Devils, Ahmad thinks. These devils seek to take away my God. All day
long, at Central High School, girls sway and sneer and expose their
soft bodies and alluring hair. Their bare bellies, adorned with
shining navel studs and low-down purple tattoos, ask, What else is
there to see? Boys strut and saunter along and look dead-eyed,
indicating with their edgy killer gestures and careless scornful
laughs that this world is all there is-a noisy varnished hall lined
with metal lockers and having at its end a blank wall desecrated by
graffiti and roller-painted over so often it feels to be coming
closer by millimeters.
The teachers, weak Christians and nonobservant Jews, make a show of
teaching virtue and righteous self-restraint, but their shifty eyes
and hollow voices betray their lack of belief. They are paid to say
these things, by the city of New Prospect and the state of New
Jersey. They lack true faith; they are not on the Straight Path;
they are unclean. Ahmad and the two thousand other students can see
them scuttling after school into their cars on the crackling,
trash-speckled parking lot like pale crabs or dark ones restored to
their shells, and they are men and women like any others, full of
lust and fear and infatuation with things that can be bought.
Infidels, they think safety lies in accumulation of the things of
this world, and in the corrupting diversions of the television set.
They are slaves to images, false ones of happiness and affluence.
But even true images are sinful imitations of God, who can alone
create. Relief at escaping their students unscathed for another day
makes the teachers’ chatter of farewell in the halls and on the
parking lot too loud, like the rising excitement of drunks. The
teachers revel when they are away from the school. Some have the
pink lids and bad breaths and puffy bodies of those who habitually
drink too much. Some get divorces; some live with others unmarried.
Their lives away from the school are disorderly and wanton and
self-indulgent. They are paid to instill virtue and democratic
values by the state government down in Trenton, and that Satanic
government farther down, in Washington, but the values they believe in are
Godless: biology and chemistry and physics. On the facts and
formulas of these their false voices firmly rest, ringing out into
the classroom. They say that all comes out of merciless blind atoms,
which cause the cold weight of iron, the transparency of glass, the
stillness of clay, the agitation of flesh. Electrons pour through
copper threads and computer gates and the air itself when stirred to
lightning by the interaction of water droplets. Only what we can
measure and deduce from measurement is true. The rest is the passing
dream that we call our selves.
Ahmad is eighteen. This is early April; again green sneaks, seed by
seed, into the drab city’s earthy crevices. He looks down from his
new height and thinks that to the insects unseen in the grass he
would be, if they had a consciousness like his, God. In the year
past he has grown three inches, to six feet-more unseen materialist
forces, working their will upon him. He will not grow any taller, he
thinks, in this life or the next. If there is a next, an inner devil
murmurs. What evidence beyond the Prophet’s blazing and divinely
inspired words proves that there is a next? Where would it be
hidden? Who would forever stoke Hell’s boilers? What infinite source
of energy would maintain opulent Eden, feeding its dark-eyed houris,
swelling its heavy-hanging fruits, renewing the streams and
splashing fountains in which God, as described in the ninth sura of
the Qur’an, takes eternal good pleasure? What of the second law of
thermodynamics?
The deaths of insects and worms, their bodies so quickly absorbed by
earth and weeds and road tar, devilishly strive to tell Ahmad that
his own death will be just as small and final. Walking to school, he
has noticed a sign, a spiral traced on the pavement in luminous
ichor, angelic slime from the body of some low creature, a worm or
snail of which only this trace remains. Where was the creature
going, its path spiralling inward to no purpose? If it was seeking
to remove itself from the hot sidewalk that was roasting it to death
as the burning sun beat down, it failed and moved in fatal circles.
But no little worm-body was left at the spiral’s center.
So where did that body fly to? Perhaps it was snatched up by God and
taken straight to Heaven. Ahmad’s teacher, Shaikh Rashid, the imam
at the mosque upstairs at 27811? West Main Street, tells him that
according to the sacred tradition of the Hadith such things happen:
the Messenger, riding the winged white horse Buraq, was guided
through the seven heavens by the angel Gabriel to a certain place,
where he prayed with Jesus, Moses, and Abraham before returning to
Earth, to become the last of the prophets, the ultimate one. His
adventures that day are proved by the hoofprint, sharp and clear,
that Buraq left on the Rock beneath the sacred Dome in the center of
Al-Quds, called Jerusalem by the infidels and Zionists, whose
torments in the furnaces of Jahannan are well described in the
seventh and eleventh and fiftieth of the suras of the Book of Books.
Shaikh Rashid recites with great beauty of pronunciation the one
hundred fourth sura, concerning Hutama, the Crushing Fire:
And who shall teach thee what the Crushing Fire is?
It is God’s kindled fire,
Which shall mount above the hearts of the damned;
It shall verily rise over them like a vault,
On outstretched columns.
When Ahmad seeks to extract from the images in the Qur’an’s
Arabic-the outstretched columns, fi ‘amadin mumaddada, and the vault
high above the hearts of those huddled in terror and straining to
see into the towering mist of white heat, naru l-lahi l-muqada-some
hint of the Merciful’s relenting at some point in time, and calling
a halt to Hutama, the imam casts down his eyes, which are an
unexpectedly pale gray, as milky and elusive as a kafir woman’s, and
says that these visionary descriptions by the Prophet are
figurative. They are truly about the burning misery of separation
from God and the scorching of our remorse for our sins against His
commands. But Ahmad does not like Shaikh Rashid’s voice when he says
this. It reminds him of the unconvincing voices of his teachers at
Central High. He hears Satan’s undertone in it, a denying voice
within an affirming voice. The Prophet meant physical fire when he
preached unforgiving fire; Mohammed could not proclaim the fact of
eternal fire too often.
Shaikh Rashid is not much older than Ahmad-perhaps ten years,
perhaps twenty. He has few wrinkles in the white skin of his face.
He is diffident though precise in his movements. In the years by
which he is older, the world has weakened him. When the murmuring of
the devils gnawing within him tinges the imam’s voice, Ahmad feels
in his own self a desire to rise up and crush him, as God roasted
that poor worm at the center of the spiral. The student’s faith
exceeds the master’s; it frightens Shaikh Rashid to be riding the
winged white steed of Islam, its irresistible onrushing. He seeks to
soften the Prophet’s words, to make them blend with human reason,
but they were not meant to blend: they invade our human softness
like a sword. Allah is sublime beyond all particulars. There is no
God but He, the Living, the Self-Subsistent; He is the light by
which the sun looks black. He does not blend with our reason but
makes our reason bow low, its forehead scraping the dust and bearing
like Cain the mark of that dust. Mohammed was a mortal man but
visited Paradise and consorted with the realities there. Our deeds
and thoughts were written in the Prophet’s consciousness in letters
of gold, like the burning words of electrons that a computer creates
of pixels as we tap the keyboard.
The halls of the high school smell of perfume and bodily
exhalations, of chewing gum and impure cafeteria food, and of
cloth-cotton and wool and the synthetic materials of running shoes,
warmed by young flesh. Between classes there is a thunder of
movement; the noise is stretched thin over a violence beneath,
barely restrained. Sometimes in the lull at the end of the school
day, when the triumphant, jeering racket of departure has subsided
and only the students doing extracurricular activities remain in the
great building, Joryleen Grant comes up to Ahmad at his locker. He
does track in the spring; she sings in the girls’ glee club. As
students go at Central High, they are “good.” His religion keeps him
from drugs and vice, though it also holds him rather aloof from his
classmates and the studies on the curriculum. She is short and round
and talks well in class, pleasing the teacher. There is an endearing
self-confidence in how compactly her cocoa-brown roundnesses fill
her clothes, which today are patched and sequinned jeans, worn pale
where she sits, and a ribbed magenta shorty top both lower and
higher than it should be. Blue plastic barrettes pull her glistening
hair back as straight as it will go; the plump edge of her right ear
holds along its crimp a row of little silver rings. She sings in
assembly programs, songs of Jesus or sexual longing, both topics
abhorrent to Ahmad. Yet he is pleased that she notices him, coming
up to him now and then like a tongue testing a sensitive tooth.
“Cheer up, Ahmad,” she teases him. “Things can’t be so bad.” She
rolls her half-bare shoulder, lifting it as if to shrug, to show she
is being playful.
“They’re not bad,” he says. “I’m not sad,” he tells her. His long
body tingles under his clothes-white shirt, narrow-legged black
jeans-from the shower after track practice.
“You’re looking way serious,” she tells him. “You should learn to
smile more.”
“Why? Why should I, Joryleen?”
“People will like you more.”
“I don’t care about that. I don’t want to be liked.”
(Continues…)
Excerpted from Terrorist
by John Updike
Copyright © 2006 by John Updike.
Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Knopf
Copyright © 2006
John Updike
All right reserved.
ISBN: 0-307-26465-3
