She crossed against the light and was standing on the crowded corner when she saw them coming toward her, running. They were bright and undisguised, moving past people wedged in routine anonymity. The sky seemed so near. They were bright with urgent life, that’s why they were running, and she raised a hand so they might see her in the mass of faces, thirty-six days after the planes.
IN NOKOMIS
He had his Visa card, his frequent-flyer number. He had the use of the Mitsubishi. He’d lost twenty-two kilos and converted this to pounds, multiplying by 2.2046. The heat on the Gulf Coast was fierce at times and Hammad liked it. They rented a little stucco house on West Laurel Road and Amir turned down an offer of free cable TV. The house was pink. They sat around a table on day one and pledged to accept their duty, which was for each of them, in blood trust, to kill Americans.
Hammad pushed a cart through the supermarket. He was invisible to these people and they were becoming invisible to him. He looked at women sometimes, yes, the girl at the checkout named Meg or Peg. He knew things she could never in ten lifetimes begin to imagine. In the drenching light he saw a faint trace of fine soft silky down on her forearm and once he said something that made her smile.
His flight training was not going well. He sat rocking in the simulator and tried to match responses to conditions. The others, most of them, did better. There was always Amir of course. Amir flew small planes and logged extra hours in Boeing 767 simulators. He paid in cash at times, using money wired from Dubai. They thought the state would read their coded e-mails. The state would check out airline databases and all transactions involving certain sums of money. Amir did not concede this. He received certain sums of money wired to a Florida bank in his name, first and last, Mohamed Atta, because he was basically nobody from nowhere.
They were clean-shaven now. They wore T-shirts and cotton slacks. Hammad pushed his cart down the aisle to the checkout and when he said something she smiled but did not see him. The idea is to go unseen.
He knew his weight in pounds but did not announce it to the others or glorify it to himself. He converted meters to feet, multiplying by 3.28. There were two or three of them in the house and others came and went but not with the frequency or the burning spirit of the days on Marienstrasse. They were beyond that now, in full and determined preparation. Only Amir burned now. Amir was electric, dripping fire from the eyes.
The weight loss had come in Afghanistan, in a training camp, where Hammad had begun to understand that death is stronger than life. This is where the landscape consumed him, waterfalls frozen in space, a sky that never ended. It was all Islam, the rivers and streams. Pick up a stone and hold it in your fist, this is Islam. God’s name on every tongue throughout the countryside. There was no feeling like this ever in his life. He wore a bomb vest and knew he was a man now, finally, ready to close the distance to God.
He drove the Mitsubishi down sleepy streets. One day, so strange, he saw a car with six or seven people crammed in, laughing and smoking, and they were young, maybe college kids, boys and girls. How easy would it be for him to walk out of his car and into theirs? Open the door with the car in motion and walk across the roadway to the other car, walk on air, and open the door of the other car and get in.
Amir switched from English to Arabic, quoting.
Never have We destroyed a nation whose term of life was not ordained beforehand.
This entire life, this world of lawns to water and hardware stacked on endless shelves, was total, forever, illusion. In the camp on the windy plain they were shaped into men. They fired weapons and set off explosives. They received instruction in the highest jihad, which is to make blood flow, their blood and that of others. People water lawns and eat fast food. Hammad ordered takeout at times, undeniably. Every day, five times, he prayed, sometimes less, sometimes not at all. He watched TV in a bar near the flight school and liked to imagine himself appearing on the screen, a videotaped figure walking through the gate-like detector on his way to the plane.
Not that they would ever get that far. The state had watch lists and undercover agents. The state knew how to read signals that flow out of your cell phone to microwave towers and orbiting satellites and into the cell phone of somebody in a car on a desert road in Yemen. Amir had stopped talking about Jews and Crusaders. It was all tactical now, plane schedules and fuel loads and getting men from one location to another, on time, in place.
These people jogging in the park, world domination. These old men who sit in beach chairs, veined white bodies and baseball caps, they control our world. He wonders if they think of this, ever. He wonders if they see him standing here, clean-shaven, in tennis sneakers.
It was time to end all contact with his mother and father. He wrote them a letter and told them he would be traveling for a time. He worked for an engineering firm, he wrote, and would soon be promoted. He missed them, he wrote, and then tore up the letter and let the pieces drift away in a rip-tide of memories.
In the camp they gave him a long knife that had once belonged to a Saudi prince. An old man whipped the camel to its knees and then took the bridle and jerked the head skyward and Hammad slit the animal’s throat. They made a noise when he did it, he and the camel both, braying, and he felt a deep warrior joy, standing back to watch the beast topple. He stood there, Hammad, arms spread wide, then kissed the bloody knife and raised it to the ones who were watching, the robed and turbaned men, showing his respect and gratitude.
One man on a visit did not know the name of the town they were in, outside another town called Venice. He’d forgotten the name or had never learned it. Hammad thought it didn’t matter. Nokomis. What does it matter? Let these things fade into dust. Leave these things behind even as we sleep and eat here. All dust. Cars, houses, people. This is all a particle of dust in the fire and light of the days to come.
They passed through, one or two, now and then, and sometimes they told him about women they’d paid for sex, okay, but he didn’t want to listen. He wanted to do this one thing right, of all the things he’d ever done. Here they were in the midst of unbelief, in the bloodstream of the kufr. They felt things together, he and his brothers. They felt the claim of danger and isolation. They felt the magnetic effect of plot. Plot drew them together more tightly than ever. Plot closed the world to the slenderest line of sight, where everything converges to a point. There was the claim of fate, that they were born to this. There was the claim of being chosen, out there, in the wind and sky of Islam. There was the statement that death made, the strongest claim of all, the highest jihad.
But does a man have to kill himself in order to accomplish something in the world?
They had simulator software. They played flight-simulator games on their computer. The autopilot detects deviations from the route. The windshield is birdproof. He had a large cardboard illustration of the flight deck in a Boeing 767. He studied this in his room, memorizing the placement of levers and displays. The others called this poster his wife. He converted liters to gallons, grams to ounces. He sat in a barber chair and looked in the mirror. He was not here, it was not him.
He basically stopped changing his clothes. He wore the same shirt and trousers every day into the following week and underwear as well. He shaved but basically did not dress or undress, often sleeping in his clothes. The others made forceful comments. There was one time he took his clothes to the laundromat wearing someone else’s clothes. He wore these clothes for a week and wanted the other man to wear his clothes now that they were clean, although clean or dirty didn’t matter.
Wrong-eyed men and women laughing on TV, their military forces defiling the Land of the Two Holy Places.
Amir had made the pilgrimage to Mecca. He was a hajji, fulfilling the duty, saying the funeral prayer, salat al- janaza, claiming fellowship with those who’d died on the journey. Hammad did not feel deprived. They were soon to perform another kind of duty, unwritten, all of them, martyrs, together.
But does a man have to kill himself in order to count for something, be someone, find the way?
Hammad thought about this. He recalled what Amir had said. Amir thought clearly, in straight lines, direct and systematic.
Amir spoke in his face.
The end of our life is predetermined. We are carried toward that day from the minute we are born. There is no sacred law against what we are going to do. This is not suicide in any meaning or interpretation of the word. It is only something long written. We are finding the way already chosen for us.
You look at Amir and see a life too intense to last another minute, maybe because he never fucked a woman.
But what about this, Hammad thought. Never mind the man who takes his own life in this situation. What about the lives of the others he takes with him?
He was not eager to bring this up with Amir but did finally, the two of them alone in the house.
What about the others, those who will die?
