Soft target

7:35 P.M.-7:55 P.M

That is it, my brother,” said the imam. He was weeping. He had been so moved by the three young fighters in their orange suits leaping up the stairway into the plane, and now, all were aboard, and the hatch door was secured. The plane had to taxi to position at the head of the runway and then roar airborne. It was a triumph beyond his imagining.

He looked at Andrew. The young man, handsome enough in the Western way with his blond, short hair, his little ski jump of a nose, his sweatshirt and blue jeans and hiking boots, his baseball cap on backward, was lit by the glow of the news feed. His face showed nothing. He was not weeping at all. He showed no trace of joy or liberation, no sense of the meaning of the great thing he had accomplished, a thing no jihadi, not even the Holy Warrior himself, the martyred Osama, had come close to achieving.

He had actually freed prisoners from the American prison system. The Kaafi brothers, innocents, naifs, idiots, who had bumbled into an American bank on the day after Osama’s death and, in a fit of Islamic passion, attempted to rob it with airsoft pistols with the idea of contributing to the cause. It was perhaps the stupidest robbery in the history of crime, more farce than threat, as the idiots had not even bothered to cover the orange rings appended to the gun muzzles to signify nonlethality. They were arrested by a smiling sixty-three-year-old security guard.

But some prosecutor decided to ride the prank as far as he could, and the three emerged six months later with massive sentences and were quickly shipped to the pen, where their frailness, their gentleness, their Somali beauty and grace got them fucked savagely every night by the depraved of America. The imam could not stand it. It hurt him so much. And now the boys were free, thanks to this American of dubious faith and principle named Andrew.

“We are so badass,” Andrew finally said flatly.

“Andrew,” the imam asked, “I have to know. Why? No virgins await you, only nothingness by your own beliefs. If there is no afterlife, this life is meaningless, so it must be so for you. But I cannot abide that. Please, now, on the cusp of your greatness, tell me your reasons.”

Andrew didn’t bother to repay the earnestness with eye contact. Clearly the W-word- why — wasn’t of much interest to him. He’d been asked it a thousand times, by teachers, deans, cops, shrinks, counselors, parents, short-term girlfriends, everybody, anybody. He preferred not to hassle with it. It was psychobabble Muzak to his ears. He shrugged his shoulders.

“One reason I did it for you is because everybody hates you. That is so cool. I love the way you guys feed on that hate and it makes you bigger and stronger and more intent on your cause, which otherwise makes no fucking sense at all to me.”

In fact, he really didn’t give a shit about the dumb-bunny Kaafis. Anyone that stupid was doomed, and the rational functioning of natural selection had worked within design specifications to cull them from the herd, and what the Crips and Bloods did to their asses in the dark of a jungle penitentiary night was of little concern to him. Empathy was not one of his gifts; he actually thought the idea of the thin and beautiful and young and tender Somalis being gangbanged was pretty funny. The point of the prisoner release had really been just to stall things out for three hours or so, in order to let the networks set up so that the final act would play out in prime time before a world audience.

He thought a bit-meanwhile, the majestic jet had made it to the end of the airstrip and was rotating on its tires to orient itself for the long surge to liftoff-and finally applied himself at last to the conundrum that was Andrew Nicks.

Ideas, abstractions, conceits, causes-all were more or less hazy to him. He had no sense of nation or state, none whatsoever of “American interest,” and to him the government was simply the entity that prevented the Osama kill shot from making it to Fox.

The game was everything. It superseded all. It provided framework, a set of rules, a rising litany of satisfied expectations, level by level, until the ultimate moment, and that moment was the point. Didn’t they get that? Come on, assholes, I want to see the ultimate moment, the kill shot, when the SEAL operator double-taps pieces of flying steel at three thousand feet per into the famous mug of the Tall Guy, and he spasms backward amid a sudden atomized mist of Cuisinarted plasma and brain cells. I want to see his eyes go all cue ball as the pupils rotate upward in the split second before his knees give and he notices his brains now decorate the wall and the ceiling. But no. We’re so delicate all of a sudden. You have violated the rules of the game. You have set up the greatest narrative since World War II and demanded our attention, and when the climax arrives, you demurely avert your eyes, you assholes. You unbelievable pansy jerkoffs. You have violated the rules of the game.

How could he say to this guy, Hey, dude, I just transformed America, the Mall, into the greatest massively multiplayer online game. It will support thousands of players simultaneously, and players can be on the same side or play against each other in large-scale combat simulations set in a real place. They can be me or the SWAT hero who takes me down, and I bet a surprising number choose to play me. I am creating the scenes for a new game. Rather than using computer-generated images and sounds, I will be the first to use actual pictures and sounds from actual slaughter and carnage, in a real place, in a real time, with real characters, real life, real death. The stories! The miraculous mistakes, the brave moms, the gay waiters who give up their lives to protect their customers, the teenaged killers, the dedicated if hopelessly fucked-up imam, Maahir the killer of Santa Claus, it just don’t git no better!

I believe that this will provide the realism lacking in the other games and in my world, which is the only one I care about, the only one I succeeded in, the only one where I found respect and loyalty and love and my ideal self, that is, immortality. No, it’s more: it’s god-hood. And they will understand, the generations of players who are absorbed into the culture of my creation and become its heroes and villains. So-am I crazy or what? And it’s all on disc. The finest first person shooter in history. Get the disc to WikiLeaks and it’ll astound the world. It is first person shooter as art, as The Odyssey or War and Peace. Not only did I have the imagination to conceive it, I had the will to engineer it. All before the age of twenty-five.

But the imam would have not even begun to grasp the conceit that if art was creation, then it also had to be destruction. Instead Andrew settled on a trope that seemed to satisfy most people, and in which he himself even slightly believed.

“I have always liked to wreck things,” he said, more to end the conversation than to explain anything. “It may be a drive as human as sex or greed or fear. Think about it. A certain tiny portion of the population has since time immemorial had a hunger to destroy so deep, so consistent, it has to be chromosomal. A gene for destruction. The DNA theory of anarchism. Maybe Allah or possibly the Wonderful Wizard of Oz, whichever one is really behind the curtain, he seeds each generation with a few of us natural-born blowers-up-of-shit because he knows someone’s got to wreck all the crap so that someone else can start over and rebuild and have something to do on Monday. Else what would we do all day, year after year? Make cuckoo clocks?”

The imam, of course, didn’t catch the refs to Wizard or to Welles’s chilly speech in The Third Man, but he caught the gist of it.

“I think,” he said, “Allah has touched you. He just forgot to whisper his name into your ear.”

“See,” Andrew said, “ everyone makes mistakes.”