Terrorist

Charlie Chehab often rides with Ahmad, even when Ahmad could handle by himself the furniture to be loaded or unloaded. The boy is growing stronger with the lifting and hauling. He has asked that his paychecks-nearly five hundred a week, at twice what Shop-a-Sec paid per hour-be made out to Ahmad Ashmawy, though he still lives with his mother. Because his Social Security and driver's license both list his last name as Mulloy, she has gone with him downtown to the bank, in one of the new glass buildings, to explain, and to make out new forms for a separate account. That is how she is these days: she makes no resistance to him, though she never made much. His mother is, he sees now, looking back, a typical American, lacking strong convictions and the courage and comfort they bring. She is a victim of the American religion of freedom, freedom above all, though freedom to do what and to what purpose is left up in the air. Bombs bursting in air- empty air is the perfect symbol of American freedom. There is no ummah here, both Charlie and Shaikh Rashid point out-no encompassing structure of divine law that brings men rich and poor to bow down shoulder to shoulder, no code of self-sacrifice, no exalted submission such as lies at the heart of Islam, its very name. Instead tiiere is a clashing diversity of private self-seeking, whose catchwords are Seize the day and Devil take the hindmost and God helps those who help themselves, which translate to There is no God, no Day of Judgment; help yourself. The double sense of "help yourself"-self-reliance and "grab what you can"-amuses the shaikh, who, after twenty years among these infidels, takes pride in his fluency in their language. Ahmad sometimes has to suppress a suspicion tJiat his teacher inhabits a semi-real world of pure words and most loves the Holy Qur'an for its language, a shell of violent shorthand whose content is its syllables, the ecstatic flow of "l"s and "a"s and guttural catches in the throat, savoring of the cries and the gallantry of mounted robed warriors under the cloudless sky of Arabia Deserta.

Ahmad sees his mother as an aging woman still in her heart a girl, playing at art and love-for she is alive lately with a preoccupation in which her son detects a new lover, though this one, unlike the run of them, does not come around to the apartment and vie witJi Ahmad for dominance of the premises. She may be your mother but I fuck her, their ma

From Ahmad's standpoint she looked and acted younger than a mother should. In the countries of the Mediterranean and the Middle East, women withdrew into wrinkles and a proud shapelessness; an indecent confusion between a mother and a mate was not possible. Praise Allah, Ahmad never dreamed of sleeping with his mother, never undressed her in those spaces of his brain where Satan thrusts vileness upon the dreaming and the daydreaming. In truth, insofar as the boy allows himself to link such thoughts with the image of his mother, she is not his type. Her flesh, mottled with pink and dotted with freckles, seems u

Charlie is married, to a Lebanese woman Ahmad sees rarely, coming into the store toward closing hour, at the end of her own day's work, which was performed in a legal office where tax forms are filled out for those who ca

"Did you see the one on the Levitra ad for guys who can't get it up?"

"I rarely watch television," Ahmad tells him. "Now tliat I am no longer a child, it does not interest me."

"Well, it should-how can you know what the corporations that run this country are doing to us if you don't? The one in the Levitra ad is my idea of absolute pussy, purring away about her 'guy' and how he likes 'quality' in his erections-she doesn't say 'erections' but that's what the whole ad is about, pricks getting hard enough, erectile dysfunction is the biggest thing the drug-makers have hit upon since Valium-and the way she gazes off into the middle distance and gets misty-eyed, you can just see, see through a woman's eyes, this big stiff prick of his, hard as a rock, and her mouth does this fu