every part, inside and out, and to whom he can turn at every moment in prayer. God is his happiness. This old Jewish devil, beneath his cunning, worldly-wise, mock-fatherly manner, wishes to disrupt that primal union and take the All-Merciful and Life-Giving One from him.