Man of the Hour (7 page)

“What did he say?”

“He said it would be better if the beast was blessed before it was slaughtered. But we can make exceptions in the country of infidels. It’s all right if we just say me blessing before we eat the food.”

“It makes me uncomfortable sometimes, to ask for too many exceptions,” Nasser said earnestly. “Did you ask the imam for his blessing on this operation?”

“Not too directly, but it will be okay,” said Youssef, muttering a blessing before he took his first bite. “Don’t worry too much. God will protect us. Everything is very strong, very simple. One more time: You go in with the
hadduta
and your old school pass. No one will stop you, because you used to be a student there and they’ve seen you outside with your sister. And don’t worry about the metal detector either—the timer is made out of plastic. I took out all the screws myself.”

“Really?”

“My God, don’t ask. This was a pain.” Youssef chewed with his mouth open. “So then you go downstairs and leave it in the boiler room next to the cafeteria. Put it
inside
the boiler if you can. You say you know where this is, right?”

“A thousand times I’ve been by it, sheik.”

Nasser wrinkled his nose at the memory of the foul-smelling cafeteria food. “Flush hard, it’s a long way to the lunchroom.” The first piece of American bathroom graffiti he’d ever understood.

“You’ll see. It will be okay.” Youssef washed another nitroglycerin pill down with a sip of Diet Coke. “It would be one thing if we were trying to do this on the day this governor visits, with all the security around. This way we get the same message across without all the risk. You put this dynamite in a contained area like a boiler, it can maybe bring the whole school down into a pile of bricks and rubble. Then they know not even their children are safe. Very big story, on all the news tonight.”

Nasser found himself starting to eat french fries out of the bag, methodically, compulsively. Hating the idea of them, but loving their salty taste. Trying to find a way to calm himself. The dashboard clock said it was nearly half past one.

“I am still noticing you look sad.” The Great Bear was looking at him closely, as if probing for momentary weaknesses. “Are you thinking again if maybe you don’t want to do this?”

“No, sheik, my heart is strong.” Nasser tried to make himself very still, aware that any small movement could set off a disastrous tremor through the rest of his body.

“Then what’s the problem?” Youssef said, his voice turning sharp. “Is it your sister you’re worried about?”

“No.” Nasser put down the french fries and wiped his hands with a napkin. “I’ve made arrangements so she won’t be here.”

“Then what is it?”

Nasser looked at himself in the rearview mirror, wondering. Trying to imagine how the next few minutes would unfold. He wanted to picture himself being cool, ruthless, and efficient, like a figure in an American action movie, leaving destruction in his wake. But instead he felt the sharp corner of his belt buckle digging into his navel.

“I have so many things in my mind,” he said softly. “My mother. My father. Everything I want to do for the faith.”

Dread. Why did he have such a feeling of dread? For three years, he’d wandered the hallways of this school, thinking he’d like to machine-gun everyone there. Now he had a chance to do it, and for a greater cause, something bigger than himself. And yet his nerve was leaving him again.

“You know, you can get up and walk away this very minute.” Youssef put the burger down and stared at him. “No problem.” He reached for the bag at his feet. “I can just stop the timer where it is. We still have almost seventeen minutes.”

Nasser looked at the remaining french fries in his bag and felt the rusty key resting against his chest. He was afraid to say anything.

“Just let me ask you one thing, though,” said Youssef. “How long were you in the Ashkelon prison?”

“Almost two hundred days.”

“And how did you like it there? Didn’t you tell me how they tortured you to get you to confess and name your friends? Didn’t they give you the freezing water?”

“Yes.”

“And didn’t they put you in the banana position?”

“Of course.” Nasser still could feel his spine threatening to break from the unrelenting pressure.

“And what about the bag?” Youssef asked. “Didn’t they put the bag on you?”

Nasser nodded, experiencing that flush of nausea all over again. The bag. It was made of brown sack material and smelled strongly of feces. He was in an outdoor prison yard shackled and rear-cuffed in a backless chair when the Israeli guards stuck it over his head. For two or three hours, he sat there baking in the Jewish sun, breathing in the vile fumes, sweating and getting sicker and sicker. His joints aching. Wondering how he would survive this. At one point, he turned a little in his seat and one of the guards hit him so hard on top of the head that he saw a flash of light. That was when he thought he couldn’t take it anymore, that he would throw up and die right there in the chair surrounded by concrete walls and barbed wire. But he didn’t die. And after a while, all the pain and discomfort became relative and he willed himself into a state of numbness. That was how he got through it. By promising himself he would never feel anything ever again.

“Just remember, my friend,” Youssef was saying. “The Book said it best: sometimes you must fight when it is the thing you least want to do.”

Outside, ocean breezes stirred the banners of the closed-up amusement arcades, and the sounds of carpenters’ hammers echoed down the boardwalk. Nasser slowly turned and looked at the Great Bear. The scars. Youssef was covered in scars. The one under his eye and the other one up and down his chest. And then the knuckles, which were like painfully swollen bulbs. His entire body was a record of the things he’d done. Nasser’s own father had no scars like this, because he’d never fought for anything. He’d been too busy running away, crossing rivers.

“It’s okay,” he said. “I’m ready.”

He decided he was going to have to stop feeling again, to stop thinking. This must be how all the brave men got from one side of an experience to the other. You had to turn yourself into a machine. Wasn’t it all for a higher purpose anyway? You were but a tool in the hand of God, and if God wanted to stop you, He would.

“Fine.” Youssef picked up the book bag and set it on Nasser’s lap. “Then you know what to do. When the alarm clock completes its circuit, the
hadduta
will go off. Don’t jostle it around too much and don’t stop to talk to anyone you know. Trust in God and think like a gun.”

He reached across Nasser and pushed the door open onto the clear blue afternoon.

Up on the fourth floor, David Fitzgerald emerged from the bathroom, still feeling hungover and sick to his stomach. He’d stayed up late the night before, drinking and worrying—as he’d been doing pretty steadily since last week when Renee told him she was considering following Anton to the West Coast. This morning his guts had finally given up on him. He came back into the classroom after a good twenty minutes away and found his students acting like subjects of some highly irresponsible hormone experiment. Kids were screaming at one another, climbing over desks, throwing wads of paper, doing strange things to one another’s hair, and, most irritatingly, using some kind of orange-and-black Halloween clicker, which made a terrible racket to go with the constant hammering outside.

“Thanks for warming them up for me.” David grimaced at his best friend, Henry Rosenthal, who was supposed to be watching the class and chumming him on today’s afterschool field trip to the Metropolitan Museum.

“It was nothing,” said Henry. “Just remember: Hendrix once opened for the Monkees.”

Henry, with his long gray hair and black radical-chic turtleneck, was not into crowd control. He’d been involved with the Free Speech movement and alternative education programs of the sixties, but not
too
involved, you understand. He preferred talking fine wine to politics.

“All right, everyone, settle down and put the clickers away.” David stepped past him. “And the rest of you. If you’re not going to let me talk, can you at least keep your voices down so I can sleep up here?”

The day had already been a blizzard of demands and responsibilities. Parents showing up unannounced, wanting to know why their kids were doing so badly; papers for his second-period freshmen needing to be graded; Xerox machines breaking down; Shooteema Edwards, in tenth grade, finding out her mother had inoperable brain cancer. And of course, it didn’t help that there was a TV news crew outside, doing a segment about the school’s deplorable condition.

From out of the rabble, Seniqua Rollins raised her hand. A big, tough girl with cornrowed hair and tight jeans, who’d been suspended last year for smashing another girl’s head into a locker, she was rumored to be the main squeeze of a jailed gang leader called King Shit, or something like that, and today she was sporting a tight pink T-shirt that said
I’M UP AND DRESSED, WHAT ELSE DO YOU WANT FROM ME
? and a navy Tommy Hilfiger jacket.

“Yo, yo, yo, Mr. Fitz, what da dilly?” she said in a voice louder than the subway. “I got a question for y’all.”

“What is it?”

“Why you wasting our time taking us on a field trip anyhow? It’s late, man. You supposed to let us out.”

A little ripple of laughter went through the class, the kids titillated by the way she was challenging him. David slapped his attendance book against the side of his leg.

“I mean, you’re always saying we shouldn’t just accept things,” Seniqua went on, getting high on the attention. “So what’s up with that shit? I rather just like go home, chill, and read my girl Alice Walker.”

Several rebel clickers seconded her dissent.

“Well,” said David, taking a deep breath and trying to pull himself together for the occasion. “Number one, it’s the only time we could fit it in. And number two, we’re going to be studying the roots of our subject. Egyptians. Sumerians. Even our buddies, the Greeks. Check it out. Achilles, the first great hero of Western literature, refused to leave his tent to fight in the Trojan War because his general stole his mistress. Spitefulness, pride, jealousy. Can you relate?”

“No,” said Seniqua, authoritative and boisterous.

“Really?”

David noticed she was sitting unusually close to Amal Lincoln, a backup forward on the basketball team and reputedly the worst amateur rapper in Brooklyn. What would King Shit make of that little alliance if he ever got out? He’d probably fly into an Achillean rage, tie Amal’s skinny ass to the rear bumper of a LeBaron, and drag him around the walls of the school three times.

“I ain’t with it,” said Seniqua, wrestling with Amal for a clicker. “It all just seems so …
white
.”

Ah, the old racial correctness bugaboo. David tried to swiftly parry her thrust. “Well, the Egyptians and the Sumerians, they’re not exactly the Osmond Family, are they?” Immediately, he realized he’d slipped and fallen behind the popular culture curve again.

“Yeeeeeahhh, whatevah!” Seniqua dismissed him with a flat-handed homegirl swipe. “I’m just tired, that’s all. I wanna go home!”

“Word!” Stray voices and clickers backed her up. What was wrong here? David wondered. It wasn’t just him being hungover and worrying about Renee and Arthur. The whole rhythm of the day kept falling on the off beat. He looked around and noticed that more than a third of the class was absent—even Elizabeth Hamdy, who usually helped focus the group in her quiet way.
Et tu, Elizabeth?
Maybe that was the problem. Classes developed their own kind of chemistry over the course of a term. If you removed just one crucial element, the whole thing could collapse or combust.

“Anyway, we’re running kind of late, so we ought to get going,” he said, rubbing his temples and checking his watch. The hammering outside and the stray clicking in class seemed to italicize his headache. “Are there any other questions?”

“Yeah.” Seniqua Rollins glared back at him. “What were y’all doing in the bathroom for so long?”

Trust in God and think like a gun.

Nasser kept repeating the words to himself as he drew closer to the school and the sound of the carpenters’ hammering grew louder.

The sun was at his back and the book bag holding the
hadduta
was in his left hand. He wasn’t sure if he could do this. He was sure he could do this. His attitude changed from second to second.

He was some one hundred yards from the school now, the weight of the bag and his own caution making him list to the left a little as he walked.

Up ahead, he saw students starting to come down the front steps of the school, ready to disperse to the various hot dog stands and clam houses along the boardwalk for a late lunch, rejecting the cafeteria food. He remembered this part of the routine from when he was a student here four years back. There’d been times when he’d wished they would ask him to join them. But then again, he was sure he would say no if they did.

Boom.
He flashed on the image of them falling under the avalanche of bricks. The boys crushed and bloody. The girls crying inconsolably. Sirens screaming everywhere. Yes, this would be horrifying, but he wouldn’t allow himself to feel anything about it. He’d seen many things just as horrifying back in Bethlehem. The rain of stones. The burning tires and the tear gas. The soldiers firing rubber bullets. The children lying in the streets and the mothers crying. They were inconsolable too.

He was within thirty yards. He could see the carpenters working on the stage raising their hammers and slamming them down, but the sound took a second to reach his ears. A flock of boys came flying past him, and one of them, an
abbed,
a black one in a yellow Polo Sport shirt and street-sweeper jeans, made a point of plowing into him, shoulder first.

Caught off guard, Nasser stumbled, twisted an ankle, and started to fall over onto his book bag.
The hadduta.
He reeled back and just barely managed to steady himself as the
abbed
kept walking, smirking over his shoulder. With no idea of how close he’d come to blowing both of them up. The black ones. They were supposed to be brothers, Nasser thought. But he’d always been a little afraid of them at school.