Terrorist

Jack Levy sighs again and thinks ahead to the next appointment-another needy, surly, misguided teen-ager about to float away into the morass of the world. "Well, perhaps I shouldn't say this, Ahmad, but in view of your grades and SATs, and your way-above-average poise and seriousness, I think your-what's that word?-imam helped you to waste your high-school years. I wish you had stayed on the college track."

Ahmad comes to Shaikh Rashid's defense. "Sir, there are no resources for any college expenses. My mother fancies herself an artist; she stopped her own education at the level of nurse's aide, rather than invest two more years in her own education when I was a pre-school child. "

Levy ruffles his thi

Ahmad's expression stiffens. "The Army would send me to fight my brothers."

"Or to fight for your brothers, it could be. Not all Iraqis are insurgents, you know. Most aren't. They just want to get on with business. Civilization started there. They had an up-and-coming little country, until Saddam."

The boy's eyebrows, thick and broad as a man's though the hairs are finer, knit into a scowl. Ahmad stands up to leave, but Levy isn't quite ready to let him go. "I asked," he insists, "do you have any job lined up?"

The answer comes reluctantly: "My teacher thinks I should drive a truck."

"Drive a truck? What kind of truck? There are trucks and trucks. You're only eighteen; I happen to know you can't get a license for a tractor rig or tank truck or even a school bus for three more years. The exam for the license, a CDL- that's commercial driver's license-is tough. Until you're twenty-one you can't drive out of state. You can't carry hazardous materials."

"I can't?"

"Not as I remember. I've had young men before you who were interested; a lot got scared off, by the technical side of it and all the regulations. You have to join the Teamsters. There's a lot of hurdles, in trucking. A lot of thugs, too."

Ahmad shrugs; Levy sees that he has exhausted the young man's quota of cooperation and courtesy. The boy has clammed up. O.K., so will Jack Levy. He's been in Jersey longer than this pretentious kid. As he hopes, the less experienced male cracks and breaks the silence.

Ahmad feels impelled to justify himself to this unhappy Jew. The scent of unhappiness rolls off Mr. Levy as sometimes it does off of Ahmad's mother, after one boyfriend has let her down and before the next has shown up, and no painting of hers has sold for months. "My teacher knows people who might need a driver. I would have somebody to show me the ropes," he explains. "It's good pay," he adds.

"And long hours," the guidance counselor says, slapping this student's folder shut, having scribbled on the topmost page "lc" and "nc," his abbreviations for "lost cause" and "no career." "Tell me this, Mulloy. Your faith-it's important to you."

"Yes."

The boy is protecting something; Jack can smell it.

"God-Allah-is very real to you."

Ahmad says, slowly, as if betranced or reciting something memorized, "He is in me, and at my side."

"Good. Good. Glad to hear it. Keep it up. I was exposed to religion a little, my mother would light the Passover candles, but I had this father who was a scoffer, so I followed his example and didn't keep it up. I never had it to lose, really. Dust to dust's my sense of it all. Sorry."

The boy blinks and nods, a bit frightened by such a confession. His eyes seem round black lamps above the stark white shirt; they burn into Levy's memory and return at times like afterimages of the sun at sunset, or the flash from a camera when you obligingly pose, trying to look natural, and it goes off unexpectedly soon.

Levy pursues it: "How old were you when you… when you found your faith?"

"Age eleven, sir."

"Fu

On Sunday morning, while most Americans are still in bed, though a few are struggling out to an early mass or a scheduled golf match in the dew, the Secretary for Homeland Security upgrades the so-called terror-threat level from yellow, meaning merely "elevated," to orange, meaning "high." That's the bad news. The good news is that the higher level applies only to specific areas of Washington, New York, and northern New Jersey; the rest of the nation remains on yellow.

The Secretary tells the nation, in his all-but-sublimated Pe

He cherishes and emphasizes the phrase "robust screening." It conjures up an image of strapping men in green or gray-blue jumpsuits tearing apart vehicles and packages, venting in their vigor the Secretary's daily frustration at the difficulty of his task. His task is to protect in spite of itself a nation of nearly three hundred million anarchic souls, their millions of daily irrational impulses and self-indulgent actions flitting out of sight just around the edge of feasible surveillability. This mob's collective gaps and irregularities form a perfect rough surface whereupon the enemy can grow one of his tenacious, wide-spreading plots. Destruction, the Secretary has often thought, is so much easier than construction, and disruption than social order, that the upholders of a society must always lag behind those who would destroy it, just as (he had been a football player for Lehigh in his youth) a fleet-footed receiver can always gain a step on the defending cornerback. "And God bless America," he publicly concludes.