Jihadi (9 page)

Walking back home, Fatima pondered the imam’s delicate situation. The heavyset woman had no doubt told many other people what she had seen, which meant the imam would likely be under pressure to do something, issue a fatwa perhaps. Yet how could he? When two women cannot come to agreement about a key fact, their testimony cannot be admitted. And the two of them stood as the only witnesses.

Fatima watched the beginnings of darkness seeping into the city. She stopped at a park where Wafa had often brought her and Noura, saw Wafa’s familiar trees illuminated, saw the gilded cityscape less unsightly now in the approach of sunset. Fatima found a point in the sky that was secure and beyond human structure. She felt brave.

The memory of playing here, sparked by the movement of the upper limbs of those trees, settled her. She enjoyed the memory of climbing them. Of Wafa saying when to stop climbing. Of obeying Wafa.

She stared up at the trees.

Fatima had a habit, one that Wafa had remarked upon and often parodied, of looking upwards when she was deep in thought. She might be studying for an exam, trying to compose herself, avoiding an unpleasant consequence. At the dinner table, Wafa imitated Fatima pondering how best to tell her mother that she had forgotten something, some essential item during a trip to the market, say (a common occurrence). Wafa stared up towards the ceiling, counting the cracks, her eyes crossed, mumbling.

‘Whenever she has to think, she looks towards heaven,’ Wafa said.

Before Wafa died, a family joke cast Fatima as the daydreamer. It had brought the four of them closer somehow, that joke, despite the
feigned anger of her denials. Now neither her mother nor her sister joked about that.

She had meant to be home before sunset. This was the ruling: Women were not to walk alone after dark. Fatima looked down again, stared at the pavement for a moment, then resumed her walk home. The city was descending into shadow, so she quickened her pace.

On the walk back home, Fatima wept for Wafa behind her veil. She wept in a way visible and audible to no one, her steps slow again, despite the steep decline of the sun. She remembered a story Wafa had read to her: a story about birds who said poo-tee-weet? Her sister had used this book to make time pass on the long airplane flight to America.

What kind of man, really, could pull the trigger, launch those projectiles. Or do such a thing to the Holy Koran. She saw the urine splashing upon the Word of God. Her insides churned.

Fatima wondered how those people could look into their mirrors each morning.

She entered her apartment building with four minutes to spare, and said Bismillah, which means ‘With the name of God’. Time to pray soon.

Fatima ended up killing Mike Mazzoni. It wasn’t murder, though.

Thelonius said: ‘Don’t you dare call us murderers.
You’re
the murderer.’

The little girl’s hand. The pool of blood. The sound of a woman clearing her throat.

‘Mr. Liddell,’ she said, loud enough to make him see her, ‘some of us have been down this road before, and some of us have not.’

‘“Put him down”. Jesus. What bullshit. Why don’t you
say
it. You want to
kill
him. Murderer!’

Melanie Del Rey rose slowly, like Justice roused, behind green-tinted glass. Her eyes narrowed.

‘Some of us, Mr. Liddell, are familiar with the relevant symptoms. Some of us have been called as witnesses in divorce proceedings and sued for slander and defamation of character, on the theory that a lawsuit along those lines might somehow rescue a relationship doomed and broken beyond all possibility of repair. Some of us have heard tell that pools of antifreeze sometimes form beneath automobiles, entirely by accident. Cats, some of us have learned from experience, have a taste for the stuff. Just a day or so of lapping at it can kill them. And some of us have heard it reliably reported that infidelities do occasionally take place, down here on Earth I mean.’

Icy hailpricks inside him again.

‘Antifreeze kills cats. So we have heard. Sometimes, we have heard, people actually pour pools of antifreeze onto the pavement, beneath their radiators, just to be rid of a cat that a spouse loves, but they, perhaps, do not.’

Stress breath CONSCIOUS.

‘My wife did
not
feed
antifreeze
to our cat.’

‘I never said she did.’

‘Hold it. I saw a green puddle in the garage. That must have been it. There must be a slow leak in my radiator.’

‘Yes. An accident. That is the best explanation. Now take a seat.’

Something in Thelonius’s chest gave way. He was breathing too hard.

‘Don’t “best explanation” me, bitch. Don’t “accident” me. You will go to
hell
. You will
burn
there. It was
you
. What did you
do
to him?’

Melanie Del Rey grimaced, apparently intending her expression to pass as a smile, and disappeared.

Thelonius, his chest heaving, made his way to the waiting room, avoiding the row of orange plastic seats near the dormant Keurig coffee dispenser.
One Life to Live
was still playing on the television mounted high for the benefit of abandoned animals or people.

Thelonius was the only one in the place.

His late mother’s favourite show spoke to him from a spot six feet or so above the floor, its dense colours playing around the glass rectangle, forming faces and voices that called him home to Llanview. Victoria Lord was in a restaurant, waiting for her oil tycoon husband Clint to arrive. Clint was late, as usual. The phone in Thelonius’s jacket pocket vibrated. Both Thelonius and Victoria flinched.

Do not bring that animal 2 the house
, Becky’s text message read.

Thelonius brought a shaky right hand to his forehead, felt time stop and pucker.

He shook himself free, then saw his left hand fling the phone hard onto the carpeted floor. It didn’t shatter. The text message was still visible.

On the evening following Fatima’s first day on the job as a translator, the corpse relating this tale insists, her sister Noura made dinner.

Noura was thirteen and too eager to be fourteen: young enough to be excited about the prospect of cooking a real meal at the end
of her sister’s first full day at her new job; old enough to mind adult interference. Fatima, who had been doing the cooking for years, was glad to be rid of the responsibility and the maternal culinary lectures that always came with it.

Noura ignored her mother’s counsel and, from time to time, said unusual things: ‘I hear people screaming in the bathroom.’ ‘There’s someone out there shouting about razors. I think it’s Nine.’ ‘That baby has a stench.’

In fact, there was no shouting, no razor, no baby. There was only chicken. Ummi continued her running commentary on Noura’s various procedural errors. Fatima just watched. That was the Plan for Coping: Ignore all references to Nine or any of Noura’s other Intimate Companions.

Intimate Companions: Fatima’s euphemism for the ever-expanding roster of hallucinatory figures influencing her sister’s social life. The Companions had made themselves known back in the States, emerging with Noura’s first spoken words: ‘Uh-oh!’ (To some unseen friend.) And a few days later, this shout: ‘It’s a trap!’

The Islamic City psychologists had been useless. Eight expensive, pointless sessions that only made things worse. The Plan for Coping had been Fatima’s idea, an innovation – of five or six years’ standing now – that worked more often than not, if working meant fewer angry episodes, fewer crying jags. The Plan for Coping had only one rule: no debates. That meant no arguments about whether there really were invisible people in (for instance) the bathroom. No disputes about reality. One moved on.

‘At least Nine
looks
at people while they’re
here
at the
table
, Fatima,’ Noura shouted without warning. ‘At least Nine asks people how their
day
went!’

Ummi reached out and smoothed her daughter’s hair, but Noura’s eyes brimmed with tears.

Noura’s chicken curry with rice was more than passable when finally served, and it was natural Noura should yearn for Fatima’s approval of it. As the three sat down to dinner, however, Fatima found
herself preoccupied and disinclined to speak. Ummi, who lived to fill such conversational gaps, praised the dish in extravagant terms. Wafa, she pointed out, had always enjoyed chicken curry. Fatima only looked up at the cracked light fixture.

‘Nine says they’re arguing about missing diapers up there,’ whispered Noura around a mouthful of her own chicken. Her eyes widened. ‘The husband says the woman
stole
them, and then sold them. He says the woman made those cracks in the ceiling on
pur
pose.’

‘You haven’t told her how much you liked her chicken, Fatima,’ Ummi observed. Her eyes said:
A compliment calms her
.

‘The chicken is delicious, Noura.’

Noura swallowed, shook her head. ‘You don’t mean it,’ she said, bitter. ‘You should
mean
it.’

‘Okay, it’s good. Not delicious. Good.’

Noura grinned, nodded, took another bite, worked her jaws, showed them both the half-chewed food, concealed it again, nodded again. ‘Crazytown says they’re going to make you look at a nudie-butt.’

Ummi grimaced. Fatima stared up at the ceiling again and thought of Wafa. This time she did not cry, or even come close to it. Some kind of commotion did seem to be taking place upstairs.

On
One Life to Live
, Clint was shouting, mid-argument, in a crowded restaurant; Victoria turned away from him in disgust, told him not to make a scene.

Thelonius pocketed his cell phone, closed his eyes. When he opened them again, it was 1992 and he had just met Becky for the first time. He held in his hands the application form he’d filled out with the primary goal of impressing her, because he knew damn well she would read it in his presence, based on how well their initial chat had gone.

When would she touch him?

He scanned the sheet a final time, looked up, found a face behind a desk, a face already familiar to him, bordered with intricate locks of cayenne and flame and alive with the morning light. He handed her the sheet, and her long index finger grazed his with intention, and lingering with that touch of hers was possibility and stability and certainty. A direction home.

Here (the dead guy telling this story recalls verbatim) is what Thelonius wrote when asked, on that form, to describe his ‘life philosophy’. ‘Thelonius Liddell loves swimming and self-improvement. Protecting his country is important to him. He first served in the Third Ranger Battalion and eventually became a member of the Special Forces, also known as the Green Berets. He is a big admirer of President Bush and cannot even conceive of a Clinton presidency. That may not be appropriate to state on a document such as this, but hey, it says “life philosophy”. He believes we only go around once in this life. One life to live. Before that, zip. After that, zip. In between, we either eat or we get eaten. No regrets and no apologies. His country eats, and so does he.’

You knew things for sure back then.

It was 2005 again and Thelonius was staring at Victoria Lord on the television that was playing in the Salem Abandoned Animals Facility.

What did he know for sure now?

He knew for sure his name was Thelonius.

He knew for sure the television set was on.

He knew for sure he wanted his cat back.

He knew for sure Child had to have been alive when he walked in the door of this godforsaken place, otherwise Melanie Del Rey would not have made such a fuss about getting him.

He knew for sure there was a green puddle back home in his garage. And a half-full jug of antifreeze. Did he know for sure there was a leak in the Siena? She had just
bought
that antifreeze. Well. That was why: The minivan was leaking, surely, and leaking fast. But. The instrument panel would have blinked on if the Siena was low on anything. She had made a big deal about the instrument panel and everything it blinked on for.

She wouldn’t poison a cat intentionally. She wasn’t pregnant or anything.

Wait. Did he know that for sure?

No. No, he didn’t.

But.

He knew for sure that when he looked out at the Siena next, that asphalt beneath it, grey as a departing storm, had damn well better have antifreeze on it.

Thelonius made for the wall, took a deep stress breath, and prepared himself to scan the bottom of the narrow, grimy window that extended half a foot or so into the basement, to check the asphalt outside, to confirm the existence of a green puddle that had to be there under his green minivan. He stood on his tiptoes and looked.

The asphalt beneath the van was blank as the face of a corpse.

His insides quivered. He shut his eyes. He saw himself in the Salem house, at the dining-room table, sitting across from his wife, watching as though he were someone else. They were eating Child, both of them. Child butchered in his bloody fur and set out on two plates: they were eating him with knives and forks, weaving the silverware with care around the puddles of blood.

‘My God,’ Thelonius said. ‘Why did I do it?’