Terrorist

Jews in. How religious is Ahmad these days?'

She relaxes a little, slumping down into her pillow. His gaze travels an inch farther down into the black bra. The freckled skin of her upper chest looks a bit crepey, exposed to sun damage year after year, in contrast to the soap-white strip this side of the bra's edge. Jack thinks, So another Jew has been here before me. Who all else? Egyptians, Chinamen, God knows. A lot of these painters she knows are kids half her age. To them she'd be a mother who fucks. Maybe that's why her own kid is queer, if he is.

She is saying, 'It's hard to say. He never talked much about it. Poor little guy, he used to look so frail and scared when I'd drop him off at the mosque, going up those stairs all by himself. When I'd ask him afterwards how it had gone, he'd say 'Great' and clam up. He'd even blush. It was something he couldn't share. With the job, he told me, it's hard for him to always get to the mosque on Fridays, and this Charlie who's always with him doesn't seem to be all that observant. But, you know, really, all in all Ahmad seems more relaxed- just the way he talks to me, more of a man's manner, looking me level in the eye. He's pleased with himself, earning money, and, I don't know, maybe I'm imagining this, more open to new ideas, not closed into this very, in my opinion, limited and intolerant belief system. He's getting fresh input.'

'Does he have a girlfriend?' Jack Levy asks, grateful to Terry for warming to a subject other than his own failings.

'Not as far as I know,' she says. He loves that Irish mouth of hers when she gets pensive, forgetting to close her lifted upper lip, with its little blister of flesh in the middle. 'I think I would know. He comes home tired, lets me feed him, reads the Koran or lately the newspaper-this stupid war on terror-so he can talk with this Charlie about it, and goes to bed in his room. His sheets'-she regrets bringing up the subject, but goes ahead with it-'are unspotted.' She adds, 'They weren't always.'

'How would you know if he has a girl?' Jack presses.

'Oh, he'd talk about it, if only to get my goat. He's always hated my having male friends. He'd want to go out nights, and he doesn't.'

'It doesn't seem quite right. He's a good-looking kid. Could he be gay?'

The question doesn't faze her; she has thought about it. 'I could be wrong, but I think I'd know that, too. His teacher at the mosque, this Shaikh Rashid, is kind of creepy; but Ahmad's aware. He reveres him but distrusts him.'

'You say you've met the man?'

'Just once or twice, picking up Ahmad or dropping him off. He was very smooth and proper with me. But I could feel hatred. To him I was a piece of meat-unclean meat.'

Unclean meat. Jack's hard-on has revived. He makes himself focus, a minute or so longer, before sharing this possibly inconvenient development. There is a pleasure, which he had forgotten, in just having the thing-the firm, stout, importunate stalk, the pompous little freshly appointed center of your being, bringing with it die sensation of there being more of you. 'The job,' he resumes. 'Does he put in long hours?'

'It varies,' Terry says. Her body gives off, perhaps in response to an emanation from his, a mix of tingling scents, soap at the nape of her neck foremost. The subject of her son is losing her interest. 'He gets off when he's delivered the furniture. Some days it's early, most days it's late. Sometimes they drive as far as Camden, or Atlantic City.'

'That's a long way to go, to deliver a piece of furniture.'

'There aren't just deliveries; there are pickups, too. A lot of their furniture is secondhand. They make bids on people's estates and truck the stuff off. They have a kind of network; I don't know how much the Islamic thing matters. Most of their customers around New Prospect are black families. Some of their homes, Ahmad says, are surprisingly nice. He loves seeing the different areas, the different lifestyles.'

'See the world,' Jack sighs. 'See New Jersey first. That's what I did, only I left out the world part. Now, missy'- he clears his throat-'you and I have a problem.'

Teresa Mulloy's protuberant, beryl-pale eyes widen in mild alarm. 'Problem?'

Jack lifts the sheet and shows her what has happened below his waist. He hopes he has shared enough life in general with her for her to share this with him.

She stares, and lets the tip of her tongue curl up to touch the plump center of her upper lip. 'That's not a problem,' she decides. 'No problema, senor.'

Charlie Chehab often rides with Ahmad, even when Ahmad could handle by himself the furniture to be loaded or unloaded. The boy is growing stronger with the lifting and hauling. He has asked that his paychecks-nearly five hundred a week, at twice what Shop-a-Sec paid per hour-be made out to Ahmad Ashmawy, though he still lives with his mother. Because his Social Security and driver's license both list his last name as Mulloy, she has gone with him downtown to the bank, in one of the new glass buildings, to explain, and to make out new forms for a separate account. That is how she is these days: she makes no resistance to him, though she never made much. His mother is, he sees now, looking back, a typical American, lacking strong convictions and the courage and comfort they bring. She is a victim of the American religion of freedom, freedom above all, though freedom to do what and to what purpose is left up in the air. Bombs bursting in air- empty air is the perfect symbol of American freedom. There is no ummah here, both Charlie and Shaikh Rashid point out-no encompassing structure of divine law that brings men rich and poor to bow down shoulder to shoulder, no code of self-sacrifice, no exalted submission such as lies at the heart of Islam, its very name. Instead tiiere is a clashing diversity of private self-seeking, whose catchwords are Seize the day and Devil take the hindmost and God helps those who help themselves, which translate to There is no God, no Day of Judgment; help yourself. The double sense of 'help yourself'-self-reliance and 'grab what you can'-amuses the shaikh, who, after twenty years among these infidels, takes pride in his fluency in their language. Ahmad sometimes has to suppress a suspicion tJiat his teacher inhabits a semi-real world of pure words and most loves the Holy Qur'an for its language, a shell of violent shorthand whose content is its syllables, the ecstatic flow of 'l's and 'a's and guttural catches in the throat, savoring of the cries and the gallantry of mounted robed warriors under the cloudless sky of Arabia Deserta.

Ahmad sees his mother as an aging woman still in her heart a girl, playing at art and love-for she is alive lately with a preoccupation in which her son detects a new lover, though this one, unlike the run of them, does not come around to the apartment and vie witJi Ahmad for dominance of the premises. She may be your mother but I fuck her, their manner said, and this too was American, this valuing of sexual performance over all family ties. The American way is to hate one's family and flee from it. Even the parents conspire in this, welcoming signs of independence from the child and laughing at disobedience. There is not that bonding love which the Prophet expressed for his daughter Fatimah: Fatimah is a part of my body; whoever hurts her, has hurt me, and whoever hurts me has hurt God. Ahmad does not hate his mother; she is too scattered to hate, too distracted by her pursuit of happiness. Though they still live together in that apartment perfumed with the sweet and acrid odors of oil paints, she has as little to do with the self he presents to the daytime world as do the pajamas, greasy widi sweat, that he sleeps in at night and sheds before the shower through which he hurries into the morning purity of the working day, and his mile walk to work. For some years it has been awkward, their bodies sharing the limited space of the apartment. Her ideas of healthy behavior include appearing before her son in her underwear or a summer nightie that allows the shadows of her private parts to show through. On the summer street she wears halters and miniskirts, blouses unbuttoned at the top and low-slung jeans tightest where she is fullest. When he rebukes her attire as improper and provocative, she mocks and teases him as if he is flirting with her. Only at the hospital, with pale-green scrubs, decently baggy, worn over her indiscreet street clothes, does she meet the Prophet's injunction to women, in the twenty-fourth sura, to throw veils over their bosoms and to display their ornaments only to dieir husbands and fathers and sons and brothers and slaves and eunuchs and, the Book emphasizes, children who note not women's nakedness. As a child often or less, he more than once, to patch over the lack of a babysitter, waited for her at Saint Francis's and would rejoice to see her flushed with the hurry of her job, muffled below the waist in scrub pants and tliick-soled running shoes, with no bangles to break die silence. A tense moment was reached when, at fifteen, he became taller dian she, and sprouted a dark down on his upper lip: still under forty, she still foolishly hoped to catch a man, to pluck a rich doctor from the midst of his harem of comely young attendants, and her teen-age son was betraying her as