American Taliban (6 page)

With no choice but to sit, John sat. And felt the ocean breeze. He gave his attention to the canopy of quivering leaves, to the shadows parting and departing on the sunlit patio outside, and recalled endless hallowed summers, but why were they no longer so endless? Slow and silent had departed with childhood. For the first time all summer, he dropped into reverie, a laptop at rest until called forth again with the brush of a hand. He’d had a busy summer. That’s why summers were no longer slow. And now he had two weeks left to recapture slowness, unless he allowed Barbara’s planning to get in the way.

She came in bearing a tray of sandwiches, clicking him out of his reverie. Behind her was Bill with plates, chips, pickles, and mustard. He set them down and went back for the jug of lemon iced tea and glasses. Barbara pulled cloth napkins and picnic cutlery from the covered basket on the buffet, set the table, and then they were all seated, the sandwiches were named—cucumber with cream cheese, ham and cheese, tomato basil. John took a bite of each, to rate them. On a scale of most to least satisfying, the ham and cheese came in number one; the beefy tomato basil second.

You suffer, Bill said, the twenty-first-century mania for rating things. We grew up with
Consumer Reports
, which helped rational shoppers make informed decisions. Which was useful. But your generation is encouraged to rate everything.

Barbara blamed it on the online phenomenon, with stores like Amazon encouraging readers to rate every book and product. Consumer interaction is capitalism’s latest frontier. Reality television’s success is based in the popular vote. We’re raising a generation for whom opinion is a kind of knowingness, which is a parody of knowledge.

If you just listen to yourselves, John said, you’ll notice that you’re sounding like your parents and grandparents. Every generation gets criticized by its elders.

It’s possible, Barbara conceded, that this late in human development,
knowing too much about everything, we’re all mere parodies, acting on images of who we supposedly are, or images we’ve conjured up for ourselves as acceptable.

It’s been said before, Bill said. All the world’s a stage—dot dot dot.

John pushed his plate away and retired to his room, to reacquaint himself with himself, and plan the next weeks.

Out of habit, he went to www.surfcheck.com and watched the virtual waves, their virtual heave and crash. They were head high, the promise of yesterday’s hurricane had materialized, and Katie and Sylvie were out there somewhere. About Jilly, he didn’t know; she might be home moping, though the best thing she could do was get out there, practice, push against limitations, against what did or didn’t happen, and prove how good she was. Katie was right. Jilly had as good a chance at championship as anyone else. After Hatteras, he would have put his money on her, but personal doubt and general negativity could hold her back. So he writes a poke: If you seek safety, it is on the shore. Warning: E-mail cannot be unsent. So he postpones sending it. So he Googles the word transcendent, reads the original, medieval, philosophical, and colloquial definitions, understands only the last one, links to links, moving through pages on American Transcendentalism, medieval transcendence, Emerson and Whitman, whose sources were Buddhist—

He’d been meaning to do this ever since he handed in his senior thesis. He’d been meaning to read and continue his chat-room conversations. He’d learned a lot from some well-informed correspondents. John checked to see whether Noor had participated in the chat room again. She hadn’t. But in his inbox he found her response to his poke.

I live in Brooklyn and study at NYU, Noor wrote. I was named after the queen of Jordan, who in case you don’t know started out as just a daughter in a Syrian-Scottish-Swedish American family, named Lisa Halaby. But she graduated from Princeton with a degree in architecture
and urban planning and met King Hussein when she was working on the design of the International Airport in Amman. Before marrying King Hussein, she accepted Islam and took the name Noor, meaning light. And she’s very beautiful.

Noor from Brooklyn seemed to him exquisitely sensitive, lonely, sublime somehow, though he was largely making her up, imagining her, as he’d made himself up for her, introducing himself as a reader of Arab literature, which he had yet to read.

I love Arabic poetry, she wrote in response. Isn’t the trilateral root system of classical Arabic awesome? she asked. I love how it allows the poem to mean more only if you know more vocabulary. Sort of a reward for knowing. The Sufis, who wrote in code to stay safe, really knew and used this root system. My dad says it’s impossible to understand the depths of Sufi ideas without a grounding in classical Arabic.

She was writing to him as an insider, John noted, assuming that he read in classical Arabic, though even Arabs, he’d read, often don’t understand the Qur’an.

Curious, John Googled the trilateral root system and read about the variety of conjugations possible on one three-letter root, about near and far meanings. It became clear to him that though his research may have been good enough for high school, he knew next to nothing. But he would begin knowing. He would take this inadvertent time-out to learn. He would read his Hafiz. He would read the Ibn ’Arabi. Become a student of Arab literature. He would write Noor. Write Jilly. So he toggles back to his poke. He hesitates. Fact: The first letter in the first modern novel (
Don Quixote)
, which borrowed or stole from Sufi work, his tenth-grade English teacher lectured, was never delivered. So he delays. Links to pages on Islamic spirituality. Finds a Sufi center in Los Angeles. Finds Madonna’s Kabbalah Center. He should call Katie, whom he loves. He should answer Noor’s e-mail. He rereads her long and intriguing response to his poke.

She presented herself in an organized manner, first introducing herself as the daughter of an Arab American family who lives in Brooklyn, was named for Queen Noor, reads poetry, attends NYU. Then she answered his query about the Qur’an as an evolved variation. Muhammed, she wrote, came into contact with the ancient mystics of the Middle East, including the Essenes, a Gnostic sect that was also a source for Jewish and Christian mysticism. This makes sense to John, considering that the stories of the Qur’an feature the characters of the
Torah, which stories also serve as source code for the New Testament, which, and which, and which, on and on, just as, so too, because.

My dad, Noor wrote, likes to say that the denial of relationship and influence and cause and effect is driven by political interests. For which John doesn’t much care, having no ambitions in that direction. His policy, he decides, will be Whitmanian all-embrace. He would be all-knowing, omnivorous, omniscient, omnificent; what Barbara would call an omnium-gatherum. He opens his reading journal and inscribes Whitman’s words:

So he Googles the word Islam, the fastest-growing religion of the twenty-first century. One in five people in the world, he reads, considers himself Muslim. Fewer than 15 percent of Muslims are Arabs. The majority of the populations in fifty-one countries are Islamic. There are between 1.4 and 1.6 billion Muslims in the world, and this number is increasing at a rate of 2.9 percent. Which inspires him. So he reads his Rumi:

So he determines to expand his project, though he is way behind. He determines to become a student of Arab literature. He links to powells.com and orders
Beginning and Intermediate Arabic
and also a Penguin Classics edition of the Qur’an.

AT TENNIS
, John sat in the shade of the white gazebo and half listened to the off rhythm of the bazooka ball, called the score when it stopped, love—thirty, love—forty. Barbara and Bill were losing fast, fulfilling his expectations. Since social life, not tennis, was what they were after, they weren’t good at tennis. Socially they were managing fine.

While the ball bopped to and fro to nonglory, he threw his head back to see the tops of the towering trees surrounding the tennis court like tall toy soldiers playing siege. They were loblolly pine, the tallest, straightest pines of the South, their canopies all at the top, one hundred fifty feet away. Loblollies. He liked them for their lanky height, their straightness, being of similar build. At age fifteen when he’d shot tall and grown his coarse hair out to big hair, someone had called him a loblolly, and though the name hadn’t stuck, too many syllables, he’d developed a kinship with this tree. Its essence might be his essence. It had the advantage of height, as he did. Though rooted at the base, it reached high. And rooted at the base as he, too, was for now, immobilized by his double casts, he could still think himself up to their highest points and float aloft in their upper breezes, near the heavens.