Terrorist - A Novel Part 3

"Studio?"

"I call it that. It's also the room I sleep in. Ignore the bed. I have to multi-task, so Ahmad has his his privacy in privacy in his his room. We shared a room for years, maybe too long. These cheap apartments, the walls are like paper." room. We shared a room for years, maybe too long. These cheap apartments, the walls are like paper."

She opens the door she came out of, ten minutes ago. "Wow!" Jack Levy says, entering. "I guess Ahmad told me you painted, but-"

"I'm trying to work bigger, and brighter. Life's so short, I suddenly figured, why keep fussing at the details? Perspective, shadows, fingernails-people don't notice, and your peers, the other painters, accuse you of being just an ill.u.s.trator. Some of my regulars, like a gift shop in Ridgewood that's sold me for ages, are a little bewildered by this new direction of mine, but I tell them, 'I can't help it, it's the way I've got to go.' If you don't grow, you die, right?"

Stepping around the carelessly made bed, its blanket tugged up roughly, he surveys the walls with a respectful squint. "You really sell this stuff?"

He regrets his phrasing; she goes defensive. "Some, not all. Not even Rembrandt and Pica.s.so sold all all their work, right away." their work, right away."

"Oh, no, I didn't mean . . ." he bl.u.s.ters. "They're very striking; you just don't expect it, walking in."

"I'm experimenting," she says, mollified and willing to go on, "with straight out of the tube. The viewer, that way, mixes the colors with his eye."

"Terrific," Jack Levy says, hoping to conclude this part of the conversation. He is out of his element.

She has got a kettle of water heating on the little electric coil set on a bureau whose top is crusty with spilled or wiped-off oil colors. He finds her paintings pretty wild but he likes the atmosphere in here, the messiness and the icy-clear fluorescent lights overhead. The smell of paints speaks to him, like the fragrance of wood shavings, of a bygone time when people made things by hand, hunched over in their own cottages. "Maybe you'd prefer herbal tea," she says. "Chamomile makes me sleep like a baby." Her eyes glance his way, testing. "Except when I wake up four hours later." Needing to go pee, Needing to go pee, she doesn't say. she doesn't say.

"Yeah," he says. "That's the problem."

Cut short and knowing it, she blushes and tends to the water, which already is sending a plume of steam out through the hole in its hinged spout cap. "I forget what you said about what kind of tea. Chamomile or what?"

He resists this woman's New Age side. Next thing she'll be pulling out her crystals and / Ching Ching sticks. He says, "I thought we had agreed on instant decaf, even though it always tastes scalded." sticks. He says, "I thought we had agreed on instant decaf, even though it always tastes scalded."

Her color stays high under her sifting of freckles. "If you feel that way about it, maybe you don't want anything."

"No, no, Miss-Mrs.-" He gives up trying to name her. "Anything wet and hot would be fine. Anything you want. You're being very gracious. I didn't expect-"

"I'll get the decaf and check on Ahmad. He hates studying when I'm not in and out of the living room; he feels he's not getting credit, you know?"

Teresa disappears, and when she comes back with, a stubby jar of brown powder in her hand-a short-nailed, firm-fleshed hand tbat does things-Jack has turned off the hot plate so tbe water wouldn't boil away. Her mothering has taken some minutes; he could hear her in the other room bantering in a light, probing, female voice, and her son's scarcely deeper voice whining and groaning back at her with those inarticulate high-school denials he knows too well- as if the very existence of adults is a cruel and needless trial they're being put to. Jack tries to pick up on this: "So you see your son as a pretty typical, average eighteen-year-old?"

"Isn't he?" Her maternal side is a sensitive side; her beryl-green eyes bulge out at him between colorless lashes that must get mascara from time to time, but not today or yesterday. The hair at her hairline is a lighter, softer tint than the metallic red up top. The set of her lips, the plump upper one lifted a bit as with someone listening hard, tells him that he has used up her initial gush of friendliness. She comes on strong, then gets impatient, is his take.

"Maybe," he tells her. "But something's throwing him off." Jack gets down to the business he came for. "Listen. He doesn't want to be a truck driver."

"He doesn't? He thinks he does, Mr.-"

"Levy, Teresa. Like in 'Down by the levee' but spelled differently. Somebody's putting pressure on Ahmad, for whatever reason. He can do better than be a trucker. He's a smart, clean-cut kid, with a lot of inner-directedness. What I want him to have are some catalogues for colleges around here where it's not too late for admission. Princeton and Penn, it's way too late, but New Prospect Community College- you have to know where that is, up past the falls-and Fair-leigh d.i.c.kinson and Bloomfield, he might get in, and could commute to any of them if you can't swing room and board. The thing would be to get him started somewhere and, depending how he does, hope to transfer up. Any college these days, the way the politics of it are, wants diversity, and your boy, what with his self-elected religious affiliation, and, pardon me for saying it, his ethnic mix, is a kind of minority's minority-they'll snap him up."

"What would he study at college?"

"What anybody studies-science, art, history. The story of mankind, of civilization. How we got here, what now. Sociology, economics, anthropology even-whatever turns him on. Let him feel his way. Few college students nowadays know what they want to do at first, and the ones that do get their minds changed. That's the purpose of college, to let you change your mind, so you can handle the twenty-first century. Me, I can't. When I was in college, who ever heard of computer science? Who knew about genomes and how they can track evolution? You, you're a lot younger than I, maybe you can. These new-style paintings of yours-you're making a start."

"They're very conservative, really," she says. "Abstraction's old hat." The open set of her lips has closed; his remark about painting was dumb.

He hurries to finish his pitch. "Now, Ahmad-"

"Mr. Levy. Jack." She has become a different person, sitting widi her too-hot decaf on a kitchen stool bought unpainted and never varnished. She lights a cigarette and props one foot, in a crepe-soled blue canvas shoe, on a rung and crosses her legs. Her pants, tight white jeans, bare her ankles. Blue veins wander through die white skin, Irish-white skin; the ankles are bony and lean, considering die soft heft of the rest of her. Beth's weight has had twenty more years than this woman's to settle low, drooping over her shoes and taking all the anatomy out of her a.s.s. Jack, though he used to be a two-packs-a-day Old Golds man, has grown unused to people smoking, even in the school's faculty room, and the smell of burning tobacco is deeply familiar to him but verges on being scandalous. The stylized acts of lighting up, inhaling, and hurling smoke violently out of her pursed lips give Terry-how her paintings are signed, big and legibly, with no last name-an edge. "Jack, I appreciate your interest in Ahmad and would have been more so if die school had shown any interest in my son before a month before graduation."

"We're swamped over there," he interrupts. "Two thousand students, and half of them it would be kind to call dysfunctional. The squeakiest wheels get the attention. Your son never made trouble, was his mistake."

"Regardless, at diis phase of his development he sees what college offers, those subjects you name, as part of G.o.dless Western culture, and he doesn't want more of it than he absolutely can't avoid. You say he never made trouble, but it was more tiian that: he sees his teachers teachers as die troublemakers, worldly and cynical and just in it for the paycheck-the short hours and summer vacations. He thinks they set poor examples. You've heard die expression, 'above it all'?" as die troublemakers, worldly and cynical and just in it for the paycheck-the short hours and summer vacations. He thinks they set poor examples. You've heard die expression, 'above it all'?"

Levy merely nods, letting this now-c.o.c.ky woman run on. What she might tell him about Ahmad could be a help.

"My son is above it all," she states. "He believes in the Islamic G.o.d, and in what the Koran tells him. I can't, of course, but I've never tried to undermine his faith. To someone without much of one, who dropped out of die Catholic package when she was sixteen, his faith seems rather beautiful."

Beauty, then, is what makes her tick-attempts at it on the wall, all that sweet-smelling paint drying, and letting her boy hang out to dry in grotesque, violent superst.i.tion. Levy asks, "How did he get to be so-so good? Did you set out to raise him as a Muslim?"

"No, Christ," she says, dragging deep, playing die tough girl, so that her roused eyes seem to burn along with die tip of the cigarette. She laughs, having heard herself. "How do you like that for a Freudian slip? 'No, in nomine Domini.' in nomine Domini.' Islam meant nothing to me-less than nothing, to be accurate: it had a negative rating. And it meant not much more to his father. Omar never went to a mosque that I could see, and whenever I'd try to raise the subject he'd clam up, and look sore, as if I was pus.h.i.+ng in where I had no business. 'A woman should serve a man, not try to own him,' he'd say, as if he were quoting some kind of Holy Writ. He'd made it up. What a pompous, chauvinistic horse's a.s.s he was, really. But I was young and in love-in love mostly with him being, you know, exotic, third-world, put-upon, and my marrying him showing how liberal and liberated I was." Islam meant nothing to me-less than nothing, to be accurate: it had a negative rating. And it meant not much more to his father. Omar never went to a mosque that I could see, and whenever I'd try to raise the subject he'd clam up, and look sore, as if I was pus.h.i.+ng in where I had no business. 'A woman should serve a man, not try to own him,' he'd say, as if he were quoting some kind of Holy Writ. He'd made it up. What a pompous, chauvinistic horse's a.s.s he was, really. But I was young and in love-in love mostly with him being, you know, exotic, third-world, put-upon, and my marrying him showing how liberal and liberated I was."

"I know the feeling. I'm a Jew, and my wife was a Lutheran."

"Was? Did she convert, like Elizabeth Taylor?"

Jack Levy snarls out a chuckle and, still clutching his unwanted college catalogues, admits, "I shouldn't have said 'was.' She never changed, she just doesn't go to church. Her sister on the other hand works for the government in Was.h.i.+ngton and is very involved in church, like all those born-againers down there. It may be just that around here die only Lutheran church is the Lithuanian, and Elizabeth can't see herself as a Lithuanian."

" 'Elizabeth' is a pretty name. You can do so much with it. Liz, Lizzie, Beth, Betsy. All you can do with Teresa is Terry, which sounds like a boy."

"Or like a male painter."

"You noticed. Yeah, I sign that way because female artists have always seemed smaller than the male ones, no matter how big they painted. This way, I make them guess."

"You can do a lot with 'Terry.' Terry cloth. Terri-ble. Terri-fy. And there's Terrytoons."

"What's that?" she asks in a startled voice. As laid-back as she wants to appear, this is a shaky woman, who married what her harp brothers and father would have called a n.i.g.g.e.r. Not a mother who'd give a lot of firm guidance; she'd let the kid take charge.

"Oh, something from long ago-animated cartoons at the movie show. You're too young to remember. One of the things when you're ancient, you remember things n.o.body else does."

"You're not ancient," she says automatically. Her mind switches tracks. "Maybe on television I saw some, when I used to watch with little Ahmad." Her mind switches tracks again. "Omar Ashmawy was handsome. I thought he was like Omar Sharif. Did you ever see him in Doctor ZhivagoV Doctor ZhivagoV "Only in "Only in Funny Girl. Funny Girl. And I went to see Streisand." "Of course." She smiles, that short upper lip of hers exposing imperfect Irish teeth, die eyeteeth crowded. She and Jack have reached a stage when anything they say to each other is pleasing, their senses ratcheted up. Sitting with her legs crossed on the high unpainted stool, she preens, stretching her neck and doing a slow s.h.i.+mmy with her back, as if easing out a kink caused by standing at her easel. How seriously can she work at this stuff? He guesses she could slap out three a day if she tried. "Handsome, huh? Does your son-" "And he's a fantastic international bridge player," she says, not jumping her own track. And I went to see Streisand." "Of course." She smiles, that short upper lip of hers exposing imperfect Irish teeth, die eyeteeth crowded. She and Jack have reached a stage when anything they say to each other is pleasing, their senses ratcheted up. Sitting with her legs crossed on the high unpainted stool, she preens, stretching her neck and doing a slow s.h.i.+mmy with her back, as if easing out a kink caused by standing at her easel. How seriously can she work at this stuff? He guesses she could slap out three a day if she tried. "Handsome, huh? Does your son-" "And he's a fantastic international bridge player," she says, not jumping her own track.

"Who? Mr. Ashmawy?" he asks, though of course he knows who she means. "No, die other one, silly. Sharif."

"Does your son, I tried to ask him, have a picture of his father in his room?" "What a strange question, Mr. -"

"Come on. on. Levy. Like a levy of taxes. School taxes, let's say. Or those things that keep the Mississippi from overflowing. Get an a.s.sociation, that's what I do with names. You can do it, Terrytoons." Levy. Like a levy of taxes. School taxes, let's say. Or those things that keep the Mississippi from overflowing. Get an a.s.sociation, that's what I do with names. You can do it, Terrytoons."

"What / started to say, Mr. Down-by-the-Levee, was you must be a mind reader. Just this year, Ahmad took the photographs in his room of his father and put them face-down in drawers. He announced it was blasphemy to duplicate the image of a person G.o.d had made-a kind of counterfeiting, he explained to me. A rip-off, like those Prada bags the Nigerians sell on the street. My intuition tells me this terrible teacher at the mosque put him up to it."

"Speaking of terri-ble," Jack Levy says quickly. Forty years ago he thought of himself as a wit, quick on the verbal trigger. He even daydreamed about joining a team of joke writers for one of the Jewish comedians on television. Among his peers at college he had been a wise guy, a fast talker. "How terrible?" he asks. "Why terrible?"

Signalling with her hands and eyes toward the other room, where Ahmad might be sitting listening while pretending to study, she drops her voice, so Jack has to move a step closer. "Ahmad often returns disturbed from one of their sessions," she says. "I don't think the man-I've met him, but just barely-shows enough conviction to satisfy Ahmad. I know my son is eighteen and shouldn't be so naive, but he still expects adults to be absolutely sincere and sure of things. Even supernatural things."

Levy likes the way she says "my son." There's a homier feeling here than his interview with Ahmad had led him to expect. She may be one of these single women trying to get by on sheer bra.s.s, but she's also some kind of nurturer. "The reason," he tells her, in a conspiratorially lowered voice, "I asked about a picture of his father is that I wondered if his . . . if this faith of his had to do with a cla.s.sic overestima-tion. You know-not there, you can do no wrong. You see a lot of that in, in"-why did he keep putting his foot in it?- "black families, the kids idealizing the absent dad and directing all their anger at poor old Mom, who's knocking herself out trying to keep a roof over their heads."

Teresa Mulloy does take offense; she sits so erect on the stool he feels the hard wood circle of the seat biting into her tightened b.u.t.tocks. "Is that how you see us single moms, Mr. Levy? So thoroughly undervalued and downtrodden?"

Single moms, he thinks. What a cutesy, sentimentalizing, semi-militant phrase. How tedious it makes conversation these days, every possible group except white males on the defensive, their dukes up. "No, not at all," he backtracks. "I see single moms as terrific, Terry-they're all that's holding our society together." he thinks. What a cutesy, sentimentalizing, semi-militant phrase. How tedious it makes conversation these days, every possible group except white males on the defensive, their dukes up. "No, not at all," he backtracks. "I see single moms as terrific, Terry-they're all that's holding our society together."

"Ahmad," she says, loosening up a little immediately, the way a responsive woman does, "has no no illusions about his father. I've made it very clear to him what a loser his father was. An opportunistic, clueless loser, who hasn't sent us a postcard, let alone a f.u.c.king check, for fifteen years." illusions about his father. I've made it very clear to him what a loser his father was. An opportunistic, clueless loser, who hasn't sent us a postcard, let alone a f.u.c.king check, for fifteen years."

Jack likes the "f.u.c.king"-loosening up fast. She was wearing instead of a painter's smock a man's blue work s.h.i.+rt, the tail hanging down and her b.r.e.a.s.t.s shaping the pockets from behind. "We were a disaster," she confides, her voice still kept low, out of Ahmad's hearing. As if stretching within the extra room of this confession, she arches her back, kitten-ishly, perched on the high bare stool, pus.h.i.+ng her b.r.e.a.s.t.s out an inch farther. "He and I were crazy, thinking we ought to marry. We each thought the other had the answers, when we didn't even speak the same language, literally. Though his English wasn't bad, to be fair. He'd studied it in Alexandria. That was another tiling I fell for, his little bit of an accent, almost a lisp, kind of British. He sounded so refined. And always tidy, s.h.i.+ning his shoes, combing his hair. Thick jet-black hair like you never see on an American, a little curl behind die ears and at the neck, and of course his skin, so smooth and even, darker than Ahmad's but perfectly matte, like a cloth that's been dipped, olive-beige with a pinch of lampblack in it, but it didn't come off on your hand-"

My G.o.d, Levy thinks, Levy thinks, she's getting carried away, she's going to describe his purple third-world p.r.i.c.k to me. she's getting carried away, she's going to describe his purple third-world p.r.i.c.k to me.

She feels his distaste and halts herself, saying, "Don't worry about any overestimation on Ahmad's part. He despises his father, as he should."

"Tell me, Terry. If his father was around, do you think Ahmad'd be settling for driving a truck for a job after graduation, with his SAT scores?"

"I don't know. Omar couldn't have done even that. He would have gotten to daydreaming and drifted off the road. He was a hopeless driver; even then, supposed to be a submissive young wife, I'd take the wheel of the car whenever I was in it. I said to him, 'It's my life, too.' I'd ask him, 'How are you going to be an American if you can't drive a car?' '

How had Omar gotten to be the subject? Is Jack Levy the only person in the world who cares about the boy's future? "You've got to help me," he tells his mother earnestly, "to get Ahmad's future more in line with his potential."

"Oh, Jack," she says, gesturing airily with her cigarette and swaying slightly on her stool, a sibyl on her tripod, p.r.o.nouncing. "Don't you think people find find their potential, like water does its level? I've never believed in people being pots of clay, to be shaped. The shape is inside, from the start. I've their potential, like water does its level? I've never believed in people being pots of clay, to be shaped. The shape is inside, from the start. I've treated Ahmad as an equal since he was eleven, when he began to be so religious. I encouraged him at it. I'd pick him up at the mosque after school in the winter months. I must say, this imam of his almost never came out to say h.e.l.lo. He hated shaking my hand, I could tell. He never showed the slightest interest in converting me. me. If Ahmad had gone the other way, if he had turned against the G.o.d racket all the way, the way I did, I would have let that happen, too. Religion to me is all a matter of att.i.tude. It's saying If Ahmad had gone the other way, if he had turned against the G.o.d racket all the way, the way I did, I would have let that happen, too. Religion to me is all a matter of att.i.tude. It's saying yes yes to life. You have to have to life. You have to have trust trust that there's a purpose, or you'll sink. When I paint, I just that there's a purpose, or you'll sink. When I paint, I just have have to believe that beauty will emerge. Painting abstract, you don't have a pretty landscape or bowl of oranges to lean on; it has to come purely out of to believe that beauty will emerge. Painting abstract, you don't have a pretty landscape or bowl of oranges to lean on; it has to come purely out of you. you. You have to shut your eyes, so to speak, and take a You have to shut your eyes, so to speak, and take a leap. leap. You have to You have to say yes." say yes." Having p.r.o.nounced to her satisfaction, she leans far over to a worktable and crushes out her cigarette in an ashy jar-lid. The effort stretches her s.h.i.+rt tight across her b.r.e.a.s.t.s and makes her eyes protrude. She turns those eyes, their gla.s.sy pale green, on her guest and adds as an afterthought, "If Ahmad believes in G.o.d so much, let G.o.d take care of him." She softens what sounds callous and flip in this with a pleading tone: "Your life isn't something to be Having p.r.o.nounced to her satisfaction, she leans far over to a worktable and crushes out her cigarette in an ashy jar-lid. The effort stretches her s.h.i.+rt tight across her b.r.e.a.s.t.s and makes her eyes protrude. She turns those eyes, their gla.s.sy pale green, on her guest and adds as an afterthought, "If Ahmad believes in G.o.d so much, let G.o.d take care of him." She softens what sounds callous and flip in this with a pleading tone: "Your life isn't something to be controlled. controlled. We don't control our breathing, our digestion, our heartbeat. Life is something to be lived. Let it We don't control our breathing, our digestion, our heartbeat. Life is something to be lived. Let it happen." happen." It has become weird. She has sensed his trouble, his desolation at four a.m., and is ministering to him, her voice ma.s.saging him. He likes it, up to a point, when women start undressing their minds in front of him. But he has stayed too long already. Beth will be wondering; he told her he had to swing by Central High for some college materials. This was not a lie; now he has distributed these materials. "Thanks for the decaf," he says. "I feel sleepy already." It has become weird. She has sensed his trouble, his desolation at four a.m., and is ministering to him, her voice ma.s.saging him. He likes it, up to a point, when women start undressing their minds in front of him. But he has stayed too long already. Beth will be wondering; he told her he had to swing by Central High for some college materials. This was not a lie; now he has distributed these materials. "Thanks for the decaf," he says. "I feel sleepy already."

"Me, too. And I got to be at work by six." "Six?"

"The early s.h.i.+ft at Saint Francis's. I'm a nurse's aide. I never really wanted to be a nurse, it was too much chemistry and then too much administration; they get to be as pompous as doctors. Nurse's aides do what nurses used to do. I like hands-on-dealing with people right down there at the level of their real needs. Bedpan level. You didn't think I made a living out of these}" these}" She gestures, with those short-nailed hands that do things, at her gaudy walls. "No," he admits. She gestures, with those short-nailed hands that do things, at her gaudy walls. "No," he admits.

She breezes on. "It's my hobby, my self-indulgence-my bliss, as that man on television used to say a few years ago. Some get bought, sure, but I hardly care. Painting is my pa.s.sion. pa.s.sion. Don't you have a pa.s.sion, Jack?" Don't you have a pa.s.sion, Jack?"

He backs off; she is beginning to look possessed, a priestess on her tripod with snakes in her hair. "Not really." He gets out of bed in the morning as if pus.h.i.+ng aside a blanket of lead, and bulls head-down into his day of waving kids good-bye as they slide off into the world's mora.s.s. "Have you ever thought," he can't help adding, "with your nursing, of urging Ahmad to become a doctor? He has a dignity, a presence. I'd trust him with my life, if I were sick."

Her eyes narrow, turning shrewd and-a word his mother used to use, mostly of other women-common. "It's a long expensive haul, Jack, a medical education. And the docs I know do nothing but complain about the paperwork and being pushed around by the insurance companies. It used to be a profession where you got a lot of respect and made a fair amount of money. But medicine isn't the field it used to be. It's going to get socialized one way or another eventually, and doctors will be paid like schoolteachers." "It's a long expensive haul, Jack, a medical education. And the docs I know do nothing but complain about the paperwork and being pushed around by the insurance companies. It used to be a profession where you got a lot of respect and made a fair amount of money. But medicine isn't the field it used to be. It's going to get socialized one way or another eventually, and doctors will be paid like schoolteachers."

He laughs at this little kick. She has a number of nimble moves. "And that's not good," he acknowledges.

"Let him wait for his pa.s.sion," she counsels the guidance counselor. "For the moment it's trucks, getting on the move. He says to me, 'Mom, I need to see the world.' '

"As I understand the Commercial Driver's License, all he'll see until he's twenty-one is New Jersey."

"That's a start," she says, and nimbly slides off the stool. She has left undone the two top b.u.t.tons of her paint-smeared man's work s.h.i.+rt, so he sees the tops of her b.r.e.a.s.t.s bounce. This woman has a lot of yes yes in her. in her.

But the interview is over; it is eight-thirty. Levy lugs the three unwanted college catalogues back through the room where the boy is still studying, and halts at the heavy old dark round table-some kind of inheritance, it reminds him of the heavy sad stuff his parents and grandparents had in the house he grew up in, out on Totowa Road. Approached from behind, Ahmad's neck looks vulnerably thin, and the tops of his tidy, tight-whorled ears show a few freckles lifted from his mother. Levy gingerly sets the catalogues on the table's edge and touches the boy's shoulder, through the white s.h.i.+rt, to get his attention. "Ahmad, look these over sometime when you have a chance, and see if anything here piques your interest enough to discuss it with me. It's not too late to change your mind about applying."

The boy feels the touch and responds, "Here's something interesting, Mr. Levy."

"What?" He feels closer and easier with the boy, having met his mother.

"Here's a typical question of the kind they're going to ask."

Levy read over his shoulder: 55. You are driving a tank truck and the front wheels begin to skid. Which of these is most likely to occur?

a.You will counter steer as necessary to maintain control.

b.Liquid surge will straighten the trailer out.

c.Liquid surge will straighten the tractor out. d.You will continue in a straight line and keep moving forward no matter how much you steer.

"Sounds like a pretty bad situation," Levy admits.

"Which do you think the answer is?"

Ahmad has felt the man approach, and then the presumptuous, poisonous touch on the shoulder. Now he is aware of, too close to his head, the man's belly, its warmth carrying out with it a smell, several smells-a compounded extract of sweat and alcohol, Jewishness and G.o.dlessness, an unclean scent stirred up by the consultation with Ahmad's mother, the embarra.s.sing mother he tries to hide, to keep to himself. The two adult voices had intertwined flirtatiously, disgustingly, two aged infidel animals warming to each other in the other room. Mr. Levy, having bathed in her babble, her insatiable desire to press upon the world her sentimental vision of herself, now thinks himself ent.i.tled to play with her son a paternal, friendly role. Pity and presumption prompt this unseemly, odorous closeness. Yet the Qur'an urges courtesy upon the faithful; this Jew, though self-invited, is a guest in Ahmad's tent.

The intruder lazily responds, "I don't know, my friend. Liquid surge isn't something I deal with very often. Let me opt for 'a,' the counter steering."

In a quiet voice that conceals the small surge of triumph within him, Ahmad says, "No, 'd' is the answer. I looked it up on the answer sheets they give you."

The belly next to his ear gives off a rumble of disquiet, and the unseen face above it grunts. "Huh. Don't bother to steer. That's sort of what your mother was just telling me. Relax. Follow your bliss."

"After a while," Ahmad explains, "the truck will lose speed on its own."

"The will of Allah," Mr. Levy says, trying to be funny, or friendly: trying to insert himself where Ahmad's insides are clenched shut, filled with the All-Encompa.s.sing.

The interface of Central High and its formerly extensive grounds with the city's private property has grown more complicated in the years since its playing fields stretched behind it, unfenced, toward a street of Victorian houses so varied and widely s.p.a.ced as to be suburban. This area, to the northwest of the spectacular City Hall, was a domain of die middle cla.s.s that pulled its money from the mills along the river, a short walk from the working-cla.s.s tenements on the lower side of t_he then-bustling downtown. But the near-suburban houses became, as Jack Levy diinks of it, housing. Cost-cutting contractors broke them into apartments and subdivided their wide lawns or else tore them down to make room for solid blocks of low-rent row houses. The pressure of population and the encroachments of vandalism bore upon the gra.s.sy vacancies of school property and eventually caused the football field, which in the spring became a track-meet site, and the baseball grounds, whose outfield became in football season a junior-varsity gridiron, to be moved, in what seemed to various city boards a shrewd and profitable rearrangement, a fifteen-minute bus ride away, to the purchased land of an old dairy farm, Whelan & Sons Dairy, whose milk had contributed calcium to the bones of gener- ations of New Prospect youngsters. The inner-city fields became congested slums.

The great high school and its several outbuildings were then walled off by Italian bricklayers whose work was later topped by glinting coils of razor wire. The immurement was piecemeal, a running response to various complaints and incidents of damage and explosions of spray-painted graffiti. The defaced, rusting fortifications created areas of unintended privacy, such as some square yards of cracked concrete alongside the half-buried yellow-brick edifice housing the giant boilers, originally coal-burning, that send steam, furiously knocking, into every cla.s.sroom. One yellow-brick wall holds a basketball backboard whose hoop has been bent at a nearly vertical angle by boys imitating the dunk-and-hang style of NBA professionals. Twenty paces away, in the main building, double doors equipped with crash bars inside are in warm weather left propped open; they give onto steel stairs leading down to the bas.e.m.e.nt floor with its locker rooms, boys' and girls' on either end, and, in between, die cafeteria and the wood and machine shops for the voke students. Underfoot, the cracks in the concrete hold crabgra.s.s and mullein and dandelions and ridges of the minute particles, s.h.i.+ning like coffee grounds, of the underlying earth which ants have brought to the surface. Where the concrete has been thoroughly undermined and pulverized, taller weeds, purslane and snakeroot and bedstraw and a species of daisy, have taken root and extend spindly stems up into the lengthening daylight.

In this gritty and unpoliced area, good for nothing with its deformed basketball hoop but to sneak a smoke or a sniff or a swig or to arrange showdowns between warring boys, Tylenol confronts Ahmad, who is still in his track shorts. A school-operated bus has brought him to the parking lot from practice on the former farm fifteen minutes away. Today he has ten minutes to shower and change and run the seven blocks to the mosque for his biweekly Qur'an lesson; he hoped to save some steps by cutting through to the double doors that should be open. This late after school, the area is usually empty, except for a few ninth-graders who accept the hoop at its ruined angle and use it for shooting baskets anyway. But today a cl.u.s.ter of blacks and Latinos, the gang allegiances declared by the blue and red of the belts on their droopy, voluminous drawers and their headbands and skull-fitting do-rags, are promiscuously mingled, as if the benign weather has declared a truce.

"Hey. You Arab." Tylenol stands square before him, flanked by several others wearing tight blue muscle s.h.i.+rts. Ahmad feels vulnerable, near-naked in his running shorts, his striped socks and feather-light cleats and sleeveless s.h.i.+rt sweat-soaked back and front in dark b.u.t.terfly shapes; he has a sense of himself, his long limbs bare, as beautiful, beauty being an affront to the brutes of the world.

"Ahmad," he corrects, and stands there still with the heat of exertion, the heart-bursting sprints and jumps, rising from his pores. He feels luminous, and Tylenol's deepset little eyes wince, looking at him.

"Hear you went to church to hear Joryleen sing. How come?"

"She asked me to."

"s.h.i.+t she did. You're an Arab. You don't go there."

"I did, though. People were friendly. One family shook my hand and gave me big smiles."

"They didn't know about you. You was there under false pretenses."

Ahmad stands lightly braced, his feet in their weightless shoes spread for balance, against Tylenol's coming a.s.sault.

But the pained squint becomes a smirk. "People seen you two walkin' after."

"After church, yes. So?"

Now, surely, the a.s.sault will come. Ahmad plans to feint left with his head and then sink his right hand into Tylenol's soft stomach, and then sharply lift his knee. But his enemy lets his smirk tear open into a grin. "So nothin', 'cordin' to her. She had somethin' she wanted me to tell you."

"Oh, yes?" The other boys, the blue-s.h.i.+rted minions, are listening. Ahmad's plan is that, having left Tylenol gasping and doubled up on the crumbling concrete, he will dodge between these astonished others for the relative safety of the school.