Jihadi (32 page)

The dead guy sharing this story recalls that October 14, 2005, was a Friday notable in the Islamic Republic for the New Imam's first public declaration of a Caliphate whose capital was Islamic City, whose head was himself. His wife, of course, had been shouting this in the streets for some time.

October 14, 2005 was also the day Fatima concluded, for reasons she could not have explained, that a strange odour her sister claimed to smell connected to something in the real world.

It was the day Mike Mazzoni made his brother decorate his hand with its fifth star. That happened before breakfast.

It was the day Indelible agreed, via email, to have his first Skype discussion with Sullivan Hand.

It was the day Becky confirmed with a home pregnancy test that she was, in fact, carrying her first and only child, though she knew her body well enough to have suspected as much for some time.

October 14, 2005 was the day Becky devoted her life to acting in defence of that pregnancy.

It was the day Thelonius Liddell found himself staring at a milk carton on his kitchen table. The day he figured out that antifreeze was lethal poison when licked up by cats. The day that all of Becky's past warnings – about cats and toxoplasmosis and foetal deformity and what she would and wouldn't put up with if there were ever a baby on the way – came back to him with special force.

It was the day Thelonius decided his wife was carrying Dick Unferth's baby. He was wrong about that.

Contingent upon his orders concerning the infidels (Abu Islam told the persistent reporter who had somehow talked his way past the Bearded Glarers) was a precondition.

Of course, he referred to the precondition of lawful Islamic authority, and this, he knew, most people believed not to exist in the Islamic Republic. Until today, there had been ample reason for scepticism. Despite the country's name, he assured the reporter, the present government served only to parody an Islamic state. Indeed, its leaders had up to this point imprisoned all those who called in public for a lawful Islamic state with a single Khilafah. Lacking a Khilafah, they knew, there could be no single voice to speak on behalf of Islam. Abu Islam had resolved this difficulty on the afternoon of October 14, 2005 by proclaiming himself the sole rightful leader of the world's 1.4 billion Muslims, two hundred thousand of whom were now camped out on all four sides of the American embassy on his orders.

Abu Islam confirmed this proclamation, speaking more slowly this time, for the reporter's benefit. He acknowledged that such a step, extreme and necessary in the face of extremity, carried with it personal danger.

He was willing to go to prison. He was willing to die. He was not willing to betray Islam.

He would, however, be out of the public eye for a while.

The reporter asked about an ayat in the word of Allah mandating moderation in daily life.

Abu Islam answered that this verse implied that there were times when moderation must itself be moderated.

The reporter left. There in Abu Islam's private quarters (quite comfortable, despite the earlier protestations against living in buildings) his wife prepared two bourbons.

There was a window in the hot, stuffy bathroom, and through it Thelonius could see the big sycamore, framed against a darkening afternoon sky. A wedge of Canadian geese flew by, and above them a bank of grey clouds moving slightly slower than the birds, but in the same direction, the sycamore leaning after them in the wind and losing more of its leaves, everything receding, heading south, away from him.

And now the geese were quite small.

He felt the old dead feeling in his chest again, the one that locked him in. Thelonius spun down the knob on the heater, which rattled and went silent. He opened the window.

Becky wouldn't approve, heating the outdoors with all this expensive warm air. But now he could hear the faint calls of the geese as they stretched away towards Florida or wherever.

Cold air streamed through the window. He breathed it in deep, closing his eyes, enjoying the clean feel of it, enjoying the expectation that it was about to rain outside.

He stroked Child once, a slow stroke. The fur was soft and matted in spots. The bathtub's old porcelain surface was cold and white.

He arranged Child as though he were sleeping. Yet his eyes remained open.

Thelonius said out loud, ‘He has succeeded who purifies her and he has failed who corrupts her.'

Now what?

He turned the four-pronged COLD handle, nearly as old as the house, then lifted the lever that made water flow through that fake-art deco showerhead Becky had installed last year. When the water hit Child it reduced him in size, but it drew all the filth out of him and straightened the wayward tufts of fur into waves. After enough time, Thelonius shut off the tap and all the water drained away and it was okay.

A HIS towel or a HERS towel: he picked the HIS towel from the rack and dried Child's fur with it, set the towel on the sink vanity, gathered him up, held him in his arms and took a breath.

Should he place the towel in the laundry hamper or throw it away?

He didn't want her touching Child or any part of him. He would come back up and throw the towel away after he had buried Child.

A gentle rain started to fall outside. Just Get Started.

He left the window open. Strong and ready, as though things were behind him, Thelonius walked back down the stairs with the damp corpse along his forearms. The leg slowed him down, and that was fine now.

Favouring the leg, he made his way outside with great care.

With a shovel he procured from the shed, he buried the cat deep in the backyard. The air was cool and open and rainy as he dug. There was a lot of space to work with. The autumn earth smelled damp and alive, and the leaves were shaking with the rain, and when he was done, he looked off toward a hillside that he had always liked, and it looked clean in the rain, cleaner than he could ever recall it looking.

By late afternoon Thelonius, who had been staring at the cat’s grave for some time, was wet and a little woozy. It was still raining. His clothes, soaked, stuck to him. It occurred to him that he ought to go inside and pray.

Once inside, though, his leg gave him trouble again, and he thought about trying to sleep that off. But the distance to the couch was intimidating, and anyway he was dripping. He opted to dry his hands and look for some instructions. Must be something about praying in that Koran.

He spent twenty minutes paging through it at the dining-room table, but didn’t find any praying instructions. He decided to call up someone. At least he ought to know. So he found a number and called it and asked about how to pray for forgiveness after killing somebody.

The ebullient imam at the Islamic Center of Greater Marblehead spoke with no accent and great enthusiasm, and pretended not to understand what Thelonius had asked. He provided clear, patient and ardent instructions on how to pray: how to find the direction,
make an intention, purify oneself with water. All that had to happen before praying. Thelonius wrote it all down. The imam mentioned casually – as though arranging a complex, exciting social event with Thelonius – that if one happened to have committed a major sin, one was supposed to do the purification step and the prayer itself, in an attitude of accountability and repentance. And pray slowly. Would Thelonius come to the mosque that afternoon?

Thelonius said he’d do his best, but he wasn’t sure what the rest of the day looked like. He thanked the man and hung up.

Thelonius went back upstairs to the bathroom and did the water thing, which involved saying ‘Bismillah’ and washing your hands and your mouth and your nose and your forearms and your feet. He figured out which direction Mecca was, made an intention to pray for forgiveness in an attitude of repentance and accountability, and prayed in the bedroom. He wept when he was finished, wept down on his knees. Then he felt angry at Becky.

He decided to do the water thing again.

As he did that, he noticed there was still some black cat-hair in the tub, and heard Becky downstairs. And he felt the anger again and slowed himself and calmed it down and started the water thing once again.

‘You’re not turning into a Muslim, are you?’ she called from below, laughing.

He had left the open Koran on the dining-room table.

He finished, turned off the water.

‘That was my idea, you know, that whole conversion,’ her voice called. ‘You could at least say thanks.’

He dried his hands and feet on a HERS towel. He was okay seeing her face now.

From the bottom of the stairs he heard her call again, closer this time: ‘T?’

A note of concern.

‘T, you know you have a home here. You’ll always have a home here. You aren’t going to turn into a Muslim on us, are you?’

A big nothing rested on the stairway after that.

‘Are you?’

‘Yeah, I was thinking I might,’ he called down finally, overloud but at least not angry.

There was another big nothing. The sound of the rain outside. He opened the window all the way, the better to see a new flock of geese trailing away beneath the clouds, the better to hear the unfaltering rain. Over the rain, from behind, came her footfall. He turned. She was standing right there in the doorway, her red hair askew and her eyes tight slits – an expression that had, historically, sent the not-to-be-disobeyed message, ‘
Don’t speak
’. He looked into them now but did not fall in.

‘Becky, I let you down.’

She looked at him as she would look at a specimen.

‘I didn’t know I was letting you down, but I was. That must have hurt you, left you feeling alone. And I am so, so sorry I couldn’t give you what you needed.’

Not a twitch of any muscle.

‘I assume it’s Dick Unferth’s baby. I want a divorce.’

Not a blink.

‘You and your
secrets
,’ she hissed at last. ‘You
weak
men with
weak
minds with all your
secrets
. You’re not the only ones with
secrets
, you know.’

‘I’ll leave tomorrow,’ Thelonius said.

She went into the bedroom and slammed the door. The rain kept up outside, steady and clean.

He heard familiar music playing from behind the bedroom door.

He took to the couch that night. So far as he could tell, she did not come out. The same album kept playing, over and over.

The next day he started packing and looking for another place to stay. For a direction home. He couldn’t reach Dad, but that was normal enough. He called Adelia.

‘Things,’ Dayton said right out loud – although there was no way for his brother or anyone else to hear him over the surging ocean of people – ‘are happening way too fast.’

The dead guy sharing this story imagines Dayton and Mike Mazzoni as two of the dozen or so marines standing at what was supposed to be attention, but was much closer to shock. Dayton was up on the helipad. His older brother was near the front gate of the embassy.

Although he could barely see his brother’s lips move from that distance, Mike Mazzoni also believed all of this was happening too quickly. It had to have been organized ahead of time. The ragheads had come together for the latest Freak Show so hot and so sudden there was no time to call in water cannons or anything else. At twelve forty there had been a few hundred white-robed ragheads, maybe a thousand. At one o’clock it was Raghead Freak Show City.

They were everywhere. All worked up about someone taking a common piss.

It did not exactly fill Mike Mazzoni with warm fuzzies to know that he had been assigned to stand in front of them all like a fucking bull’s eye.

By the time the Raghead-in-Chief started his latest prerecorded speech in some damn language that wasn’t English, Mike Mazzoni had downed about a fifth of gin from what looked like a water bottle, but wasn’t. Hajji dangled comfortably from the index and middle fingers of his left hand. The back of that hand had accumulated a total of seven black tattooed stars: one for the teenager whom he now referred to as Asshole A, and one each for Assholes B, C, D, E, F, and G.

‘Getting full,’ Bobbler had remarked that morning. ‘Just saying it doesn’t look so great on a sergeant, maybe. Maybe time to stop adding stars.’

‘Oh, hell no,’ Mike Mazzoni had said.

He kept the back of his hand facing out now, toward Freak Show Squared.

There it was, right in front of him, a crowd like fucking Woodstock,
but all white, shaped like an O that extended out forever, a sea of white surrounding the embassy from every side. The gates around him marked out the hollow of that O, where a crew of armed, uniformed personnel drew together in the courtyard like it was a little mosh pit. On top of the embassy, looking down at that mosh pit, looking down on everything, there was Bobbler, rifle drawn, circling in a constant, slow three sixty, targeting everyone in white and a target to everyone in white. Mike Mazzoni muttered, ‘Don’t fuck this one up, bro.’

A pinprick in the middle of the O, Bobbler had his own AK-47, not Hajji, nothing with a name, but nothing to be messed with, either. Men screamed themselves red in the face like they were getting paid for it and damned if they didn’t dare Bobbler to shoot them. In English.

No way Bobbler could hear that, though.

Crowd or no crowd, it was lonely in the hollow of that O. Who the hell screams at a sniper and waves his hands up in the air, all SHOOT ME SHOOT ME SHOOT ME? These people were in love with death. You couldn’t get ESPN or anything worth having in a country based on death. There’d been potential here once, he’d felt it himself in the Wreck Room, he had met a lot of them personally, before the Freak Show began, before this Raghead-in-Chief shit. But once upon a time, man…

Mike Mazzoni wished he had a cigarette. He breathed in a deep lungful of air instead.

Once upon a time you might have seen a mall here and some goddamned satellite dishes or some other signs of fucking civilization. Over the past month somebody had obviously been pumping crap into their heads in the mosques or the madrassas or maybe in the streets, while they were bowing their ragheads to Allah, getting hard-ons over their black box off in Mecca. Someone was pumping this death crap into them. Now they had all gotten on this insane wavelength of just wanting to die.

There was nothing to say to that. So the next lesson would have
to be a lesson in respect, and that lesson, if it were ever given, would have to come through families, not through the individual assholes. They were each happy to go down for a dirt nap. But family. Family, they cared about. Family, they would negotiate for. Family was the key.

That, Mike Mazzoni had determined, was the only thing these people took more seriously than death. Family.

Some white-robed idiot tried to climb over the gate.

Over
razorwire
. You could see the stupid son of a bitch bleeding from the hands and forearms. And he just kept on fucking climbing.

Mike Mazzoni called, ‘Bobbler!’

Bobbler heard him, or heard something, from the helicopter pad atop the embassy – a brother thing, maybe – and spun around.