Terrorist

Why beat himself up? He has done all right, more than all right: prize student at Central High, class of '59, before it felt so much like a prison and you could still study and take pride in the praise of the teachers; diligent commuter to CCNY before sharing a SoHo apartment with two guys and a girl who kept shifting her affections around; after graduation, two years of draft-era Army, before Vietnam heated up, basic training at Fort Dix, file clerk at Fort Meade, Maryland, south enough of the Mason-Dixon Line to be full of anti-Semitic Southerners, then the second year at Fort Bliss m El Paso, in so-called human resources, matching men to assignments, the start of his giving guidance to teen-agers; afterwards to Rutgers for a master's on the cut-back GI Bill; since then, teaching high-school history and social science thi rty years before becoming full-time guidance counselor these last six. The bare facts of his career make him feel trapped, in a curriculum vitae as tight as a coffin. The room's black air has become hard to breathe, and he stealthily turns from lying on his side to lying on his back, like a stiff laid out at a Catholic viewing.

How noisy bedsheets can be!-crashing waves, next to your ear. He doesn't want to wake Beth. Close to suffocated, he can't cope with her too. For a moment, like the first sip of a drink before the ice cubes turn the whisky watery, the new position eases the problem. On his back, he has the calm of a dead man but with no casket lid inches from his nose. The world is quiet-the commuter traffic not yet started up, the night prowlers with their broken mufflers having at last crawled into bed. He hears a lone truck shifting gears at the blinking stoplight one street over and, two rooms away, a restless fit of soft-pawed galloping from Carmela, the Levys' desexed, declawed cat. Declawed, she can't be let outdoors, for fear the cats with claws will kill her. In her indoors captivity, sleeping away much of the day under the sofa, she hallucinates at night, imagining in the stilled house the feral adventures, the battles and escapes, that she can never have, for her own good. So desolate is the sensory surround of these pre-dawn hours, and so alone does Jack Levy appear to himself, that the furtive uproar of a deluded, neutered cat soothes him almost enough for his mind, excused from sentry duty, to slip back into sleep.

But, sustained in wakefulness by a nagging bladder, he instead lies exposed, as to a sickening blast of radioactivity, to an awareness of his life as a needless blot-a botch, a prolonged blunder-imposed upon the otherwise immaculate surface of this ungodly hour. In the world's dark forest he had missed the right path. But was there any right path? Or was being alive in itself the mistake? In the stripped-down history that he used to purvey to students who had trouble believing that the world didn't begin with their births and the proliferation of computer games, even the greatest men came to nothing, to a grave, their visions unfulfilled- Charlemagne, Charles V, Napoleon, the unspeakable but considerably successful and still, at least in the Arab world, admired Adolf Hitler. History is a machine perpetually grinding mankind to dust. Jack Levy's guidance counseling replays in his head as a cacophony of miscommunication. He sees himself as a pathetic elderly figure on a shore, shouting out to a flotilla of the young as they slide into the fatal morass of the world-its dwindling resources, its disappearing freedoms, its merciless advertisements geared to a preposterous popular culture of eternal music and beer and impossibly thin and fit young females.

Or had most young females, even Beth, once been as thin as those in the beer and Coke commercials? No doubt she had, but he could hardly remember-like trying to see the television screen as she waddles back and forth assembling di

Not that the Jewish God had ever been big on promises- a shattered glass at your wedding, a quick burial in a shroud when you die, no saints, no afterlife, just a lifetime of drudging loyalty to the tyrant who asked Abraham to make a burnt offering of his only son. Poor Isaac, the trusting shmuck, having been nearly killed by his own father was as an old blind man tricked out of his blessing by his son Jacob and his own wife, Rebekah, brought to him veiled from Paddan-aram. More lately, over in the old country, if you observed all the rules-and for the Orthodox it was a long list of rules- you got a yellow star and a one-way ticket to the gas ovens. No, thanks: Jack Levy took a stiff-necked pleasure in being one of Judaism's stiff-necked naysayers. He had encouraged the world to make "Jack" of "Jacob" and had argued against his son's circumcision, though a slick Wasp doctor at the hospital talked Beth into it, for "purely hygienic" reasons, claiming that studies showed it would lower the risk of venereal disease for Mark and of cervical cancer for Mark's partners. A week-old infant, his prick just a little fat button on the seamed pincushion of his balls, and they were improving his sex life and coming to the rescue of female infants as yet unborn.

Beth was a Lutheran, a hearty Christer denomination keen on faith versus works and beer versus wine, and he figured she would mitigate his dogged Jewish virtue, the oldest lost cause still active in the Western world. Even his grandfather's socialist faith had gone sour and musty with the way Communism had worked out in practice. Jack had seen his and Beth's marrying, on the second floor of New Prospect's ridiculous City Hall, witli only her sister and his parents in attendance, as a brave mismatch, a little loving mud in history's eye, like a lot else that was happening in 1968. But after thirty-six years together in northern New Jersey, the two of them with their different faiths and ethnicities have been ground down to a lackluster sameness. They have become a couple that shops together at ShopRite and Best Buy on weekends, and whose idea of a jolly time is two tables of bridge with three other couples from the high school or the Clifton Public Library, where Beth works four days a week. Some Friday or Saturday nights they try to cheer themselves up with a meal out, alternating the Chinese and Italian restaurants where they are frequent diners and die maitre d' with a resigned smile leads them to a corner table where Beth can squeeze in; never a booth. Or else they drive to some seedy cineplex that has sticky floors and charges seven dollars for a medium popcorn, if they can find a movie that isn't too violent or sexy or too blatantly aimed at the mid-teen male demographic. Their courtship and young marriage coincided with the collapse of the studio system and the release of dazzling subversive visions-Midnight Cowboy, Easy Rider, Bob and Carol and Ted and Alice, The Wild Bunch, A Clockwork Orange, Dirty Harry, Carnal Knowledge, Last Tango in Paris, the first Godfather, The Last Picture Show, American Graffiti-not to mention late Bergman and French and Italian films still full of angst and edge and national personality. These had been good movies, which kept a hip couple on its mental toes. There had still been a sense in the air, left over from '68, that the world could be reimagined by young people. In sentimental memory of those shared revelations when they were both new to married sharing, Jack's hand even now in the movies sneaks across and takes hers from her lap and holds it, delicately puffy and hot, in his own while their faces are being bathed in the explosions of some latter-day, dumbed-down thriller, the coldly calibrated shocks of its adolescent script mocking their old age.