Terrorist

II

THE SOOT-STAINED ironstone church beside the lake of rubble is filled inside with pastel cotton dresses and sharp-shouldered polyester suits. Ahmad's eyes are dazzled, and find no balm in the stained-glass windows, depicting men in parodies of Middle Eastern dress enacting incidents in their supposed Lord's progress through his brief and inglorious life. To worship a God known to have died- the very idea affects Ahmad like an elusive stench, a stoppage in the plumbing, a dead rodent in the walls. Yet the congregants, a few of whom are even paler than he in his crisp white shirt, bask in the clean-scrubbed happiness of tbeir Sunday-morning assembly. The receding rows of seated and sexually mixed people, and the stagy confused area at the front with its built-in knobbed furniture and high, grimy triple window showing a pigeon about to alight on the head of a white-bearded man, and the giddy murmur of greetings and the crackle of heavy rumps shifting on the wooden pews, all seem to Ahmad more like a movie theatre before the movie starts than a holy mosque, with its thick muffling rugs and empty tiled mihrab and the liquid chants, la ildha ilia Allah, emitted by men fragrant of their menial Friday labors and, in their rhythmic unison of obeisance, crammed together as closely as the segments of a worm. The mosque was a domain of men; here, women in their spring shimmer, their expansive soft flesh, dominate.

He had hoped by arriving just as the ten-o'clock bells were ringing to slip into the back unnoticed, but he is tenaciously greeted by a plump descendant of slaves in a peach-colored suit with wide lapels and a sprig of lily-of-the-valley pinned to one of them. The black man hands Ahmad a folded sheet of tinted paper and leads him forward, up the center aisle, to the front pews. The church is nearly full, and none but the front pews, apparently the less desirable, are empty. Accustomed to worshippers squatting and kneeling on a floor, emphasizing God's height above them, Ahmad feels, even seated, dizzily, blasphemously tall. The Christian attitude of lazily sitting erect as at an entertainment suggests that God is an entertainer who, when He ceases to entertain, can be removed from the stage, and another act brought on.

Ahmad thinks he will have the pew to himself, as a sop to his strangeness and his sensed trepidation at being here, but another usher officiously herds down the carpeted aisle a large black family bobbing and bristling with the corn-rowed, beribboned heads of little females. Ahmad is pushed to the pew's far end, and in acknowledgment of his displacement the patriarch of the brood reaches over the laps of several small daughters to offer Ahmad his broad brown hand and a smile of welcome in which a gold tooth gleams. The mother of this brood, too far away to reach the stranger, gaily follows suit with a distant wave and nod. The little girls glance up, showing moon crescents of eye white. All this kafir friendliness-Ahmad doesn't know how to repel it, or what further inroads the service will impose. Already he hates Joryleen for luring him into such a sticky trap. He holds his breath as if to fend off contamination and stares straight ahead, where the curious carvings on what he takes to be the Christian equivalent of the minbar slowly sort themselves out as winged angels; he identifies the one of them blowing a long horn as Gabriel, and the crowded occasion therefore as the same Judgment Day the thought of which prompted Mohammed to gusts of his most rapturous poetry. What a mistake, Ahmad thinks, it is to attempt depiction, in images whose very grain betrays them as mere wood, of the inimitable work of God the Creator, al-Khdliq. The imagery of words, the Prophet knew, alone grips the soul with its own spiritual substance. Verily, were men and Djinn assembled to produce the like of this Qur'an, they could not produce its like, though the one should help the other.

The service at last begins. There is an expectant silence and then a swooping, bouncy thunder whose toylike timbre Ahmad recognizes, from assemblies at Central High, as that of an electric organ, poor cousin of the real pipe organ that he spies gathering dust beyond the Christian minbar. All stand to sing. Ahmad is brought to his feet as if by chains tying him to the others. A blue-robed mass, a choir, floods down the central aisle and fills the spaces behind a low rail beyond which, it seems, the congregation dare not pass. The sung words, distorted by the rhythm and languid accents of these zanj, concern, as best he can understand, a hill far away, and an old rugged cross. From within his resolute silence he spots Joryleen in the choir, a mass of mostly women, massive women among whom Joryleen looks girlishly young and relatively slim. She in turn spots Ahmad, in his pew up front; her smile disappoints him by being tentative, darting, nervous. She, too, knows he should not be here.

Up, down, everyone in his row but he and the smallest girl go onto their knees and return to sitting. There are group recitations and responses he cannot follow, though the father with the gold tooth shows him the page in the front of the hymnal. We believe this and that, the Lord is thanked for that and this. Then a long prayer is offered by the Christian imam, a stern-faced, coffee-colored man with wireless glasses and a flashing tall bald head. His gravelly voice is electrically amplified so that it booms from the back of the church as well as the front; while he, his eyes tight-shut behind his spectacles, burrows more deeply into the darkness that his mind's eye sees as he prays, voices from the congregation, here and there, shout out agreement-"Thass right!" "Say it, Reverend!" "Praise the Lord!" Arising like sweat on the skin, a murmur of assent continues when, in the wake of the second hymn, concerning the joys of walking with Jesus, the preacher ascends into the high minbar decorated with carved angels. In ever more rolling tones, moving his head in and out of the amplifying system's range so that his voice shrinks and swells like that of a man calling from the topmost mast of a storm-tossed ship, he tells of Moses, who led the chosen people out of slavery and yet was himself denied admission to the Promised Land.

"Why was that?" he asks. "Moses had served the Lord as spokesman in and out of Egypt. Spokesman: our President down there in Washington has a spokesman, our company heads in their lofty offices in Manhattan and Houston, they have spokesmen, spokeswomen in some cases, being spokespersons comes more naturally to them, doesn't it, brothers?"

There were guffaws and titters, inviting a digression: "Mercy, our beloved sisters do know how to speak. God didn't give Eve our strength of arm and shoulder, but he gave her double our strength of tongue. I hear laughing, but that's no joke, it's simple evolution, like they want to teach our innocent children in all the public schools. But seriously: nobody trusts himself to speak for himself any more. Too many risks. Too many lawyers watching and writing down what you say. Now, if I had a spokesperson right now I would be home watching a TV chat show with Mr. William Moyers or Mr. Theodore Koppel and having a second helping, a second slice or two or three, of that delicious, syrup-saturated French toast my dear Tilly makes for me some mornings after she's bought herself a new dress, a new dress or some fancy alligator purse she feels the teeniest bit guilty about."

Above the chuckles that greet this revelation, the preacher goes on, "That way, I would be saving my voice. That way, I wouldn't have to wonder out loud with all of you listening why God held Moses back from entering the Promised Land. If I only had a spokesperson."

To Ahmad it seems as if suddenly, in the midst of this expectant and heated crowd of dark-skinned knffar, the preacher is musing to himself, having forgotten why he is here, why all of them are here, while mockingly loud radios can be heard from cars swishing past on the street outside. But the man's eyes fly open behind his glasses and with a thump he pounces on the big gold-edged Bible in the minbar lectern, saying, "Here's the reason; God gives it in Deuteronomy, chapter thirty-two, verse fifty-one: 'Because ye trespassed against me among the children of Israel at the waters of Meribah-Kadesh, in the wilderness of Zin, because ye sanctified me not in the midst of die children of Israel.' "

The preacher, in his blue big-sleeved robe with a shirt and red necktie peeking out at the top, surveys the congregation with eyes widened in amazement and seems to Ahmad to focus especially upon him, perhaps because his is not a familiar face. "What does that mean?" he asks softly. " 'Trespassed against me'? 'Sanctified me not'? What did those poor long-suffering Israelites do wrong at those waters of Meribah-Kadesh, in that wilderness of Zin? Raise your hand, anybody who knows." Nobody does, taken off guard, and the preacher hurries on, consulting his big Bible again, tugging a thickness of its gilded edges over to a place he had marked. "It's all in here, my friends. Everything you need to know is right spang in here. The Good Book tells how a scouting party went out from the people Moses was leading all that way out of Egypt, they went into the Negev and north to the Jordan and came back and said, according to die thirteenth chapter of Numbers, that the land they had explored 'floweth with milk and honey,' but 'nevertheless the people be strong that dwell in the land, and the cities are walled, and very great,' and furthermore-furthermore, they reported-'die children of Anak' are there, and they are giants next to which 'we were in our own sight as grasshoppers, and so we were in their sight.' They knew it, and we knew it, brothers and sisters-next to them we were just little old grasshoppers, grasshoppers that live in the weeds for a few quick days, in the hay of a meadow before it is cut, in the outfield of the baseball field where nobody ever hits the ball, and then are gone, their exoskeletons, as intricate as everything else the good Lord makes, easily crunched in the beak of a crow or swallow, a seagull or a cowbird."

Now the preacher's blue sleeves thrash and bits of spittle from his mouth spark in the lectern light, and the choir below him sways, with Joryleen in it. "And Caleb said, 'Let's go, let us go up at once, and possess it'-'We can take 'em, giants or not. Let's go do it!' " And die tall coffee-colored man reads, in a voice vibrant and rapid, taking many voices: " 'And all the congregation lifted up their voice, and cried; and the people wept that night. And all the children of Israel murmured against Moses and against Aaron: and the whole congregation said unto them, Would God that we had died in the land of Egypt! or would God we had died in this wilderness!' "

He looks gravely out at the congregation, his spectacles circles of pure blind light, and repeats, " 'Would to God that we had died in Egypt!' So why did God bring us out of slavery into this wilderness"-he consults his book-" 'to fall by the sword, that our wives and our children should be a prey'? A prey! Hey, this is wrious! Let's hustle our asses- our oxes and asses-back to Egypt!" He glances into the book, and reads a verse aloud: " 'They said to one another, Let us make a captain, and let us return to Egypt.' That Pharaoh, he wasn't so bad. He fed us, though not much. He gave us cabins to sleep in, down by the marsh with all the mosquitoes. He sent us welfare checks, pretty regular. He gave us jobs dishing up fries at McDonald's, for the minimum wage. He was friendly, diat Pharaoh, compared to those giants, those humongous sons of Anak."

He stands erect, dropping his impersonation for the moment. "And what did Moses and his brother Aaron do about all this talk? It says right here, in Numbers fourteen, five: 'Moses and Aaron fell on their faces before all the assembly of the congregation of the children of Israel.' They gave up. They said to the people, the people they were supposed to be leading on behalf of the Almighty Lord, diey said, 'Maybe you're right. We've had it. We've been wandering out of Egypt too long. This wilderness is just too much.'

"And Joshua-you remember him, the son of Nun, of the tribe of Ephraim, he was one of the twelve on that scouting party, along with. Caleb-and Joshua stood up and said, 'Wait a minute. Wait a minute, brethren. This is good land those Canaanites have. Don't be afraid of those Canaanites, for they'-and I'm reading now-'are bread for us: their defense is departed from them, and the Lord is with us: fear them not.' " Solemnly, slowly, the preacher repeats, " 'The Lord is with us: fear them not.' And how did those average Israelites react when those two brave warrior-men stood up and said, 'Let's go. Don't be afraid of those Canaanites'? They said, 'Stone them. Stone those noisy rascals.' And they picked up stones-some considerably sharp and ugly flint lying around in that desert wilderness-and were set to crush the heads and mouths of Caleb and Joshua, when something amazing happened. Let me read to you what happened: 'And the glory of the Lord appeared in the tabernacle of the congregation before all the children of Israel. And the Lord said unto Moses, "How long will this people provoke me? and how long will it be ere they believe me, for all the signs which I have showed among them?" ' Manna from Heaven had been a sign. Water from the rock of Horeb had been a sign. The voice from the burning bush had been a clear sign. The pillars of cloud by day and of fire by night had been signs. Signs, signs around the clock, twenty-four/seven, as the saying is now.

"Still, the people had no faith. They wanted to go back to Egypt and that friendly Pharaoh. They preferred the devil they knew to the God they didn't. They still had a soft spot for that golden calf. They wouldn't mind going back to being slaves. They wanted to give up their civil rights. They wanted to forget their sorrows in dope and disgraceful behavior on Saturday nights. The good Lord said, 'I can't stand this people.' This tribe of Israel. And he asked Moses and Aaron, as if just for the information, 'How long shall I bear with this evil congregation, which murmur against me?' He doesn't wait for the answer; he answers Himself. The Lord, He slays all the scouts except for Caleb and Joshua. He tells all the others, that evil congregation, 'Your carcasses shall fall in this wilderness.' He sentences the others, all twenty years old or older, who had murmured against him, to forty years in this wilderness-'and your children shall wander in the wilderness forty years, and bear your whoredoms, until your carcasses be wasted in the wilderness.' Think of it. Forty years, with no time off for good behavior." He repeats, "With no time off for good behavior, because you have been an evil congregation."

A male voice in the congregation cries out, "Right on, Reverend! Evil!"

"No time off, because," continues the Christian imam, "you lacked the faith. Faith in the power of the Lord Almighty. That was your iniquity-let me give you the wonderful old word in all four of its syllables, in-ick-qui-tee: 'visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation.' Moses tries to soften Him up, the mouthpiece pleading with his client. 'Pardon, I beseech thee,' he says it right here in the Book, 'the iniquity of this people according unto the greatness of thy mercy, and as thou hast forgiven this people, from Egypt even until now.'

" 'No way,' the Lord says back. 'I'm tired of all this forgiving I'm supposed to do. I want some glory for a change. I want your carcasses.' "

The preacher slumps in the pulpit a little wearily, and rests his elbows informally on the massive holy book with gilded edges. "My friends," he confides, "you can see what Moses was driving at. What was so terrible, what was so"- he parts with a smile, pronouncing- ^uin-ick-qui-tuss, about going into enemy territory, scouting out the situation, coming home and giving an honest, cautious report? 'Things don't look good. These Canaanites and giants have a good tight grip on the milk and honey. We better back off.' It sounds just like good common sense, doesn't it? 'Don't cross the man. He has the stocks and bonds, he has the whip and chains, he controls the means of pro-duc-^ww.' '

Several voices call out, "That's right. Good sense. Don't cross tbe man."

"And to drill home his point, the Lord sent down plagues and pestilences, and the people mourned, and decided too late to go up into the mountains and face the Canaanites, who didn't look so bad now, and Moses, that good old mouthpiece, that savvy lawyer, advised them, 'Don't go. You shall not prosper. The Lord is not with you.' But these wrongheaded Israelites, tliey went up anyway, and what do we read, in the last verse of Numbers fourteen? 'Then the Amalekites came down, and the Canaanites which dwelt in that hill, and smote them, and discomfited them, even unto Hormah.' 'Even unto Hormah'-that's a long way. It's a long way to Hormah.

"You see, my friends, the Lord had been witli diem. He gave them a chance to go forward witli Him in all of His glory, and what did they do? They hesitated. They betrayed Him witli their hesitations-their caution, their cow-ar-diss-and Moses and Aaron betrayed Him by letting themselves be swayed, as politicians do when the polls come in-pollsters and spokesmen, they had them even then, in the days of the Bible-and for diat they were held back from the Promised Land, Moses and Aaron left there on that mountain looking over into the land of Canaan like children with their faces pressed to the window of the candy store. They couldn't pass through. They were impure. They hadn't measured up. They didn't let the Lord act through them. They had good human intentions, but they didn't trust enough in the Lord. The Lord is trustworthy. He says He'll do the impossible, He'll do it, don't tell Him He can't."

Ahmad finds himself getting excited along with the rest of the congregation, which is stirring and murmuring, relaxing from straining to follow every turn in the sermon, even the little pigtailed girls in the pew beside him, switching their heads back and forth as if to ease a pain in their necks, one of them looking up into Ahmad's face like a bug-eyed dog wondering if this human being is worth begging at. Her eyes shine as if reflecting a treasure she has spotted within him.

"Faith," the preacher is proclaiming in a voice roughened by oratory, gritty like coffee overloaded with sugar. "They didn't have faith. That is why they were an evil congregation. That is why the Israelites were visited by pestilence and shame and defeat in battle. Abraham, the father of the tribe, had faith when he lifted up his knife to sacrifice his only son, Isaac. Jonah had faith in the belly of the whale. Daniel had faith in the lion's den. Jesus on the cross had faith-he asked the Lord why He had abandoned him but then in the next breath he turned to the thief on the cross next to him and promised that man, that evil man, that 'hardened criminal,' as the sociologists say, that that very day he would dwell with him in Paradise. Martin Luther King had faith on the Mall in Washington, and in that hotel in Memphis where James Earl Ray martyred Reverend King-he had gone diere to support the striking sanitation workers, the lowest of the low, the untouchables that haul our trash. Rosa Parks had faith in that bus in Montgomery, Alabama." The preacher's body leans out, growing taller, and his voice changes tune as a new thought strikes him. "She took a seat in the front of the bus," he says at conversational pitch. "That's what the Israelites didn't do. They were afraid to sit at the front of the bus. The Lord said to them, 'There it is, right behind the driver, the land of Canaan full of milk and honey, that seat's for you,' and they said, 'No thanks, Lord, we like it at the back of the bus. We have a little game of craps going, we have our little pint of Four Roses to pass around, we have our little crack pipe, our heroin needle, we have our underage crackhead girlfriends to bear our illegitimate children that we can leave in a shoebox at the disposal and recycling facility on the edge of town-don't send us up that hill, Lord. We no match for those giants. We no match for Bull Connor and his police dogs. We'll just stay in the back of the bus. It's nice and dark there. It's cozy' " He returns to his own voice and says, "Don't be like them, brothers and sisters. Tell me what you need."

"Faith," a few voices weakly offer, uncertain.

"Let me hear it again, louder. What do we all need?"

"Faith," comes the more unified reply. Even Ahmad pronounces the word, but so no one can hear, except the little girl next to him.

"Better, but not loud enough. What do we have, brothers and sisters?"

"Faith!"

"Faith in what? Let me hear it so those Canaanites quake in their big goatskin boots!"

"Faith in the Lord!"

"Yes, oh yes," individual voices add. A few women here and there are sobbing. The mother, still young and comely, in Ahmad's pew has gleaming cheeks, he sees.

The preacher is not quite done with them. "The Lord of who?" he asks, answering himself with an excitement almost boyish: "The Lord of Abraham." He takes a breath. "The Lord of Joshua." He takes another. "The Lord of King David."

"The Lord of Jesus," a voice from the back of the old church puts forth.

"The Lord of Mary," cries a female voice.

Another ventures, "The Lord of Bathsheba."

"The Lord of Zipporah," calls a third.

The preacher decides the time to close has come. "The Lord of us all," he booms, leaning as close into the microphone as a rock star. He is wiping the shine from his tall bald head with a white handkerchief. He is filmed with sweat. It has made his starched collar wilt. He has been in his kafir way wrestling with devils, wrestling even with Ahmad's devils. "The Lord of us all," he repeats, mournfully. "Amen."

"Amen," many say, in relief and emptiness. There is silence, and then a businesslike sound of muffled pacing as four men in their suits march two abreast up the aisle to receive wooden plates while the choir with a massive rustle stands and readies itself to sing. A small robed man who has made up for his shortness by growing his kinky hair into a tall puff lifts his arms in readiness as the grave men in pastel polyester suits take the plates the preacher has handed them and fan out, two down the center aisle and two on the sides. They expect money to be placed in the plates, which have red felt bottoms to soften the rattle of coins. The unexpected word "impure" returns from the sermon; Ahmad's insides tremble with the impure trespass of his witnessing these black unbelievers at worship of their non-God, their three-headed idol; it is like seeing sex among people, pink scenes glimpsed over the shoulders of boys misusing their computers at school.

Abraham, Noah: these names are not totally strange to Ahmad. The Prophet in the third sura affirmed: We believe in God, and in what bath been sent down to us, and what hath been sent down to Abraham, and Ishmael, and Isaac, and Jacob, and the tribes, and in what was given to Moses, and Jesus, and the Prophets, from their Lord. We make no difference between them. These people around him are too in their fashion People of the Book. Why disbelieve ye the signs of God? Why repel believers from the way of God?

The electric organ, played by a man the back of whose neck shows rolls of creased flesh as if to form another face, makes a trickle of sound, then jabs out a swoop like a splash of icy water. The choir, Joryleen among them, in the front row, begins to sing. Ahmad has eyes only for her, the way she opens her mouth so wide, the tongue inside so pink behind her small round teeth, like half-buried pearls. "What a friend we have in Jesus," he understands the opening words to say, slowly, as if dragging the burden of the song up from some cellar of sorrow. "All our sins and griefs to bear!" The congregation behind Ahmad greets the words with grunts and yips of assent: they know this song, they like it. From the side aisle a kafir man taller than most, in a lemon-yellow suit, with a big broad-knuckled hand that makes the collection plate look the size of a saucer, passes it into the row where Ahmad sits. Ahmad passes it on quickly, depositing nothing; it tries to fly out of his hand, the wood is so surprisingly light, but he brings it down to the level of the little girl next to him, her scrabbly brown hands, not quite a baby's, reaching to snatch it away and pass it on. She, who has been looking up at him with bright dog-eyes, has inched over so that her wiry small body touches his, leaning so softly she may think he will not notice. Still feeling himself a trespasser, he stiffly ignores her, looking straight ahead as if to read the words from tire mouths of the robed singers. "What a priv-i-\ege to carry," he understands, "everything to God in prayer."

Ahmad himself loves prayer, the sensation of pouring the silent voice in his head into a silence waiting at his side, an invisible extension of himself into a dimension purer than the three dimensions of this world. Joryleen has told him she would be singing a solo, but she stays in her row, between a fat older woman and a skinny one the color of dried leadier, all jiggling slightly in their shimmery blue robes, their mouths pretty much in unison, so he cannot tell which voice is Joryleen's. Her eyes stay on the puff-haired director and not once stray toward Ahmad, though he has risked Hellfire to accept her invitation. He wonders if Tylenol is in the evil congregation at his back; his shoulder hurt for a day where Tylenol had gripped it. "… All because we do not carry," the choir sings, "everything to God in prayer." These women's voices all together, with the deeper ones of the men standing in the row behind, have a stately frontal quality, like an army advancing without fear of attack. The many throats are massed into an organ sound, unanswerable, plaintive, far removed from an imam's single voice intoning the music of the Qur'an, a music tiiat enters the spaces behind your eyes and sinks into a silence of your brain.

The electronic organist slips into a different rhythm, a hippity-hop studded with a knocking noise, a wooden percussion produced at the back of die choir, by an instrument, a set of sticks, that Ahmad cannot see. The congregation greets the shift of tempo with mutters of approval, and the choir begins to keep the rhythm with its feet, its hips. The organ makes a gulping, dipping sound. The song is shedding the clothing of its words, which become harder to understand-something about trials and temptations and trouble anywhere. The skinny dried-up woman next to Jory-leen steps forward and, in a voice that sounds like a man's, a mellow man's, asks the congregation, "Can we find a friend so faithful, who will all our sorrows share?" Behind her the chorus is chanting the one word, "Prayer, prayer, prayer." The organist is bouncing up and down, seemingly going his own way but keeping in touch. Ahmad hadn't known the organ had so many notes on the keyboard, high ones and low ones, all in clusters hurrying upward, upward. "Prayer, prayer, prayer," the chorus keeps chanting, letting that fat organist have his solo say.

Then comes Joryleen's turn; she steps forward into a spatter of clapping, and her eyes skim right across Ahmad's face before she turns the full-lipped oval of her own face toward the crowd beyond his pew and higher, in the balcony. She takes a breath; his heart stops, fearful for her. But her voice unspools a luminous thread: "Are we weak and heavy laden, cumbered with a load of care?" Her voice is young and frail and pure, with a little quaver to it before her nervousness settles. "Precious Savior, still our refuge," she sings. Her voice relaxes into a brassy color, with a rasping edge, then rises in sudden freedom to a shriek like that of a child pleading to be let into a locked door. The congregation murmurs approval of these liberties. Joryleen cries out, "Do-hoo thy friends despise, for-horsake thee?"

"Hey, well, do they?" the fat woman next to her calls out, chiming in as if Joryleen's solo is a warm bath become too inviting to stay out of. She jumps in not to jostle Joryleen but to join her; hearing this other voice beside her, Joryleen tries a few off notes, harmonizing, her young voice getting bolder, transported into self-forgetfulness. "In his arms," she sings, "in his arms, in his arms he'll take and shield thee; thou wilt find, oh mercy yes, a solace there."

"Yes, a solace; yes, a solace," the fat woman echoes, and steps out into a roar of recognition, of love from the crowd, for her voice takes them deep into and then right out of the bottom of their lives, Ahmad feels. Her voice has been seasoned in the suffering that for Joryleen is mainly ahead, a mere shadow on her young life. With that authority, the fat woman, her face as broad as a stone idol's, begins again, with "What a friend." Dimples appear not just below her cheeks but at the corners of her eyes, the sides of her broad flat nose, as her nostrils flare at a fierce slant. The hymn has by now been so pounded into the veins and nerves of those gathered here that it can be accessed at any point. "All our sins, I mean all our sins and griefs-hear that, Lord?" The choir, Joryleen among them, hang on undismayed while this fat ecstatic snaps her arms back and forth, swings them for a moment in the mock-comic jaunty triumph of someone striding down a gangplank after crossing a stormy sea, and shoots out a pointing hand to the writhing reaches of the balcony, shouting, "Hear that? Hear that?"

"We hearin' it, sister," comes back a man's voice.

"Hear what, brother?" She answers the question: "All our sins and griefs to bear. Think of those sins. Think of those griefs. They're our babies, isn't that right? Sins and griefs, our natural-born babies." The chorus keeps dragging the tune along, but faster now. The organ clambers and jounces, the percussion sticks keep knocking out of sight, the fat woman shuts her eyes and slaps the word "Jesus" across the blindly continuing beat, shortening it to "Jeez. Jeez. Jeez," and breaking into, as if another song is leaking in, "Thank you, Jesus. Thank you, Lord. Thank you for the love, all day, all night." As the choir sings, "O what needless pain we bear," she sobs, "Needless, needless. We need to take it to Jesus, we need to, need to!" When the choir, still under the control of the small man with the high puff of hair, arrives at the last line, she does too, singing it, "Everything, everything, every little old thing to God in prayer. Yeaahuyess."

The choir, Joryleen's the widest-open, freshest mouth in it, stops singing. Ahmad finds his eyes heated and his stomach in such a stir he fears he might vomit, here among these yelping devils. The false saints in the soot-darkened tall windows look down. The face of a scowling white-bearded one burns with a passing beam of sun. The little girl has snuggled into his side without his noticing; suddenly heavy, she has fallen asleep in the heart of the huge, belting music. The whole rest of the family, down the length of the pew, smiles at him, at her.

He doesn't know if he should wait for Joryleen outside the church, as the worshippers in their pastel spring outfits push out into the April air, which is turning watery and chill as clouds overhead tarnish darker. Ahmad's indecision is prolonged while, half hiding behind a curbside locust tree that survived the demolition that created the lake of rubble, he satisfies himself that Tylenol was not in the crowd. Then, just as he decides to sneak away, there she is, coming up to him, serving up all her roundnesses like fruit on a plate. She wears a silver bead, holding a tiny reflection of the sky, in one nostril-wing. Beneath the blue robe all along there were the same sort of clothes she wears to high school, not dress-up church clothes. He remembers her telling him she doesn't take religion all that seriously. "I saw you," she teases. "Sitting with the Johnsons, no less."

"The Johnsons?"

"That family you were with. They are big church people. They own do-it-yourself laundry places downtown and over in Passaic. You've heard of the black boor-shwa-zee} That's them. What you staring at, Ahmad?"

"That little thing in your nose. I didn't notice it before. Just those little rings on the edge of your ear."

"It's new. You don't like it? Tylenol likes it. He can hardly wait till I get a tongue stud."

"Piercing your tongue? That's horrible, Joryleen."

"Tylenol says the Lord loves a sporty woman. What does your Mr. Mohammed say?"

Ahmad hears the mockery but nevertheless feels tall standing next to this short, ripe girl; he looks down past her face, with its gleam of mischief, to the tops of her breasts, exposed by a loose-necked springtime blouse and still glazed with the excitement and exertion of her singing. "He advises women to cover their ornaments," he tells her. "He says good women are for good men, and unclean women for unclean men."

Joryleen's eyes widen and she blinks her lids, taking this unsmiling solemnity as part of him, which she might have to deal with. "Well, I don't know where that leaves me," she says cheerfully. "Their notion of unclean was pretty broad in those there days," she adds, and brushes back some moisture from her temple, where the hair is fine like a boy's mustache before he thinks to shave. "How'd you like my singing?"

He takes thought, while the chattering congregants stroll past, their duty done for the week, and the in-and-out sun makes feathery weak shadows beneath the emergent locust leaves. "You have a beautiful voice," Ahmad tells her. "It is very pure. The uses to which it is being put, however, are not pure. The singing, especially of the very fat woman-"

"Eva-Marie," Joryleen supplies. "She's the most. She never gives it less than her everything."

"Her singing seemed to me very sensual. And I did not understand many of the words. In what way is Jesus such a friend to all of you?"

"What a friend, what a friend," Joryleen pants lightly, in imitation of the way the choir broke up the hymn's phrases suggesting the repetitive (as he understood them) motions of sexual intercourse. "He just is, that's all," she insists. "People feel better, thinking he's right there. If he isn't there caring, who is, right? The same thing, I 'spect, with your Mohammed."

"The Prophet is many things to his followers, but we do not call him our friend. We are not so cozy, as your clergyman said."

"Hey," she says, "let's not talk this stuff. Thanks for coming, Ahmad. I never thought you would."

"You have been gracious to me, and I was curious. It is helpful, up to a point, to know the enemy."

"Enemy? Whoa. You didn't have no enemies there."

"My teacher at the mosque says that all unbelievers are our enemies. The Prophet said that eventually all unbelievers must be destroyed."

"Oh, man. How'd you get this way? Your mother's just a freckle-faced mick, right? That's what Tylenol says."

"Tylenol, Tylenol. How close are you, may I ask, to this fount of wisdom? Does he consider you his woman?"

"Oh, that boy's just trying things out. He's too young to get fixed up with any one lady friend. Let's walk along. We're getting too many looks."

They walk along the northern edge of the empty acres waiting to be developed. A painted big sign shows a four-story parking garage that will bring shoppers back to the inner city, but for two years nothing has been built, there is only the picture, more and more scribbled over. When the sun, slanting from the south above the new glass buildings downtown, comes through the clouds, a fine dust can be seen lifting from the rubble, and when the clouds return the sun becomes a white circle like a perfect hole burned through, exactly the size of the moon. Feeling the sun on one side of him makes him conscious of the warmth on the other, the warmth of Joryleen's body moving along, a system of overlapping circles and soft parts. The bead above her nostril-wing gleams a hot pinpoint; sunlight sticks a glistening tongue into the cavity at the center of her scoop-necked blouse. He tells her, "I am a good Muslim, in a world that mocks faith."

"Instead of being good, don't you ever want to feel good?" Joryleen asks. He believes she is sincerely curious; in his severe faith he is a puzzle to her, a curiosity.

"Perhaps the two go together," he offers. "The feeling and the being."

"You came to my church," she says. "I could go to your mosque with you."

"That would not do. We could not sit together, and you could not attend without a course of instruction, and a demonstration of sincerity."

"Wow. That may be more than I have time for. Tell me, Ahmad, what do you do for fun}"

"Some of the same things you do, though 'fun,' as you put it, is not the point of a good Muslim's life. I take lessons twice a week in the language and lessons of the Qur'an. I attend Central High. I am on the soccer team in the fall-indeed, I scored five goals this past season, one a penalty shot-and do track in the spring. For spending money, and to help out my mother-the freckle-faced mick, as you call her-"

"As Tylenol called her."

"As the two of you evidently call her-I clerk at the Shop-a-Sec from twelve to eighteen hours a week, and this can be 'fun,' observing the customers and the varieties of costume and personal craziness that American permissiveness invites. There is nothing in Islam to forbid watching television and attending the cinema, though in fact it is all so saturated in despair and unbelief as to repel my interest. Nor does Islam forbid consorting with the opposite sex, if strict prohibitions are observed."

"So strict nothing happens, right? Turn left here, if you're walking me home. You don't have to, you know. We're getting into worse neighborhoods. You don't want to be hassled."

"I wish to see you home." He goes on, "They exist, the prohibitions, for the benefit less of the male than of the female. Her virginity and purity are central to her value."

"Oh, my," Joryleen says. "In whose eyes? I mean, who's doing this valuing?"

She is leading him, he feels, close to the edge of betraying his beliefs, just in responding to her questions. In class, he observed at the high school, she talked well, so that the teachers became engaged with her, not realizing that she was leading them from the set lessons and wasting classroom time. She has a wicked streak. "In the eyes of God," he tells her, "as revealed by the Prophet: 'Enjoin believing women to turn their eyes away from temptation and to preserve their chastity.' That's from the same sura that advises women to cover their ornaments, and to draw their veils over their bosoms, and not even to stamp their feet so their hidden ankle bracelets can be heard."

"You think I show too much tit-I can tell by where your eyes go."

Just hearing the word "tit" from her lips stirs him indecently. He says, staring ahead, "Purity is its own end. As we were discussing, it is both being good and feeling good."

"What about all them virgins on the other side? What happens to purity when those young-men martyrs get there, all full of spunk?"

"Their virtue enjoys its reward, while remaining pure, in the context God has created. My teacher at the mosque thinks that the dark-eyed virgins are symbolic of a bliss one cannot imagine without concrete images. It is typical of the sex-obsessed West that it has seized upon that image, and ridicules Islam because of it."

They continue in the direction she indicated. The neighborhood grows shaggier around them; bushes are untended, houses unpainted, sidewalk squares in places tilted and cracked by tree roots underneath; the little front yards are speckled with litter. The rows of houses lack a few, like teeth knocked out, the gaps fenced in but the thick chain-link fencing cut and twisted under the invisible pressure of people who hate fences, who want to get somewhere quick. The row houses in some blocks become a single long building with many peeling doors and four-step stairs, old and wooden or new and concrete. Overhead, high twigs interlace with electric wires carrying electricity across the city, a sagging harp that dips through gaps lopped by tree crews. Spatters of blossom and unfolding leaf, in color between yellow and green, appear luminous against the cloud-blotched sky.

"Ahmad," Joryleen says with a sudden exasperation, "suppose none of it is true-suppose you die and there's nothing there, nothing at all? What's the point of all this purity then?"

"If none of it is true," he tells her, his stomach clenching at the thought, "then the world is too terrible to cherish, and I would not regret leaving it."

"Man! You are one in a million, no kidding. They must love you to death over at that mosque."

"There are many like me," he tells her, both stiffly and gently, half rebuking. "Some are"-he does not want to say "black," since the word though politically correct does not sound kind-"what you call your brothers. The mosque and its teachers give them what the Christian U.S. disdains to- respect, and a challenge that asks something of them. It asks austerity. It asks restraint. All America wants of its citizens, your President has said, is for us to buy-to spend money we cannot afford and thus propel the economy forward for himself and other rich men."

"He ain't my President. If I could vote this year I'd vote to kick him out, in favor of Al Sharpton."

"It makes no difference which President is in. They all want Americans to be selfish and materialistic, to play their part in consumerism. But the human spirit asks for self-denial. It longs to say 'No' to'the physical world."

"You scare me when you talk like that. It sounds like you hate life." She goes on, revealing herself as freely as if she is singing, "The way I feel it, the spirit is what comes out of the body, like flowers come out of the earth. Hating your body is like hating yourself, the bones and blood and skin and shit that make you you."

As when standing above that glistening trail of a disappeared worm or slug, Ahmad feels tall, tall enough to be dizzy, looking down at this short round girl whose indignation at his yearning for purity gives her voice and lips a lively quickness. Where her lips meet the other skin of her face there is an edge, a little line like the circle cocoa leaves on the inside of a cup. He thinks of sinking himself into her body and knows from its richness and ease that this is a devil's thought.

"Not hate your body," he corrects her, "but not be a slave to it either. I look around me, and I see slaves-slaves to drugs, slaves to fads, slaves to television, slaves to sports heroes that don't know they exist, slaves to the unholy, meaningless opinions of others. You have a good heart, Joryleen, but you're heading straight for Hell, the lazy way you think."

She has halted on the sidewalk, in a bleak, treeless stretch, and he thinks it is her anger at him, her disappointment near tears, that has stopped her, but then realizes that this drab doorway is hers, with its four wooden steps stained gray as if with never-ending rain. He at least lives in a brick apartment building on the north side of the boulevard. He feels guilty about her disappointment, since in inviting him to walk with her she laid herself open to expectation.

"You're the one, Ahmad," she says, turning to go in, planting a foot on the first drab step, "don't know where he's heading. You're the one don't know which fucking end is up."

Sitting at the heavy old round brown table that he and his mother call "the dining table" though they never dine at it, Ahmad studies the Commercial Drivers' License Home Study Course booklets, four of them, each stapled together.

Shaikh Rashid helped him send away to Michigan for them, writing the check for $89.50 on the mosque account. Ahmad always thought truck-driving was something for simpletons like Tylenol and his gang at school, but in fact there is a confusing amount of expertise to it, such as all the hazardous materials that have to be publicly identified one from another by means of four different placards measuring ten and three-quarters inches and placed in a diamond shape. There are flammable gases like hydrogen and poisonous/ toxic gases like compressed fluorine; there are flammable solids like wetted ammonium picrate and spontaneously combustible ones like white phosphorus and ones spontaneously combustible when wet like sodium. Then there are real poisons like potassium cyanide and infectious substances like the anthrax virus and radioactive substances like uranium and corrosives like battery fluid. All this has to be trucked, and any spills of a certain quantity (depending on toxicity, volatility, chemical durability) must be reported to the DOT (Department of Transportation) and EPA (Environmental Protection Agency).

Ahmad is sickened, thinking of the paperwork, the shipping papers bristling with numbers and codes and prohibitions. Poisons should never be loaded with animal or human food; hazardous materials even in a tightly sealed canister should never ride up front with the driver; beware of heat, leaks, and sudden changes in speed. Besides hazardous substances there are ORM (Other Regulated Materials) that might have an anesthetic or irritating or noxious effect on a driver and his passengers, such as monochloroacetone or diphenylchlorarsine, and a material that might damage the vehicle if leaked, like the liquid corrosives bromine, soda lime, hydrochloric acid, sodium-hydroxide solution, and battery acid. All across this land, Ahmad now realizes, hazardous materials are hurtling, spilling, burning, eating roadways and truck beds-a chemical deviltry making manifest materialism's spiritual poison.

Then, the booklets tell him, there is, in shipping liquids by bulk in tanker trucks, outage, also called ullage, the amount by which the cargo falls short, so that the tank will not burst when its contents expand during shipping-if, say, ambient temperature goes as high as one hundred thirty degrees. And also, with tank vehicles, the driver must beware of liquid surge, more acute and dangerous in the case of so-called smooth-bore tanks than in that of those with inside baffles or complete compartments. Even in these, however, sideways surge can overturn a truck taking a curve too sharply. Forward surge can push a truck out into traffic at a red light or stop sign. Yet sanitation regulations forbid baffles in a tanker transporting milk or fruit juice; baffles make the tanks harder to clean, and hence invite contamination. Transportation is full of dangers that Ahmad has never before contemplated. It excites him, however, to see himself-like the pilot of a 727 or the captain of a supertanker or the tiny brain of a brontosaurus-steering a great vehicle through the maze of dire possibilities to safety. He is pleased to find in the trucking regulations a concern with purity almost religious in quality.

Somebody knocks at the door, at quarter of eight at night. The noise, not far from the table where Ahmad studies by the light of a battered bridge lamp, jolts him from his focus on ullage and tonnage, surge and flow. His mother quickly emerges from her bedroom, which is also her painting studio, and goes-rushes, even-to answer the knock, fluffing up her light red hair-nape-length, henna-enhanced-as she goes. She greets mysterious interruptions more hopefully than Ahmad. He is still, ten days after attending the infidel church service, nervous about having trespassed on Tylenol's territory; it is not impossible that the bully and his gang will waylay him sometime, even at night, calling him out from his own apartment.

Nor is it impossible, though unlikely, that an emissary from Shaikh Rashid knocks. His master has few disciples. He has seemed on edge lately, as if something weighs upon him; he feels to Ahmad like a finely honed element in a structure on which too much tension is imposed. This past week the imam showed a short temper with his pupil in a discussion of a verse from the third sura: Let not the infidels deem that the length of days we give them is good for them! We only give them length of days that they may increase their sins! and a shameful chastisement shall be their lot. Ahmad dared ask his teacher if there wasn't something sadistic in the taunt, and in the many verses like it. He ventured, "Shouldn't God's purpose, as enunciated by the Prophet, be to convert the infidels? In any case, shouldn't He show them mercy, not gloat over their pain?"

The imam presented half a face, the lower half being hidden by a trimmed beard flecked with gray. His nose was thin and high-arched and the skin of his cheeks pale, but not pale as Anglo-Saxons or Irish were, freckled and quick to blush, like Ahmad's mother (a tendency the boy has regrettably inherited), but pale in a waxy, even, impervious Yemeni way. Within his beard, his violet lips twitched. He asked, "The cockroaches that slither out from the baseboard and from beneath the sink-do you pity them? The flies that buzz around the food on the table, walking on it with the dirty feet that have just danced on feces and carrion-do you pity them?"

Ahmad did, in truth, pity them, being fascinated by the vast insect population teeming at the feet of godlike men, but, knowing that any qualifications or signs of further argument would anger his teacher, responded, "No."

"No," Shaikh Rashid agreed with satisfaction, as a delicate hand tugged lightly at his beard. "You want to destroy them. They are vexing you with their uncleanness. They would take over your table, your kitchen; they will settle into the very food as it passes into your mouth if you do not destroy them. They have no feelings. They are manifestations of Satan, and God will destroy them without mercy on the day of final reckoning. God will rejoice at their suffering. Do thou likewise, Ahmad. To imagine that cockroaches deserve mercy is to place yourself above ar-Rahim, to presume to be more merciful than the Merciful."

It seemed to Ahmad that, as with the facts of Paradise, his teacher resorted to metaphor as a shield against reality. Joryleen, though an unbeliever, did have feelings; they were there in how she sang, and how the other unbelievers responded to the singing. But it was not Ahmad's role to argue; it was his to learn, to submit to his own place in Islam's vast structure, visible and invisible.

His mother may have hurried to the door in expectation of one of her male friends, but her voice in Ahmad's hearing backs off, puzzled and yet not alarmed, respectful. A polite, weary voice slightly familiar to Ahmad is announcing itself as Mr. Levy, the guidance counselor at Central High School. Ahmad relaxes; it is not Tylenol or anybody from the mosque. But why Mr. Levy? Their conference left Ahmad uneasy; the counselor communicated dissatisfaction with Ahmad's plans for his future and a desire to interfere.

How has he gotten this far, to the door? The apartment building is one of three erected twenty-five years ago to displace row houses so run-down and drugs-plagued that the administrators of New Prospect thought that ten-story stacks of mixed-income housing had to be an improvement. In addition, they calculated, the land taken under the right of eminent domain could be used for a park with recreational areas and, in the bargain, a curving parkway speeding commerce with towns where a "better element" prevailed. Yet, as with draining malarial land, problems returned: the sons of former drug dealers took up the trade, and addicts used the park benches and bushes and the apartment-house stairways, and raced back and forth in the hallways at night. The original plan called for a security guard at each entrance, but the city had to effect budget cuts, and the little offices with television monitors showing halls and doorways were erratically manned. Back in 15 minits, a hand-lettered sign would say for hours at a time. This time of evening, residents and visitors usually walked right in. Mr. Levy must have walked in and studied the mailboxes and taken the elevator and knocked on their door. Here he was, standing in the space this side of the door, off the kitchen, describing himself in a louder, more formal voice than he had used with Ahmad in the guidance conference. Then, he had seemed insinuating, lazy, and bone-weary. Ahmad's mother's face is flushed and her voice high and quick; she is excited by this visit from a representative of the distant bureaucracy that hovers above their lonely lives.

Mr. Levy senses her excitement and tries to put a calm face on things. "I apologize for invading your privacy," he says to a point midway between the standing mother and the sitting son, who does not get up from the brown table. "But when I tried the phone number on Ahmad's school records, I got a recording saying it had been disconnected."

"We had to, after Nine-Eleven," she explains, still a little breathless. "We were getting hate calls. Anti-Muslim. I had the number changed and unlisted, even if it does cost a couple dollars a month more. It's worth it, I tell you."

"I'm sorry to hear that, Mrs.-Ms.-Mulloy," the guidance counselor says, and he does seem sorry, above and beyond his usual sad look.

"There were just one or two calls," Ahmad interposes. "No big deal. Most people were cool. I mean, I was only fifteen when it happened. Who could blame me?"

His mother, with that infuriating way she has of making something of nothing, says, "It was more than one or two, I can tell you, Mr. Levine."

"Levy." He still wants to explain why he has shown up. "I could have called Ahmad to my office at the school, but it was you I wanted to speak to, Ms. Mulloy."

"Teresa, please."

"Teresa." He comes to the table and looks over Ahmad's shoulder. "At it already, I see. Studying for the CDL. As you realize, I'm sure, until you're twenty-one you can't get better than a 'C rating. No tractor trailers, no hazardous materials."

"Yeah, I know," Ahmad says, pointedly looking down at the page he was trying to study. "But it's interesting, it turns out. I wanted to learn it all, while I'm at it."

"Good for you, my friend. For a young man as bright as you are, it should all be pretty simple."

Ahmad isn't afraid of arguing with Mr. Levy. He tells him, "There's more to it than you'd tbink. There's a lot of strict rules, and then there's all tbe parts of the truck and what you should do for maintenance. You don't want your truck to break down, it can be dangerous."

"O.K., you keep at it, son. Don't let it get in the way of your schoolwork, though; there's still a month to go, with a lot of exams. You want to graduate, don't you?"

"Yes, I do." He doesn't want to argue over everything, though in truth he resents the hint of a threat. They're dying to graduate him, get rid of him. And graduate into what? An imperialist economic system rigged in favor of rich Christians.

Mr. Levy, hearing his surly tone, asks, "Do you mind if I talk a minute with your mother?"

"No. Why would I? And what if I did?"

"You want to see me?" the woman affirms, to cover up her son's rudeness.

"Very briefly. Again, Mrs.-Ms.-whatever: Teresa!-I'm sorry to bother you, but I'm the kind of guy, when something is bothering me, my mind won't let me rest until I take action."

"Would you like a cup of coffee, Mr.-?"

"Jack. My mother called me Jacob, but people call me Jack." He looks at her face, with its flush and freckles and protuberant, overeager eyes. She seems anxious to please. School personnel don't get the respect from parents they used to, and with some of the parents you're an enemy like the police, only laughable because you don't have a gun. But this woman, though of a generation younger than his, is old enough, he guesses, to have had a parochial education and learned respect from the nuns. "No thanks," he tells her. "I'm a lousy sleeper anyway."

"I can do decaf," she promises, too eagerly. "Can you stand instant?" Her eyes are a pale green, like the glass bottles Coke used to come in.

"I'm tempted," he allows. "If it can be quick. Where can we go, to stop bothering Ahmad here? The kitchen?"

"It's too messy. I haven't cleared the dishes yet. I'd hoped to get to my painting while I still had some energy left. Let's go into my studio. I have a hot plate."

"Studio?"

"I call it that. It's also the room I sleep in. Ignore the bed. I have to multi-task, so Ahmad has his privacy in his room. We shared a room for years, maybe too long. These cheap apartments, the walls are like paper."

She opens the door she came out of, ten minutes ago. "Wow!" Jack Levy says, entering. "I guess Ahmad told me you painted, but-"

"I'm trying to work bigger, and brighter. Life's so short, I suddenly figured, why keep fussing at the details? Perspective, shadows, fingernails-people don't notice, and your peers, the other painters, accuse you of being just an illustrator. Some of my regulars, like a gift shop in Ridgewood that's sold me for ages, are a little bewildered by this new direction of mine, but I tell them, 'I can't help it, it's the way I've got to go.' If you don't grow, you die, right?"

Stepping around the carelessly made bed, its blanket tugged up roughly, he surveys the walls with a respectful squint. "You really sell this stuff?"

He regrets his phrasing; she goes defensive. "Some, not all. Not even Rembrandt and Picasso sold all their work, right away."

"Oh, no, I didn't mean…" he blusters. "They're very striking; you just don't expect it, walking in."

"I'm experimenting," she says, mollified and willing to go on, "with straight out of the tube. The viewer, that way, mixes the colors with his eye."

"Terrific," Jack Levy says, hoping to conclude this part of the conversation. He is out of his element.

She has got a kettle of water heating on the little electric coil set on a bureau whose top is crusty with spilled or wiped-off oil colors. He finds her paintings pretty wild but he likes the atmosphere in here, the messiness and the icy-clear fluorescent lights overhead. The smell of paints speaks to him, like the fragrance of wood shavings, of a bygone time when people made things by hand, hunched over in their own cottages. "Maybe you'd prefer herbal tea," she says. "Chamomile makes me sleep like a baby." Her eyes glance his way, testing. "Except when I wake up four hours later." Needing to go pee, she doesn't say.

"Yeah," he says. "That's the problem."

Cut short and knowing it, she blushes and tends to the water, which already is sending a plume of steam out through the hole in its hinged spout cap. "I forget what you said about what kind of tea. Chamomile or what?"

He resists this woman's New Age side. Next thing she'll be pulling out her crystals and / Ching sticks. He says, "I thought we had agreed on instant decaf, even though it always tastes scalded."

Her color stays high under her sifting of freckles. "If you feel that way about it, maybe you don't want anything."

"No, no, Miss-Mrs.-" He gives up trying to name her. "Anything wet and hot would be fine. Anything you want. You're being very gracious. I didn't expect-"

"I'll get the decaf and check on Ahmad. He hates studying when I'm not in and out of the living room; he feels he's not getting credit, you know?"

Teresa disappears, and when she comes back with, a stubby jar of brown powder in her hand-a short-nailed, firm-fleshed hand tbat does things-Jack has turned off the hot plate so tbe water wouldn't boil away. Her mothering has taken some minutes; he could hear her in the other room bantering in a light, probing, female voice, and her son's scarcely deeper voice whining and groaning back at her with those inarticulate high-school denials he knows too well- as if the very existence of adults is a cruel and needless trial they're being put to. Jack tries to pick up on this: "So you see your son as a pretty typical, average eighteen-year-old?"

"Isn't he?" Her maternal side is a sensitive side; her beryl-green eyes bulge out at him between colorless lashes that must get mascara from time to time, but not today or yesterday. The hair at her hairline is a lighter, softer tint than the metallic red up top. The set of her lips, the plump upper one lifted a bit as with someone listening hard, tells him that he has used up her initial gush of friendliness. She comes on strong, then gets impatient, is his take.

"Maybe," he tells her. "But something's throwing him off." Jack gets down to the business he came for. "Listen. He doesn't want to be a truck driver."

"He doesn't? He thinks he does, Mr.-"

"Levy, Teresa. Like in 'Down by the levee' but spelled differently. Somebody's putting pressure on Ahmad, for whatever reason. He can do better than be a trucker. He's a smart, clean-cut kid, with a lot of inner-directedness. What I want him to have are some catalogues for colleges around here where it's not too late for admission. Princeton and Penn, it's way too late, but New Prospect Community College – you have to know where that is, up past the falls-and Fair-leigh Dickinson and Bloomfield, he might get in, and could commute to any of them if you can't swing room and board. The thing would be to get him started somewhere and, depending how he does, hope to transfer up. Any college these days, the way the politics of it are, wants diversity, and your boy, what with his self-elected religious affiliation, and, pardon me for saying it, his ethnic mix, is a kind of minority's minority-they'll snap him up."

"What would he study at college?"

"What anybody studies-science, art, history. The story of mankind, of civilization. How we got here, what now. Sociology, economics, anthropology even-whatever turns him on. Let him feel his way. Few college students nowadays know what they want to do at first, and the ones that do get their minds changed. That's the purpose of college, to let you change your mind, so you can handle the twenty-first century. Me, I can't. When I was in college, who ever heard of computer science? Who knew about genomes and how they can track evolution? You, you're a lot younger than I, maybe you can. These new-style paintings of yours-you're making a start."

"They're very conservative, really," she says. "Abstraction's old hat." The open set of her lips has closed; his remark about painting was dumb.

He hurries to finish his pitch. "Now, Ahmad-"

"Mr. Levy. Jack." She has become a different person, sitting widi her too-hot decaf on a kitchen stool bought unpainted and never varnished. She lights a cigarette and props one foot, in a crepe-soled blue canvas shoe, on a rung and crosses her legs. Her pants, tight white jeans, bare her ankles. Blue veins wander through die white skin, Irish-white skin; the ankles are bony and lean, considering die soft heft of the rest of her. Beth's weight has had twenty more years than this woman's to settle low, drooping over her shoes and taking all the anatomy out of her ass. Jack, though he used to be a two-packs-a-day Old Golds man, has grown unused to people smoking, even in the school's faculty room, and the smell of burning tobacco is deeply familiar to him but verges on being scandalous. The stylized acts of lighting up, inhaling, and hurling smoke violently out of her pursed lips give Terry-how her paintings are signed, big and legibly, with no last name-an edge. "Jack, I appreciate your interest in Ahmad and would have been more so if die school had shown any interest in my son before a month before graduation."

"We're swamped over there," he interrupts. "Two thousand students, and half of them it would be kind to call dysfunctional. The squeakiest wheels get the attention. Your son never made trouble, was his mistake."

"Regardless, at diis phase of his development he sees what college offers, those subjects you name, as part of godless Western culture, and he doesn't want more of it than he absolutely can't avoid. You say he never made trouble, but it was more tiian that: he sees his teachers as die troublemakers, worldly and cynical and just in it for the paycheck-the short hours and summer vacations. He thinks they set poor examples. You've heard die expression, 'above it all'?"

Levy merely nods, letting this now-cocky woman run on. What she might tell him about Ahmad could be a help.

"My son is above it all," she states. "He believes in the Islamic God, and in what the Koran tells him. I can't, of course, but I've never tried to undermine his faith. To someone without much of one, who dropped out of die Catholic package when she was sixteen, his faith seems rather beautiful."

Beauty, then, is what makes her tick-attempts at it on the wall, all that sweet-smelling paint drying, and letting her boy hang out to dry in grotesque, violent superstition. Levy asks, "How did he get to be so-so good? Did you set out to raise him as a Muslim?"

"No, Christ," she says, dragging deep, playing die tough girl, so that her roused eyes seem to burn along with die tip of the cigarette. She laughs, having heard herself. "How do you like that for a Freudian slip? 'No, in nomine Domini.' Islam meant nothing to me-less than nothing, to be accurate: it had a negative rating. And it meant not much more to his father. Omar never went to a mosque that I could see, and whenever I'd try to raise the subject he'd clam up, and look sore, as if I was pushing in where I had no business. 'A woman should serve a man, not try to own him,' he'd say, as if he were quoting some kind of Holy Writ. He'd made it up. What a pompous, chauvinistic horse's ass he was, really. But I was young and in love-in love mostly with him being, you know, exotic, third-world, put-upon, and my marrying him showing how liberal and liberated I was."

"I know the feeling. I'm a Jew, and my wife was a Lutheran."

"Was? Did she convert, like Elizabeth Taylor?"

Jack Levy snarls out a chuckle and, still clutching his unwanted college catalogues, admits, "I shouldn't have said 'was.' She never changed, she just doesn't go to church. Her sister on the other hand works for the government in Washington and is very involved in church, like all those born-againers down there. It may be just that around here die only Lutheran church is the Lithuanian, and Elizabeth can't see herself as a Lithuanian."

" ' Elizabeth ' is a pretty name. You can do so much with it. Liz, Lizzie, Beth, Betsy. All you can do with Teresa is Terry, which sounds like a boy."

"Or like a male painter."

"You noticed. Yeah, I sign that way because female artists have always seemed smaller than the male ones, no matter how big they painted. This way, I make them guess."

"You can do a lot with 'Terry.' Terry cloth. Terri-ble. Terri-fy. And there's Terrytoons."

"What's that?" she asks in a startled voice. As laid-back as she wants to appear, this is a shaky woman, who married what her harp brothers and father would have called a nigger. Not a mother who'd give a lot of firm guidance; she'd let the kid take charge.

"Oh, something from long ago-animated cartoons at the movie show. You're too young to remember. One of the things when you're ancient, you remember things nobody else does."

"You're not ancient," she says automatically. Her mind switches tracks. "Maybe on television I saw some, when I used to watch with little Ahmad." Her mind switches tracks again. "Omar Ashmawy was handsome. I thought he was like Omar Sharif. Did you ever see him in Doctor ZhivagoV "Only in Funny Girl. And I went to see Streisand." "Of course." She smiles, that short upper lip of hers exposing imperfect Irish teeth, die eyeteeth crowded. She and Jack have reached a stage when anything they say to each other is pleasing, their senses ratcheted up. Sitting with her legs crossed on the high unpainted stool, she preens, stretching her neck and doing a slow shimmy with her back, as if easing out a kink caused by standing at her easel. How seriously can she work at this stuff? He guesses she could slap out three a day if she tried. "Handsome, huh? Does your son-" "And he's a fantastic international bridge player," she says, not jumping her own track.

"Who? Mr. Ashmawy?" he asks, though of course he knows who she means. "No, die other one, silly. Sharif."

"Does your son, I tried to ask him, have a picture of his father in his room?" "What a strange question, Mr. -"

"Come on. Levy. Like a levy of taxes. School taxes, let's say. Or those things that keep the Mississippi from overflowing. Get an association, that's what I do with names. You can do it, Terrytoons."

"What / started to say, Mr. Down-by-the-Levee, was you must be a mind reader. Just this year, Ahmad took the photographs in his room of his father and put them face-down in drawers. He announced it was blasphemy to duplicate the image of a person God had made-a kind of counterfeiting, he explained to me. A rip-off, like those Prada bags the Nigerians sell on the street. My intuition tells me this terrible teacher at the mosque put him up to it."

"Speaking of terri-ble," Jack Levy says quickly. Forty years ago he thought of himself as a wit, quick on the verbal trigger. He even daydreamed about joining a team of joke writers for one of the Jewish comedians on television. Among his peers at college he had been a wise guy, a fast talker. "How terrible?" he asks. "Why terrible?"

Signalling with her hands and eyes toward the other room, where Ahmad might be sitting listening while pretending to study, she drops her voice, so Jack has to move a step closer. "Ahmad often returns disturbed from one of their sessions," she says. "I don't think the man-I've met him, but just barely-shows enough conviction to satisfy Ahmad. I know my son is eighteen and shouldn't be so naive, but he still expects adults to be absolutely sincere and sure of things. Even supernatural things."

Levy likes the way she says "my son." There's a homier feeling here than his interview with Ahmad had led him to expect. She may be one of these single women trying to get by on sheer brass, but she's also some kind of nurturer. "The reason," he tells her, in a conspiratorially lowered voice, "I asked about a picture of his father is that I wondered if his… if this faith of his had to do with a classic overestima-tion. You know-not there, you can do no wrong. You see a lot of that in, in"-why did he keep putting his foot in it?- "black families, the kids idealizing the absent dad and directing all their anger at poor old Mom, who's knocking herself out trying to keep a roof over their heads."

Teresa Mulloy does take offense; she sits so erect on the stool he feels the hard wood circle of the seat biting into her tightened buttocks. "Is that how you see us single moms, Mr. Levy? So thoroughly undervalued and downtrodden?"

Single moms, he thinks. What a cutesy, sentimentalizing, semi-militant phrase. How tedious it makes conversation these days, every possible group except white males on the defensive, their dukes up. "No, not at all," he backtracks. "I see single moms as terrific, Terry-they're all that's holding our society together."

"Ahmad," she says, loosening up a little immediately, the way a responsive woman does, "has no illusions about his father. I've made it very clear to him what a loser his father was. An opportunistic, clueless loser, who hasn't sent us a postcard, let alone a fucking check, for fifteen years."

Jack likes the "fucking"-loosening up fast. She was wearing instead of a painter's smock a man's blue work shirt, the tail hanging down and her breasts shaping the pockets from behind. "We were a disaster," she confides, her voice still kept low, out of Ahmad's hearing. As if stretching within the extra room of this confession, she arches her back, kitten-ishly, perched on the high bare stool, pushing her breasts out an inch farther. "He and I were crazy, thinking we ought to marry. We each thought the other had the answers, when we didn't even speak the same language, literally. Though his English wasn't bad, to be fair. He'd studied it in Alexandria. That was another tiling I fell for, his little bit of an accent, almost a lisp, kind of British. He sounded so refined. And always tidy, shining his shoes, combing his hair. Thick jet-black hair like you never see on an American, a little curl behind die ears and at the neck, and of course his skin, so smooth and even, darker than Ahmad's but perfectly matte, like a cloth that's been dipped, olive-beige with a pinch of lampblack in it, but it didn't come off on your hand-"

My God, Levy thinks, she's getting carried away, she's going to describe his purple third-world prick to me.

She feels his distaste and halts herself, saying, "Don't worry about any overestimation on Ahmad's part. He despises his father, as he should."

"Tell me, Terry. If his father was around, do you think Ahmad'd be settling for driving a truck for a job after graduation, with his SAT scores?"

"I don't know. Omar couldn't have done even that. He would have gotten to daydreaming and drifted off the road. He was a hopeless driver; even then, supposed to be a submissive young wife, I'd take the wheel of the car whenever I was in it. I said to him, 'It's my life, too.' I'd ask him, 'How are you going to be an American if you can't drive a car?' '

How had Omar gotten to be the subject? Is Jack Levy the only person in the world who cares about the boy's future? "You've got to help me," he tells his mother earnestly, "to get Ahmad's future more in line with his potential."

"Oh, Jack," she says, gesturing airily with her cigarette and swaying slightly on her stool, a sibyl on her tripod, pronouncing. "Don't you think people find their potential, like water does its level? I've never believed in people being pots of clay, to be shaped. The shape is inside, from the start. I've treated Ahmad as an equal since he was eleven, when he began to be so religious. I encouraged him at it. I'd pick him up at the mosque after school in the winter months. I must say, this imam of his almost never came out to say hello. He hated shaking my hand, I could tell. He never showed the slightest interest in converting me. If Ahmad had gone the other way, if he had turned against the God racket all the way, the way I did, I would have let that happen, too. Religion to me is all a matter of attitude. It's saying yes to life. You have to have trust that there's a purpose, or you'll sink. When I paint, I just have to believe that beauty will emerge. Painting abstract, you don't have a pretty landscape or bowl of oranges to lean on; it has to come purely out of you. You have to shut your eyes, so to speak, and take a leap. You have to say yes." Having pronounced to her satisfaction, she leans far over to a worktable and crushes out her cigarette in an ashy jar-lid. The effort stretches her shirt tight across her breasts and makes her eyes protrude. She turns those eyes, their glassy pale green, on her guest and adds as an afterthought, "If Ahmad believes in God so much, let God take care of him." She softens what sounds callous and flip in this with a pleading tone: "Your life isn't something to be controlled. We don't control our breathing, our digestion, our heartbeat. Life is something to be lived. Let it happen." It has become weird. She has sensed his trouble, his desolation at four a.m., and is ministering to him, her voice massaging him. He likes it, up to a point, when women start undressing their minds in front of him. But he has stayed too long already. Beth will be wondering; he told her he had to swing by Central High for some college materials. This was not a lie; now he has distributed these materials. "Thanks for the decaf," he says. "I feel sleepy already."

"Me, too. And I got to be at work by six." "Six?"

"The early shift at Saint Francis's. I'm a nurse's aide. I never really wanted to be a nurse, it was too much chemistry and then too much administration; they get to be as pompous as doctors. Nurse's aides do what nurses used to do. I like hands-on-dealing with people right down there at the level of their real needs. Bedpan level. You didn't think I made a living out of these}" She gestures, with those short-nailed hands that do things, at her gaudy walls. "No," he admits.

She breezes on. "It's my hobby, my self-indulgence-my bliss, as that man on television used to say a few years ago. Some get bought, sure, but I hardly care. Painting is my passion. Don't you have a passion, Jack?"

He backs off; she is beginning to look possessed, a priestess on her tripod with snakes in her hair. "Not really." He gets out of bed in the morning as if pushing aside a blanket of lead, and bulls head-down into his day of waving kids good-bye as they slide off into the world's morass. "Have you ever thought," he can't help adding, "with your nursing, of urging Ahmad to become a doctor? He has a dignity, a presence. I'd trust him with my life, if I were sick."

Her eyes narrow, turning shrewd and-a word his mother used to use, mostly of other women-common. "It's a long expensive haul, Jack, a medical education. And the docs I know do nothing but complain about the paperwork and being pushed around by the insurance companies. It used to be a profession where you got a lot of respect and made a fair amount of money. But medicine isn't the field it used to be. It's going to get socialized one way or another eventually, and doctors will be paid like schoolteachers."

He laughs at this little kick. She has a number of nimble moves. "And that's not good," he acknowledges.

"Let him wait for his passion," she counsels the guidance counselor. "For the moment it's trucks, getting on the move. He says to me, 'Mom, I need to see the world.' '

"As I understand the Commercial Driver's License, all he'll see until he's twenty-one is New Jersey."

"That's a start," she says, and nimbly slides off the stool. She has left undone the two top buttons of her paint-smeared man's work shirt, so he sees the tops of her breasts bounce. This woman has a lot of yes in her.

But the interview is over; it is eight-thirty. Levy lugs the three unwanted college catalogues back through the room where the boy is still studying, and halts at the heavy old dark round table-some kind of inheritance, it reminds him of the heavy sad stuff his parents and grandparents had in the house he grew up in, out on Totowa Road. Approached from behind, Ahmad's neck looks vulnerably thin, and the tops of his tidy, tight-whorled ears show a few freckles lifted from his mother. Levy gingerly sets the catalogues on the table's edge and touches the boy's shoulder, through the white shirt, to get his attention. "Ahmad, look these over sometime when you have a chance, and see if anything here piques your interest enough to discuss it with me. It's not too late to change your mind about applying."

The boy feels the touch and responds, "Here's something interesting, Mr. Levy."

"What?" He feels closer and easier with the boy, having met his mother.

"Here's a typical question of the kind they're going to ask."

Levy read over his shoulder:

55. You are driving a tank truck and the front wheels begin to skid. Which of these is most likely to occur?

a. You will counter steer as necessary to maintain control.

b. Liquid surge will straighten the trailer out.

c. Liquid surge will straighten the tractor out. d.You will continue in a straight line and keep moving forward no matter how much you steer.

"Sounds like a pretty bad situation," Levy admits.

"Which do you think the answer is?"

Ahmad has felt the man approach, and then the presumptuous, poisonous touch on the shoulder. Now he is aware of, too close to his head, the man's belly, its warmth carrying out with it a smell, several smells-a compounded extract of sweat and alcohol, Jewishness and Godlessness, an unclean scent stirred up by the consultation with Ahmad's mother, the embarrassing mother he tries to hide, to keep to himself. The two adult voices had intertwined flirtatiously, disgustingly, two aged infidel animals warming to each other in the other room. Mr. Levy, having bathed in her babble, her insatiable desire to press upon the world her sentimental vision of herself, now thinks himself entitled to play with her son a paternal, friendly role. Pity and presumption prompt this unseemly, odorous closeness. Yet the Qur'an urges courtesy upon the faithful; this Jew, though self-invited, is a guest in Ahmad's tent.

The intruder lazily responds, "I don't know, my friend. Liquid surge isn't something I deal with very often. Let me opt for 'a,' the counter steering."

In a quiet voice that conceals the small surge of triumph within him, Ahmad says, "No, 'd' is the answer. I looked it up on the answer sheets they give you."

The belly next to his ear gives off a rumble of disquiet, and the unseen face above it grunts. "Huh. Don't bother to steer. That's sort of what your mother was just telling me. Relax. Follow your bliss."

"After a while," Ahmad explains, "the truck will lose speed on its own."

"The will of Allah," Mr. Levy says, trying to be funny, or friendly: trying to insert himself where Ahmad's insides are clenched shut, filled with the All-Encompassing.

The interface of Central High and its formerly extensive grounds with the city's private property has grown more complicated in the years since its playing fields stretched behind it, unfenced, toward a street of Victorian houses so varied and widely spaced as to be suburban. This area, to the northwest of the spectacular City Hall, was a domain of die middle class that pulled its money from the mills along the river, a short walk from the working-class tenements on the lower side of t_he then-bustling downtown. But the near-suburban houses became, as Jack Levy diinks of it, housing. Cost-cutting contractors broke them into apartments and subdivided their wide lawns or else tore them down to make room for solid blocks of low-rent row houses. The pressure of population and the encroachments of vandalism bore upon the grassy vacancies of school property and eventually caused the football field, which in the spring became a track-meet site, and the baseball grounds, whose outfield became in football season a junior-varsity gridiron, to be moved, in what seemed to various city boards a shrewd and profitable rearrangement, a fifteen-minute bus ride away, to the purchased land of an old dairy farm, Whelan amp; Sons Dairy, whose milk had contributed calcium to the bones of generations of New Prospect youngsters. The inner-city fields became congested slums.

The great high school and its several outbuildings were then walled off by Italian bricklayers whose work was later topped by glinting coils of razor wire. The immurement was piecemeal, a running response to various complaints and incidents of damage and explosions of spray-painted graffiti. The defaced, rusting fortifications created areas of unintended privacy, such as some square yards of cracked concrete alongside the half-buried yellow-brick edifice housing the giant boilers, originally coal-burning, that send steam, furiously knocking, into every classroom. One yellow-brick wall holds a basketball backboard whose hoop has been bent at a nearly vertical angle by boys imitating the dunk-and-hang style of NBA professionals. Twenty paces away, in the main building, double doors equipped with crash bars inside are in warm weather left propped open; they give onto steel stairs leading down to the basement floor with its locker rooms, boys' and girls' on either end, and, in between, die cafeteria and the wood and machine shops for the voke students. Underfoot, the cracks in the concrete hold crabgrass and mullein and dandelions and ridges of the minute particles, shining like coffee grounds, of the underlying earth which ants have brought to the surface. Where the concrete has been thoroughly undermined and pulverized, taller weeds, purslane and snakeroot and bedstraw and a species of daisy, have taken root and extend spindly stems up into the lengthening daylight.

In this gritty and unpoliced area, good for nothing with its deformed basketball hoop but to sneak a smoke or a sniff or a swig or to arrange showdowns between warring boys, Tylenol confronts Ahmad, who is still in his track shorts. A school-operated bus has brought him to the parking lot from practice on the former farm fifteen minutes away. Today he has ten minutes to shower and change and run the seven blocks to the mosque for his biweekly Qur'an lesson; he hoped to save some steps by cutting through to the double doors that should be open. This late after school, the area is usually empty, except for a few ninth-graders who accept the hoop at its ruined angle and use it for shooting baskets anyway. But today a cluster of blacks and Latinos, the gang allegiances declared by the blue and red of the belts on their droopy, voluminous drawers and their headbands and skull-fitting do-rags, are promiscuously mingled, as if the benign weather has declared a truce.

"Hey. You Arab." Tylenol stands square before him, flanked by several others wearing tight blue muscle shirts. Ahmad feels vulnerable, near-naked in his running shorts, his striped socks and feather-light cleats and sleeveless shirt sweat-soaked back and front in dark butterfly shapes; he has a sense of himself, his long limbs bare, as beautiful, beauty being an affront to the brutes of the world.

"Ahmad," he corrects, and stands there still with the heat of exertion, the heart-bursting sprints and jumps, rising from his pores. He feels luminous, and Tylenol's deepset little eyes wince, looking at him.

"Hear you went to church to hear Joryleen sing. How come?"

"She asked me to."

"Shit she did. You're an Arab. You don't go there."

"I did, though. People were friendly. One family shook my hand and gave me big smiles."

"They didn't know about you. You was there under false pretenses."

Ahmad stands lightly braced, his feet in their weightless shoes spread for balance, against Tylenol's coming assault.

But the pained squint becomes a smirk. "People seen you two walkin' after."

"After church, yes. So?"

Now, surely, the assault will come. Ahmad plans to feint left with his head and then sink his right hand into Tylenol's soft stomach, and then sharply lift his knee. But his enemy lets his smirk tear open into a grin. "So nothin', 'cordin' to her. She had somethin' she wanted me to tell you."

"Oh, yes?" The other boys, the blue-shirted minions, are listening. Ahmad's plan is that, having left Tylenol gasping and doubled up on the crumbling concrete, he will dodge between these astonished others for the relative safety of the school.

"She says she hates you. Joryleen says she don't give a flying fuck about you. You know what a flying fuck is, Arab?"

"I've heard the phrase." He feels his face go stiff, as if something warm is slowly coating it.

"So I don't care about you and Joryleen no more," Tylenol concludes, leaning in closer, almost as if amorous. "We laugh about you, the two of us. Especially when I fuck her. We fuck a lot, lately. A flying fuck is when you do it to yourself, like all you Arabs do. You all faggots, man."

The little audience around them laughs, and Ahmad knows from the heat on his face that he is blushing. This infuriates him to the point that when he blindly pushes through the muscular bodies toward the doors to the locker room, late now for his shower, late for his lesson, no one moves to stop him. Instead, there are whistles and hoots behind him, as if he is a white girl with pretty legs.

The mosque, the humblest of the several in New Prospect, occupies the second floor above a nail salon and a check-cashing facility, in a row of small shops that includes a dusty-windowed pawn shop, a secondhand bookstore, a shoe-repair man and sandal-maker, a Chinese laundry down a little flight of steps, a pizza joint, and a grocery store specializing in Middle Eastern foods-dried lentils and fava beans, hummus and halvah, falafel and couscous and tabouli moldering in plain printed packages that look strange, in their lack of pictures and bold lettering, to Ahmad's American eyes. For four or so blocks to the west, the so-called Arab section, begun with the Turks and Syrians who worked as tanners and dyers in the old mills, stretches along this part of Main Street, but Ahmad never ventures there; his exploration of his Islamic identity ends at the mosque. The mosque took him in as a child of eleven; it let him be born again.

He opens a flaking green door, number 2 7 81V2, between the nail salon and the establishment, its big window masked by long blond Venetian blinds, that advertises Checks Cashed: Minimal Fee. Narrow stairs lead upward to al-masjid al-jdmi', the place of prostration. The green door and the windowless long flight of stairs frightened him the first times he came here, searching for something he had heard about in the chatter of his black classmates concerning their mosques, their preachers who "didn't take none of the man's shit." Other boys his age became choir boys or joined the Cub Scouts. He thought he might find in this religion a trace of the handsome father who had receded at the moment his memories were beginning. His flighty mother, who never went to mass, and deplored the restraints of her own religion, humored him by driving him, those first times and afterwards, when her schedule permitted, until he was a teen-ager and relatively safe on the streets, to this mosque on the second floor. The large hall converted to worship was once a dance studio, and the imam's office has replaced the foyer where pupils in tap and ballroom dancing, accompanied by parents if they were children, waited for their lessons. The lease and conversion of the space dated from the last decade of the last century, but the close air still bears, Ahmad imagines, echoes of a piano being thumped and a whiff of awkward, unholy effort. The worn, wavery boards where so many labored steps were rehearsed are covered by large Oriental rugs, rug upon rug, which in turn show some wear.

A caretaker, a shrivelled elderly Lebanese with a bent back and lame leg, vacuums the rugs and tidies the imam's office and the children's nursery created to satisfy Western babysitting habits, but the windows, high enough to discourage spying, whether upon dancers or worshippers, are beyond the crippled caretaker's reach and semi-opaque with accumulated grime. Clouds are all that can be glimpsed through them, and these darkly. Even on Friday's saldt al-Jum'a, when a sermon is preached from the minbar, the hall of prostration is underutilized, while the thriving modernistic mosques of Harlem and Jersey City fatten on fresh emigrants from Egypt, Jordan, Malaysia, and the Philippines. The Black Muslims of New Prospect, and the apostate adherents of the Nation of Islam, keep to their own lofts and storefront sanctuaries. Shaikh Rashid's hope of starting, in one of his third-floor spaces, a kuttab for teaching the Qur'an to flocks of elementary-school-age children, hangs short of fulfillment. Lessons that Ahmad seven years ago began in the company of eight or so others, in age from nine to thirteen, are now carried on by him as the only pupil. He is alone with the teacher, whose soft voice in any case carries best to a small audience. Ahmad is not utterly comfortable with his master, but, as the Qur'an and the Hadith enjoin, reveres him.

For seven years Ahmad has been coming twice a week, for an hour and a half, to learn the Qur'an, but he lacks opportunity in die rest of his time to use classical Arabic. The eloquent language, al-lugha al-fusbd, still sits awkwardly in his mouth, with all its throat syllables and dotted emphatic consonants, and baffles his eyes: the cursive print, with its attendant spattering of diacritical marks, looks small to him, and to read it from right to left still entails a switch of gears in his head. As the lessons, having slowly marched through the holy text, undergo review, recapitulation, and refinement, Shaikh Rashid reveals his preference for the shorter, early Meccan suras, poetic and intense and cryptic compared with the prosy stretches in the book's first half, wherein the Prophet set about governing Medina with particularizing laws and mundane advisements.

Today the teacher says, "Let us turn to 'The Elephant.' It is the one hundred and fifth sura." Since Shaikh Rashid doesn't wish to pollute his student's carefully acquired classical Arabic with the sounds of a modern colloquial tongue, al-lugha al-'dmmiyya, in his rapid Yemeni dialect, he conducts the lessons in a fluent but rather formal English, speaking with some distaste, his violet lips, framed in his neat beard and mustache, pursed as if to maintain an ironical remove. "Read it to me," he tells Ahmad, "with some rhythmic feeling, please." He shuts his eyes the better to listen; his lowered lids show a few purple spider veins, vivid in the waxy-white face.

Ahmad recites the invocatory formula "bi-smi lldhi r-rah-mani r-rahim" and, tensely because of his master's demand for a feeling rhythm, tackles aloud the long first line of the sura: "a-lam tara kayfa fa'ala rabbuka bi-asbdbi 'l-fil." His eyes still closed as he leans back against the cushions of the spacious silver-gray high-backed wing chair in which he sits at his desk and receives his student, who perches at the corner of his desk on a Spartan chair of molded plastic such as might be found in the luncheonette of a small-city airport, the shaikh admonishes, "S, h: two distinct sounds, not 'sh.' Pronounce them as in, oh, 'asshole.' Forgive me; that is the sole word in the devils' language that comes to mind. On the glottal stop, don't overdo it; classical Arabic is not some African click-language. Sweep the sound in gracefully, as though it's second nature. Which it is, of course, for native speakers, and students sufficiently diligent. Maintain the rhythm, despite difficult sounds. Stress the last syllable, the rhyming syllable. Remember the rule? Stress falls on a long vowel between two consonants, or on a consonant followed by a short vowel followed by two consonants. Proceed, please, Ahmad." Even the master's pronunciation of "Ahmad" has the soft knife-edge, the soulful twist, of the pharyngeal fricative.

"-a-lam yaj'al kaydahum ft tad,lll-"

"Strengthen that Hit,' " Shaikh Rashid says, his eyes still closed, trembling as if with a weight of jelly behind them. "You can hear it even in the Reverend Rodwell's quaint nineteenth-century translation: 'Did He not make their guile to go astray?' " His eyes half open as he explains, "The men or companions, that is, of the elephant. The sura supposedly refers to an actual event, an attack on Mecca by Abraha al-habashi, the governor, as it happens, of Yemen, the lavender land of my warrior ancestors. Armies in those days, of course, had to have elephants; elephants were the Sherman Ml tanks, the armored Humvees, of the time; let's hope they were equipped with thicker skins than the unfortunate Humvees supplied to Bush's brave troops in Iraq. The historical event was supposed to have occurred at about the time the Prophet was born, in 570 of the Common Era. He would have heard his relatives-not his parents, since his father died before he was born and his mother when he was six, but perhaps his grandfather, Abd al-Muttalib, and his uncle, AbuTalib-talking about this fabled battle, by the firelight of the Hashemite camps. For a time the infant was entrusted to a Bedouin nurse, and perhaps from her, it has been thought, he imbibed the heavenly purity of his Arabic."

"Sir, you say 'supposedly,' yet the sura asks in the first verse, 'Have you not seen?'-as if the Prophet and his audience have seen it."

"In his mind's eye," the teacher sighs. "In his mind's eye, the Prophet saw many things. As to whether the attack by Abraha was historical, scholars, equally devout and equally convinced that the Qur'an was of divine inspiration, differ. Read me the last three verses, which are especially profoundly inspired. Keep your breath flowing. Favor your nasal passages. Let me hear the desert wind."

"wa arsala alayhim tayran abdbil," Ahamad intones, trying to drop his voice into a place of gravity and beauty deeper in his throat, so he feels the holy vibration in his sinuses, "tarmihim b-hijdratin min sijjil," he continues, gathering a walled-in resonance in at least his own ears, "fa-ja'alahum ka-'asfin ma'kul."

"Better," Shaikh Rashid indolently concedes, waving in dismissal his soft white hand, whose fingers appear sinuously long, though his body as a whole, clothed in a delicately embroidered caftan, is slight and small. Beneath it he wears the white undertrousers called the sirwdl, and, level on his tidy head, the white brimless lacy cap, the amdma, that identifies him as an imam. His black shoes, tiny and obdurate as a child's, peep out of the caftan's hem when he lifts them and rests them on the padded footstool in the same opulent fabric, containing the glints of a thousand silver threads, that covers the thronelike wing chair from which he delivers his teaching. "And what do these superb verses tell us?"

"They tell us," Ahmad ventures, blushing with the shame of sullying the holy text with a clumsy paraphrase, which furthermore depends less on his sight-reading of the ancient Arabic than on a surreptitious study of English translations, "they tell us that God loosed flocks of birds, hurling them against stones of baked clay, and made the men of the elephant like blades of grass that have been eaten. Devoured."

"Yes, more or less," said Shaikh Rashid. "The 'stones of baked clay,' as you put it, presumably formed a wall which then came down, under the barrage of birds, which remains somewhat mysterious to us, though presumably as clear as crystal in the graven prototype of the Qur'an that exists in Paradise. Ah, Paradise; one can hardly wait."

Ahmad's blush slowly fades, leaving on his face a crust of unease. The shaikh has closed his eyes again in reverie. When the silence stretches painfully, Ahmad asks, "Sir, are you suggesting that the version available to us, fixed by the first caliphs within twenty years of the Prophet's death, is somehow imperfect, compared with the version that is eternal?"

The teacher pronounces, "The imperfections must lie within ourselves-in our ignorance, and in the records that the first disciples and scribes made of the Prophet's utterances. The very title of our sura, for example, may be a mistranscription of Abraha's royal monarch, Alfilas, which a dropped ending left as al-Fll-'the elephant.' One presumes that the flocks of birds are a metaphor for some sort of missiles hurled by catapult, or else we have the ungainly vision of winged creatures, less formidable than the Roc of The Thousand and One Nights but presumably more numerous, crunching their beaks upon the clay bricks, the bi-hijdratin. Only in this verse, the fourth, you will notice, are there any long vowels that do not come at the end of a line. Though he spurned the title of poet, the Prophet, especially in these early Meccan verses, achieved intricate effects. But, yes, the version handed down to us, while it would be blasphemy to call it imperfect, is, because of our mortal ignorance, in sore need of interpretation, and interpretations, in the course of fourteen centuries, differ. The exact meaning of the word abdbil, for example, remains after all this time conjectural, since it occurs nowhere else. There is a term in Greek, dear Ahmad, for such a unique and therefore undeterminable word: hapax legomenon. In the same sura, sijjil is another mystery-word, though it occurs three times in the sacred book. The Prophet himself foresaw difficulties, and in the seventh verse of the third sura, 'The Imrans,' admits that some expressions are clear-muhkamdt-but others are understood only by God. These unclear passages, the so-called mutashdbihdt, are sought out by the enemies of the true faith, those 'with an evil inclination in their hearts,' as the Prophet expressed it, whereas the wise and faithful say, 'We believe in it; it is all from our Lord.' Am I boring you, my pet?"

"Oh, no," Ahmad answers, truly; for as his teacher murmurs casually on, the student feels an abyss is opening within him, a chasm of the problematical and inaccessibly ancient.

The shaikh, tilting forward in his great chair, is taking on a vehement energy of discourse, with indignant gestures of his long-fingered hands. "The atheist Western scholars in their blind wickedness allege the Sacred Book to be a shambles of fragments and forgeries slapped together in expedient haste and arranged in the most childish order possible, that of sheer bulk, the longest suras first. They claim to find endless obscurities and cruces. For example, there has been a recent, rather amusing controversy over the scholarly dicta of a German specialist in ancient Middle Eastern tongues, one Christoph Luxenberg, who maintains that many obscurities of the Qur'an disappear if the words are read not as Arabic but as Syriac homonyms. Most notoriously, he asserts that, in the magnificent suras 'Smoke' and 'The Mountain,' the words that have traditionally been read as 'virgins with large dark eyes' actually mean 'white raisins' of 'crystal clarity.' Similarly, the enchanting youths, likened to scattered pearls, cited in the sura called 'Man' should be rendered 'chilled raisins'-referring to a cooling raisin drink served with elaborate courtesy in Paradise while the damned drink molten metal in Hell. I fear this particular revision would make Paradise significantly less attractive for many young men. What say you to that, as a comely young man?" With an animation almost humorous, the teacher accentuates his forward tilt, resting his feet on the floor so that his black shoes flick out of sight; his lips and eyelids open in expectation.

Startled, Ahmad says, "Oh, no. I thirst for Paradise," though the abyss within him continues to widen.

"It is not merely attractive," Shaikh Rashid pursues,

"some distant place pleasant to visit, like Hawaii, but something we long for, long for ardently, is it not so?"

"Yes."

"So that we are impatient with this world, so dim and dismal a shadow of the next?"

"Yes, exacdy."

"And even if the dark-eyed houris are merely white raisins, does that lessen your appetite for Paradise?"

"Oh, no, sir, it does not," Ahmad answers, as these otherworldly images swirl in his head.

Where some might take these provocative moods of Shaikh Rashid to be satiric, and indeed a dangerous flirtation with Hellfire, Ahmad has always taken them to be maieutic, a teasing-forth, from his student, of necessary shadows and complications, thus enriching a shallow and starkly innocent faith. But today the rub of maieutic irony feels sharper, and the boy's stomach chafes, and he wants the lesson to end.

"Good," the teacher pronounces, his lips snapping shut in a tight bud of flesh. "My own sense of it has always been that the houris are metaphors for a bliss beyond imagining, a bliss chaste and unending, and not literal copulation with physical women-warm, rounded, slavish women. Surely copulation as commonly experienced is the very essence of earthly transience, of vain joy. "

"But…," Ahmad blurts, blushing again.

"But-?"

"But Paradise must be real, a real place."

"Of course, dear boy-what else? And yet, to continue briefly with this matter of textual perfection, even in the tamer declarations of the suras ascribed to the Prophet's Medina governance, infidel scholars claim to discover awkwardness. Could you read for me-I know, the shadows are lengthening, the spring day outside our windows is pathetically dying-read for me, please, verse fourteen from the sixty-fourth sura, 'Mutual Deceit.' "

Ahmad fumblingly finds the page in his dog-eared copy of the Qur'an, and makes his way aloud through "yd ayyuhd

'lladhina dmanu inna min azwdjikum wa awlddikum 'aduw-

wan lakumfa 'hdharubum, wa in ta'fuwa tasfabuwa taghfirii

fa-inna 'lldha ghafiirun rahim."

"Good. I mean, good enough. We must work harder, of course, on your accent. Can you tell me, Ahmad, quickly, what it means?"

"Uh, it says that in your wives and children you have an enemy. Beware of them. But if you, uh, forgive and pardon and are lenient, God is forgiving and merciful."

"But your wives and children! What is 'enemy' about them? Why would they need forgiveness?"

"Well, maybe because they distract you from jihdd, from the struggle to become holy and closer to God."

"Perfect! What a beautiful tutee you are, Ahmad! I could not have put it better myself. ⁱta'fu wa tasfahii wa taghfirii''- afd and safaba, abstain and turn away! Do without these women of non-Heavenly flesh, this earthly baggage, these unclean hostages to fortune! Travel light, straight into Paradise! Tell me, dear Ahmad, are you afraid of entering into Paradise?"

"Oh, no, sir. Why would I be? I look forward to it, as do all good Muslims."

"Yes. Of course they do. We do. You gladden my heart. For next session, kindly prepare 'The Merciful' and 'The Event.' In numerical terms, suras fifty-five and fifty-six- side by side, conveniently. Oh, and Ahmad-?"

"Yes?" The spring day has passed, beyond the upward- looking windows, into evening, an indigo sky too stained by the mercury-vapor lights of inner-city New Prospect to show more than a handful of stars. Ahmad tries to remember if his mother's hours at the hospital will permit her to be home. Otherwise, perhaps there will be a cup of yogurt in the refrigerator, or he else must risk the doubtful cleanness of the Shop-a-Sec's snack provisions.

"I trust you will not be returning to the kafir church in the center of town." The shaikh hesitates, and then speaks as if quoting a sacred text: "The unclean can appear to shine, and devils do good imitations of angels. Keep to the Straight Path-ibdind s-sirdta 'l-mustaqim. Beware of anyone, however pleasing, who distracts you from Allah's pure being."

"But the entire world," Ahmad confesses, "is such a distraction."

"It need not be. The Prophet himself was a worldly man: merchant, husband, father of daughters. Yet he became in his forties the vehicle God chose through which to deliver His final and culminating word." The cell phone that lives deep in the shaikh's overlapping garments suddenly sounds its trilling, semi-musical plea, and Ahmad seizes the moment to flee out into the evening, out into the world with its homeward rush of headlights and its sidewalk scents of frying food and of branches pale with blossoms and sticky catkins overhead.

Corny as they are, and as many times as he has participated in them, commencements at Central High bring Jack Levy near to tears. They all begin with "Pomp and Circumstance" and the stately procession of seniors in their swinging black robes and perilously perched mortarboard hats, and end in die brisker, grinning, parent-greeting, highflying parade back up the aisle to the tunes of "Colonel Bogey's March" and "When die Saints Go Marchin' In." Even the most rebellious and recalcitrant student, even those with free at last spelled out in white tape on their mortarboards or a sassy sprig of paper flowers interwoven with the tassel cord, appears subdued by the terminal nature of the ceremony and the timeworn pieties of the speeches. Contribute to America, they are told. Take your places in the peaceful armies of democratic enterprise. Even as you strive to succeed, be kind to your fellow-man. Think, in spite of all the scandals of corporate malfeasance and political corruption with which the media daily dishearten and sicken us, of the common good. Real life now commences, they are informed; the Eden of public education has swung shut its garden gate. A garden, Levy reflects, of rote teaching dully ignored, of the vicious and ignorant dominating the timid and dutiful, but a garden nevertheless, a weedy patch of hopes, a rough and ill-tilled seedbed of what this nation wants itself to be. Ignore the armed cops stationed here and there in the back of the auditorium, and the metal detectors at every entrance that isn't locked and chained. Look instead at the graduating seniors, at the smiling earnestness with which they perform, to loyal applause denied to none of them, not the dullest and most delinquent, their momentary march across the stage, under the Roxyesque proscenium, between banks of flowers and potted palms, to receive their diplomas from the hand of slick Nat Jefferson, head of die New Prospect school system, while their names are chanted into the mike by the acting high-school principal, tiny Irene Tsoutsouras. The diversity of names is echoed by that of the footgear displayed beneath the bouncing hems of their robes as they saunter forth in tattered Nikes, or strut by on stiletto heels, or shuffle past in loose sandals.

Jack Levy begins to choke up. The docility of human beings, their basic willingness to please. Europe 's Jews dressing up in their best clothes to be marched off to the death camps. The male and female students, men and women suddenly, shaking Nat Jefferson's practiced hand, something they have never done before and will never do again. The broad-shouldered black administrator, a master surfer of local political waves as voting power has shifted from white to black and now to Hispanics, refreshes his smile for each and every graduating face, showing a special graciousness, in Jack Levy's eyes, to the white students, a distinct minority here. Thank you for sticking with us, his warmly prolonged handshake says. We're going to make America /New Prospect / Central High work. In the middle of the seemingly endless list, Irene reads out, "Ahmad Ashmawy Mulloy." The boy moves elegantly, tall but not ungainly, enacting his part but not overacting-too dignified to play, like some of the others, to partisans in the audience with waves and giggles. He has few partisans-sparse handclaps spatter. Situated in a front row between two other faculty members, Levy with a furtive knuckle attacks the incipient tears tickling both sides of his nose.

The benediction is offered by a Catholic priest and, as a sop to the Muslim community, an imam. A rabbi and a Presbyterian had delivered the invocations, both of them, for Jack Levy's money, at excessive length. The imam, in a caftan and tight turban of an electrically pure whiteness, stands at the lectern and twangs out a twist of Arabic as if sticking a dagger into the silent audience. Then, perhaps translating, he offers up in English, "Knower of the Hidden and the Manifest! the Great! the Most High! God is the Creator of all things! He is the One! the Conquering! He sendeth down the rain from Heaven: then flow the torrents in their due measure, and the flood beareth along a swelling foam. And from the metals which are molten in the fire for the sake of ornaments or utensils, a like scum ariseth. As to the foam, it is quickly gone: and as to what is useful to man, it remaineth on the Earth. To those who graduate today, we say, rise above the foam, the scum, but dwell instead usefully upon the Eardi. To those whom the Straight Path leads into danger, we repeat the words of the Prophet: 'Say not of those who are slain on God's path they are Dead; nay, they are Living!' " Levy studies the imam-a slight, impeccable man embodying a belief system that not many years ago managed the deaths of, among others, hundreds of commuters from northern New Jersey. From the higher vantages in New Prospect, crowds gathered to see smoke pour from the two World Trade Towers and recede over Brooklyn, that clear day's only cloud. When Levy thinks of embattled Israel and of Europe 's pathetically few remaining synagogues needing to be guarded by police day and night, his initial good will toward the imam dissolves: the man in his white garb sticks like a bone in the throat of the occasion. Levy doesn't mind Father Corcoran's nasally nailing the triple Lord's blessing on the lid of the long ceremony; Jews and Irish have been sharing America's cities for generations, and it was Jack's father's and grandfather's generation, not his, that had to endure the taunt of "Christ-killer."

"Well, mon, we made it," the teacher on his right says. The speaker is Adam Bronson, an emigrant from Barbados who taught business math to tenth- and eleventh-graders. "Always I thank God when the school year gets by with no killings."

"You watch too much news," Jack tells him. "We're no Columbine; tbat was Colorado -the Wild West. Central is safer now than when I was a kid here. The black gangs had zip guns, and there were no security gates or security guards. The hall monitors were supposed to be the security. They were lucky if they weren't pushed down the stairs."

"I could not at first believe when I came here," Adam tells him, in his hard-to-understand accent, music from a gentle island, a steel-drum pealing from a distance, "the policemen in the halls and cafeteria. In Barbados we shared books falling apart and used both sides of tablet paper, every scrap, education was so precious to us. We never dreamed of mischief. Here in this grand building you need guards as if in a jail, and the students do everything destructive. I do not understand this American hatred of decent order."

"Think of it as love of freedom. Freedom is knowledge."

"My students do not believe they will ever need business math in their heads. They imagine the computer will do everything for them. They think the human mind is on eternal holiday, and from now on has nothing else to do but absorb entertainment."

The faculty falls two by two into the procession, and Adam, paired with a teacher from across the aisle, steps ahead of Levy but then turns and continues the conversation. "Jack, tell me. There is something I am embarrassed to ask anyone. Who is this J-Lo? My students keep referencing him."

"Her. Singer. Actress," Jack calls ahead. "Hispanic. Very well turned out. Great ass, apparently. I can't tell any more. There comes a time in life," he explains, lest the Barbadian think him curt, "when celebrities don't do for you what they used to."

The teacher he has been paired with in the recessional is, he now notices, a woman, Miss Mackenzie, twelfth-grade English, first name Caroline. Lean, square-jawed, a fitness freak, she wears her graying hair in an old-fashioned pageboy, the bangs cut level with her eyebrows. "Carrie," Jack says warmly. "What's this I hear about your assigning Sexus to your seniors?" She lives with another woman up in Paramus, and Levy feels he can josh her as he would another man.

"Don't be dirty, Jack," she says, not giving him a smile. "It was one of his memoirs, the one with Big Sur in the title. I had it on the optional list, nobody had to read it." "Yeah, but what did those that did make of it?" "Oh," her flat, incipiently hostile voice tells him, through the din and shuffle and recessional music, "they take it in stride. They've already seen it all, at home."

The entire human agglomeration of this gala event- graduates, teachers, parents, grandparents and uncles and aunts, nieces and nephews-pushes out of the auditorium into the front hall, where the athletic trophies stand watch in long cases like a dead Pharaoh's treasure, sealed in, the magical past, and out the broad front doors, thrown open to the sunshine of early June and the dusty vista of die lake of rubble, and down the great front steps, gabbing and catcalling in their triumph. Once this grand granite staircase gave onto an ample green lap of lawn and symmetrical shrubs; but the demands of the automobile nibbled and tfren slashed at this margin, widening Tilden Avenue (defiandy thus renamed by die solidly Democratic board of aldermen in the wake of the 1877 theft of die Presidency by a Republican-dominated electoral commission colluding with a South anxious to have all Northern military protection of its Negro population lifted) so that now the lowest course of granite impinges directly upon a sidewalk, a sidewalk separated from the asphalt street by a narrow strip of sod that is green only for a few weeks, before summer's baking heat and a host of heedless footsteps beat its burst of vernal growth into a flat mat of dead grass. Beyond the curb the asphalt avenue, as rumpled as a hastily made bed with its patched and repatched potholes and the tarry swales created by the constant weight of rushing cars and trucks, has been closed to traffic by orange-striped barricades for this hour, to give the graduation crowd a place to stand and bask in self-congratulation and to wait for the recent graduates to turn in their gowns within the building and make their final partings.

Milling in this crowd, in no hurry to go home and face the start of a summer in the company of his wife, and morosely feeling after his merry exchange with Carrie Mackenzie that he is missing out in an anything-goes society, Jack Levy bumps into Teresa Mulloy. Freckled and flushed in the heat, she wears an already wilted orchid pinned to the rumpled jacket of a pale linen suit. He greets her gravely: "Congratulations, Ms. Mulloy."

"Hello!" she responds, making an exclamatory occasion of it, and lightly touching his forearm, as if to re-establish die burgeoning intimacy of their last encounter. She tells him, breathlessly grabbing the first words that come to her, "You must have a wonderful summer ahead of you!"

The thought takes him aback. "Oh-same old same old," he tells her. "We don't do much. Beth has only a few weeks off from the library. I try to pick up some pin money tutoring. We have a son in New Mexico and we visit him for a week in usually August; it's hot but not muggy the way it is here. Beth has a sister in Washington, but that's even muggier, so she used to come up to us and we'd go for a week or so to the mountains somewhere, one side or otlier of the Delaware Water Gap. But now she's so damn busy, always some emergency or other, that this summer…" Shut up, Levy. Don't talk it to death. Maybe it was good that the "we" slipped out, reminding this woman he has a wife. He thinks of them, actually, as being on the same continuum, with their fair skins and tendency to plumpness, but Beth twenty years farther along. "What about you? You and Ahmad."

Her outfit is staid enough-eggshell-colored linen suit over a white chemise-yet colorful touches suggest a free spirit, an artist as well as a mother. Clunky turquoise rings weigh down those short-nailed, firm-fleshed hands of hers, and her arms, showing haloes of fuzz candescent in the sunlight, hold a clicking horde of gold and coral bracelets. Most surprisingly, a large silk scarf, patterned in angular abstract shapes and staring circles, is knotted beneath her chin and covers the hair of her head but for the blurred edge, witb a few stray reddish filaments, where it meets the Irish-white bulge of her brow. Watching Levy's eyes with her own, and seeing them fix on her jauntily demure head scarf, she laughs and explains, "He wanted me to wear it. He said if there was one thing he wanted for his graduation it was his mother not looking like a whore."

"My goodness. But, anyway, it's oddly becoming. And the orchid was his idea too?"

"Not really. The other boys do it for their mothers, and he would have been embarrassed not to. He has this conformist streak."

Her face with its protuberant green eyes, pale as beach glass, seems in the scarf to look at him around a corner; its covering poses a provocation, implying a dazzling ultimate nakedness. Her head scarf speaks of submission, which stirs him. He moves closer in the press of the crowd, as if taking her under his protection. She tells him, "I spotted some other scarved mothers, Black Muslims quite dramatic in all their white, and some of the graduating daughters of the Turks-as a girl we called them 'Turks,' die dark men at the mills, but of course they all weren't. I was thinking, / bet I have the reddest hair underneath. The nuns would be thrilled. They said I flaunted my charms. At the time I wondered what charms were, and how you could flaunt them. They were just there, it seemed to me. My so-called charms."

She shares his tendency to babble, here in this excited crowd. He says quietly, meaning it, "You were a good mom, to humor Ahmad."

Her face loses its gleam of mischief. "He's asked so little, really, over the years, and now he's leaving. He's always seemed so alone. He did this Allah thing all by himself, with no help from me. Less than help, really-I resented that he cared so much about a father who didn't do squat for him. For us. But I guess a boy needs a father, and if he doesn't have one he'll invent one. How's that for cut-rate Freud?"

Does she know she is doing this to him, making him want her? Beth would never think to bring in Freud. Freud, who encouraged a century to keep on screwing. Levy says, "Ahmad looked handsome up there, in his robe. I'm sorry I began too late to get to know your son. I feel a fondness for him, though I suspect it's not reciprocated."

"You're wrong, Jack-he appreciates your wanting to raise his sights. Maybe he'll do it himself later. For now he's barreling ahead on the trucker's license. He passed the written exam and in two weeks takes the physical exam. For Passaic County it's over in Wayne. They need to make sure you're not color-blind and have enough peripheral vision. Ahmad has beautiful eyes, I've always thought. Inky. His father had lighter eyes, oddly, sort of gingerbread color. I say 'oddly' because you'd think Omar's would be the darker, with my pale ones in there."

"I see a shadow of your green in Ahmad's." She ignores this flirtation and goes on, "But they're not twenty-twenty. Ahmad's. More like twenty-thirty- astigmatism-but he was always too vain to wear glasses. You'd think with all this piety he wouldn't be vain, but he is. Maybe it's not vanity, it's more that he thinks Allah would give you glasses if He wanted you to wear them. He had trouble seeing the ball in baseball; that was one of die reasons he took up track as his spring sport."

This tumble of sudden specifics about a boy not too different in Jack Levy's mind from the hundreds he deals with every year, intensifies his suspicion that this woman wants to see him again. He says to her, "I guess he won't be needing those college catalogues I dropped off a month ago."

"I hope he can still find them: his room is a mess except for the corner where he prays. He should have returned them to you, Jack."

'Wo pfoblema, senor-a." He notices around tJiem, in the jostling, jubilant, but already dwindling crowd, other people glancing in their direction and giving them a little room, sensing that sometliing is cooking here. He feels himself incriminated by Terry's overanimation as he tenaciously tries to match his smile to tiiat on her round, bright, freckle-starred face.

The shadow of a big dark-hearted cloud sweeps the sunshine away and casts dullness upon the scene-the lake of rubble, the street from which traffic is barred, the bravely, brightly clad mob of parents and relatives, the civic facade of Central High School, its portals pillared and its windows barred, the height of it like the backdrop of an opera set dwarfing the singers of a duet.

"That was rude of Ahmad," his mother says, "not to return them to you at the school. Now it's too late."

"Like I said, no problem. Why don't I come by sometime and pick 'em up?" he asks. "I'll give a call ahead to make sure you're there."

As a kid, living over on Totowa Road when it was still pretty rural but for the new ranch houses, walking to school in the winter, Jack would sometimes venture out, to test his nerve, onto the ice of a marshy pond, long since built over, that he passed on the way. The water was not deep enough to drown in-cattails and grassy hummocks betrayed its shallow depth-but if he broke through, his good leather school shoes would be soaked and muddied and maybe even ruined, and in a family whose finances were as pinched as his family's, that would have been a disaster. At the silver edge of the cloud, sunshine breaks through, scintillating on Terry's silk head scarf, and he listens with trepidation for the ice to crack.