Terrorist

IV

CHARLIE'S UNCLE and Habib Chehab's brother, Maurice, rarely comes up from Florida, but the heat and humidity of Miami in July and August drive him north for those months. He stays off and on at Habib's home in Pompton Lakes and shows up occasionally at Excellency Home Furnishings, where Ahmad sees him-a man much like his brother, only bigger and more formal, given to seersucker suits, white leather shoes, and shirts and neckties rather too obviously coordinated. He formally shakes Ahmad's hand the first time they meet, and the boy has an unpleasant sensation of being sized up, by eyes more guarded than Habib's, with even more gold in them, and less quick to break into a twinkle of amusement. He is the younger brother, it turns out, though he has the overweening manner of an older. Ahmad, an only child, is fascinated by brotherhood-its advantages and disadvantages, the quality it imparts of being in some sense duplicated. Had he been blessed with a brother, Ahmad would feel less alone, perhaps, and rely less on the God he carries with him, in his pulse and thoughts. Whenever he and Maurice see each other in the store, the portly, smooth man in his pale clothes gives Ahmad a slightly smiling nod that says, / know you, young man. I have your number.

Ahmad's glimpse of the dollars he delivered to the four men in the cottage on the Upper Shore stays with him as something partaking of the supernatural, that featureless vastness which yet deigns, by Its own unfathomable will, to reach into our lives. He wonders if he dares confess his discovery to Charlie. Was Charlie aware of the contents of the ottoman? How many others of the pieces of furniture they have delivered and collected were similarly loaded in their crevices and interior hollows? And to what purpose? The mystery savors of the events reported in the newspapers, the headlines he barely skims, of political violence abroad and domestic violence locally, and in the nightly newscasts that he clicks through while channel-surfing the stations on his mother's obsolete Admiral.

He has taken to searching television for traces of God in this infidel society. He watches beauty pageants where luminous-skinned and white-toothed girls, along with one or two token entrants of color, compete in charming die master of ceremonies with their singing or dancing talents and their frequent if hasty expressions of gratitude to the Lord for their blessings, which tJiey intend to devote, when their singing days in bathing suits are done, to their fellow-man in the form of such lofty vocations as doctor, educator, agronomist, or, holiest calling of all, homemaker. Ahmad discovers a specifically Christian channel featuring deep-voiced, middle-aged men in suits of unusual colors, with wide, reflective lapels, who leave off their impassioned rhetoric ("Are you ready for Jesus?" they ask, and "Have you received Jesus in your hearts?") to break suddenly into sly flirtation with the middle-aged female members of the audience, or else jump back, snapping their fingers, into song. Christian song interests Ahmad, above all gospel choruses in iridescent robes, the fat black women bouncing and rolling with an intensity that at times appears artificially induced but at others, as the choruses go on, appears to be genuinely kindled from within. The women hoist high their hands along with their voices and clap in a rocking, infectious manner that spreads even to the smattering of whites among them, this being one area of American experience, like sports and crime, where darker skins unquestionably prevail. Ahmad knows, from Shaikh Rashid's dry, half-smiling allusions, of the Sufi enthusiasm and rapture that had anciently afflicted Islam, but finds not even a faint echo of it in the Islamic channels beamed from Manhattan and Jersey City- just the five calls to prayer broadcast over a still slide of the great mosque of Mohammed Ali in Saladin's Citadel, and solemn panels of bespectacled professors and mullahs discussing the anti-Islamic fury that has perversely possessed the present-day West, and sermons delivered by a turbanned imam seated at a bare table, relayed by a static camera from a studio strictly devoid of images.

It is Charlie who broaches the subject. One day in the cab of the truck, as they pass through an unusually empty piece of northern New Jersey, between an extensive cemetery and a surviving piece of the Meadows-cattails and shiny-leaved reeds rooted in brackish water-he asks, "Something eating you, Madman? You seem quiet lately."

"I am generally quiet, no?"

"Yeah, but this is different. At first it was 'Show me' quiet, now it's more a 'What's up?' kind of quiet."

Ahmad does not have so many friends in the world that he can risk losing one. There is no going back from this juncture, he knows; he has little to go back to. He tells Charlie, "Some days ago, when I was doing deliveries alone, I saw a strange thing. I saw men removing wads of money from that ottoman I delivered to the Shore." "They opened it in front of you?"

"No. I left, and then crept back and looked in the window. Their manner made me suspicious, and curious." "You know what curiosity did to the cat, don't you?" "It killed it. But ignorance can also kill. If I am to deliver, I should know what I am delivering."

"Why so, Ahmad?" Charlie says, almost tenderly. "I saw you as not wanting to know more than you can handle. In truth, ninety-nine percent of the time the furniture you are delivering is just that-furniture."

"But who are that fortunate one percent who win a bonus?" Ahmad feels a tense freedom, now that the juncture is behind them. It is like, he imagines, the release and responsibility a man and a woman feel when they first take off their clothes together. Charlie, too, seems to feel this; his voice sounds lighter, having shed a level of pretense. "The fortunate," he says, "are true believers." "They believe," Ahmad guesses, "in jihad?" "They believe," Charlie carefully restates, "in action. They believe that something can be done. That the Muslim peasant in Mindanao need not starve, that the Bangladeshi child need not drown, that the Egyptian villager need not go blind with schistosomiasis, that the Palestinians need not be strafed by Israeli helicopters, that the faithful need not eat the sand and camel dung of the world while the Great Satan grows fat on sugar and pork and underpriced petroleum. They believe that a billion followers of Islam need not have their eyes and ears and souls corrupted by the poisonous entertainments of Hollywood and a ruthless economic imperialism whose Christian-Jewish God is a decrepit idol, a mere mask concealing the despair of adieists."

"Where does the money come from?" Ahmad asks, when Charlie's words-not so different, after all, from the world-picture that Shaikh Rashid more silkily paints-have run their course. "And what are the recipients to do with these funds?"

"The money comes," Charlie tells him, "from those who love Allah, both within the U.S. and abroad. Think of those four men as seeds placed within the soil, and the money as water to keep the soil moist, so that some day the seeds will split their shells and bloom. Allahu akbar!"

"Does the money," Ahmad persists, "come somehow through Uncle Maurice? His arrival here seems to make a difference, though he disdains the daily workings of the store. And your good father-how much is he part of all this?"

Charlie laughs, indulgently; he is a son who has grown beyond his father but continues to honor him, as Ahmad has done to his own. "Hey, who are you, the CIA? My father is an old-fashioned immigrant, loyal to the system that took him in and let him prosper. If he knew any of what you and I are discussing, he would report us to the FBI."

Ahmad in his new capacity tries a joke: "Who would swiftly mislay the report."

Charlie does not laugh. He says, "These are important secrets that you have extracted from me. They are life-and-death stuff, Madman. I'm wondering right now if I've made a mistake, telling you all this."

Ahmad seeks to minimize what has passed between them.

He realizes that he has swallowed knowledge that cannot be coughed back up. Knowledge is freedom, it said on the front of Central High. Knowledge can also be a prison, with no way out once you're in. "You've made no mistake. You've told me very little. It was not you who led me back to the window to see the money being counted. There could be many explanations for the money. You could have denied knowledge of it, and I would have believed you."

"I could have," Charlie concedes. "Perhaps I should have."

"No. It would have put falsity between us, where there has been trust."

"Then you must tell me this: are you with us?"

"I am with those," Ahmad says slowly, "who are with God."

"O.K. Good enough. Be as silent as God about this. Do not tell your mother. Do not tell your girlfriend."

"I have no girlfriend."

"That's right. I promised to do something about that, didn't I?"

"You said I should get laid."

"Right. I'll work on it."

"Do not, please. It is not yours to work on."

"Friends help each other out," Charlie insists. He reaches over and squeezes the young driver's shoulder, and Ahmad does not entirely like it; it reminds him of Tylenol's bullying grip that time in the high-school hall.

The boy states, with a new-won man's dignity, "One more question, and then I will say nothing until I am spoken to on these matters. Is there a plan developing, with these seeds that are being watered?"

Ahmad knows Charlie's facial expressions so well he does not have to look sideways in the truck to see the man's rubbery lips work around as if exploring the shape of his own teeth, and then heavily exhale in an exaggerated sigh of exasperation. "Like I said, there are always a number of projects under consideration, and how they develop is somewhat hard to predict. What does the Book say, Madman? And the Jews plotted, and God plotted. But of those who plot, God is the best."

"In these plots, will I ever have a part to play?" "You might. Would you like that, kid?" Again, Ahmad feels a juncture being reached, and a gate closing behind him. "I believe I would."

"You believe? You got to do better than that." "As you say, individual events are not easy to predict. But the lines are clear." "The lines?"

"The lines of battle. The armies of Satan versus those of God. As the Book affirms, Idolatry is worse than carnage."

"Right. Right," Charlie agrees, and slaps his thigh as if to wake himself up, there in the passenger's seat. "I like that. Worse than carnage." He is a naturally talkative and humorous man, and it has been hard for him to keep a straight face, talking with Ahmad like two men walking through a cemetery where they may some day lie. "One thing to keep in mind," he adds. "There's an anniversary coming up, in September. And the people who call the shots-our generals, so to speak-have an old-fashioned thing about anniversaries."

Jacob and Teresa have made love and bring the sheets up over their naked bodies. The breeze through her bedroom windows is cool. September is drawing near; single yellow leaves, like isolated sparks, show in the wearying greenery. They both, he reflects after his warm bath in her flesh, could lose a few pounds. Her skin, where it is not freckled, is almost too pale, like that of a plastic doll except that it yields under his thumb, leaving a pink dent slow to erase itself. His shaggy arms and chest pain him with their slack, rumpled look; at home the bathroom mirror shows him the beginnings of puckery pseudo-breasts, and his stomach under its twin black swirls of hair has developed another fold. On his chest, the white hairs have no curl, and stick out like wavery antennae: an old man's hairs.

Terry cuddles against him, her snub nose snuggled into his armpit. His love for her stirs widiin him like the start of nausea.

"Jack?" she breathes.

"What?" He sounds ruder than he had intended.

"What makes you so sad?"

"I'm not sad," he says. "I'm fucked. You really do it. I thought my old chassis was ready for the junk heap, but you get those spark plugs firing. You're gorgeous, Terry."

"Cut the malarkey, as my father used to say. You haven't answered my question. Why are you sad?"

"Maybe I was thinking, Labor Day's coming. It's going to be harder to work us in." He has learned to express his difficulties in deceiving his wife without mentioning Beth's name, which Terry hates to hear, for some reason that eludes him. If the truth were known, Beth should be the jealous and indignant one.

Terry smells his very thought. "You're so afraid of Beth's finding out," she spitefully says. "So what if she did? Where can she go? Who would want her, in the shape she's in?"

"Is that the point?"

"No? So what is the point, baby? You tell me."

"Not hurting people?" he suggests.

"You don't think I hurt? You think being fucked and deserted die next minute doesn't hurt?"

Jack sighs. The fight is on, the same old fight. "I'm sorry. I'd like to be with you more." Leaving before he gets bored suits him, actually. Women can be boring. They make everything personal. They're so wrapped up in self-preservation, self-presentation, self-dramatization. With men you don't have to keep maneuvering, you just punch. Dealing with a woman is like jujitsu, looking for the trip.

She senses die threatening run of his thoughts and says, mollifyingly if grumpily, "She probably guesses anyway."

"How would she do that?" Though of course Terry is right.

"Women know," she tells him smugly, bragging up her gender, cuddling closer to him, and toying annoyingly with the hair on his rumpled slack belly. She says, "I keep telling myself, 'Love him less. For your own good, girl. For his good, too.' "

But as Terry says this, she feels an inner sliding and glimpses the relief she might experience if he indeed were to become less to her-if her tacky relationship with this melancholy old loser of a guidance counselor were in fact to end. At the age of forty she has parted from a number of men, and how many of them would she want back? Widi each break, it seems to her in retrospect, she returned to her single life with a fresh forthrightness and energy, like facing a blank, taut, primed canvas after some days away from the easel. The broken circle of her, an arc of it held open in hope of a phone call from a certain man, a knock on the door, an invasion and transformation from without, would close again. This Jack Levy, smart as he is, and even sensitive at times, is a heavy case. A guilty Jewish gloom weighs him down, and her too, if she lets it. She needs somebody nearer her own age, and unmarried. These married men are always more married than they let on at first. They even try to marry bet; without letting go of the legal one first.

"How's Ahmad doing?" he asks her, pseudo-paternally.

He keeps asking her about Ahmad, though as far as she's concerned she wants to move on from mothering to something she's better at. "With me on night duty lately," she says, "and him doing deliveries until after dark many days, we hardly overlap. He's gotten fuller in the face and the rest of him more muscular, what with all this lifting he does- this Charlie he loves so much just comes along for the ride, as far as I can tell. These Lebanese, they get the last penny's worth out of their help. The blacks they hire keep quitting on them, Ahmad did mention. Lately they seem to have promoted him-at least he comes home later and, the few times I see him, acts preoccupied."

"Preoccupied?" Jack says, preoccupied himself-worrying about big Beth, no doubt. Face it: much as she would miss Jack's flattery in bed when they get there, he would be good riddance. Maybe she needs another artist, even if he's like the last, Leo: Leo the un-lion-hearted, utterly stuck on himself, a dripper and scrubber channeling Pollock sixty years too late, quick to push and slap back when he's de-inhibited on liquor or meth, but at least he made her laugh and didn't try to lay a guilt trip on her, implying he could have been a better mother of Ahmad than she was. Or maybe she should go out with a resident, like that new little guy with a blinky stammer on his way to be a neurosurgeon; but, face it, she is too old for a resident now, and in any case they always pass up the nurses they fuck and go for the proctologist's daughter. Still, just the thought of the world of men out there, even at her age, even in northern New Jersey, hardens her heart against this lugubrious, boringly well-intentioned, stale-smelling man. She resolves to put him behind her.

"Secretive," she clarifies. "Maybe he's found a girl. I hope so. Isn't he way overdue?"

Jack says, "Kids today have more to worry about than we did. At least than I did-I shouldn't talk as if we're the same age."

"Oh, go ahead. Help yourself."

"It's not just AIDS and the rest; there's a certain hunger for, I don't know, the absolute, when everything is so relative, and all the economic forces are pushing instant gratification and credit-card debt at them. It's not just the Christian right-Ashcroft and his morning revival meeting down in D.C. You see it in Ahmad. And the Black Muslims. People want to go back to simple-black and white, right and wrong, when things aren't simple."

"So my son is simple-minded."

"In a way. But so is most of mankind. Otherwise, being human is too tough. Unlike the other animals, we know too much. They, the other animals, know just enough to get the job done and die. Eat, sleep, fuck, have babies, and die."

"Jack, everything you say is depressing. That's why you're so sad."

"All I'm saying is that kids like Ahmad need to have something they don't get from society any more. Society doesn't let them be innocent any more. The crazy Arabs are right- hedonism, nihilism, that's all we offer. Listen to the lyrics of these rock and rap stars-just kids themselves, with smart agents. Kids have to make more decisions than they used to, because adults can't tell them what to do. We don't know what to do, we don't have the answers we used to; we just futz along, trying not to think. Nobody accepts responsibility, so the kids, some of the kids, take it on. Even at a dump like Central High, where the demographics are stacked against the whole school population, you see it-this wish to do right, to be good, to sign up for something-die Army, the marching band, the gang, the choir, the student council, the Boy Scouts even. The Boy Scout leader, the priests, all they want is to bugger the kids, it turns out, but the kids keep showing up, hoping for some guidance. In die halls, their faces break your heart, they're so hopeful, wanting to be good, to amount to something. They expect something of themselves. This is America, we all expect something, even the sociopaths have some sort of a good opinion of themselves. You know what they wind up being, the worst discipline cases? They wind up being cops and high-school teachers. They want to please society, though they say they don't. They want to be worthy, if we could just tell them what worth is." His discourse, delivered in a rapid, edgy mutter from within his hairy chest, lurches: "Shit, forget what I just said. The priests and Boy Scout troop leaders don't only want to bugger them; they want to be good, too. But they can't, the little boys' bottoms are just too inviting. Terry, tell me: why am I going on like this?"

Her inner sliding brings her to: "Maybe because you sense that this is your last chance."

"My last chance at what?"

"At sharing yourself with me."

"What are you saying?"

"Jack, it's no good. It's hurting your marriage and isn't doing me any good either. It did at first. You're a great guy – just not my guy. After some of the jerks I've been dealing widi, you're a saint. I mean it. But I got to deal with reality, I've got to think about my future. Already, Ahmad's gone- all he needs from me is some food in the refrigerator."

"I need you, Terry."

"You do and you don't. You tliink my painting's a crock-"

"Oh no. I love your painting. I love it that you have this extra dimension. Now, if BetJi-"

"If Beth had an extra dimension, she'd break through the floor." She laughs at diis image, sitting up in bed so her breasts bounce free of the sheet, their top half freckled, the half witii tiie nipple untouched by die sun no matter how many other men have put their lips and fingers there.

The Irish in her, he thinks. That's what he loves, that's what he can't do witJiout. The moxie, the defiant spark of craziness people get if they're sat on long enough-the Irish have it, the blacks and Jews have it, but it's died in him. He wanted to be a comic but he's become a humorless enforcer of a system that doesn't believe in itself. All those mornings waking up too early, he was giving himself time to die in. Learn to die in your spare time. What did Emerson say about being dead? At least you're done with the dentist. That struck him forty years ago, when he could still read something that mattered. This zaftig redhead isn't dead yet, and she knows it. But he has to protest to her, of Beth, "Let's leave her out of it. She can't help the shape she's in."

"Oh, crap. If she can't, who can? As to leaving her out of it, I'd have loved to, Jack, but you can't. You bring her with you. There's a look on your face, a look that says, 'So help me, dear Lord, this is just for an hour.' You treat me like a fifty-minute class period at school. I can feel you waiting for the buzzer." This is the way, she thinks. This is the way to repel him, to make herself repulsive-attack his wife. "You're married, Jack. You're too fucking married for me."

"No." It comes out as a whimper.

"You are," Terry tells him. "I tried to forget it, but you wouldn't let me. I give up. For my own sake, Jack, I got to give up. Let me go now."

"What about Ahmad?"

This surprises her. "What about him?"

"I worry about him. Something's fishy with this furniture store."

Her temper is getting short; it has not been helped by Jack's lying there in the sweaty warmth of her bed as if he was still her lover and had some rights of tenancy. "So what?" she says. "Something's fishy everywhere these days. I can't live Ahmad's life for him, and I can't live yours. I wish you well, Jack, I truly do. You're a sweet, sad man. But if you call me or come around after you go out the door today, it'll be harassment."

"Hey, don't," he says brokenly, just wanting things back the way they were an hour ago, she greeting him with a wet kiss that carried down to their groins, the apartment door not even closed behind them. He liked having a woman on the side. He liked her baggage: her being a mother, her being a painter, her being a nurse's aide, forgiving of other people's bodies.

She gets out of the bed that smells of them both. "Let go, Jack," she tells him, standing just out of his arm's reach. With a wary quickness she bends down to retrieve some of her clothes where she dropped them. Her tone is getting pedagogic, scolding. "Don't be a leech. I bet you're a leech on Beth, too. Sucking, sucking the life out of a woman, dragging her down into your feeling so sorry for yourself. No wonder she eats. I've given what I can, Jack, and must move on. Please. Don't make it hard."

He begins to resent and resist this cunt's scolding tone. "I can't believe this is happening, for no reason," he says. He feels soft, too limp and damp to get out of her bed; her image of a leech has penetrated him. Maybe she's right; he's a burden on the world. He stalls. "Let's give ourselves some time to tb.ink about it," he says. "I'll call you in a week."

"Don't you dare."

This imperious command gets his goat; he snaps, "What's your reason again? I missed it."

"You teach school, you've heard of a clean slate."

"I'm a guidance counselor."

"Well, give yourself some guidance. Clean up your act."

"If I got rid of Beth, what would happen then?"

"I don't know. Nothing much, probably. Anyway, how would you get rid of her?"

Indeed, how? Terry's bra is back on, and her jeans are being angrily tugged up, his inert nakedness becoming increasingly shameful and abject. He says, "O.K. Enough said. Sorry if I've been thick." Still he keeps lying there. A melody from long ago, when the downtown bristled witJi movie marquees, enters his head-a cascading, slippery tune. He croons the concluding phrase: "Deedee-dit-dtf-dat-daaa."

"What's that?" she asks, angry tiiough she has won.

"Not a Terry tune. Another kind, Warner Brotliers. At the end a stuttering pig would pop out of a drum and say, "Th-th-that's all, folks!"

"You're not cute, you know."

He kicks off the sheet. He likes the feel of being a naked hairy animal, spent genitals flopping, yellow-soled feet smelling cheesy; he likes the flare of alarm in the other animal's glassy bulging eyes. Standing naked, his creased and sagging sexagenarian self, Jack Levy tells her, "I'll miss the hell out of you." As the cool air licks his skin, he remembers reading years ago how that paleontologist Leakey, who found the world's oldest human in the Olduvai Gorge, claimed that a naked human being could run down and kill bare-handed any prey, even a toothed predator, smaller than he. He feels that potential within him. He could wrestle this smaller member of his own species to the floor and strangle her. "You were my last-" he begins.

"Your last what? Piece of ass? That's your problem, not mine. You can hire it, you know." Her freckled face is pink with defiance. She doesn't get it, that she doesn't have to fight him, being crude and spelling everything out. He knows when he's flunked the course. He feels his exposed flesh as dead weight.

"Hey, Terry, easy. My last reason to live, I was going to say. My last reason for joie de vivre."

"Don't do a sentimental kike number on me, Jack. I'll miss you, too." Then she has to add hurtfully, "For a while."

Charlie greets Ahmad one morning early in September saying, "This is your lucky day, Madman!"

"How so?"

"You'll see." Charlie has been sober yet brusque lately, as if something is eating at him, but whatever this surprise is pleases him so simply that, seen from the side, the corner of his restless mouth tucks into his cheek with a smile. "First, we got a ton of deliveries, one of them way down to Camden."

"Do they need both of us? I don't mind doing it alone." He has come to prefer it. In the solitude of the cab he is not alone, God is with him. But God is Himself alone, He is the ultimate of solitude. Ahmad loves his lonely God.

"Yep, they do. One's a Hide-A-Bed, they weigh a fucking ton with all that internal metal, and the Camden delivery is an eighty-eight-inch all-actual-leather nail-head sofa, with flared arms. But you mustn't lift by the arms; they crack right off, as one of your predecessors and I discovered. Marked down from over a thousand, for the waiting room of a fancy clinic for disturbed children."

"Disturbed?"

"Who isn't, right? Anyway, with the two matching armchairs it's a two-grand deal, and we don't get those every day of the week. Watch that oil truck on your left; I think the bastard's stoned."

But Ahmad already has his eye on the speeding, grimy Getty tanker, wondering if the driver is taking sufficient account of liquid surge and other factors requiring caution. September brings with it an extra danger on the streets and highways, as returning vacationers jostle and joust for their old place in the pack. "Excellency is heading upscale," Charlie is saying, "with all these new houses selling for a million up. Have you noticed, on the quiz shows, the audience no longer laughs when you say you're from New Jersey? We're getting to be Connecticut South, only a tunnel away from Wall Street. My dad and uncle, they thought modest- stained poplar and stapled vinyl for the masses-but now we get these white-collar commuters from Montclair and Short Hills who think nothing of forking over two grand for a bone leather sectional or three for an Old World-style dining suite, say, with a matching Gothic-style curio cabinet and everything carved oak. Stuff like that moves these days;

it never used to. We'd take die odd quality piece at an estate clearance and have it on the floor for years. There's new money even in poor old New Prospect."

"It is good," Ahmad says cautiously, "that business thrives." He dares to add, seeking harmony with Charlie's upbeat mood, "Perhaps the new customers expect to find a cash bonus tucked into the cushions."

Charlie's profile doesn't acknowledge any joke. He keeps his tone offhand. "We've done our payouts for now. Uncle Maurice has headed back to Miami. Now we're the ones waiting for delivery." His tone becomes less offhand; he says, "Madman, you don't talk about your job here with anybody, do you? The details. Anybody ever quiz you? Your mother, say? Any guys that she dates?"

"My mother is too self-absorbed to spare me much curiosity. She is relieved I have steady employment, and contribute now to our expenses. But we come and go in our apartment as strangers." This is not quite true, it occurs to him. The other night, during an unusual, well-cooked dinner together at the old round table where he used to study, she asked him if he had ever felt anything "fishy" at the furniture store. Not at all, he told her. He is learning to lie. To be honest with Charlie, he tells him, "I tJiink recently my mother has suffered one of her romantic sorrows, for the odier night she produced a flurry of interest in me, as if remembering that I was still diere. But this mood of hers will pass. We have never communicated well. My father's absence stood between us, and tJien my faith, which I adopted before entering my teen years. She is a warm-natured woman, and no doubt cares for her hospital patients, but I tiiink has as little talent for motherhood as a cat. Cats let the kittens suckle for a time and then treat them as enemies. I am not yet quite grown enough to be my mother's enemy, but I am mature enough to be an object of indifference."

"How does she feel about your not having a girlfriend?"

"I think she is relieved, if anything. An attachment to my life would complicate hers. Another woman, however young, might begin to judge her and hold her to a certain standard of conventional behavior."

Charlie interrupts: "There's a left turn coming-I think not this light but die next-where we get Route 512 to Summit, where we drop off the dinette set with the cinnamon finish. So you haven't gotten laid yet?" He takes Ahmad's silence to confirm his assertion, and says, "Good." The dimpling smile has returned to his profile. Ahmad is so used to seeing Charlie in profile that it shocks him when the man turns in die shadows of the cab and shows him botJi sides of his face. Having done this, Charlie returns his gaze to die shifting lights seen through die windshield. "You're right about Western advertisers," he says, picking up an old thread between them. "They push sex because it means consumption. First the liquor and flowers diat go with dating, and then the breeding and the buying diat goes with that, baby food and SUVs and-"

"Dinette sets," Ahmad supplies.

When Charlie is not kidding he is so serious he invites teasing. The lone eye in his profile blinks and his mouth makes a swigging motion, as if he has tasted a sour truth. "A bigger house, I was going to say. These young couples spend and go deeper and deeper into debt, which is just what the Jewish usurers want. It's die 'buy now, pay later' trap-very seductive." But he did hear the teasing; he goes on, "Sure, we're merchants. But Dad's idea was, reasonable prices. Don't encourage die customer to buy more dian he can afford. Bad for him, and eventually bad for us. We didn't even accept credit cards until a couple years ago. Now we do. One must join the system," he says, "until the moment."

"The moment?"

"The moment to give it a blow from within." He sounds impatient. He seems to think Ahmad knows more than he does.

Ahmad asks him, "When does such a moment arrive?"

Charlie ponders. "It arrives when it has been created. It can be never, or can be sooner than we think."

Ahmad feels he is balanced on a scaffolding of straws, in the dizzying space of tlieir shared faith, revealed when the other man spoke of the Jewish usurers. Having been admitted, die boy feels, to a rare level of Charlie's confidence, he in turn confides, "I have a God to whom I turn five times a day. My heart needs no other companion. The obsession with sex confesses the infidels' emptiness, and their terror. "

Charlie says, perking up, "Hey, don't knock it till you've tried it. Here we are. Number eight eleven Monroe. One cinnamon dinette set, coming up. One table, four chairs."

The house is a hybrid colonial, red brick and white wood, on a well-watered small lawn. The young lady of the house, Chinese-American, comes out on her flagstone walk to greet them. As the two men carry in chairs and an oval table, her two children, a kindergarten-age girl in hot-pink overalls with duckling appliques and a male toddler in a food-stained T-shirt and a sagging diaper, stare and cavort as if another set of siblings is being delivered. The young mother in her happiness of fresh acquisition offers to tip Charlie a ten, but he waves it away, giving her a lesson in American equality. "It's been our pleasure," he tells her. "Enjoy."

There are fourteen more deliveries that day, and by the time they get back from Camden long shadows have crept across Reagan Boulevard, and die otJier stores are closed. They approach from die west. Next to Excellency Home Furnishings, on the other side of Thirteenth Street, there is a tire store tJiat used to be a service station, with the gas island still in place though the pumps are gone, and next to it a funeral home, converted from a private mansion before this section of town went commercial, with a deep porch and white awnings and a discreet sign, unger amp; son, out on the lawn. They park the truck in die lot and wearily clump up onto the resounding loading platform, into die back door and die hall, where Ahmad punches his card on the time clock. "Don't forget, you have a surprise," Charlie tells him.

The reminder surprises Ahmad; in die course of the long day he has forgotten. He has outgrown games.

"It's waiting upstairs," says Charlie in a voice too soft to be heard by his fadier, who is working late in his office. "Let yourself out the back when you're done. Put die alarm on when you go."

Habib Chehab, bald as a mole in his musty underworld of furniture new and used, emerges from behind his office door. He looks pale even after a summer of Pompton Lakes, with a sickly puffiness to his face, but he says cheerfully to Ahmad, "How's the boy?"

"I can't complain, Mr. Chehab."

The old man contemplates his young driver, feeling a need to say something additional, to cap a summer's worth of faithful service. "You the best boy," he says. "Hundreds of miles, two, three hundred miles many days, not a dent, not a scrape. No speeding ticket, either. Excellent."

"Thank you, sir. It's been my pleasure"-a phrase, he realizes, he heard from Charlie earlier in the day.

Mr. Chehab looks at him curiously. "You going to stay with us, now Labor Day here?"

"Sure. What else? I love driving."

"I just thought, boys like you-bright, obedient-go for more education."

"People have suggested it, sir, but I don't feel the need yet." More education, he feared, might weaken his faith. Doubts he had held off in high school might become irresistible in college. The Straight Path was taking him in another, purer direction. He couldn't explain this very well. Ahmad wonders how much the old man knows of the smuggled cash, of the four men in the Shore cottage, of his own son's anti-Americanism, of his brother's connections in Florida. It would be strange if he were totally ignorant of these currents; but, then, families, as Ahmad knows from his own family of two, are nests of secrets, of eggs that lightly touch but hold each its own life.

As the two men move toward the back door to the parking lot and their own separate cars-Habib's Buick, Charlie's Saab-Charlie repeats his instructions to Ahmad about activating the alarm and closing the door with its oiled double lock. Mr. Chehab asks, "The boy stays?"

Charlie puts a hand on his father's back to urge him forward. "Papa, I've given Ahmad an assignment to do upstairs. You trust him to close up, don't you?"

"Why ask? He is good boy. Like family."

"Actually," Ahmad hears Charlie explaining to his father on the loading porch, "the kid has a date and wants to freshen up and put on clean clothes."

Date? Ahmad thinks. He has already figured out the surprise Charlie has for him: it will be a hassock, like the one he delivered, stuffed with money, an end-of-summer bonus. But as if to make Charlie's lie to his father good, Ahmad does, in the little lavatory next to the water cooler, scrub the day's grime from his hands and splash water on his face and neck before making his way toward the stairs, in the middle of the store, up to the second floor. With silent steps he climbs them. The second floor displays beds and dressers, side tables and armoires, mirrors and lamps. These things bulk in the dim light of a distant bedside lamp, while the headlights of the evening rush flicker at the high windows. Unlit lampshades knife into the shadows with their acute angles; overhead fixtures dangle spiderlike. There are padded headboards, and headboards of florid wooden shapes, and others of parallel rods of brass. Bare mattresses, side by side on both sides, present a pair of receding planes raised up by the thickness of box springs mounted on metal frames. As he moves between the two receding planes, his heart beats and his nose is touched by forbidden cigarette smoke and his ears by a familiar voice. "Ahmad! They didn't tell me it would he you."

"Joryleen? Is that you} They didn't tell me anything." The black girl steps out from behind the low-lit lampshade, under which the smoke from her cigarette, suddenly doused in an ashtray improvised from a candy bar's tinfoil wrap, stands up like a piece of sculpture, slowly twisting. As his eyes adjust he sees that she is wearing a red vinyl miniskirt and tight black top with a low oval neckline like that of a ballet leotard. Her roundnesses have been poured somehow into a new mold, narrower at the waist; her jaw is leaner. Her hair is cut shorter and splashed with blond bleach, the way it never was at Central High. Looking lower, he sees she is wearing white boots with zigzag stitching and long pointed toes, the new kind with lots of spare room in the front. "All I was told was to wait for this boy that needs to be devirginated."

"To be laid, I bet he said."

"Yes, he did, come to think of it. You don't hear that word all the time; you hear lots of others. He said he was your boss and here was where you worked. Tylenol was who he originally talked to, but he wanted then to see me and tell me how sweet I should be to this certain boy. He was a tall kind of Arab, with a shifty twitchy mouth. I said to myself, ^l]ory-leen, don't you trust tliat man,' but his cash was good. Nice clean bills."

Ahmad is struck; he would not have described Charlie as an Arab or as shifty. "They're Lebanese. Charlie's been raised pure American. He's not exactly my boss, he's tbe son of the owner, and we deliver furniture in a truck together."

"You know, Ahmad, pardon my saying it, but I would have figured you back in school for something a little above that. Something where you could use your head more."

"Well, Joryleen, I could say the same about you. The last time I had a good look, you were dressed up in choir robes. What you doing in that hooker outfit, talking about devir-ginating people?"

Defensively she tips back her head, pushing out her mouth, with its greasy shine of a coral-colored lipstick. "It's not something permanent," she explains. "Just a few favors Tylenol asks me to do for people till we get set up and can have a house of our own and all." Joryleen looks around her and changes the subject. "You mean a bunch of Arabs have all this on their own? Where their money come from?"

"You don't understand business. You borrow from the bank to create an inventory, and then the interest gets figured into your expenses. That's called capitalism. The Chehabs came over here in the 'sixties, when everything was easier."

"I guess it was," she says, and sits down bouncily on a bare mattress, its pattern of cushioned diamond shapes covered in a silvery brocade. Her little red miniskirt, smaller than a cheerleader's, allows him to see her thighs, spread fat from the pressure of the mattress edge. He thinks of only her underpants coming between her bare bottom and tiie fancy ticking; the thought constricts his throat. Everything about her seems to gleam-her hot-pink lipstick, her short hair moussed up into little points like porcupine quills, the gold sparkles sprinkled in the grease around her eyes. She says, to fill his silence, "Those were easy times, compared to nowadays and its job market."

"Why doesn't Tylenol get a job for this money he wants?"

"He thinks too big for any old job. He has plans to be a big man some day and meanwhile asks me to put a little bread on the table. He doesn't ax me to work the street, just oblige somebody now and then, usually some white man. When we're fixed up and settled down he's gone to treat me like a queen, he says." Since high school she has pierced one eyebrow for a little ring to add to the nostril-bead and the silver row of rings that looks like a caterpillar feeding on the upper curve of her ear. "So, Ahmad. No more just standing there staring your face off. What would you like? I could give you a blow job right tbe way we are and cut down on the mess, but I think your Mr. Charlie had his heart set on your getting a real piece of ass, which involves a scumbag and a wash-up afterwards. He paid me for the full deal, depending on how it suited you. He anticipated you might be shy."

Ahmad whimpers. "Joryleen, I can't stand to hear you talk like this."

"Talk like what way, Ahmad? You still have your head up there in Arab Neverland? I'm just trying to be clear. Let's get some clothes off and pick one of these beds. Boy, do we have the beds!"

"Joryleen, you keep those clothes on. I respect you the way you used to be, and anyway don't want to be devir-ginated, until a lawful marriage to a good Muslim woman, like the Qur'an says."

"She's out there in Neverland, baby, and I'm right here and ready to take you around the world."

"What does that mean, 'take you around the world'?"

"I can show you. You don't even have to take off that faggy white shirt, just your black pants. Those are evil tight pants of yours; they used to get me to creaming."

And, her face at the level of his fly, Joryleen opens her lips, not as wide as when she used to sing, but wide enough so he can see in. The moist inner membranes and gums gleam at the base of her teeth, the perfect pearly arc of diem, with the fat pale tongue behind. The whites of her eyes enlarge as she looks a question up into his face.

"Don't you be disgusting," he says, though the flesh behind his fly has responded.

Joryleen turns pettish, teasing. "You want me to have to return tire money your Mr. Charlie gave? You want Tylenol to beat the shit out of me?"

"Is that what he does?"

"He tries not to mark me up. The older pimps tell him you're just spiting your own self when you do that." She stops looking up at him and gently butts him below his belt, twisting her head there like a dog drying off. She looks up again. "Come on, you pretty thing. You like me, I can see you do." With both sets of long-nailed fingertips she touches the bulge behind his fly.

He jumps back, alarmed less by Joryleen's caress than by the devil of assent and submission rising within him, stiffening one part of his body and causing a dazed relaxation elsewhere, as if his blood has been injected with a thickening substance; she has roused a sugary reality within him, that of a man coming into his own in the service of the seed he carries. Women are his fields, on couches with linings of brocade shall they recline, and the fruit of the two gardens shall be within easy reach. He tells Joryleen, "I like you too well to treat you like some whore."

But she is in a crooning mood, amused and challenged by her balky customer. "Just let me take him into my mouth," she says. "That's no sin in the old Koran. That's just natural affection. We're made for it, Ahmad. And we won't stay made forever. We get old, we get sick. Be your plain self with me for an hour, and you'll be doing us both a favor. Wouldn't you like to play with my nice big tits? I see you looking down my blouse every time we got close at school."

He holds himself back from her, his calves pressing against the mattress of the next bare bed, but is too dazed by the storm in his blood to protest when in a zigzag set of gestures she tugs her close-fitting top out of her little skirt, pulls it up over her blotchily bleached head of short hair, and, arching her back, uncouples her webby black bra. The brown of her breasts is dark as eggplants in the circles around the meat-colored nipples. Having them there out in the air, purple and rose, looking less enormous than they seemed half concealed, makes her feel, somehow, more like the old friendly Joryleen he used to, slightly, know, her smile both cocky and tentative out by the lockers.

He says, with a thick tongue and dry throat, "I don't want you telling Tylenol what we did and didn't do."

"O.K., I won't, I promise. He doesn't like to hear what I do with the tricks anyway."

"I want you to take off the rest of your clothes and we'll just lie together a while and talk."

That he has taken even this much initiative seems to subdue her. She crosses her legs and takes off one pointy white boot and then the other and stands, the top of her spiky blond-spotted head no higher, now that she is barefoot, than the base of Ahmad's throat. Joryleen bumps against his chest, balancing on one leg and now the other, to pull down her red vinyl skirt and filmy black underpants. This done, she keeps her chin and eyelids lowered, waiting, crossing her arms in front of her breasts as if nudity makes her more modest.

He stands back and says, "Little Miss Popular," marvelling at the real, bare, vulnerable Joryleen. "We'll leave my clothes on," he tells her. "Let me see what I can find for a blanket and some pillows."

"It's pretty hot and stuffy up here," she says. "I'm not sure we need a blanket."

"A blanket under us," he explains. "To protect the mattress. You know what a good mattress costs?" Most are protected in thick plastic, but tJiat would make an unpleasant, skin-adhesive surface to lie down on.

"Hey, let's move this show along," she complains. "I'm all undressed-suppose somebody comes up?"

"I'm surprised you care," he says, "if you turn all those tricks." He has taken on a responsibility, to create a bower for him and a mate; the sensation excites him but makes him anxious. Turning at the head of the stairs, he sees her, sitting calmly in the lamplight, light anotlier cigarette, and the smoke make that rippling structure in the conical glow. He runs downstairs, rapidly so she won't evaporate. Amid the furniture in the main showroom he finds no blankets, but he takes two patterned pillows from a chenille-covered sofa and carries up along with them a small Oriental rug, four by six. These hurried tasks cool him off a little, but his legs still tremble.

" 'Bout time," she greets him. He arranges the pillows and rug on the mattress, and she stretches herself out on the rug's intertwining pattern, bordered in blue-the traditional image, Habib Chehab has explained to him, of an oasis garden, encircled by a river. Joryleen, one arm cocked behind her head on the chenille pillow, exposes a shaved armpit. "Man, this is kinky," she says as he lies down, shoeless but otherwise clothed, beside her.

His shirt will get wrinkled, but he figures this is part of what this will cost him. "Can I put my arm around you?" he asks.

"Oh, Christ, sure. You're entitled to a lot more than tliat."

"Just this," he tells her, "is as much as I can stand."

"O.K. Ahmad: now, you relax."

"I don't want to do anytliing mat strikes you as repulsive."

This makes her smile, and then laugh, so he feels her expressed breath warm on the side of his neck. "That would be harder than you'd like to know."

"Why do you do it? Let Tylenol send you out like this."

She sighs, again a gust of life on his neck. "You don't know much yet about love. He's my man. Without me, he doesn't have much. He'd be pathetic, and maybe I love him too much for him to know that. For a black man grown up poor in New Prospect, having a woman to peddle around is no disgrace-it's a way to prove your manhood."

"Yeah, but what are^ow getting to prove?"

"That I can deal with shit, I guess. It's just for a while. I don't do drugs, that's how the girls get hooked, they do the drugs so they can stand die shit, and then the habit becomes the main shit. All I'll do is grass, and a puff of crack now and then; nobody's breakin' into my veins. I can walk away, when circumstances change."

"Joryleen: how would tliey change?"

She offers, "He gets set up with some other connection. Or I say I won't do it any more."

"I don't think he will let you go easily now. You yourself say you're all he has."

She confesses the truth of diis with her silence, a silence that adds a density to her body under his arm. Lightly she presses her belly against his, and her breasts are like sponges of warm water held at the level of his shirt pocket, deepening the wrinkles. At a far reach of him, her toenails- painted plain red, he noticed when she took off her pointy white boots, whereas her fingernails are painted silver and green divided the long way-scratch at his ankles in playful interrogation. These touches from her are wonderfully welcome, washing across his senses with the odors of her hair and scalp and sweat and the velvet abrasion of her voice, close to his ear. He hears in her breath a huskiness with its own tremble. "I don't want to talk about me," she tells him. "That kind of talk scares me." She must be aware, if less intensely than he, of the congested knot of arousal below his waist, but in obedience to die pact he has imposed upon her she does not touch it. He has never had power over anybody before, not since his mother, without a husband, had to worry about keeping him alive.

He persists, "What about all that church singing you were doing? How does that fit in?"

"It doesn't. I don't do it any more. My mother doesn't understand why I've dropped out. She says Tylenol is a bad influence. She doesn't know how right she is. Listen: the deal is you can fuck me, but not grill me."

"I just want to be with you, as close as I can."

"Oh, boy. I've heard that before. Men, they are all heart. Let's hear about you, then. How's old Allah doing? How do you like being holy, now that school's out and we're in the real world?"

His lips move an inch from her forehead. He has decided to be open witii her, about this thing in his life that his instinct is to protect from everyone, even from Charlie, even from Shaikh Rashid. "I still hold to the Straight Path," he tells Joryleen. "Islam is still my comfort and guide. But-"

"But what, baby?"

"When I turn to Allah and try to think of Him, it is borne in upon me how alone He is, in all the starry space He has willed into existence. In the Qur'an, He is called the Loving, the Self-Subsistent. I used to think of the love; now I'm struck by the self-subsistence, in all that emptiness. People are always thinking of themselves," he tells Joryleen. "Nobody thinks of God-if He suffers or not, if He likes being what He is. What does He see in the world, to take any pleasure in it? And to even think of such things, to try to make such pictures of God as a kind of human being, my master the imam would tell me was blasphemy, deserving an eternity of Hellfire."

"My goodness, what a lot to take on in your own brain. Maybe He gave us each other, so we wouldn't be as alone as He is. That's in the Bible, pretty much."

"Yeah, but what are we? Smelly animals, really, with a little bunch of animal needs, and shorter lives than turtles."

This-his mentioning turtles-makes Joryleen laugh; when she laughs, her whole naked body jiggles against his, so he tliinks of all those intestines, and stomach and things, packed in: she has all that inside her, and yet also a loving spirit, breathing against the side of his neck, where God is as close as a vein. She says to him, "You better get on top of all those weird ideas you have, or they gone to drive you crazy."

His lips move within an inch of her brow. "At times I have this yearning to join God, to alleviate His loneliness." No sooner are the words out of his mouth than he recognizes them as blasphemy: in the twenty-ninth sura it is written, Allah does not need His creatures' help.

"To die, you mean? You're scaring me again, Ahmad. How's that prick been poking me doing? We talk it all away?" She touches him, quickly, expertly. "No, man, we didn't. He's still there, wanting what he wants. I can't stand it-can't stand the suspense. Don't you do a thing. Allah can blame me. I can take it, I'm just a woman, dirty anyway." Joryleen puts her hands one on each of his buttocks through the black jeans and by pulling him rhythmically into her pushing softness draws him up and up into a convulsive transformation, a vaulting inversion of his knotted self like that, perhaps, which occurs when the soul passes at death into Paradise.

The two young bodies cling together, panting climbers who have attained a ledge. Joryleen says, "There, now. You got a mess in your pants but we didn't have to use any scumbag and you're still a virgin for that bride of yours with the head scarf."

"The hijab. There may never be such a bride."

"Why you say that? You've got the working parts, and a good nature besides."

"A feeling," he answers her. "You may be the closest to a bride I get." He lightly accuses her, "I didn't ask you to do that, making me come."

"I like to earn my money," she tells him. He is sorry to feel her relax into conversation, receding from the tight, moist seam that made them one body. "I don't know where you get that bad feeling from, but that Charlie friend of yours has some sort of game going. Why'd he arrange this hook-up, when you didn't ax for it?"

"He thought it was something I needed. And maybe I did. Thank you, Joryleen. Though, as you said, it was unclean."

"It's almost like they're fattening you up."

"Who is, for what?"

"Sugar, I don't know. You heard my advice. Get away from that truck."

"Suppose I told you to get away from Tylenol?"

"That's not so easy. He's my man."

Ahmad tries to understand. "We seek attachments, however unfortunate."

"You got it."

The mess in his underpants is drying, growing sticky; still, he resists when she tries to roll out from under his arm. "Got to go," Joryleen says.

He hugs her tighter, a little cruelly. "Have you earned your money?"

"Haven't I? I felt you shoot off, real big."

He wants to join her in uncleanness. "We didn't fuck, though. Maybe we should. Charlie would want me to."

"Getting the idea, huh? Too late this time, Ahmad. Let's keep you pure for now."

Night has descended outside the furniture store. They are two beds away from the single lit lamp, and by its dim light her face, on the pillow of white chenille, is a black oval, a perfect oval holding its sparkles and the silvery small movements of her lips and eyelids. She is lost to God but is giving her life for another, so that Tylenol, that pathetic bully, can live. "Do one more thing for me," Ahmad begs. "Joryleen, I can't bear to let you go."

"What kind of thing?"

"Sing to me."

"Boy. You're a man, all right. Always wanting one more thing."

"Just a little song. I loved it, in the church, being able to pick your voice out from all the others."

"And now somebody's taught you how to sweet-talk. I got to sit up. You can't sing lying down. Lying down's for other things." This was needlessly coarse of her to say. Her breasts there in the light from the lone lamp in that ocean of mattresses have crescents of shadow beneath their rounded weight; she is eighteen, but already gravity tugs them down. He has an urge to reach out and touch the jut of her meat-colored nipples, to pinch them even, since she is a whore and used to worse, and wonders at this itch of cruelty within him, fighting that tenderness which would seduce him away from his innermost loyalty. He that fights for Allah's cause, the twenty-ninth sura says, fights for himself. Ahmad closes his eyes as he sees from the tensing little muscles of her lips, with that delicate welt of flesh that runs around their edges, that she is about to sing.

" 'What a friend we have in Jesus,' " she croons, quaver-ingly and without the jumping syncopation of the version he heard in church, " 'all our sins and griefs to bear… ' " As she sings she reaches out a pale-palmed hand and touches his brow, an upright square brow bent on carrying more faith than most men can bear, and, her fingers with their two-toned nails straying, pinches the lobe of his ear in conclusion. " '… take it to the Lord in prayer.' "

He watches her briskly put her clothes back on: bra first, then, with a comical wriggle, her skimpy underpants; next, her snug jersey, short enough to let a strip of belly show, and the scarlet miniskirt. She sits on the edge of the bed to put on her long-toed boots, over some thin white socks he hadn't noticed her taking off. To protect the leather from her sweat, and her feet from the smell.

What time is it? The dark comes earlier every day. Not much past seven; he has been with her less than an hour. His mother might be home, waiting to feed him. She has more time for him, lately. Reality calls: he must get up and smooth any shadow of their shapes out of the plastic-wrapped mattress and restore the carpet and cushions to their places downstairs and lead Joryleen among the tables and armchairs, past the desks and the water cooler and the time clock, and let them both out the back door into the night, busy with headlights less now of workers coming home than of people out hunting for something, for dinner or for love. Her singing and his coming have left him so sleepy that the thought, as he walks the dozen blocks home, of going to bed and never waking up has no terror for him.

Shaikh Rashid greets him in the language of the Qur'an: "fa-inna ma a 'l-'usri yusrd." Ahmad, his classical Arabic rusty after three months of skipping his lessons at the mosque, deciphers the quote in the head and ponders it for hidden meanings. Every hardship is followed by ease. He recognizes it as from "Comfort," one of the early Meccan suras placed late in the Book because of their shorter length but dear to his master because of their compressed, enigmatic nature. Sometimes called "The Opening," it addresses, in God's voice, the Prophet himself: Have We not lifted up your heart and relieved you of the burden which weighed down your back?

His encounter with Joryleen had been arranged for the

Friday before Labor Day, so it was not until the next Tuesday that Charlie Chehab asked him at work, "How'd it go?"

"Fine" was Ahmad's queasy reply. "It turns out I knew her, slightly, at Central High. She has been led sorely astray since."

"She do the job?"

"Oh, yes. The job is done."

"Good. Her thug promised she could do it nicely. What a relief. To me, I mean. It didn't feel natural, you still having your cherry. Don't know why I took it so personally, but I did. Feel like a new man?"

"Oh, yes. I see life through a new veil. A new lens, I should say."

"Great. Great. Until your first piece of ass, you really haven't lived. I got mine when I was sixteen. Two, actually- a pro with a Trojan, and a girl from the neighborhood bareback. But that was when things were wilder, before AIDS. Your generation is smart to be cautious."

"We were cautious." Ahmad blushed at the secret he was hiding from Charlie, that he was still pure. But he had no wish to disappoint his mentor by sharing this truth. There had perhaps been too much sharing between them, in the closeness of the cab as Excellency processed New Jersey beneath its whirring wheels. Joryleen's advice to get away from that truck rankles.

An air of apprehension, of nervous multi-tasking, clung to Charlie this morning. The quick creasing of his face, the flitting expressions of his mobile mouth, seemed excessive in his office behind the showroom, where morning coffee was consumed and the day's plan was sketched. Unwashed olive coveralls waited here, and yellow slickers for days of delivering in the rain; they hung on their hooks like flayed skins.

Charlie announced, "I ran into Shaikh Rashid over the long weekend."

"Oh, yes?" Of course, Ahmad reflected, the Chehabs were significant members of the mosque; there was nothing strange in an encounter.

"He'd like to see you over at the Islamic Center."

"To chastise me, I fear. Now that I work, I neglect the Qur'an, and my Friday attendance has fallen off, though I never fail, as you have noticed, to fulfill salat, wherever I can spend five minutes in an unpolluted place."

Charlie frowned. "You can't do just you and God, Madman. He sent His Prophet, and the Prophet created a community. Witbout the ummah, the knowledge and practice of belonging to a righteous group, faith is a seed that bears no fruit."

"Is that what Shaikh Rashid told you to say to me?" It sounded more like Shaikh Rashid than Charlie.

The man grinned-that sudden, engaging exposure of his teeth, like a child caught out in a trick. "Shaikh Rashid can speak for himself. But he isn't calling you to him to rebuke you-quite the contrary. He wants to offer you an opportunity. Shut my big mouth, I'm speaking out of turn. Let him tell you himself. We'll end deliveries early today, and I'll drop you at the mosque."

Thus he has been delivered to his master, the imam from Yemen. The nail salon below the mosque, though well equipped with chairs, holds one bored Vietnamese manicurist reading a magazine, and the Checks Cashed window, through its long Venetian blinds, affords a narrow glimpse of a high counter, protected by a grille, behind which a heavyset white man yawns. Ahmad opens the door between these places of business, the scabby green door numbered 2781V2, and climbs the narrow stairs to the foyer where once the customers of the departed dance studio would wait for their lessons. The bulletin board outside the imam's office still holds the same computer-printed notices for classes in Arabic, for counseling in holy, proper, and seemly marriage in the modern age, and for lectures in Middle Eastern history by this or that visiting mullah. Shaikh Rashid, in his caftan embroidered with silver thread, comes forward and clasps his pupil's hand with an unusual fervor and ceremoniousness; he seems unchanged by the summer past, though in his beard perhaps a few more gray hairs have appeared, to match his dove-gray eyes.

To his initial greeting, while Ahmad is still puzzling over its meaning, Shaikh Rashid adds, "wa la 'l-dkhiratu khayrun laka mina l-uld. wa la-sawfa yu'tika rabbuka fa-tardd." Ahmad dimly recognizes this as from one of the short Mec-can suras of which his master was so fond, perhaps that one called "The Brightness," to the effect that the future, the life to come, holds a richer prize for you than the past. You shall be gratified with what your Lord will give you. In English Shaikh Rashid says, "Dear boy, I have missed our hours studying Scripture together, and talking of great matters. I, too, learned. The simplicity and strength of your faith instructed and fortified my own. There are too few like you."

He leads the young man into his office, and settles himself in the tall wing chair from which he does his teaching. "Well, now," he addresses Ahmad, when both are seated in their accustomed positions around the desk, upon whose surface nothing rests but a well-worn, green-bound copy of the Qur'an. "You have travelled in the wider, infidel world- what our friends the Black Muslims call 'the dead world.' Has it modified your beliefs?"

"Sir, I am not aware that it has. I still feel God beside me, as close as the vein in my neck, cherishing me as only He can."

"Did you not witness, in the cities you visited, poverty and misery that led you to question His mercy, and inequalities of wealth and power that cast doubt on His justice? Did you not discover that the world, in its American portion, emits a stench of waste and greed, of sensuality and futility, of the despair and lassitude that come with ignorance of the inspired wisdom of the Prophet?"

The dry flourishes of this imam's rhetoric, delivered by a two-edged voice that seems to withdraw even as it proffers, afflict Ahmad with a familiar discomfort. He tries to answer honestly, somewhat in Charlie's voice: "This isn't the fanciest part of the planet, I guess, and it has its share of losers, but I enjoyed being out in it, really. People are pretty nice, mostly. Of course, we were usually delivering something they wanted, and they thought would make their lives better. Charlie was good fun to be with. He knows a lot about state history."

Shaikh Rashid leans forward, resting his shoes on the floor, and presses the fingertips of his fine small hands together, perhaps to suppress their tremor. Ahmad wonders why his teacher should be nervous. Perhaps he is jealous of another man's influence upon his student. "Yes," he says. "Charlie is 'fun,' but is possessed of serious purpose as well. He informs me that you have expressed a willingness to die for jihad."

"I did?"

"In an interview in Liberty State Park, in view of lower Manhattan, where the twin towers of capitalist oppression were triumphantly brought down."

"That was an interview?" How strange, Ahmad thinks, that the conversation, in the open air, has been reported here, in the closed space of this inner-city mosque, whose windows have a view of only brick walls and dark clouds. The sky today is close and gray in wispy layers that may produce rain. At that earlier interview, the day had been harshly bright, the cries of children in holiday packs ricocheting between the glitter of the Upper Bay and the glaring white dome of the Science Center. Balloons, gulls, sun. "I will die," he confirms, after silence, "if it is the will of God."

"There is a way," his master cautiously begins, "in which a mighty blow can be delivered against His enemies."

"A plot?" Ahmad asks.

"A way," Shaikh Rashid repeats, fastidiously. "It would involve a shahid whose love of God is unqualified, and who impatiently thirsts for the glory of Paradise. Are you such a one, Ahmad?" The question is put almost lazily, while the master leans back and closes his eyes as if against too strong a light. "Be honest, please."

Ahmad's rickety feeling, of being supported over a gulf of bottomless space only by a scaffold of slender and tenuous supports, has returned. After a life of barely belonging, he is on the shaky verge of a radiant centrality. "I believe I am," the boy tells his teacher. "But I have no warrior skills."

"It has been seen to that you have all the skills you need. The task would involve driving a truck to a certain destination and making a certain simple mechanical connection. Exactly how would be explained to you by the experts that arrange these matters. We have, in our war for God," the imam lightly explains, with an amused small smile, "technical experts equal to those of the enemy, and a will and spirit overwhelmingly greater than his. Do you recall the twenty-fourth sura, al-niir, 'The Light'?"

His eyelids close, showing their tiny purple veins, in the effort of remembering and reciting, "wa 'l-ladhlna kafaru a'mdluhum ka-sardbi biqi'atin yahsabubu 'z-zam'anu ma an hattd idhdjd'ahu lamyajidhn shay'an wa wajada llaha 'indahu fa-waffahu hisdbahu, wa 'lldhu sarl'u 'l-hisab." Opening his eyes to see a guilty incomprehension on Ahmad's face, the shaikh, with his thin off-center smile, translates: " 'As for the unbelievers, their works are like a mirage in a desert. The thirsty traveller thinks it is water, but when he comes near he finds that it is nothing. He finds Allah there, who pays him back in full.' A beautiful image, I have always thought-the traveller thinks it is water, but he finds only Allah there. It dumbfounds him. The enemy has only the mirage of selfishness, of many small selves and interests, to fight for: our side has a single sublime selflessness. We submit to God and become one with Him, and with one another."

The imam shuts his eyes again as in a holy trance, his closed lids shuddering with the pulse of the capillaries within them. His voice emerges from his mouth cogently, however. "Your translation to Paradise would be instant," he states. "Your family-your mother-would receive compensation, i'dla, for her loss, even though she is an unbeliever. The beauty of her son's sacrifice may perhaps persuade her to convert. All things are possible with Allah."

"My mother-she has always supported herself. Could I name another, a female friend my age, to receive the compensation? It might help her to achieve freedom."

"What is freedom?" Shaikh Rashid asks, his eyes opening and breaking the skin of his trance. "As long as we are in our bodies, we are slaves to our bodies and their necessities. How I envy you, dear boy. Compared with you, I am old, and it is to the young that the greatest glory of battle belongs. To sacrifice one's life," he continues, as his eyelids half shut, so just a wet gray glitter shows, "before it becomes a tattered, exhausted thing. What an endless joy that would be."

"When," Ahmad asks after letting these words sink into a silence, "will my istishhdd take place?" His self-sacrifice: it is becoming a part of him, a live, helpless thing like his heart, his stomach, his pancreas gnawing away with its chemicals and enzymes.

"Your heroic sacrifice," his master quickly amplifies. "Within a week, I would say. The details are not mine to specify, but a week would approximate an anniversary and send an effective message to the global Satan. The message would be, 'We strike when we please.' "

"The truck. Would it be the one I drive for Excellency?" Ahmad can grieve, if not for himself, for the truck-its cheerful pumpkin orange, its ornate script lettering, the vantage from its driver's seat that puts the world of obstacles and dangers, of pedestrians and other vehicles, just on the other side of the tall windshield, so that clearances are easier to gauge than when driving an automobile, with its long and bloated hood.

"A truck like it, which should give you no trouble in driving a short distance. The Excellency truck itself would of course incriminate the Chehabs, if any identifiable fragments remain. The hope is that none will. In the first World Trade Center bombings, you may be too young to remember, the rented truck was traced with laughable ease. This time, the physical clues will be obliterated-sunk, as the great Shakespeare puts it, full fathom five."

"Obliterated," Ahmad repeats. The word is not one he often hears. A strange layer, as of a transparent, disagreeable-tasting wool, has come to enwrap him and act as an impediment to the interaction of his senses with the world.

In contrast, Shaikh Rashid has come sharply out of his trance, sensitive to the boy's queasy mood, quickly insisting to him, "You will not be there to experience it. You will already be in Jannah, in Paradise, at that instant, confronting the delighted face of God. He will greet you as His son." The shaikh bends forward earnestly, changing gears. "Ahmad, listen to me. You do not have to do this. Your avowal to Charlie does not obligate you, if your heart quails. There are many others eager for a glorious name and the assurance of eternal bliss. The jihad is overwhelmed by volunteers, even in this homeland of evil and irreligion."

"No," Ahmad protests, jealous of this alleged mob of others who would steal his glory. "My love of Allah is absolute. Your gift is one I cannot refuse." Seeing a kind of flinch on his master's face, a clash of relief and sorrow, a disconcerted gap, in his usual composed surface, through which his mere humanity flashes, Ahmad relents, joining him in humanity with the joke, "I would not have you think that our hours studying the Eternal Book were wasted."

"Many study the Book; few die for it. Few are given your opportunity to prove its truth." From this stern high plane Shaikh Rashid relents in turn: "If there is any uncertainty in your heart, dear boy, speak it now, without penalty. It will be as if this conversation has never taken place. I ask from you only silence, a silence in which someone with more courage and faith may carry out the mission."

The boy knows he is being manipulated, yet accedes to the manipulation, since it draws from him a sacred potential. "No, the mission is mine, though I feel shrunk to the size of a worm within it."

"Good, then," the teacher concludes, leaning back, lifting up his little black shoes, and resting them in view on the silver-threaded footstool. "You and I will not speak of this again. Nor will you visit here again. Word has reached me that the Islamic Center may be under surveillance. Inform Charlie Chehab of your heroic resolve. He will arrange that you soon receive detailed instruction. Give him the name of this sharmoota whom you value above your mother. I cannot say that I approve: women are our fields, but our mother is the Earth itself, from which we drew existence."

"Master, I would rather entrust the name to you. Charlie has a connection with her that might lead him to disrespect my intent."

Shaikh Rashid resents such a complication, which mars the purity of his pupil's submission. "As you wish," he says stiffly.

Ahmad prints joryleen grant on a piece of notepaper, just as he saw it, not many months ago, inscribed in ballpoint on the edges of the pages of a thick high-school textbook. They were nearly equals then; now he is headed for Jannah and she for Jahannan, the pits of Hell. She is the only bride he will enjoy on Earth. Ahmad notices in writing that the trembling has passed out of his teacher's hands into his own. His soul feels like one of those out-of-season flies that, trapped in winter in a warm room, buzz and insistently bump against the glass of a window saturated with the sunlight of an outdoors wherein they would quickly die.

The next day, a Wednesday, he wakes early, as if at a shout that quickly dies away. In the kitchen, in the dark before six o'clock, he encounters his mother, who is back on the morning shift at Saint Francis. She wears, chastely, a beige street dress and a blue cardigan thrown across her shoulders; her footsteps pad silently in the white Nikes she wears for the miles she traverses the hospital's hard floors. He gratefully senses that her recent mood-the short temper and distraction caused by one of those obscure disappointments whose atmospheric repercussions have bothered him since early childhood-is lifting. She wears no makeup; the skin beneath her eyes is blanched, and her eyes are reddened by her swim in the waters of sleep. She greets him with surprise: "Well, you're an early bird!"

"Mother-"

"What, darling? Don't make it long, I'm on duty in forty minutes."

"I wanted to thank you, for putting up with me all these years."

"Why, what a strange thing to say! A mother doesn't put up with her child; die child is her reason for being."

"Without me, you would have had more freedom to be an artist, or whatever."

"Oh, I'm as much of an artist as I have talent for. Without you to care for, I might have just sunk myself in self-pity and bad behavior. And you've been such a good boy, really- never giving me real trouble, like I hear about at the hospital all the time. And not just from the other nurse's aides but from the doctors, with all that education they have and the lovely homes. They give rfieir children everything, and yet they turn out horribly-self-destructive and other-destructive. I don't know how much credit to give your Mohammedanism. Even as a baby, you were so trusting and easy. Everything I suggested, you diought was a good idea. It worried me, even, you seemed so easily led, I was afraid you'd be influenced by the wrong people as you grew older. But look at you! A man of the world, earning good money just as you said you would, and handsome besides. You have your father's lovely lanky build, and his eyes and sexy mouth, but nothing of his cowardice, always looking for a shortcut."

He does not tell of the shortcut to Paradise he is about to take. He tells her instead, "We don't call it Mohammedanism, Mother. That sounds as if we worshipped Mohammed. He never claimed to be God; he was just God's prophet. The only miracle he ever claimed was the Qur'an itself."

"Yes, well, darling, Roman Catholicism is full of these fussy distinctions too, about all these things nobody can see. People make them up out of hysteria and then they get passed on as gospel. Saint Christopher medals and not touching the wafer with your teeth and saying the mass in Latin and no meat on Fridays and crossing yourself constantly, then it all got tossed out by Vatican Two as cool as you please-stuff that people had believed for two thousand years! The nuns put such ridiculous stock in all of it, and expected us children to, too, but all I saw was a beautiful world around me, for however briefly, and I wanted to make images of its beauty."

"In Islam, diat's called blasphemy, trying to usurp God's prerogative of creation."

"Well, I know. That's why there aren't any statues or paintings in mosques. To me that seems unnecessarily bleak. God gave us eyes to see what, then?"

She talks while rinsing her cereal bowl and slapping it into the drainer in the sink, and hurrying her toast up out of the toaster and slapping on jam between gulps of coffee. Ahmad tells her, "God is supposed to be beyond description. Didn't the nuns say tiiat?"

"Not really, that I remember. But, then, I only had tJiree years of parochial school before switching to public, where they were supposed not to mention God, for fear some Jewish child would go home and tell his atheist lawyer parents." She looks at her watch, thick-faced like a diver's watch, with big numbers she can see while taking a pulse. "Darling, I love having a serious conversation, maybe you could convert me, except there are all these baggy hot clotb.es they make you wear, but now I'm truly getting late and must run. I don't even have time to swing you by work, I'm so sorry, and anyway you'd be the first one tJiere. Why don't you finish up your breakfast and the dishes and tben walk over to the store, or even run? It's only ten blocks."

"Twelve."

"Remember how you used to run everywhere in those little track shorts? I was so proud, you looked so sexy."

"Mother, I love you."

Touched, even stricken, sensing some abyss of need within him but able only to dart to the edge and away, Teresa pecks a kiss on her son's cheek and tells Ahmad, "Well, of course, you sweet thing, and I do you. What is it the French say? Qa va sans dire. It goes without saying."

He is blushing, stupidly, hating his own hot face. But he must get this out: "I mean, all tJiose years, there I was obsessing about my father, and you were the one taking care of me." Our mother is the Earth itself, from which we drew existence.

Her hands flit over herself to check that everything is in place; she looks at her watch again, and he can feel her mind flying, flying away. Her response makes him doubt that she heard what he said. "I know, dear-we all make mistakes in relationships. Can you possibly see to your own supper tonight? The Wednesday-evening sketch group is starting up again, we have a model tonight-you know, we each kick in ten dollars to pay her and have five-minute poses followed by a longer sitting, you can bring pastels but they discourage oils. Anyway, Leo Wilde called the otber day and I promised to go with him. You remember Leo, don't you? I used to go out with him, a little. Stocky, wears his hair in a ponytail, funny little granny glasses-"

"I remember him, Motber," Ahmad says coldly. "One of your losers."

He watches her rush out the door, hears her rapid padded steps in die hall and die muffled heave of die elevator answering her call. At the sink he washes his dirty bowl and orange-juice glass with a new zeal, the thoroughness of a last time. He leaves tbem in the drainer to dry. They are utterly clean, like a desert morning, die crescent moon sharing die sky with Venus.

At Excellency, out on die lot, witb the freshly loaded orange truck between themselves and the office window from which old, bald Mr. Chehab might see diem talking and sense a conspiracy, he tells Charlie, "I'm in."

"I heard. Good." Charlie gives Ahmad a look, and it's as if his Lebanese eyes are new to the boy, crystalline in complexity, tbis part of us not quite flesh, brittle witb its amber rays and granulations, die area around the pupil paler than the dark-brown ring rimming the iris. Charlie has a wife and children and a fadier, Ahmad realizes; he is tied to diis world in a way Ahmad isn't. His substance is knottier. "You sure, Madman?"

"As God is my witness," Ahmad tells him. "I burn to do it."

It always faintly embarrasses him, he does not know why, when God arises between himself and Charlie. The man makes one of his intricate quick mouths, a pinching of the lips together and then puffing them out, as if something inside has been regretfully kept from escaping.

"Then you'll need to meet some specialists. I'll arrange it." He hesitates. "It's a little tricky, it may not happen tomorrow. How're your nerves?"

"I have placed myself in God's hand, and feel very serene. My own will, my own cravings, are at rest."

"Right." Charlie lifts his fist and punches Ahmad on the shoulder with it, in a gesture of solidarity and mutual congratulation such as when football players bump helmets, or basketball players exchange high-fives even as they backpedal into their defensive positions. "All systems go," Charlie says; his wry smile and wary eyes mix in an expression in which Ahmad recognizes the mixed nature- Mecca and Medina, the rapt inspiration and the patient working-out- of any holy enterprise on Earth.

Not die next day but the next, a Friday, Charlie, sitting in the passenger seat, directs the truck to leave the lot and go right on Reagan, then left at the light up on Sixteenth down to West Main, into that section of New Prospect, extending some blocks west of the Islamic Center, where emigrants from the Middle East, Turks and Syrians and Kurds packed into steerage on the glamorous transatlantic liners, settled generations ago, when the silk-dyeing and leather-tanning plants were in full operation. Signs, red on yellow, black on green, advertise in Arabic script and Roman alphabet Al Madena Grocery, Turkiyem Beauty, Al-Basba, Baitul Wahid Ahmadiyya. The older men visible on die streets have long since discarded the gallabiya and the fez for the dusty-black

Western-style suits, shapeless with daily wear, favored by the Mediterranean males, Sicilians and Greeks, who preceded them in this neighborhood of tight-to-the-street row houses. The younger Arab-Americans, idle and watchful, have adopted die bulky running shoes, droopy oversize jeans, and hooded sweatshirts of black homeys. Ahmad, in his prim white shirt and his black jeans slim as two stovepipes, would not fit in here. To these co-religionists, Islam is less a faith, a filigreed doorway into the supernatural, than a habit, a facet of their condition as an underclass, alien in a nation that persists in thinking of itself as light-skinned, English-speaking, and Christian. To Ahmad these blocks feel like an underworld he is timidly visiting, an outsider among outsiders.

Charlie seems at ease here, cheerfully exchanging jabber for jabber as he directs Ahmad to park the truck in a jammed parking lot behind a Pep Boys and the Al-Aqsa True Value hardware store. He pleadingly holds up ten fingers to trie True Value clerk who has emerged, arguing that nobody in his right mind could refuse him ten minutes of off-street parking; to clarify his point, a ten-dollar bill changes hands. Walking away, he mutters to Ahmad, "Out on the street the damn truck sticks out like a circus van."

"You do not wish to be observed," Ahmad deduces. "But who would observe?"

"You never know" is the unsatisfactory reply. They walk, at a pace brisker than Charlie's usual one, along a back alley running parallel to Main and haphazardly lined with razor-wire-topped chain-link fences, asphalt lots forbiddingly marked private property and customers only, and the porches and front steps of housing meekly fitted into back-lot slices of urban space, their original wooden sides covered with aluminum clapboards or metal sheets patterned to imitate bricks. Non-domestic structures of real, time-darkened brick serve as warehouses and back-lot workplaces for the shops that front on Main Street; some are now boarded-up shells, with every exposed window smashed by methodical delinquents, and from others emerge the glow and clangor of small-scale manufacture or repair still being carried forward. One such building, of a brick painted a dour tan, has rendered its metal-sashed windows opaque with an interior coating of the same tan paint. Its wide overhead garage door is down, and the tin sign above, advertising in clumsy hand-painted letters Costello's Machine Shop All Repairs and Body Work, has faded and rusted into near-illegibility. Charlie raps on a small side door of quilted metal, with a shiny new brass lock. After a considerable silence, a voice from within asks, "Yes? Who?"

"Chehab," Charlie says. "And the driver."

He speaks so softly that Ahmad doubts he has been heard, but the door does open, and a scowling young man steps aside. Ahmad is coping with his sensation that he has seen this man before when Charlie roughly, witli fear's rigid touch, takes his arm and pushes him inside. The interior space smells of oil-soaked concrete and an unexpected substance that Ahmad recognizes from two summers spent, in his mid-teens, as a junior member of a lawn crew: fertilizer. The caustic dry odor of it parches his nose and sinuses; there are also the scents of an acetylene welding torch and of closeted male bodies needing to be bathed and aired. Ahmad wonders if the men-two of them, the younger slender one and a stockier older, who turns out to be the technician- were among the four in the cottage on the Jersey Shore. He saw them for only a few minutes, in an unlit room and then through a dirty window, but they exuded this same sullen tension, as of distance runners who have trained too long. They resent being asked to talk. But they owe Charlie the deference paid a supplier and an arranger, at a level above them. Ahmad they regard with a kind of dread, as if, so soon to be a martyr, he is already a ghost.

"La ildha Ma Allah," he greets them, as a reassurance. Only the younger-and though young he is older than Ahmad by some years-replies in kind, "Muhammad rasvlu Allah," muttering the formula as if tricked into an indiscretion. Ahmad sees that no merely human response, no nuance of sympathy or humor, is expected of them; they are operatives, soldiers, units. He straightens his posture, seeking their good opinion, shouldering his similar role.

Traces of the building's former life as Costello's Machine Shop linger in the cloistered, layered air: overhead, beams, chains, and pulleys for hoisting engines and axles; workbenches and arrays of small drawers whose pulls are blackened by greasy fingers; pegboards painted with the silhouettes of absent tools; scraps of wire and sheet metal and rubber tubing left where the last hand set them aside at the end of the last repair; drifts of discarded oil cans and gaskets and traction belts and emptied parts packages in the corners, behind oil drums used as trash cans. In the center of the concrete floor, under the only bright lights, with extension cords feeding into its cab like the tubes sustaining a patient on life support, sits a truck much the size and shape of Excellency. Instead of being a Ford Triton E-350, it is a GMC 3 500, not orange but a bleak white, the way it came from the factory. On its side has been lettered, in carefully but not professionally done black block letters, the words Window Shades Systems.

Ahmad dislikes the truck at first sight; the vehicle has a furtive anonymity, a generic blankness. It has a hard-used, slummy look. At the side of the New Jersey Turnpike he has often seen ancient sedans from the 'sixties and 'seventies, bloated and two-tone and chrome-laden, broken down, with some hapless family of color clustered waiting for the state police to come and rescue them and tow away their shabby bargain. This bone-white truck savors of such poverty, such pathetic attempts to keep up in America, to join the easy seventy-miles-per-hour mainstream. His mother's maroon Subaru, with its Bondo-patched fender and its red enamel abraded by years of acid New Jersey air, was another pathetic attempt. Whereas bright-orange Excellency, its letters gold-edged, has a spruce jolliness to it-as Charlie said, a circus air.

The older, shorter of the two operatives, who is fractionally more friendly, beckons Ahmad to come look witii him into the cab's open door. His hands, the fingertips stained with oil, flow toward an unusual element between the seats-a metal box the size of a cigar box, its metal painted a military drab, with two terminal knobs on the top and insulated wires trailing from these back into the body of the truck. Since the space between the driver's and passenger's seats is deep and awkward to reach down into, the device rests not on the floor but on an inverted plastic milk crate, duct-taped to the crate's bottom for security. On one side of the detonator-for such it must be-there is a yellow contact lever, and in the center, sunk a half-inch in a little well where a thumb would fit, a glossy red button. The color-coding smacks of military simplicity, of ignorant young men being trained along the simplest possible lines, the sunken button guarding against accidental detonation. The man explains to Ahmad, "This switch safety switch. Move to right"-snap-"like this, device armed. Then push button down and hold-boom. Four thousand kilos ammonium nitrate in back. Twice what McVeigh had. That much needed to break steel tunnel sheath." His black-tipped hands shape a circle, demonstrating.

"Tunnel," Ahmad repeats, stupidly, nobody having spoken to him before now of a tunnel. "What tunnel?"

"Lincoln," the man answers, with slight surprise but no more emotion than a thrown switch. "No trucks allowed in Holland."

Ahmad silently absorbs this. The man turns to Charlie. "He knows?"

"He does now," Charlie says.

The man gives Ahmad a gap-toothed smile, his friendliness growing. His flowing hands describe a larger circle. "Morning rush," he explains. "From Jersey side. Right-hand tunnel only one for trucks. Newest built of three, nineteen fifty-one. Newest but not strongest. Older construction better. Two-thirds through, weak place, where tunnel makes turn. Even if outer sheatJi hold and keep out water, air system destroyed and all suffocate. Smoke, pressure. For you, no pain, not even panic moment. Instead, happiness of success and God's warm welcome."

Ahmad recalls a name dropped weeks ago. "Are you Mr. Karini?"

"No, no," he says. "No no no. Not even friend. Friend of friend-all fight for God against America."

The younger operative, not much older than Ahmad, hears the word " America " and utters a heated long Arabic sentence that Ahmad does not understand. Ahmad asks Charlie, "What did he say?"

Charlie shrugs. "The usual."

"You sure this will work?"

"It'll do a ton of damage, minimum. It'll deliver a statement. It'll make headlines all over the world. They'll be dancing in the streets of Damascus and Karachi, because of you, Madman."

The older unidentified man adds, " Cairo, too." He smiles that engaging smile of square, spaced, tobacco-stained teeth and strikes his chest with his fist and tells Ahmad, "Egyptian."

"So was my father!" Ahmad exclaims, yet in exploration of the bond can only think to ask, "How do you like Mubarak?"

The smile fades. "Tool of America."

Charlie, as if joining in a game, asks, "The Saudi princes?"

"Tools."

"How about Muammar al-Qadaffi?"

"Now, too. Tool. Very sad."

Ahmad resents Charlie intruding in the conversation between what are, after all, the key players, the technician and the martyr; it is as if, his martyrdom assured, he can be brushed aside. A tool. He asserts himself, asking, "Osama bin Laden?"

"Great hero," the man with oil-blackened fingers answers. "Cannot be caught. Like Arafat. A fox." He smiles, but has not forgotten the point of this meeting. He says to Ahmad in his most careful English, "Show me what you will do."

The boy is beset by a freezing sensation, as if reality has shed a layer of its bulky disguise. He overcomes his distaste for the ugly plain truck, dispensable like him. He reaches toward the detonator, his face stretched into a question.

The stocky technician smiles and reassures him, "Is O.K. Not connected. Show me."

The small yellow lever, L-shaped in cross-section, touches his hand, it seems, rather than his hand touching it. "I turn this switch to the right"-it stiffly resists, and then sucks, as if magnetized, into its off position, ninety degrees away- "and push this button down in here down." Involuntarily he closes his eyes, feeling it sink half an inch.

"And hold down," his teacher repeats, "until-"

"Boom," Ahmad supplies.

"Yes," the man agrees; the word hangs in the air like a mist.

"You are very brave," the younger, taller, and thinner of the two strangers says, in an English virtually accent-free.

"He is a faithful son of Islam," Charlie tells him. "We all envy him, right?" Again Ahmad feels irritation with Charlie, for acting proprietorial where he has no ownership. Only the doer owns this deed. Something preoccupied and bossy in Charlie's approach casts doubt on the absolute nature of istishhdd and the exalted, dread-filled condition of the istishhddi.

Perhaps the technician feels this slight failure of accord among the warriors, for he rests a paternal hand on Ahmad's shoulder, soiling the boy's white shirt with oily fingerprints, and explains to the others, "His way is good. To be hero for Allah."

Back in the cheerfully orange truck, Charlie confides to Ahmad, "Interesting to see their minds work. Tools, hero: no shades in between. As if Mubarak and Arafat and the Saudis don't all have tlieir special situations and their own intricate games to play."

Again, Charlie strikes a note that feels, to Ahmad in his newly elevated and simplified sense of himself, slightly false. Relativism seems cynical. "Perhaps," he offers in polite contradiction, "God Himself is simple, and employs simple men to shape the world."

"Tools," Charlie says, staring humorlessly ahead through the windshield, which Ahmad wipes every morning but which becomes dirty anyway by the end of the day. "We're all tools. God bless brainless tools-right, Madman?"

A certain simplicity does lay hold of Ahmad in the troughs between surges of terror and then of exaltation, collapsing back into an impatience to be done with it. To have it behind him, whatever "him" will then be. He exists as a close neighbor to the unimaginable. The world in its sunstruck details, the minute scintillations of its interlocked workings, yawns all about him, a glistening bowl of busy emptiness, while within him a sodden black certainty weighs. He cannot forget the transformation awaiting him, behind, as it were, the snapped camera's shutter, even as his senses still receive their familiar bombardment of sights and sounds, scents and tastes. The luster of Paradise leaks backward into his daily life. Things will feel big there, on a cosmic scale; in his childhood, only a few years into this life, falling asleep, he would experience a sensation of hugeness, every cell a world, and this demonstrated to his childish mind religion's truth.

His workload at Excellency has lightened, and he is left with stretches of idleness in which he should read the Qur'an, or study the pamphlets, readily available from overseas sources, composed and printed to prepare a shahid-the ablutions, the mental cleansing of the spirit-for his end, or her end, for women now, their loose black burqas well concealing their explosive vests, are permitted, in Palestine, the privilege of martyrdom. But his mind is too a-flutter to sink into study. His whole existence has become enraptured as perhaps the Prophet's was in accepting Gabriel's dictation of the divine suras. Ahmad's every minute has taken on the intimate doubleness of prayer, the self-release of turning aside and addressing a self not his own but that of Another, a Being as close as the vein of his neck. More than five times a day he finds the opportunity, most often in the store's barren parking lot, to spread his mat in the eastward direction and touch his forehead to the earth, each time receiving, through the concrete, the close comfort of submission. The slaglike dark weight nagging within him skews his view of die world, and bedecks each twig and telephone wire with jewels he has never before noticed.

Saturday morning, before the store has opened, he sits on a step of die loading platform, observing a black beetle struggling on his back on the concrete of the parking lot. The day is September eleventh, still summer. The early sun slants off the rough, pale surface with a mildness that holds in it the heat of the coming day as a seed not yet germinated holds in it die eventual blossom. The concrete in its cracks has permitted weeds to flourish, the tall weeds of the dying season, with their milky spittle and fine-haired leaves, wet with autumn's heavy dew. The sky above is cloudless, but for some dry shreds of cirrus and a disintegrating jet trail. Its pure blue is still somehow soft, powder-blue, from its recent immersion in darkness and stars. The beetle's tiny black legs wave in the air, groping for a purchase with which to right itself, casting sharp shadows elongated by the sun at its morning slant. The legs of the small creature wiggle and wridie in a kind of fury, then subside into a semblance of thought, as if the beetle seeks to reason a way out of its predicament. Ahmad wonders, Where did this bug come from? How did it fall here, seeming unable to use its wings? The struggle resumes. How precise the shadows of its legs are, cast widi an all-loving fidelity by photons that have traveled ninety-three million miles to this exact spot!

Ahmad rises from his seat on the coarse plank step and stands over die insect in lordly fashion, feeling huge. Yet he shies from touching this mysterious fallen bit of life. Perhaps it has a poisonous bite, or, like some miniature emissary from Hell, it will fasten onto his finger and never let go. Many a boy-Tylenol, for one-would simply crush this irritating presence with his foot, but for Ahmad die option does not exist: it would produce a broadened corpse, a squashed tangle of tiny parts and spilled vital fluid, and he does not wish to contemplate any such organic horror. He looks around him briefly for a tool, for something stiff with which to flip the insect over-the dark little cardboard, for instance, used to give die two parts of a Mounds bar integrity, or to reinforce a double Reese's Peanut Butter Cup-but he sees nothing suitable. Excellency Home Furnishings tries to keep its private lot litter-free. The African-American "muscle" and Ahmad himself have been sent out into it with a green garbage bag, on clean-up duty. He spots no happenstance spatula lying loose but, on a sudden inspiration, remembers the driver's license in his wallet, a plastic rectangle in which a scowling and unflattering image of himself is embedded with some numerical data important to the state of New Jersey and a hologrammatical, counterfeit-repellent image of its Great Seal. With this, he manages, after a few tentative, squeamish attempts, to flip the tiny creature at his mercy over onto its legs. Sunlight strikes sparks of iridescence, purple and green, from the biform shell of folded wings. Ahmad goes back to his porch on the step to enjoy the good results of his rescue, his merciful intervention in the natural order. Fly away, fly away.

But the bug, right side up, its shiny body minutely hoisted on its six legs above the rough concrete, merely creeps a fraction of its length and then remains still. Its antennae searchingly wave, then they too stop. For five minutes that partake of the eternal, Ahmad watches. He returns his license with its burden of coded information to his wallet. Cars blaring rap music rush by out of sight on Reagan Boulevard, the noise swelling and receding. An airplane gaining altitude out of Newark rattles in the hardening sky. The beetle, paired with its microscopically shrinking shadow, remains still.

It had been on its back in its death throes and now is dead, leaving behind a largeness that belongs not to this world. The experience, so strangely magnified, has been, Ahmad feels certain, supernatural.