Terrorist

listening carefully to the answer, he asked Ahmad how his plans are coming and whether he intends to stick around here or to go out and see the world, the way a young man should. This sounded curious coming from Mr. Levy, who has lived in New Prospect all of his life, except for college and the spell in the Army that American men used to have to do. Though the doomed American war against Vietnamese self-determination was progressing at this time, Mr. Levy was never assigned to leave the United States, remaining in desk jobs, a fact he feels guilty about, since even though the war was a mistaken one it offered a chance to prove his courage and to show his love for his country. Ahmad knows this because his mother talks to him now and then about Mr. Levy-what a nice man he seems to be, though not a very happy one, and underappredated by the school administrators, and no longer of much importance to his wife or his son. His mother lately is unusually talkative and inquisitive; she takes more interest in Ahmad than he has come to expect, asking him, whenever he goes out, when he is coming back, and sometimes acting annoyed when he answers, 'Oh, sometime.'

'And when might that be, exactly?'

'Mother! Get off my case. Pretty soon. I might poke around over at the library.'

'Would you like some money for a movie?'

'I have money, and I just saw a couple movies, one with Tom Cruise and one with Matt Damon. They were both about professional assassins. Shaikh Rashid is right- movies are sinful and stupid. They are foretastes of Hell.'

'Oh, my, how holy we're getting to be! Don't you have any friends? Don't boys your age usually have girlfriends?'

'Mom. I'm not gay, if that's what you're implying.'

'How do you know?'

He was shocked. 'I know.'

'Well, all / know,' she said, combing her hair back from her forehead with the bent fingers of her left hand in a swift gesture acknowledging the dishevelled nature of this conversation and signalling a willingness to end it, 'is I never know when you're going to pop back in.'

Now, with somewhat the same testy tone, Shaikh Rashid answers, 'They don't want you to drive out of state. They don't want you to carry hazardous materials. They wish you to transport furniture. The Chehabs' firm is Excellency Home Furnishings, on Reagan Boulevard. You must have noticed it, or heard me mention the Chehab family.'

'The Chehabs?' At times Ahmad fears that, wrapped in his sensation of God standing beside him-so close as to make a single, unique holy identity, closer to him than his neck-vein, as the Qur'an expresses it-he notices fewer mundane details than other people, unreligious people.

'Habib and Maurice,' the imam clarifies, with an impatience that bites off his words as precisely as his beard is trimmed. 'They are Lebanese, non-Maronite, non-Druze. They came to this country as young men in the 'sixties, when it looked as if Lebanon might become a satellite of the Zionist entity. They brought some capital with them and put it into Excellency. Inexpensive furniture, new and used, for the blacks, was the basic idea. It has proved successful. Habib's son, informally called Charlie, has been selling merchandise and performing deliveries, but they wish him to play a more significant role in the office, now that Maurice has retired to Florida, save for a few summer months, and Habib's diabetes takes an increasing toll on his stamina. Charlie will-what's the phrase?-show you the ropes. You'll like him, Ahmad. He's very American.'

The Yemeni's feminine gray eyes narrow in amusement. To him, Ahmad is American. No amount of zeal and Qur'an studies can change his mother's race or his father's absence. The lack of fathers, the failure of paternity to keep men loyal to their homes, is one of the marks of this decadent and rootless society. Shaikh Rashid-a man slight and slim as a dagger, with a dangerous slyness about him, implying at moments that the Qur'an may not have eternally pre-existed in Paradise, to which the Prophet during one night-journey travelled on the supernatural horse Buraq-does not offer himself as a father; there is in his regard of Ahmad something fraternal and sardonic, a splinter of hostility.

But he is right, Ahmad does like Charlie Chehab, a thickset six-footer in his middle thirties, his swarthy face deeply creased, with a broad and flexible mouth much in motion. 'Ahmad,' he says, giving the syllables equal weight, broadening the second 'a' as in ' Baghdad ' or 'mad.' He asks, 'So what're you mad about?' Expecting no answer, he goes on, 'Welcome to Excellency, so called. My dad and uncle didn't quite know English when tiiey named it; they thought it meant something excellent.' His face as he talks expresses complicated mental currents like disdain, self-disparagement, suspicion, and (with lifted eyebrows) a good-humored awareness of himself and his listener being placed somehow in a compromised situation together.

'We knew English,' his father beside him protests. 'We knew English from the American School in Beirut. 'Excellency' means something classy. Like 'new' in New Prospect. Doesn't mean prospect is new now, it was new then. If we call it 'Chehab Furnishings,' people ask, 'What means that, 'Chehab'?' ' He softly hawks the 'ch,' a sound Ahmad associates with his Qur'an lessons.

Charlie stands a good foot taller than his father, and easily encircles the older, paler man's head in his arm and gives him a fond hug, a harmless enactment of a wrestling hold. Thus cradled, old Mr. Chehab's head looks like a giant egg, hairless on top and thinner-skinned than his rubber-faced son's. The father's face is somewhat translucent and puffy, perhaps because of the diabetes Shaikh Rashid had mentioned. Mr. Chehab's pallor is glassy but his manner is not sickly; though older than, say, Mr. Levy, he seems younger, plump and excitable and willing to be amused, even by his own son. He appeals to Ahmad: ' America. I don't understand this hatred. I came here a young man, married but my wife had to be left behind, just me and my brother, and nowhere was diere the hatred and shooting of my own country, everybody in tribes. Christian, Jew, Arab, indifferent, black, white, in between- everybody get along. If you have something good to sell, people buy. If you have job to do, people do it. Everything is clear, on surface. Makes business easy. From the beginning, no trouble. We thought in the Old World to set our prices high, then be bargained down. But nobody understands, even poor zanj come in to buy sofa or easy chair, they pay the price on sticker just like in grocery store. But few come. We understand, and put on the furniture prices we expect getting-lower prices-and more come. I say to Maurice, 'This is honest and friendly country. We will have no problems.' '

Charlie has released him from his hug, looks Ahmad in the eye, for the new employee was his height though thirty pounds lighter, and winks. 'Papa,' he says, with a snarl of patience. 'There are problems. The zanj weren't given any rights, they had to fight for them. They were being lynched and not allowed in restaurants, they even had separate drinking fountains, they had to go to the Supreme Court to be considered human beings. In America, nothing is free, everything is a fight. There is no nmmak, no shari'a. Let the young man here tell you, he's just out of high school. Everything is war, right? Look at America abroad-war. They forced a country of Jews into Palestine, right into the throat of the Middle East, and now they've forced their way into Iraq, to make it a little U.S. and have the oil.'

'Don't believe him,' Habib Chehab tells Ahmad. 'He says this propaganda, but he knows he has it good here. He is good boy. See, he smiles.'

And Charlie does more than smile; he laughs, throwing back his head so the horseshoe arc of his upper teetb is displayed, and the grainy muscle of his tongue, like a broad worm. His flexible lips close upon a contemplative smirk; his eyes, watchful beneath his thick brows, study Ahmad.

'How do you feel about all this, Madman? The imam tells us you're very pious.'

'I seek to walk the Straight Path,' Ahmad admits. 'In this country, it is not easy. There are too many paths, too much selling of many useless things. They brag of freedom, but freedom to no purpose becomes a kind of prison.'

The father interrupts, speaking loudly. 'You have never known a prison. In this country, people have no fear of prison. Not like Old World. Not like Saudis, not like Iraq before. '

Charlie says soothingly, 'Papa, the U.S. has the biggest prison population in the world.'

'Not bigger dian Russia 's. Not tJian China 's, if we knew.'

'Plenty big, though-going on two million. The young black women don't have enough guys to go around. They're all in jail, for Chrissake.'

'They are for criminals, the prisons. Three, four times a year they break into store. If don't find money they smash the furniture and make shit everywhere. Disgusting!'

'Papa, they're underprivileged. To them, we're rich.'

'Your friend Saddam Hussein, he knows prisons. The Communists, they knew prisons. In this country, die