Terrorist

Ahmad calculates that a push back from Tylenol that he would accept would be a fair way to ease out of this contention, with the next change-of-class bell about to sound. But Tylenol wants no part of a truce; he gives Ahmad a sneak punch in the stomach that pops all of the air out of him. Ahmad's astonished, gulping expression makes the watching schoolmates laugh, including the chalk-faced Goths, minority whites at Central who pride themselves on showing no emotion, like their nihilistic punk-rock heroes. Plus, there are silvery giggles from several bubbly buxom brown girls, Miss Populars, who Ahmad thinks should be kinder. Some day they will be mothers. Some day soon, the little whores.

He is losing face and has no choice but to wade into those iron hands of Tylenol's and try to make a dent in that shieldlike chest and the obtuse walnut-stained mask above it. The bout becomes mostly pushing and squeezing and grunting, since a fistfight lurching into the lockers would make a racket to bring the teachers and security guards. In this minute before the bell rings and everybody has to scatter to classes, Ahmad does not so much blame the other boy-he is just a robot of meat, a body too full of its juices and reflexes to have a brain-as he blames Joryleen. Why did she have to tell her boyfriend the whole private conversation? Why do girls have to tell all the time? To make themselves important, like those fat-lettered graffiti for those who spray them on helpless walls. It was she who brought up religion, inviting him so saucily to her church to sit with kinky-haired kafirs, the singe of Hellfire on them like the brown skin on barbecued drumsticks. It gets his devils to murmuring inside him, the way Allah allows so many grotesquely mistaken and corrupt religions to lure millions down to Hell forever when in a single flash of light the All-Powerful could show them the way, the Straight Path. It was as if (Ahmad's devils murmur, as he and Tylenol push and flail at one another while trying not to make noise) the Merciful, the Beneficent, ca

The bell rings, in its little tamper-proof box high on the custard-colored wall. Nearby in the hall a door with its big pane of frosted glass snaps open; Mr. Levy, a guidance counselor, emerges. His coat and pants don't match, like a rumpled suit put together blindly. The man stares absent-mindedly, then warily, at the suspiciously clustered students. The gathering freezes into instant silence, and Ahmad and Tylenol back off, putting their enmity on hold. Mr. Levy, a Jew who has been in this school system practically forever, looks old and tired, baggy-eyed, his hair thi

Tylenol and his gang would be laying for him now. After being dissed to pretty much a standstill, the bully with his iron thumbs wouldn't be satisfied with anything less than a black eye or a broken tooth or finger-something that would show. Ahmad knows it is a sin to be vain of his appearance: self-love is a form of competition with God, and competition is what He ca

He has only two months of his schooling left. Spring is in the air beyond the brick walls, the caged tall windows. The customers at the Shop-a-Sec make their pathetic, poisonous purchases with a new humor, a new palaver. His feet fly across the school's old cinder track as if each stride is individually cushioned. When he paused on the sidewalk to puzzle over the spiral trail of the roasted and vanished worm, all around him new green shoots, garlic and dandelions and clover, brightened the winter-weary patches of grass, and birds explored in rapid, excited arcs the invisible medium that sustained them.

Jack Levy wakes, now that he is sixty-three, between three and four in the morning, with the taste of dread in his mouth, dry from his breath being dragged through it while he dreamed. His dreams are sinister, soaked through with the misery of the world. He reads the dying, ad-starved local daily, the New Prospect Perspective, and the New York Times or Post when these are left lying around in the faculty room, and, as if this is not enough of Bush and Iraq and domestic murders in Queens and East Orange-murders even of children aged two or four or six, so young that struggling and crying out against their murderers, their parents, would seem to them blasphemy, as Isaac's resisting Abraham would have been blasphemy-Levy in the evening, between the hours of six and seven, while his corpulent wife, moving pieces of their di

His wife, Beth, a whale of a woman giving off too much heat through her blubber, breathes audibly beside him, her tireless little rasp of a snore extending into unconsciousness her daily monologue, her output of prattle. When, in a repressed fury, he nudges her with a knee or elbow or gently cups in his hand a buttock bared by her risen nightgown, she docilely falls silent, and then he fears that he has woken her, breaking the unspoken vow taken between any two people who have agreed, however long ago, to sleep together. He wants only to jog her up to the level of sleep where her breath will stop vibrating in her nose. It was like tuning the violin he used to play, in his boyhood. Another Heifetz, another Isaac Stern: is that what his parents had hoped for? He disappointed them-a segment of misery where his own and the world's coincided. His parents grieved. He had defiantly told them he was quitting lessons. The life in books and on the streets meant more to him. He was eleven, maybe twelve to take such a stand, and never picked up the violin again, though sometimes, hearing on the car radio a snatch of Beethoven or a Mozart concerto or Dvorak's Gypsy music that he had once practiced in a student arrangement, Jack is surprised to feel the fingering trying to live again in his left hand, twitching on the steering wheel like a dying fish.