Jihadi Page 4

  He was urinating on it.

  xxi. urinating

  That cat pissed all over the house whenever Liddell was on assignment. And left great tufts of fur about.

  No answer from Becky. The milk carton was still, but it bore her picture.

  Thelonius and Becky had been married since 1993, which was twelve years now. In all of that time, Thelonius had refused to have a baby with her, his reasons not always open for discussion. She had certainly worked them all out for herself by now. Both Becky and Thelonius, of course, had lost their mothers at a young age.

  ‘I don’t understand why you’re so worried about repeating your father’s mistakes,’ Becky had said on their honeymoon, her smile wide. ‘Just don’t make my father’s mistakes. Don’t disrespect me. Don’t betray me. Don’t micromanage me. Don’t screw the help. Or I’ll kill you.’

  They laughed at that, raised their glasses of red wine, clinked them, drank to his promise, laughed at Dad, and (Thelonius having sworn credibly enough that he had no intention of screwing the help) made love.

  Becky talked a lot during sex, something Thelonius didn’t and couldn’t do. She even told fitful, whispered stories that focused him while he was inside her. She was all about stage management, all words and knees and words and elbows and words and green eyes to die for. He did what she told him to do. Why not? She made him feel, for a moment at least, like he was home.

  The whirring blades of a helicopter sent to monitor the crowd drowned out what would have been the splash of a stream of urine hitting the Koran’s open pages.

  When he finished, the marine rearranged himself, picked the Koran up by a dry corner, heaved it into the dumpster, and stalked away in an arrogant, loose-limbed manner that made Fatima’s flesh crawl. He had kept his back to them the whole time. Neither Fatima nor the heavyset woman could have accurately described his face.

  Fatima fought a powerful urge to flee. Given the crowd, she could not have run away, even if she’d allowed herself to try. She stood her ground.

  Perhaps she was brave. Or perhaps the moment was structured in such a way as to instil courage.

  xxii. courage

  These hagiographic passages make me physically ill. An airplane roars overhead, and into my temple, presaging synchronistically the all-important note xl. A need for a lie down.

  Naked Becky held Thelonius in her arms in 1993 and said, ‘Big boys don’t cry.’

  It was a night of stars, counted through a big window overlooking a broad, unnameable Massachusetts lake happy to reflect starlight. Becky, whose mother had read her Shakespeare, pointed out the constellations she knew, of which there were many: the lesser lights, the greater ones, and even her slim hand, the same shade of even flame as the moon. She counted that as a constellation, too. The night was luminous. She was luminous. Her story of Prospero. Her kiss on his forehead. Her love.

  ‘We won’t be talking about this again. Time goes in one direction. Do you hear?’

  He nodded.

  ‘Say it out loud, Thelonius. Time goes in one direction.’

  ‘Time,’ Thelonius said, ‘goes in one direction.’

  He closed his eyes and tried to believe it. His face was still wet all over. In La Pine, Oregon, his grandmother Louise wiped his face, told him that his mother had loved him very much. Told him he would be fine. The boy was not so sure. He had begun to have flashbacks, found himself, without warning, watching his father cut his mother. He was terrified he would have one at school.

  ‘Say it out loud, Thelonius,’ his grandmother Louise said. ‘Everything is going to be all right.’

  ‘Everything,’ Thelonius said, ‘is going to be all right.’

  Haste and hard work, he found, stopped the flashbacks.

  The era of Just Getting Started had begun.

  In the late spring of 2000, Thelonius, sleeping poorly, exhausted with Becky’s lectures on the subject of parenthood, Just Got Started. He brought a little charcoal fluffball of a kitten to their ample Salem foursquare. He unboxed him in the living room for Becky’s inspection, announcing him, mock-pretentiously, as Child.

  Becky refused to call him that at first, but everything she proposed over the next week or so – Marx, Stalin, Castro, Lenin, Lennon – brought unacceptable cultural and geopolitical baggage that Thelonius rejected as unsuited to the animal’s genial, baffled personality. So he remained Child.

  xxiii. unacceptable cultural and geopolitical baggage

  And back. How much the traitor Liddell papers over with these five words! He was, of course, a serious Fab Four devotee before the virus overcame him, however much he may attempt to conceal the fact here.

  Child, Becky said, played into Thelonius’s ‘deep need to be responded to’. Child saw things that were not there and expressed his concerns about them until Thelonius stroked his furry back to calm him. Then he purred in gratitude. Child noticed when Thelonius was not around, and, more often than not, went to whatever room Thelonius occupied. Child became skittish and anxious whenever Thelonius went off on assignment, relaxed again when he came home. Child was family.

  xxiv. not around

  I myself have been forced to take an extended leave of absence from the Directorate. Sitting in my nowhere land, waiting for absolution, I note that Thelonius here describes behaviour he admits to not having observed.

  xxv. Child was family.

  Nonsense.

  At the time Child died, Thelonius and Becky had not made love for a long time, but it was best (he decided, sitting there at the kitchen table) not to think about things like that. Time might collapse on him.

  9 In Which Liddell Turns Down the Chance of a Lifetime

  Fatima, who had never met the heavyset woman, suggested it might be best to leave unspoken what they had both seen behind the dumpster. She appealed to her as a sister in Islam, said life was complicated enough at the moment. The heavyset woman didn’t respond. Instead, she scowled, averted her gaze, edged away from Fatima, and melted into the crowd.

  xxvi. what they had both seen

  Claimed to have seen, rather. No hard evidence ties anyone in American uniform to this incident. Room service – actually Clive, the vacuous middle-aged front-desk clerk who appears to live onsite – has knocked. He bears pizza. Waits a moment when instructed, as now. He will, I hope, do something about that cadre of noisy Brazilians. Their elderly leader, not content with having reinfested the pool area, has just cranked up another infernal macarena. Check carefully and delete all refs to Brazilians etc. on final pass through manuscript.

  For the sake of compromise, for the good of the marriage, Becky made a point of noting, once a month or so, that she had gone along with Thelonius’s gag name of Child – ‘but only as a reminder,’ she insisted, ‘that the subject is not closed.’ Five years later, Thelonius asked his unseen wife: ‘Becky. Where is the cat?’

  The sound of Becky taking a deep breath. The sound of Becky saying ‘Goodbye’. A flash of peach and black. The sound of the phone being dropped on the cradle. The sound of a familiar argument that had not yet started.

  Then from the next room: ‘You’ll be making a speech at the Freedom Banquet, T.’

  ‘The Freedom Banquet. I’d forgotten. Who’s setting that up?’

  ‘Dick Unferth,’ Becky’s voice answered. ‘Your new boss.’

  Thelonius felt cold rain, pinpricked with hail, piercing his veins.

  ‘According to Dick, whom we now trust, T, that heroic return from the Islamic Republic won us the keynote slot. Keynote! Oh, don’t wince. I mean, you are home, aren’t you? You are still alive, aren’t you? You are proof of concept, right? Keynote means we are top of the heap. Dad or no Dad. It means we get a strategic vision theme, if we want it. Which we do. We get all the big themes we want from now on: freedom, courage, respect, democracy and so forth. Justice, your favourite. If we want that. Also sacrifice; can’t forget sacrifice. Whatever we want. Quite a coup, T. Oh: you’ll love this. Your pal, Carl Arnette? The dispenser o
f all the good gossip? The Directorate’s embodiment of neutral Switzerland? The one who claims he has no ambitions? Turns out he coveted, and I mean coveted coveted, a slot at the Freedom Banquet. Tried to persuade Dick to let him speak right before you. Wanted Dick to give him the First and Fourth Amendments, their ongoing relevance to the mission. Good Gravy. That came under serious consideration for about ten seconds. We can go anywhere we want now. Anywhere. Anywhere. If we follow the script, and follow the Law of Appearances. So much for us to work toward, you know. If we just work together. Say something, for Christ’s sake, T.’

  The Law of Appearances.

  Becky’s latest obsession held that, to the degree you managed people’s perceptions, you managed reality. Control the message. Unferth stuff. She had been on this for weeks before he left for the Republic. He had been hoping it would have worn off by now. The ice in Thelonius’s veins ran colder, sharper.

  ‘I suppose I constitute some kind of internal trophy now.’

  She still had not made her way into the room. Her shadow rearranged its hair.

  ‘Oh, stop. You aren’t really serious about making difficulties. You aren’t going off the reservation now. I know you aren’t. Consider the possibilities. There are some big victories in store for us, some wonderful things, wonderful, if we market ourselves properly. Some respect. If we control the variables. Even heroes have to follow the rules, T, once they get home.’

  Market ourselves. Control the variables. Follow the rules.

  Icy rain outside, too.

  ‘What about Carl? He was held hostage, back in ’94, you know. Why shouldn’t he say a few words?’

  He already knew the answer. Too pre 9/11.

  After the deluge of words, another drought. That disapproving silence of hers, designed to intimidate: there was an art to avoiding it. Like sidestepping her occasional ethnic jokes. You just change the subject the instant you see it coming.

  xxvii. deluge of words

  Clive wonders: What’s on all those index cards? How in the world did I learn to write so neat and so small? What am I so busy typing all the time? Offers unrequested details of his failed marriage to Twyla Jean, or Tammy Lynne, or Tina Mae, or whatever her utterly inconsequential name is. Then, after I give an imitation of condolence sufficient to generate another of his long-suffering smiles, he predicts that I will be wanting to rest, asks if I need anything (I don’t), and skitters away on a repair errand of some kind.

  ‘By the way,’ Thelonius said, ‘I couldn’t find Child this morning.’

  Becky stepped into the dining room.

  Having shaken the phone’s vague imprint from her hair, having made it symmetrical again for him, she opened the blinds. She settled into her customary chair, opened the most recent Sunday New York Times Magazine, shielded the bottom of her face with it and flashed her green eyes across the top.

  ‘You couldn’t find Child,’ Becky said, ‘because I drove him to the pound last week while you were still in the Republic.’

  Thelonius’s abdomen tightened. The milk carton trembled.

  ‘That animal no longer made sense here, T. Too many scratches. Too much shedded hair in too many corners. And the litter box. You gone. Who knew how long. Some decisions make themselves. Why are you staring at that?’

  The back of Thelonius’s milk carton rattled to a halt. It showed him a colour image of Child, terrified, backed into a bleak cage, eyes wide after having seen too much, his great tufts of dark fur matted with blood and urine. The caption above the photo read: LOST CHILD.

  Thelonius backhanded the carton, watched milk spray in a dense arc across the dining room, barely missing Becky. She frowned at him.

  ‘That was not closed,’ Becky said, calm but firm. ‘Deep breaths, T, from the diaphragm.’

  xxviii. not closed

  The subject is not closed, not by a very long shot indeed. During the riotous summer of 1968, as the masterpiece now known as The White Album evolved in-studio, conflagrations in Poland, Hungary, Romania and, yes, even our own American college campuses coalesced into a single crisis. This metacrisis underlined the deep divide between Western values and those of the Other Side. We face a graver, more lethal metacrisis today, one playing out on a far larger global stage, encompassing an exponentially greater universe of conflagrations. Yet some in our Directorate dare not call this metacrisis by its true name. My own case (fortuitously, I believe) requires a clear understanding of the true nature of this Great Challenge, dark older sibling to the Communist menace! This commentary, at least, calls it out explicitly and without apology: The Islamic Threat. Referring to it as ‘post-war’ misses the point. It has always been the war. It is not at all new. It has plagued us for fourteen centuries.

  My friends, my colleagues, my peers, I ask you: After all I have sacrificed for this nation, all the dark trails I pursued, all the evildoers I identified, interrogated, and neutralized, do I deserve her fate? Is that to be the precedent? Can our nation afford that? Before you answer, consider: I have uncovered, thanks to patient, persistent and unyielding evaluation of the evidence, invaluable new intel on the 9/11 attacks, outlined for the first time by any analyst, anywhere, in my note xlv, below.

  But to the point. Of course, the reference to respiration here (‘Deep breaths’) is contextually appropriate, but it may also be intended to alert members of Thelonius’s terrorist cell to the importance of performing certain bizarre Islamic breathing rituals strongly associated with suicide attacks. Note Liddell’s equally bizarre insistence in the next chapter that a puddle of milk is breathing!

  This passage foreshadows the critical ‘let it in and let it out’ passage of Jihadi, which presents (see note xxx) a synchronistic rephrasing of a key lyric from the Fab Four’s biggest global hit single, released during the fateful late summer of 1968. See, see and see again note xl.

  Thelonius obeyed. He had been trained, in moments of crisis, to do what he was told.

  The guilty dead guy writing this, recalling his countless misplaced obediences, spots a big expanse of nothing below his scribbled words, finds this nothing preferable, reaches for a new sheet of paper.

  10 In Which Liddell Falls Prey to a Characteristic Fit of Blind Rage

  A convoy of tanks approached, each equipped with water cannons. Fatima took a deep breath and found cover behind a van. She drew herself into a ball.

  In the end, the van did little to protect her from the jets of water, but it did separate her decisively from a photographer she had noticed. She had no desire to show up on the front page of the newspaper the next morning. The tanks dispersed the crowd, pummelling protesters with high-velocity torrents. Order vanished. A cascade of water, stray garments, and lost objects overtook the street. The tanks belonged to the Islamic Republic. The Americans paid for them, though.

  People scattered like leaves. Everyone began to head home. The tanks withdrew. When the street was empty enough, Fatima emerged from behind the van.

  The next morning’s papers explained that the Americans had apologized for the flechettes. The problem was an error in intelligence. Their troops had believed they were firing those flechettes at insurgents. The story in the paper explained how sorry the Americans were for being wrong about that. Fatima scanned the paper for another news item, but did not find it. She breathed deep and gave thanks to the Creator. It seemed no one besides Fatima and the heavyset woman – whose name Fatima never got – had seen the marine do what he did. An end to it, then.

  xxix. end to it

  It will not end here in the desert, I can promise that much.

  ‘Blind rage?’

  Thelonius, standing, staring at his wife’s feet, nodded twice, fast. He breathed in just as deeply as he could breathe. Stress response CONSCIOUS. Stress response CONSCIOUS. Becky straightened in her seat, uncrossed her slim, white ankles, just visible below their curtain of peach-and-black satin, and dropped the New York Times Magazine, which landed on the floor with a light slap. She was scanning him, making
sure there was movement in the midsection beneath his grey T-shirt and jeans: the diaphragm rising and falling, from long practice. Thelonius refused to meet her eye, but he was breathing deeply, sending her a sign of his intent to cope. Stress response CONSCIOUS. Let the breath in and let the breath out. Thelonius closed his eyes, saw his father holding a bloody knife.

  xxx. Let the breath in and let the breath out.

  A message of encouragement from four friends. See notes xxviii and xl.

  xxxi. his father

  A pompous windbag, from all I could ever gather. Interviews with him would have yielded nothing actionable. Died in prison 1980.

  A volcano rumbled.

  He shook himself, opened his eyes, meant to walk toward her.

  She’s a machine, kid. Take her out.

  But his knee flinched, and wouldn’t take the weight.

  That damned limp. He sat again.

  Stress breath CONSCIOUS.

  Look at the puddle breathing on the floor.

  11 In Which Liddell Continues a Pattern of Deliberate Obfuscation

  The dead guy telling this story has decided not to give titles to these chapters.