Jihadi (3 page)

On the morning of October 14, 2005, Thelonius Liddell, having just returned from the last overseas assignment of his career, noticed that the milk carton on his dining-room table was vibrating.

This was forty-three years, three months, and seven days after Thelonius Liddell was born – thirty-six days after the unpleasantness with the flechettes – and exactly two months before he would be escorted into the Beige Motel.

Thelonius tried not to think about why a gallon of milk would be vibrating all by itself.

Ever since he’d returned from the Islamic Republic the previous day, things had been vibrating inexplicably. In the garage, a clear, tightly capped plastic jug of antifreeze had shaken long after he kicked it away. He saw it waver for ten full seconds, heard it shiver, still half-full and still insistent, from behind a rake that had fallen in front of it. Becky walked right past. Antifreeze is not supposed to vibrate at any time. He took a deep stress breath and walked away.

And a framed photo of Child the Cat. That had been vibrating, too.

Tough it out, kid. Tough it out. Stick with Sarge
.

Becky did not need to know about the vibrating. Not yet. He recorded these incidents in a tiny book he might or might not decide to show Becky.

I know something is happening
, Thelonius wrote.

He wrote a sentence with quote marks, ‘
Where then are you going???
’

He scratched that last sentence out. Then he put the little book in his back pocket.

In the kitchen, Becky could be heard but not seen. She was on the phone, negotiating something complex. Becky was good at negotiating complex things.

The dead guy telling this story wants you to imagine Fatima’s neighbours.

He never met them. He has to imagine them, just like you do. Every day, he writes this book you’re reading. Today he wants you to imagine them drinking tea, opening their discussion about how scandalous Fatima did not spend any time grieving her pregnant sister, Wafa.

The two had been quite close, her mother always said, but the women on the block insisted that one would never know that. For the neighbours, Fatima’s lack of emotion was troubling, and her lack of propriety more so. She was nineteen, a woman now. Her sister had passed. Her niece had passed. She had obligations to her family. Yet she appeared to live only to mount stairs and close doors. She lived for solitude. Why?

The neighbours had many conjectures. They settled on a theory put forward by Mrs. H., who lived directly across the narrow street from Fatima: She preferred the company of lustful men, conversed with them online for hours at a time. She sat in her room staring at the computer, no doubt typing out and receiving messages from unwholesome fellows.

Her typing was visible from Mrs. H’s bedroom window: the distracted girl neglected to close her blinds. The messages themselves were not legible from that distance, but Mrs. H had opinions as to their content. At any rate, no one had seen her weep.

Fatima had always been regarded as unusual. It was not surprising to them that she would avoid doing what a woman should do.

Thelonius was trying to decide whether he wanted Becky’s insights on that rattling milk container, a persistent blur of colour and a wash of sound that was increasing in volume and raising the stakes of his morning, when he saw the word CHANGE writing itself in milk in midair. The word collapsed into a puddle on the dining-room floor. He put down his coffee cup and covered his mouth with his palm.

Whenever something is vibrating, you’re supposed to stop and look at it, according to the weirdo back in the Republic: ‘Vibration is change.’

The Plum, for instance, is change.

Complicating everything that follows (the guilty dead guy telling this story acknowledges) is the deepening illness of Thelonius’s wife.

Becky has a grey tumour, larger than a plum by now, surely, that the Directorate’s physicians isolated. They reported a clear pattern of accelerating growth. This type of tumour mimics schizophrenia with increasing accuracy. It culminates in blindness and, some unknown number of weeks later, death. It is located alarmingly near the centre of Becky’s brain. No one can get at the Plum. It has been expanding with dark purpose, they guess, for about five years.

Doctors caught the Plum during an MRI for a nerve problem Becky inherited from her mother, Prudence. This was an entirely separate problem that also required periodic monitoring. As it broadens, that Plum, Becky’s behavioural and mood swings become more pronounced. A change.

What to write next.

The guilty dead guy telling this story decides he doesn’t feel like writing anything else on this page. He plans to start fresh with a new sheet tomorrow.

Dad opted to make Becky’s final years count. Thelonius went along. He justified this silence by thinking, ‘We decided not to tell her.’ But whenever Thelonius thought ‘we’ about that kind of thing, he meant Dad.

Thelonius called Becky’s father Dad. He could’ve pushed Dad on certain secrets, could’ve objected earlier and harder. But Dad always had the final word on secrets.

The dead guy telling this story notes that Dad is dead now. Another change.

‘Everything changes,’ the Raisin said, ‘except the face of God.’

‘Whenever something changes, the first moral and legal imperative is to consider the new development closely; simply look at it without preconception,’ Fatima typed in a message box on the website IslamIsPeace.com.

‘We must stop and look in order to determine whether that which is new is halal or haram. Not everything new is haram. Not everything familiar is halal.’

The discussion thread in which she posted was called SORRY, SISTERS. A man had started that discussion thread. Fatima was defending
her right, as a Muslim woman, to use the internet to organize public protests, a right some members of the group had questioned.

Fatima reminded herself that Allah was ever with the patient and struck the Enter key.

Thelonius looked at his hands, so as to avoid looking at the milk carton. Then he didn’t want to look at his hands. So he looked at the floor.

Well. Maybe it would stop that shaking. If he just stopped and looked at it. Like what that wacko back in the Republic promised.

No, kid. Eyes front. That’s an order. Stick with Sarge.

Well. Suppose he just tried it. Once. To see whether that would do anything to slow down that freakish rattling noise.

No.

Well. He had to do something. The noise hurt his knee now. It was spreading through his body. Why not look? What was the harm in looking?

Just no.

The ache broadened. He grabbed his knee. As he did so, he looked at the milk carton. He didn’t know whether he meant to look or not.

The noise stopped. The milk carton calmed itself to stillness.

There, on the panel of the plastic jug facing him: a still colour photograph. It was clear, remarkably high in resolution. It showed his peach-and-black bathrobed wife Becky, in their kitchen.

Becky wearing that robe. Becky in that kitchen. Becky having a conversation on that landline, its actual cord leading to Becky, stretching and bobbing as she spoke. In the photo: Becky’s pale, delicate profile and long, bare neck, exposed. Becky’s massive wave of deep-red hair, slung motionless over one angled, robed shoulder.

The picture on the carton had to have been taken within the last minute or so. It stopped his breath.

Look
away, kid. Machine.

Thelonius did not look away, though. He waited for the photo to vanish, as certain elements of dreams vanish upon inspection. It refused. He felt a dark tightening and buzzing in his chest.

Thud. Then a smaller thud. What the hell?

Of course: the sound of Becky bumping into something, then recovering.

Her field of vision was receding.

When Thelonius looked toward the direction of the noise, he heard the carton begin rattling again. In the kitchen, he saw only that taut, white, trembling phone cord, parallel to the floor. Becky stood, certainly, on the other end of it. She had in fact been wearing that very black-and-peach patterned satin bathrobe, his gift to her on her most recent birthday. Thelonius had seen it flash as she spun past him to answer the kitchen phone. Now he could only hear her.

He looked back at the carton. The shivering stopped.

The photographic image of Becky was so clear, so impossible to refute, that it made his mouth go dry. The plastic jug showed Thelonius his own kitchen in high definition, and Becky’s profile playing soft in its shadow against the green, butterfly pattern of the wallpaper, and Becky within it, on the phone, her eyes narrowed in concentration.

‘You can count on him,’ Thelonius heard his wife say from the next room. ‘We all know how much the banquet means.’

Above the photograph was a headline: LOST WOMAN.

The dead guy writing this story ponders the timeline and concludes that two long, busy days after the passing of her sister Wafa and her unborn, unnamed niece, Fatima attended a big protest at the U.S. Embassy in Islamic City, one she had helped to organize.

Islamic City was, and may still be, the capital of the Islamic Republic.

This protest took shape quickly. It had been arranged in less than forty-eight hours by just under a dozen people. As the crowd gathered, Fatima was veiled and (she hoped) anonymous. She did not want to jeopardize her new job as a translator for the Bureau of Islamic Investigation, also known as the BII.

The Bureau of Islamic Investigation was, and may still be, the national intelligence-gathering apparatus of the Islamic Republic. It was full of spies and military men who lacked basic English skills. Fatima’s English was perfect. She and her sister Noura had dual citizenship. They spoke English like Americans because that’s what they were: Americans.

Fatima’s new boss, who did not speak English, wanted her to help him keep an eye on the Americans. He would probably have put her in prison if he’d known about her work organizing the protest, his own organizing principle being that no one should organize anything he didn’t know about.

In
SERGEANT USA #109, THE HERO THAT WAS
(the dead guy recalls), Sarge takes down the Mutant Machines. The Mutant
Machines are part of an evil plot spun by the enemies of America. Sarge disables all seven by flinging his Expand-A-Shield at them.

PLOOF. THWOCK. KA-THOK.

Before her promotion to translator, Fatima had been a typist for the BII. With a little help from Ummi, who worked part-time in a fabric shop, Fatima had been (barely) supporting the family for more than a year. She had to work, at least until she got married, and she didn’t feel like getting married. She was fine with work. She didn’t like Ummi working at all. Ummi’s back was giving her trouble.

When Fatima was ten, her Baba – an obstetrician from Massachusetts who prayed all mandatory and optional prayers, who read the Koran aloud every day to his daughters, who told Fatima Paradise lay beneath the feet of her Ummi, who knew Fatima was destined by God to be a good girl and a patient woman and a true believer, and told her so every night – was in a car accident. The accident was serious, and he passed. They set him into his grave, to be questioned by angels there.

A few months after Fatima’s Baba died, Ummi returned to the Islamic Republic, dragging her three daughters along with her, saying, ‘That’s where family is.’ Ummi had never liked Massachusetts much.

Fatima didn’t like the Islamic Republic much.

Fatima withdrew into herself and prayed and read the Koran.

The guilty dead guy telling you this story does that now, too.

In Islamic City, Fatima’s schoolyard opponents had called her the Ugly American. This was before she grew into her features. Fatima told her sister Wafa about the insults, and Wafa reminded her that what mattered was not what people called her, but what she answered to. It was something Baba would have said.

Baba had also said Fatima should take her time getting married.

In her Koran, Fatima kept a photograph of Baba kissing the top of her little-girl head. After each evening prayer, when she was alone, she took out the photo of that kiss and studied it.

Ummi always said she wanted her girls to get married, just not to Americans. There were a lot of American soldiers since the invasion, but Ummi considered none of them appropriate son-in-law material. These days, her mom had taken to introducing Fatima to total strangers. She brought them right in the house. Fatima waited until her mother left the room on some imaginary errand, then, whispering, threatened to pour boiling water on the man’s private area while he slept. This was something she never would have done, but lies in warfare are permitted. The man always left, never to return.

More people now. Fatima prayed no one would die at the demonstration.

Thelonius, who had only killed people when specifically instructed to do so by the United States of America, sipped his coffee, closed his eyes, took a deep breath, then said to Becky, ‘Honey, have you seen Child?’

Within fifteen minutes, the protest Fatima helped organize had drawn about twenty thousand people, double what she had prayed for.

She stood chanting
Allahu Akbar
with everyone else.
Allahu Akbar
is one of those hard-to-translate phrases. You hear people saying it means ‘God is great’, but that’s wrong. In fact, it means, ‘God is greater than anything that might have ever happened, or is happening now, or could happen in the future’. That’s too long for a translation, though.

Fatima took deep breaths each time she said it, used it to avoid crying tears of rage.