Man of the Hour (35 page)
Arthur was still sitting on the examining table, but the nebulizer mask was off. On seeing him, David felt himself becoming more vivid. The little pulse next to his heart. He knew there was a reason he hadn’t gotten around to killing himself today.
“Daddy, the cloud almost got me.”
“The cloud?” David sat down beside him on the table, still a little green and churned up inside.
“The bad cloud. The one from my dreams.”
Oh yes, the nightmare cloud that always appeared after he’d seen his parents fighting.
“I was fighting with Maxwell and then the bad cloud came in my chest and I couldn’t breathe.”
“Okay. Okay.” David put his arm around the boy and pulled him close, like he was pulling him to shore. “The cloud almost got me too.”
“What?”
“It’s all right. I’ve got you now. I’ve got you.”
AFTER LAST NIGHT’S
cold snap and rain, the weather had warmed up again, a final gasp of Indian summer. And from the way the sun was roaming on top of the water and the wind was carrying the carousel music up the Coney Island boardwalk, Elizabeth could tell this was going to be an American day.
There were days she felt more Arab. But this Saturday—as she put on a pair of denim cut-offs, a black tank top, and her Rollerblades and went skating down the boardwalk with her friend Merry Tyrone—she felt more American.
“Come on, girlfriend, shake that thang,” said Merry, keeping pace with her in a blue Spandex tank top and tight navy shorts with the Adidas stripes down the sides. “Put some rhythm into it.”
Elizabeth wobbled a little, hoping none of her family would see her like this. She’d had it with Nasser and the insanity of him going through her room. It made her just want to shuck off all the tradition, all the relatives, all the history, all the pressure of being part of an oppressed people without a real homeland.
Enough already.
She just wanted to skate.
She pushed off with her right leg and then her left, feeling the tendons and muscles stretch as she sailed past the hot dog stands and the old burned-down Dreamland amusement park, its disused Thunderbolt roller coaster shrouded in moss and ivy. The sun played lightly on her skin, making her shoulders shine and her arms look golden. She was wearing the new pads that Nasser had bought her but not the helmet. It was too small and it made her feel like she was suffocating. Besides, she liked having her hair in the salty breeze. She wanted the sensation of things rolling off her today.
“Yo, what about Mr. Fitz?” Merry said.
“I know. Did they arrest him yet?”
“No, but everybody’s buggin’ out about it. None of us knew he was, like, the
mad bomber
an’ shit. So now, I’m like, thinking like a detective, you know. Going back over things he said in class. Re
examining.
I always thought there was something a little
out
about him. What was that shit he wrote on the blackboard the other day? To know yourself is the final horror. Now we know
why
.”
“It was, ‘To be afraid of oneself is the last horror,’” Elizabeth corrected her. “That’s not at all the same thing. He was being a teacher.”
“If you say so.”
Elizabeth pushed off hard on her right leg, hearing the roar of the herringbone boards under her skates as seagulls scattered from her path. “I don’t believe what they said about him in the paper anyway.”
“You liked him. Right?” Merry was grinning at her.
“What you talkin’ about, girl?” Elizabeth was trying out that homegirl speak; it never sounded right coming out of her mouth.
“You were sweet on him, Mr. Fitz. I seen the way you looked at him sometimes.”
“He’s my teacher. What’s up with that? Why’s everybody think I’ve got something going on with him? It’s just because he takes me seriously.”
She passed through scents of perfume and cigarette smoke, thinking about him. Mr. Fitzgerald. It still made no sense to her, the accusation. He never seemed that strange in class, not like they said in the papers and on television. He just liked to push things a little. In fact, she’d enjoyed that about him. The way he could pull ideas out of you that you didn’t know you had. Not like her other teachers, declaiming the same boring lessons from the same books in the same can’t-be-bothered voices. When Mr. Fitzgerald talked, the words moved around in your head. Of course, he’d touched her, lightly, that day in the parking lot. But somehow she hadn’t minded.
“Yeah, I know what that’s about,” Merry was saying. “You got that
older man thang
going on with him.”
“I do not.”
“Yeah, that’s what you say. But you thinking about that mad bomber love.”
The carousel music grew louder. Elizabeth pushed off on her left leg as they approached the entrance to the Aquarium. Four boys from school were standing there, some thirty yards away, smoking blunts and hoisting forties. One of them was that cute Dominican guy, Obstreperous Q, with the shaved head and the earring, and another was Ray-Za with the funky hair and the gangsta-style, whom Merry dated sometimes.
“Speaking of bad boys,” said Merry, skating on ahead. “Excuse me a minute. I have to
communicate
with this
fine
young Nubian.”
Elizabeth hung back a little, watching Merry’s hips do the side-to-side swivel and wondering what it would be like to be so free and easy with your body. To be so relaxed. To be a hot American babe, instead of a demure Arab girl. To have men stare at you, enthralled. She thought she’d seen Mr. Fitzgerald look at her that way once or twice. And why not? Why should she be different from anyone else? She had more in common with kids here than she did with her crazy brother from Bethlehem. She was raised in America, she had an American stepmother, she read American books, had American thoughts. But something wouldn’t let her go all the way over to that side. The one night she’d tried hanging out on a street corner, drinking beer with Merry and a couple of other girls from school, she’d found herself getting restless and uncomfortable, liking the idea of what she was doing, but hating the actual taste of it. With boys, it was the same. She’d look at a guy for weeks, fantasizing about the absolute coolness of being on a date with him. But if he dared to approach her, she’d shrink away in terror.
What was the matter with her? She was seventeen years old, a healthy American girl, with a good mind and a good body. A rockin’ bod, as the other girls in the class would say. A slammin’ bod. So what was holding her back? Why couldn’t she play? In fact, why couldn’t she do anything she wanted? She wasn’t wrapped up in a veil in a Middle Eastern village somewhere, about to be bartered away in an arranged marriage. She had the run of the country—the open sea on her right, the arcades, merry-go-rounds, and everything beyond on her left. She didn’t have to stay home until she got married, though that was what Nasser and her father would have liked. She could go away to college, maybe even to Boston, where Merry was probably headed next year. She could have her own life, her own career, she could marry who she wanted. She could even make her own mistakes.
She started picking up speed as she drew closer to Merry, who was already sweet-talking with the
boyz
by the Aquarium entrance. There was nothing for her to be afraid of, she told herself. She wanted them to see her, to see she was just like them, and maybe even to chase her if they had the nerve.
But as she zoomed past the crew, and heard Obstreperous Q call out, “Ooow mama, I like it like that,” she saw something that scared her. An old woman in a black head scarf feeding seagulls by the benches on her right. She couldn’t see the woman’s face, couldn’t even tell if she was Arab, but for some reason, the thought came into her head that this was what her mother would have looked like. She turned, glancing back over her shoulder as she kept skating forward, twisting herself into a kinetic sculpture of confused emotions. She wanted this, she didn’t want it. And so she tripped and fell.
OKAY, THIS IS
who you are.
You are not a man who beats his wife. You are not a man who would ever hurt his child. You are a father and a teacher. That much you know for sure. It’s a start. And you are not going to kill yourself. At least not yet.
Thus David Fitzgerald began trying to reassemble himself.
You are going to go on with your life. You are going to walk out of the apartment this morning. You are going to ignore the photographers on the sidewalk, yelling, “Hey, fuckface, look over here!” and “Hey, shithead, have you beaten your kid today?” to try to get a rise out of you. You will ignore the vicious animal gnawing at your insides and you will get on the subway, bury your face in
Darkness at Noon
, and start the long ride out to Coney Island. You are going to survive this somehow. You are not a victim. You are going to get back to being yourself, whoever that is.
You will show up at school for the first time in almost a week and you will not be embarrassed when Charisse, the sullen, spherical security guard, insists you go through the metal detector like a student when all the other teachers routinely step around it. You will go to the principal’s office and you will ask to see Larry and you will not get upset when Michelle, his bitchy secretary, tells you that you’ll have to wait most of the morning and gets on the phone with her crazy boyfriend. You will do this because you cannot continue to sit around the apartment waiting for further disaster to strike.
When Larry finally makes time to see you a few minutes before lunch, you will smile and grasp his hand warmly and try to summon up memories of when you were an eager young teacher. When Larry gives you a look of glacial seriousness, you won’t be discouraged. You will ask for your job back.
“David, you have got to be kidding me,” he will say. “Do you know what the people in the district superintendent’s office and the Parents’ Association will do if they even find out you’ve set foot in the school after what you’ve been accused of?”
You will remind him that no one has any legal standing to keep you from doing your job. You are yet to be charged with any crime, and though Ralph says that could change at any time, you still have your rights. You also have lawyers who are more than willing to sue the school if it comes to that. You will be making Larry very, very unhappy. When he tries to argue that you should be fired for not mentioning on your original application that you’d been arrested for stealing a car, you will point out that it happened when you were a juvenile and the record was sealed, so it can’t be counted against you. You will cause his already waxy skin to turn slightly gray. You will make his hairline recede. You will make him reach for the Maalox. But this isn’t your problem. You have been punished for a crime you didn’t commit and you need to be made whole again. You have to re-apply to the world. The fact that you’re still getting paid is irrelevant. A man is his work, and you need to work again.
A fighter fights, a writer writes, a teacher teaches. You need to get back in the classroom again, because it’s the only place you’ve ever truly felt at home. But just as important, one of the kids may know who did the actual bombing. And in your heart, you know they’re far more likely to tell you than a cop.
So you have to get back to work. It’s impossible, Larry will tell you. The parents will go ballistic. Be reasonable. Take a reassignment back to the district office, he’ll say. But that’s not what you had in mind.
After going back and forth with him for ten minutes, you’ll work out a compromise. College applications are due in a few weeks and someone has to review the students’ essays with them. You will have some contact with the kids but it will be limited enough to keep everyone else satisfied. This seems like a fair alternative until the case is resolved. Until forces beyond your control determine whether you spend the rest of your life as a free man or a convict in a faraway prison, who gets to see his son maybe two or three times a year. But you will not think about that for now. You will try to get on with things. You are not a victim.
You will leave it to Larry to work out the details with the other administrators. It’s not your concern who has to be stroked and who has to be bludgeoned. You just want to come back and find out who did this bombing. Hands will be shaken and eyes will be averted. You will walk out of there with a sense of purpose. You will still be scared and dreading every minute, for fear that you will suffocate, but you will put one foot in front of the other. You are going to live until you die. You are going to be a father to your son and a teacher to your students. You will have lunch at Nathan’s down the street. Two dogs with relish, a large Coke, and those sublimely greasy fries. And for the first time in weeks, your food will taste decent.
WITH THE BOMBING TARGETS
selected, Nasser, Youssef, and Dr. Ahmed arranged to have breakfast with the imam, Sheik Abdel Aziz Ayad, at the Skyview Diner in Bay Ridge.
The purpose, Nasser assumed, was to try to get some money and obtain blessings for each of their choices, especially since Youssef had expressed reservations about the school as a target. Getting permission was no easy matter, Nasser knew, for out of the literally thousands of imams in the tri-state area, almost none would sanction acts of violence against innocent people.
“I would like plain pancakes with no butter on the side,” the imam told the waitress in English with his crooked smile. “And please have them wipe the grill for me, so my food doesn’t touch any of the pork.”
“Yes, keep my eggs away from the bacon too,” chimed in the Great Bear, who was wedged into the booth next to the imam and across from the doctor and Nasser. “I only eat what’s
halal
.”
Nasser noticed the bigger man trying to puff himself up in front of the imam. Things had changed in their little constellation lately. Nasser sensed that he’d elevated himself to a new level of respect in Dr. Ahmed’s eyes by suggesting they bomb the school again, while Youssef had forfeited some status with his hesitation.