Terrorist

Not that the Jewish God had ever been big on promises- a shattered glass at your wedding, a quick burial in a shroud when you die, no saints, no afterlife, just a lifetime of drudging loyalty to the tyrant who asked Abraham to make a burnt offering of his only son. Poor Isaac, the trusting shmuck, having been nearly killed by his own father was as an old blind man tricked out of his blessing by his son Jacob and his own wife, Rebekah, brought to him veiled from Paddan-aram. More lately, over in the old country, if you observed all the rules-and for the Orthodox it was a long list of rules- you got a yellow star and a one-way ticket to the gas ovens. No, thanks: Jack Levy took a stiff-necked pleasure in being one of Judaism's stiff-necked naysayers. He had encouraged the world to make 'Jack' of 'Jacob' and had argued against his son's circumcision, though a slick Wasp doctor at the hospital talked Beth into it, for 'purely hygienic' reasons, claiming that studies showed it would lower the risk of venereal disease for Mark and of cervical cancer for Mark's partners. A week-old infant, his prick just a little fat button on the seamed pincushion of his balls, and they were improving his sex life and coming to the rescue of female infants as yet unborn.

Beth was a Lutheran, a hearty Christer denomination keen on faith versus works and beer versus wine, and he figured she would mitigate his dogged Jewish virtue, the oldest lost cause still active in the Western world. Even his grandfather's socialist faith had gone sour and musty with the way Communism had worked out in practice. Jack had seen his and Beth's marrying, on the second floor of New Prospect's ridiculous City Hall, witli only her sister and his parents in attendance, as a brave mismatch, a little loving mud in history's eye, like a lot else that was happening in 1968. But after thirty-six years together in northern New Jersey, the two of them with their different faiths and ethnicities have been ground down to a lackluster sameness. They have become a couple that shops together at ShopRite and Best Buy on weekends, and whose idea of a jolly time is two tables of bridge with three other couples from the high school or the Clifton Public Library, where Beth works four days a week. Some Friday or Saturday nights they try to cheer themselves up with a meal out, alternating the Chinese and Italian restaurants where they are frequent diners and die maitre d' with a resigned smile leads them to a corner table where Beth can squeeze in; never a booth. Or else they drive to some seedy cineplex that has sticky floors and charges seven dollars for a medium popcorn, if they can find a movie that isn't too violent or sexy or too blatantly aimed at the mid-teen male demographic. Their courtship and young marriage coincided with the collapse of the studio system and the release of dazzling subversive visions-Midnight Cowboy, Easy Rider, Bob and Carol and Ted and Alice, The Wild Bunch, A Clockwork Orange, Dirty Harry, Carnal Knowledge, Last Tango in Paris, the first Godfather, The Last Picture Show, American Graffiti-not to mention late Bergman and French and Italian films still full of angst and edge and national personality. These had been good movies, which kept a hip couple on its mental toes. There had still been a sense in the air, left over from '68, that the world could be reimagined by young people. In sentimental memory of those shared revelations when they were both new to married sharing, Jack's hand even now in the movies sneaks across and takes hers from her lap and holds it, delicately puffy and hot, in his own while their faces are being bathed in the explosions of some latter-day, dumbed-down thriller, the coldly calibrated shocks of its adolescent script mocking their old age.

Insomniac, despairing, Jack thinks of seeking Beth's hand under the covers but in trying to find it amid tbe mounds of her slumbering flesh he might disturb her and awaken her needy, tireless, still-girlish voice. With a stealth almost criminal, he slides his feet upward on the bottom sheet and eases the blankets aside and escapes the marital bed. Stepping beyond the bedside rug, he feels on his bare feet an April chill. The thermostat is still on night mode. He stands at a window curtained in sun-yellowed lace and contemplates his neighborhood by the gray light of its mercury-vapor street lamps. The orange of the Gulf sign at the all-night gas station two blocks away is the only emphatic touch of color in the pre-dawn vista. Here and there in the neighborhood a wan low-voltage night light warms the window of a child's room or a stair landing. In the semi-darkness, under a polished dome of darkness weakened by the climbing rot of city glow, the foreshortened angles of roof lines, shingles, and sidings recede to infinity.

Housing, Jack Levy thinks. Houses have compressed into housing, squeezed closer together by rising land costs and subdivision. Where within his memory back and side yards had once included flowering trees and vegetable gardens, clotheslines and swing sets, now a few scruffy bushes fight for carbon dioxide and damp soil between concrete walks and asphalt parking spaces stolen from what had been generous margins of grass. The needs of the automobile have proved decisive. The locust trees planted along the curbs, the wild ailanthus taken rapid root along the fences and house walls, the few horse-chestnut trees surviving from the era of ice wagons and coal trucks-all these trees, their buds and small new leaves showing as a silvery fur of fresh growth in the lamplight, stand in danger of being uprooted by the next push of street-widening. Already, the simple outlines of 'thirties semi-detached and 'fifties colonial-style ranch houses are loaded with added dormers, superimposed sun-decks, rickety outside staircases to give legal access to studio apartments carved from what were once considered spare rooms. Affordable housing units are dwindling in size like pieces of paper repeatedly folded. Discarded divorcees and obsolete craftsmen in outsourced industries and hardworking people of color, grabbing for the next rung in the climb out of the inner slums, move into the neighborhood and can't afford to leave. Smart young couples fix up rundown semis and make their mark by painting their porches and gable trim and window frames outlandish colors- Easter lilac, acid green-and the splash on the block feels like an insult to the older residents, a flare of contempt, an unsightly toying. Corner grocery stores have one by one dropped away, leaving the field to franchises whose standardized logos and decors are cheerfully garish, as are the gargantuan full-color images of their fattening fast food. As Jack Levy sees it, America is paved solid with fat and tar, a coast-to-coast tarbaby where we're all stuck. Even our vaunted freedom is nothing much to be proud of, with the Commies out of the running; it just makes it easier for terrorists to move about, renting airplanes and vans and setting up Web sites. Religious fanatics and computer geeks: the combination seems strange to his old-fashioned sense of the reason-versus-faith divide. Those creeps who flew the planes into the World Trade Center had good technical educations. The ringleader had a German degree in city planning; he should have redesigned New Prospect.

A more positive and energetic person than himself, Jack believes, would be using these hours before his wife awakes and die Perspective hits the porch and the star-pricked sky above the rooftops quickens to a dirty gray. He could go downstairs and look for one of the books he has read the first thirty pages of, or make some coffee, or watch the early-morning TV news teams kid and jabber the frogs out of their throats. But he prefers to stand here and soak his empty head, too tired to dream, in the sublunar sights of the neighborhood.

A striped cat-or is it a small raccoon?-skitters across the empty street, disappearing under a parked car. Jack can't tell the make. Cars all look alike now, not like the big fins and grinning chrome grilles when he was a kid, even mock portholes on the Buick Riviera and the bullet nose on the Studebaker, the great long Caddies of the 'fifties- now, that was aerodynamic. In the name of aerodynamics and fuel economy, all the cars now are slightly fat and squat and neutral in color to hide road dirt, Mercedes down to Honda. It makes a big parking lot a nightmare, you could never find your own if it weren't for the little keyfob that flashes the lights from a distance or as a last resort blasts the horn.

A crow with something pale and long in its beak lazily flaps up from having poked a hole in a green garbage bag put out last night for collection today. A man in a suit hurries off a porch down the block and gets into a car, a chunky, gas-guzzling SUV, and roars off, never mind waking the neighbors. An early flight out of Newark, Jack guesses. He stands there staring through the chilly windowpanes thinking, Life. This is life, living in housing, gulping down grease, shaving in the morning, taking a shower so you won't disgust the other guys at the conference table with your pheromones. It took Jack Levy a lifetime to realize that people stink. When he was younger, he never smelled in his own nostrils, he never noticed that stale aroma he gives off now, just in moving quietly through the day, not even sweating.

Well, he is still alive, seeing what he sees. He supposes this is a good thing, but it is an effort. Who was that Greek, in that book by Camus they all were crazy about back at CCNY? Or maybe it was at Rutgers, among the master's candidates. Sisyphus. The rock uphill. Down it must roll. He stands there no longer seeing but pressing with his consciousness back against the certainty that all this will some day cease for him. The screen in his head will go totally blank, and yet it will all go on without him, dawn breaking and cars starting up and wild creatures continuing to feed in a terrain poisoned by Man. Carmela has silently padded up the stairs and rubs against his bare ankles, purring loudly, thinking of being fed early. This too is life, life touching life.

Jack's eyes feel sandy and heavy. He thinks he should never have gotten out of bed; at his wife's great warm side he might have stolen another hour of sleep. Now he must carry his fatigue through a long and tightly scheduled day, people at him every minute. He hears the bed creak as Beth stirs and relieves the mattress of her weight. The