Terrorist - A Novel Part 1

John Updike.

TERRORIST.

I.

DEVILS, Ahmad thinks. Ahmad thinks. These devils seek to take away my G.o.d. These devils seek to take away my G.o.d. All day long, at Central High School, girls sway and sneer and expose their soft bodies and alluring hair. Their bare bellies, adorned with s.h.i.+ning navel studs and low-down purple tattoos, ask, All day long, at Central High School, girls sway and sneer and expose their soft bodies and alluring hair. Their bare bellies, adorned with s.h.i.+ning navel studs and low-down purple tattoos, ask, What else is there to see? 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. 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 non.o.bservant Jews, make a show of teaching virtue and righteous self-restraint, but their s.h.i.+fty 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 sh.e.l.ls, and they are men and women like any others, full of l.u.s.t and fear and infatuation with things that can be bought. Infidels, they think safety lies in acc.u.mulation 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 G.o.d, 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 Was.h.i.+ngton, but the values they believe in are G.o.dless: biology and chemistry and physics. On the facts and formulas of these their false voices firmly rest, ringing out into the cla.s.sroom. They say that all comes out of merciless blind atoms, which cause the cold weight of iron, the transparency of gla.s.s, 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 die pa.s.sing dream that we call our selves.

Ahmad is eighteen. This is early April; again green sneaks, seed by seed, into die drab city's earthy crevices. He looks down from his new height and thinks that to the insects unseen in the gra.s.s he would be, if they had a consciousness like his, G.o.d. In the year past he has grown three inches, to six feet-more unseen materialist forces, working dieir will upon him. He will not grow any taller, he thinks, in this life or the next. If there is a next, If there is a next, an inner devil murmurs. What evidence beyond the Prophet's blazing and divinely inspired words proves that diere is a next? Where would it be hidden? Who would forever stoke h.e.l.l'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 splas.h.i.+ng fountains in which G.o.d, as described in the ninth sura of the Qur'an, takes eternal good pleasure? What of die second law of thermodynamics? an inner devil murmurs. What evidence beyond the Prophet's blazing and divinely inspired words proves that diere is a next? Where would it be hidden? Who would forever stoke h.e.l.l'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 splas.h.i.+ng fountains in which G.o.d, as described in the ninth sura of the Qur'an, takes eternal good pleasure? What of die second law of thermodynamics?

The deaths of insects and worms, their bodies so quickly absorbed by eardi 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 s.n.a.t.c.hed up by G.o.d and taken straight to Heaven. Ahmad's teacher, Shaikh Ras.h.i.+d, 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 Ras.h.i.+d recites with great beauty of p.r.o.nunciation the one hundred fourth sura, concerning Hutama, the Crus.h.i.+ng Fire: And who shall teach thee what the Crus.h.i.+ng Fire is?

It is G.o.d's kindled fire, Which shall mount above the hearts of the d.a.m.ned; 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, ft 'amadin mumaddada, ft '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, and the vault high above the hearts of those huddled in terror and straining to see into the towering mist of white heat, ndru l-ldhi l-muqada ndru l-ldhi l-muqada-some hint of the Mer-ciful'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 G.o.d and the scorching of our remorse for our sins against His commands. But Ahmad does not like Shaikh Ras.h.i.+d'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 Ras.h.i.+d 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 G.o.d roasted that poor worm at the center of the spiral. The student's faith exceeds the master's; it frightens Shaikh Ras.h.i.+d to be riding the winged white steed of Islam, its irresistible onrus.h.i.+ng. 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 G.o.d 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 sc.r.a.ping 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 cla.s.ses 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 cla.s.smates and the studies on the curriculum. She is short and round and talks well in cla.s.s, 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 a.s.sembly programs, songs of Jesus or s.e.xual 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 s.h.i.+rt, 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."

"You care," she tells him. "Everybody cares."

"You care," he tells her, sneering down at her from his recently acquired height. The tops of her b.r.e.a.s.t.s push up like great blisters in the scoop neck of the indecent top that at its other hem exposes the fat of her belly and the contour of her deep navel. He pictures her smooth body, darker than caramel but paler than chocolate, roasting in that vault of flames and being scorched into blisters; he experiences a s.h.i.+ver of pity, since she is trying to be nice to him, in accordance with an idea she has of herself. "Little Miss Popular," he says scornfully. care," he tells her, sneering down at her from his recently acquired height. The tops of her b.r.e.a.s.t.s push up like great blisters in the scoop neck of the indecent top that at its other hem exposes the fat of her belly and the contour of her deep navel. He pictures her smooth body, darker than caramel but paler than chocolate, roasting in that vault of flames and being scorched into blisters; he experiences a s.h.i.+ver of pity, since she is trying to be nice to him, in accordance with an idea she has of herself. "Little Miss Popular," he says scornfully.

This wounds her, and she turns away, her thick books to take home pus.h.i.+ng up at her b.r.e.a.s.t.s, making the crease between them deep. "f.u.c.k you, Ahmad," she says, still with some gentleness, tentatively, her lower lip of its soft weight hanging loose a little. The saliva at the base of her gums sparks with reflected light from the overhead fluorescent tubes that keep the hall safely bright. To rescue the exchange, though she has turned to end it, Joryleen adds, "You didn't care, you wouldn't pretty yourself up with a clean white s.h.i.+rt every day, like some preacher. How's your mother stand doing all that ironing?"

He doesn't deign to explain that this considered outfit sends out a non-combatant message, avoiding both blue, the color of the Rebels, the African-American gang in Central High, and red, the color always worn, if only in a belt or headband, by the Diabolos, the Hispanic gang. Nor does he tell her that his mother rarely irons, for she is a nurse's aide at the Saint Francis Community Hospital and a spare-time painter who sees her son often for less than one hour in twenty-four. His s.h.i.+rts come back stiffened by cardboard from the cleaners, whose bills he pays out of the money he earns clerking at the Tenth Street Shop-a-Sec two evenings a week, and on weekends and Christian holidays, when most boys his age are roaming the streets looking for mischief. But there is, he knows, vanity in his costume, a preening that offends the purity of the All-Encompa.s.sing.

He senses tliat Joryleen is not just trying to be nice: he arouses curiosity in her. She wants to get close to smell him better, even though she already has a boyfriend, a notorious "bad" one. Women are animals easily led, Ahmad has been warned by Shaikh Ras.h.i.+d, and he can see for himself that the high school and the world beyond it are full of nuzzling- blind animals in a herd b.u.mping against one another, looking for a scent that will comfort them. But the Qur'an says there is no comfort but for those who believe in the unseen Paradise and who observe the injunction to pray five times a day, which the Prophet brought back to Earth after the night journey on Buraq's broad, blazingly white back.

Joryleen persists in still standing there, too near him. Her perfume cloys in his nostrils; the crease between her b.r.e.a.s.t.s bothers him. She s.h.i.+fts her heavy books in her arms. Ahmad reads on the edge of the thickest text the ballpointed words joryleen grant. Her lips, painted with a luminous metallic pink to make them look thinner, startle him by faltering in embarra.s.sment. "What I was wondering to say to you," she gets out, so haltingly he leans down toward her to hear better, "was whether you might want to come to the church this Sunday to hear me sing a solo in the choir."

He is shocked, repelled. "I am not of your faith," he reminds her solemnly.

Her response is airy, careless. "Oh, I don't take that all that seriously," she says. "I just love to sing."

"Now you have have made me sad, Joryleen," Ahmad says. "If made me sad, Joryleen," Ahmad says. "If you don't take your religion seriously, you shouldn't go." He slams his locker shut with an anger mostly at himself, for having scolded and rejected her when, by offering an invitation, she had made herself vulnerable. His face hot with confusion, he turns back from his slammed locker to examine the damage he has done, and she is gone, the rubbed and sequinned seat of her jeans swis.h.i.+ng carefree down the hall. The world is difficult, The world is difficult, he thinks, he thinks, because devils are busy in it, confusing things and making the straight crooked. because devils are busy in it, confusing things and making the straight crooked.

When constructed in the last century, the twentieth by Christian reckoning and the fourteenth after the Prophet's Hegira from Mecca to Medina, the high school on its little rise hung above the city like a castle, a palace of learning for the children of millworkers and of their managers alike, with pillars and ornate cornices and a motto carved in granite, knowledge is freedom. Now the building, rich in scars and crumbling asbestos, its leaded paint hard and s.h.i.+ny and its tall windows caged, sits on the edge of a wide lake of rubble that was once part of a downtown veined with trolley-car tracks. The tracks gleam in old photographs, amid men in straw hats and neckties and boxy automobiles all the color of a hea.r.s.e. So many movie marquees thrust over the sidewalks then, advertising competing Hollywood hits, that a man could dart from one marquee to another in a rainstorm and hardly get wet. There was even a subterranean public lavatory, labelled in old-fas.h.i.+oned porcelain letters ladies and gentlemen, entered by two different sets of stairs from the sidewalk of East Main Street at Tilden Avenue. One elderly attendant in each kept the underground toilets and basins clean; the facilities were closed in the 1960s, having become foul-smelling lairs for drug deals, h.o.m.os.e.xual contacts, acts of prost.i.tution, and occasional muggings.

The city was named New Prospect two centuries ago, for the grand view from the heights above the falls but also for its enthusiastically envisioned future. The river pouring through it, with its picturesque falls and churning rapids, would attract industry, it was thought when the nation was young, and so, eventually, after many false starts and bankruptcies, it did-knitting mills, silk-dyeing plants, leather-works, factories that produced locomotives and horseless carriages and cables to sustain the great bridges that were spanning the rivers and harbors of the Mid-Atlantic region. As the nineteenth century became the twentieth, there were prolonged and b.l.o.o.d.y strikes; the economy never recovered the optimism that helped emigrants from Eastern Europe, the Mediterranean, and the Middle East endure fourteen-hour days of strenuous, poisonous, deafening, monotonous labor. The factories drifted south and west, where labor was cheaper and easier to cow, and where iron ore and c.o.ke were closer to transport.

Those who occupy the inner city now are brown, by and large, in its many shades. A remnant of fair-skinned but rarely Anglo-Saxon merchants finds some small profit in selling pizzas and chili and brightly packaged junk food and cigarettes and state-lottery tickets downtown, but they are giving way to recently immigrant Indians and Koreans who feel less compelled, as darkness falls, to flee to the still-mixed outskirts of the city and its suburbs. White faces downtown look furtive and dingy. At night, after a few choice ethnic restaurants have discharged their suburban clientele, a police car will stop and question white pedestrians, on the a.s.sumption that they are looking for a drug deal or else need to be advised on the dangers of this environment. Ahmad himself is the product of a red-haired American mother, Irish by ancestry, and an Egyptian exchange student whose ancestors had been baked since the time of the Pharaohs in the muddy rice and flax fields of the overflowing Nile. The complexion of the offspring of this mixed marriage could be described as dun, a low-l.u.s.ter shade lighter than beige; that of his surrogate father, Shaikh Ras.h.i.+d, is a waxy white shared with generations of heavily swathed Yemeni warriors.

Where six-story department stores and the closely stacked offices of Jewish and Protestant exploiters once formed a continuous f.a.gade of gla.s.s, brick, and granite, there are bulldozed gaps and former display windows covered by plywood crawling with spray-painted graffiti. To Ahmad's eyes, the bulbous letters of the graffiti, their bloated boasts of gang affiliation, a.s.sert an importance to which the perpetrators have pathetically little other claim. Sinking into the mora.s.s of G.o.dlessness, lost young men proclaim, by means of property defacement, an ident.i.ty. Some few new boxes of aluminum and blue gla.s.s have been erected amid the ruins, sops from the lords of Western capitalism-branches of banks headquartered in California or North Carolina, and outposts of the Zionist-dominated federal government, attempting with welfare enrollment and army recruitment to prevent the impoverished from rioting and looting.

And yet the downtown of an afternoon gives a festive, busy impression: East Main Street in the blocks around Tilden is a carnival of idleness, thronged by an onrolling ma.s.s of dark citizens in flashy clothes, a Mardi Gras parade of costumes lovingly a.s.sembled by those whose lawful domain extends scarcely an inch beyond their skins, and whose paltry a.s.sets are all on view. Their joy amounts to defiance. Their cackling, whooping voices are loud with the village fellows.h.i.+p, the luxuriant mutual attention, of those with little to do and nowhere to go.

After the Civil War, a conspicuous gaudiness entered New Prospect with the erection of an elaborate City Hall, a sprawling, turreted aggregation, Moorish in feeling, of rounded arches and rococo ironwork capped by a great tower in mansard style. Its sloped sides are covered in multicolored fish-scale s.h.i.+ngles and contain four white clock faces the size, if they were to be brought down to Earth, of wading pools. The broad copper gutters and downspouts, monuments to the skilled metalworkers of their time, have turned mint-green witJi age. This civic pile, whose princ.i.p.al bureaucratic operations were long ago relegated to less lofty, more modern, less spectacular, but air-conditioned and easier-to-heat structures behind it, has been recendy awarded, after much lobbying, the status of a national architectural treasure. It stands within sight of Central High School, a block to the west, the school's once-generous grounds much nibbled by widened streets and real-estate encroachments permitted by bribed officials.

On the eastern edge of the lake of rubble, where becalmed parking lots alternate with choppy waves of knocked-down brick, a thick-walled ironstone church supports a heavy steeple and advertises, on a cracked signboard, its award-winning gospel choir. The windows of this church, blasphemously a.s.signing G.o.d a face, and gesturing hands, sandalled feet, and tinted robes-in short, a human body with all that is unclean and enc.u.mbering about it-are blackened by decades of industrial soot and made further indecipherable by their protective grids of wire. Religion's images now attract hatred, as in the wars of the Reformation. The church's decorous glory days of pious white burghers in the hierarchically a.s.signed pews also belong to die past. Now African-American congregants bring their dishevelled, shouting religion, their award-winning choir dissolving their brains in a rhydimical rapture as illusory as (Shaikh Ras.h.i.+d sardonically puts forward the a.n.a.logy) the shuffling, mumbling trance of Brazilian candomble. candomble. It is here that Joryleen sings. It is here that Joryleen sings.

The day after she invited Ahmad to come hear her sing in the choir, her boyfriend, Tylenol Jones, comes up to Ahmad in the hall. His mother, having delivered a ten-pound infant, saw the name in a television commercial for painkiller and liked the sound of it. "Hey, Arab," he says. "Hear you been dissing Joryleen."

Ahmad tries to talk the other's language. "No way, dissing. We talked a little. It was she she come up to me." come up to me."

Reaching carefully, Tylenol takes the more slender boy's shoulder in his hand and digs his thumb into that sensitive place below the shoulder ball. "She say you disrespect her religion." His thumb works deeper, into nerves that have been asleep all of Ahmad's life. Tylenol has a square face the color of walnut furniture-stain while it's still sitting up wet on the wood. He is a tackle on the Central High football team and a gymnast on the rings in the winter, so his hands are iron-strong. His thumb is gouging wrinkles into Ahmad's crisp white s.h.i.+rt; the taller boy makes an impatient motion to shrug off the hostile grip.

"Her religion is the wrong one," Ahmad informs Tylenol, "and anyway she said she had no use for it but to sing in that foolish choir." The iron thumb keeps digging, but with a surge of adrenaline Ahmad swats it away, the edge of his hand chopping at the thick branch of muscle.

Tylenol's face darkens and comes closer with a jerk. "Don't you talk to me of foolish-you so foolish n.o.body give you s.h.i.+t, Arab."

" 'Cept Joryleen," comes the quick response, riding the same adrenaline. Ahmad feels watery inside and suspects his face is shamefully stiff with fear, but there is a holy bliss in confronting even a superior enemy, allowing rage to increase your ma.s.s. He dares go on, "And I wouldn't exactly call it s.h.i.+t, what she gave me. It was simple friendliness your type wouldn't understand."

"My type, what is that? My type has no use for your type, that's the truth, you dumb f.u.c.k. You weird queer. You f.a.ggot."

His face is so close Ahmad smells cheese from the cafeteria macaroni. He gives Tylenol a push on his chest to make some distance. Other Central High students are crowding around, there in the hall, the cheerleader types and computer nerds, the Rastas and Goths, the wallflowers and do-nothings, waiting for something entertaining to happen. Tylenol likes the audience; he announces, "Black Muslims I don't diss, but you not black, you not anything but a poor s.h.i.+thead. You no raghead, you a s.h.i.+thead." s.h.i.+thead."

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-cla.s.s 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 wh.o.r.es.

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 s.h.i.+eldlike chest and the obtuse walnut-stained mask above it. The bout becomes mostly pus.h.i.+ng 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 cla.s.ses, 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 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 h.e.l.lfire 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 h.e.l.l 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, cannot be bothered. 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 h.e.l.lfire 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 h.e.l.l 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, cannot be bothered.

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 gla.s.s snaps open; Mr. Levy, a guidance counselor, emerges. His coat and pants don't match, like a rum- pled suit put together blindly. The man stares absent-mindedly, then warily, at the suspiciously cl.u.s.tered 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 thinned raggedly on the top of his head and a few strands standing up mussed. His sudden appearance startles Ahmad like a p.r.i.c.k of conscience: he has an appointment with Mr. Levy this week, to discuss his future after high-school graduation. Ahmad knows he must have a future, but it seems insubstantial to him, and repels his interest. The only guidance, The only guidance, says the third sura, says the third sura, is the guidance of Allah. is the guidance of Allah.

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 compet.i.tion with G.o.d, and compet.i.tion is what He cannot abide. But how can the boy not cherish his ripened manhood, his lengthened limbs, the upright, dense, and wavy crown of his hair, his flawless dun skin, paler than his father's but not the freckled, blotchy pink of his red-haired mother and of those peroxided blondes who in white-bread America are considered the acme of beauty? Though he shuns, as unholy and impure, the glances of lingering interest he receives from the dusky girls around him in the school, Ahmad does not wish his body marred. He wishes to keep it as its Maker formed it. Tylenol's enmity becomes one more reason to leave this h.e.l.lish castle, where the boys bully and hurt for sheer pleasure and the infidel girls wear skintight hiphuggers almost low enough-less than a finger's breadth, he has estimated-to release into view the topmost fringe of their pubic curls. The very bad girls, the ones already thoroughly fallen, have tattoos where only their boyfriends get to see them, and where the tattoo artist had to poke his needle most gingerly. There is no end of devilish contortions once human beings feel free to compete with G.o.d and to create themselves.

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 cus.h.i.+oned. 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 gra.s.s, 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, New Prospect Perspective, and the and the New York Times New York Times or or Post 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 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 dinner from the refrigerator to the microwave, keeps crossing in front of the little screen of the kitchen television set, turns on the metro round-up and the network talking heads; he watches until the commercials, all of which he has repeatedly seen before, so exasperate him that he clicks the imbecilic device off. On top of the news, Jack has personal misery, misery tiiat he "owns," as people say now-the heaviness of the day to come, the day that will dawn through all this dark. As he lies there awake, fear and loathing squirm inside him like die components of a bad restaurant meal-twice as much food as you want, the way they serve it now. Dread slams shut the door back into sleep, an awareness, deepening each day, that all that is left on Earth for his body to do is to ready itself for deatJi. He has done his courting and mating; he has fathered a child; he has worked to feed that child, little sensitive Mark with his shy cloudy eyes and slippery lower lip, and to furnish him with all the tawdry junk the culture of the time insisted he possess, to blend in with his peers. Now Jack Levy's sole remaining task is to die and thus contribute a little s.p.a.ce, a little breathing room, to this overburdened planet. The task hangs in the air just above his insomniac face like a cobweb with a motionless spider in the center.

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 b.u.t.tock 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 s.n.a.t.c.h 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.

Why beat himself up? He has done all right, more than all right: prize student at Central High, cla.s.s 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 s.h.i.+fting 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 a.s.signments, 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!-cras.h.i.+ng 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 m.u.f.flers having at last crawled into bed. He hears a lone truck s.h.i.+fting gears at the blinking stoplight one street over and, two rooms away, a restless fit of soft-pawed galloping from Carmela, the Levys' des.e.xed, 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 unG.o.dly 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 sh.o.r.e, shouting out to a flotilla of the young as they slide into the fatal mora.s.s of the world-its dwindling resources, its disappearing freedoms, its merciless advertis.e.m.e.nts 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 c.o.ke commercials? No doubt she had, but he could hardly remember-like trying to see the television screen as she waddles back and forth a.s.sembling dinner. They had met in his year and a half at Rutgers. She had been a Pennsylvania girl, from the East Mount Airy section of northwest Philadelphia, studying library science. He had been drawn to her lightness, her bubbly laugh, her sly quickness at making everything, even their courts.h.i.+p, a joke. What sort of baby boys do you think we would make? Will they be born half circ.u.mcised? What sort of baby boys do you think we would make? Will they be born half circ.u.mcised? She was German-American, Elizabeth Fogel, with a more uptight, less lovable older sister, Hermione. He was a Jew. But not a proud Jew, wrapped in the ancient covenant. His grandfather had shed all religion in the New World, putting his faith in a revolutionized society, a world where the powerful could no longer rule through superst.i.tion, where food on the table, decent hous- She was German-American, Elizabeth Fogel, with a more uptight, less lovable older sister, Hermione. He was a Jew. But not a proud Jew, wrapped in the ancient covenant. His grandfather had shed all religion in the New World, putting his faith in a revolutionized society, a world where the powerful could no longer rule through superst.i.tion, where food on the table, decent hous- ing and shelter, replaced the untrustworthy promises of an unseen G.o.d.

Not that the Jewish G.o.d had ever been big on promises- a shattered gla.s.s 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 circ.u.mcision, 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 p.r.i.c.k just a little fat b.u.t.ton on the seamed pincus.h.i.+on of his b.a.l.l.s, and they were improving his s.e.x 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 lackl.u.s.ter 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 Sat.u.r.day 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 s.e.xy or too blatantly aimed at the mid-teen male demographic. Their courts.h.i.+p 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 the first G.o.dfather, The Last Picture Show, American Graffiti G.o.dfather, 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.

Insomniac, despairing, Jack thinks of seeking Beth's hand under the covers but in trying to find it amid tbe mounds of her slumbering flesh he might disturb her and awaken her needy, tireless, still-girlish voice. With a stealth almost criminal, he slides his feet upward on the bottom sheet and eases the blankets aside and escapes the marital bed. Stepping beyond the bedside rug, he feels on his bare feet an April chill. The thermostat is still on night mode. He stands at a window curtained in sun-yellowed lace and contemplates his neighborhood by the gray light of its mercury-vapor street lamps. The orange of the Gulf sign at the all-night gas station two blocks away is the only emphatic touch of color in the pre-dawn vista. Here and there in the neighborhood a wan low-voltage night light warms the window of a child's room or a stair landing. In the semi-darkness, under a polished dome of darkness weakened by the climbing rot of city glow, the foreshortened angles of roof lines, s.h.i.+ngles, and sidings recede to infinity.

Housing, Jack Levy thinks. Houses have compressed into housing, squeezed closer together by rising land costs and subdivision. Where within his memory back and side yards had once included flowering trees and vegetable gardens, clotheslines and swing sets, now a few scruffy bushes fight for carbon dioxide and damp soil between concrete walks and asphalt parking s.p.a.ces stolen from what had been generous margins of gra.s.s. The needs of the automobile have proved decisive. The locust trees planted along the curbs, the wild ailanthus taken rapid root along the fences and house walls, the few horse-chestnut trees surviving from the era of ice wagons and coal trucks-all these trees, their buds Jack Levy thinks. Houses have compressed into housing, squeezed closer together by rising land costs and subdivision. Where within his memory back and side yards had once included flowering trees and vegetable gardens, clotheslines and swing sets, now a few scruffy bushes fight for carbon dioxide and damp soil between concrete walks and asphalt parking s.p.a.ces stolen from what had been generous margins of gra.s.s. The needs of the automobile have proved decisive. The locust trees planted along the curbs, the wild ailanthus taken rapid root along the fences and house walls, the few horse-chestnut trees surviving from the era of ice wagons and coal trucks-all these trees, their buds and small new leaves showing as a silvery fur of fresh growth in the lamplight, stand in danger of being uprooted by the next push of street-widening. Already, the simple outlines of 'thirties semi-detached and 'fifties colonial-style ranch houses are loaded with added dormers, superimposed sun-decks, rickety outside staircases to give legal access to studio apartments carved from what were once considered spare rooms. Affordable housing units are dwindling in size like pieces of paper repeatedly folded. Discarded divorcees and obsolete craftsmen in outsourced industries and hardworking people of color, grabbing for the next rung in the climb out of the inner slums, move into the neighborhood and can't afford to leave. Smart young couples fix up rundown semis and make their mark by painting their porches and gable trim and window frames outlandish colors- Easter lilac, acid green-and the splash on the block feels like an insult to the older residents, a flare of contempt, an unsightly toying. Corner grocery stores have one by one dropped away, leaving the field to franchises whose standardized logos and decors are cheerfully garish, as are the gargantuan full-color images of their fattening fast food. As Jack Levy sees it, America is paved solid with fat and tar, a coast-to-coast tarbaby where we're all stuck. Even our vaunted freedom is nothing much to be proud of, with the Commies out of the running; it just makes it easier for terrorists to move about, renting airplanes and vans and setting up Web sites. Religious fanatics and computer geeks: the combination seems strange to his old-fas.h.i.+oned sense of the reason-versus-faith divide. Those creeps who flew the planes into the World Trade Center had good technical educations. The ringleader had a German degree in city planning; he should have redesigned New Prospect.

A more positive and energetic person than himself, Jack believes, would be using these hours before his wife awakes and die Perspective Perspective hits the porch and the star-p.r.i.c.ked sky above the rooftops quickens to a dirty gray. He could go downstairs and look for one of the books he has read the first thirty pages of, or make some coffee, or watch the early-morning TV news teams kid and jabber the frogs out of their throats. But he prefers to stand here and soak his empty head, too tired to dream, in the sublunar sights of the neighborhood. hits the porch and the star-p.r.i.c.ked sky above the rooftops quickens to a dirty gray. He could go downstairs and look for one of the books he has read the first thirty pages of, or make some coffee, or watch the early-morning TV news teams kid and jabber the frogs out of their throats. But he prefers to stand here and soak his empty head, too tired to dream, in the sublunar sights of the neighborhood.

A striped cat-or is it a small racc.o.o.n?-skitters across the empty street, disappearing under a parked car. Jack can't tell the make. Cars all look alike now, not like the big fins and grinning chrome grilles when he was a kid, even mock portholes on the Buick Riviera and the bullet nose on the Studebaker, the great long Caddies of the 'fifties-now, that that was aerodynamic. In the name of aerodynamics and fuel economy, all the cars now are slightly fat and squat and neutral in color to hide road dirt, Mercedes down to Honda. It makes a big parking lot a nightmare, you could never find your own if it weren't for the little keyfob that flashes the lights from a distance or as a last resort blasts the horn. was aerodynamic. In the name of aerodynamics and fuel economy, all the cars now are slightly fat and squat and neutral in color to hide road dirt, Mercedes down to Honda. It makes a big parking lot a nightmare, you could never find your own if it weren't for the little keyfob that flashes the lights from a distance or as a last resort blasts the horn.

A crow with something pale and long in its beak lazily flaps up from having poked a hole in a green garbage bag put out last night for collection today. A man in a suit hurries off a porch down the block and gets into a car, a chunky, gas-guzzling SUV, and roars off, never mind waking the neighbors. An early flight out of Newark, Jack guesses. He stands there staring through the chilly windowpanes thinking, Life. Life. This is life, living in housing, gulping down grease, shaving in the morning, taking a shower so you won't disgust the other guys at the conference table with your pheromones. It took Jack Levy a lifetime to realize that people stink. When This is life, living in housing, gulping down grease, shaving in the morning, taking a shower so you won't disgust the other guys at the conference table with your pheromones. It took Jack Levy a lifetime to realize that people stink. When he was younger, he never smelled in his own nostrils, he never noticed that stale aroma he gives off now, just in moving quietly through the day, not even sweating.

Well, he is still alive, seeing what he sees. He supposes this is a good thing, but it is an effort. Who was that Greek, in that book by Camus they all were crazy about back at CCNY? Or maybe it was at Rutgers, among the master's candidates. Sisyphus. The rock uphill. Down it must roll. He stands there no longer seeing but pressing with his consciousness back against the certainty that all this will some day cease for him. The screen in his head will go totally blank, and yet it will all go on without him, dawn breaking and cars starting up and wild creatures continuing to feed in a terrain poisoned by Man. Carmela has silently padded up the stairs and rubs against his bare ankles, purring loudly, thinking of being fed early. This too is life, life touching life.

Jack's eyes feel sandy and heavy. He thinks he should never have gotten out of bed; at his wife's great warm side he might have stolen another hour of sleep. Now he must carry his fatigue through a long and tightly scheduled day, people at him every minute. He hears the bed creak as Beth stirs and relieves the mattress of her weight. The door to the bathroom opens and shuts, its latch clicking and then letting go in that infuriating way it has. In his younger days he would have had a go at fixing it, but with Mark settled in New Mexico and coming home once a year if that, there's no great need for privacy. Beth's ablutions cause water to murmur and tremble in pipes throughout the house.

A man's voice, very rapid and overlaid on music, tumbles from the bedside table; his wife's first act upon awaking is to turn the d.a.m.n thing on and then walk away. She keeps reaching out electronically to an environment wherein they are physically more and more isolated, an aging couple with their only child flown the coop, their daily occupations surrounding them both with heedless youth. Beth at the library had been compelled to learn computer basics, how to search for information and print it out and pa.s.s it on to kids too dumb or lazy to paw around in books, where there still were were books on the subject. Jack has tried to ignore the whole revolution, stubbornly keeping a few scribbled notes on his counseling sessions, the way he has done it for years, and neglecting to "keyboard" his conclusions into Central High's computerized data bank on its two thousand students. For this failure, or refusal, he is chronically rebuked by his fellow counselors, especially by, in a counseling staff that has tripled in thirty years, Connie Kim, a pet.i.te Korean-American specializing in troubled, truant girls of color, and Wesley Ray James, an equally prim and efficient black man whose athletic skills of not long ago-he is still whippet-thin-give him a ready mode of relation to boys. Jack always promises to spend an hour or two and do die updating, and yet weeks go by without his finding the time. There is something about confidentiality that makes him resist feeding die gist of private sessions into an electronic network that blankets the whole school, accessible to all. books on the subject. Jack has tried to ignore the whole revolution, stubbornly keeping a few scribbled notes on his counseling sessions, the way he has done it for years, and neglecting to "keyboard" his conclusions into Central High's computerized data bank on its two thousand students. For this failure, or refusal, he is chronically rebuked by his fellow counselors, especially by, in a counseling staff that has tripled in thirty years, Connie Kim, a pet.i.te Korean-American specializing in troubled, truant girls of color, and Wesley Ray James, an equally prim and efficient black man whose athletic skills of not long ago-he is still whippet-thin-give him a ready mode of relation to boys. Jack always promises to spend an hour or two and do die updating, and yet weeks go by without his finding the time. There is something about confidentiality that makes him resist feeding die gist of private sessions into an electronic network that blankets the whole school, accessible to all.

BetJi is more in touch with things, more willing to bend and change. She had gone along with their City Hall marriage even though, blus.h.i.+ng, she had admitted to him that it would break her parents' hearts not to have the wedding in their church. She had not said what it would do to her own heart, and he had replied, "Let's keep it simple. No hocus-pocus." Religion meant nothing to him, and as they merged into a married ent.i.ty it meant less and less to her. Now he wonders if he had deprived her of something, however grotesque, and if her constant chatter and her overeating weren't compensatory. Being married to a stiff-necked Jew couldn't be easy.

Emerging from the bathroom with her body wrapped in square yards of bathrobe, she sees him standing silent and motionless at the window of the upstairs hall and cries out, frightened, "Jack! What's wrong?"

A certain uxorious sadism in him protects his gloom, only half hiding it from her. He wants Beth to feel his state of mind is her fault, though his reason tells him it is not. "Nothing new," he says. "I woke up too early again. And couldn't go back to sleep."

"That's a sign of depression, they were saying on television the other day. Oprah had a woman on who's written a book. Maybe you should see a-I don't know, the word 'psychiatrist' frightens everybody who isn't rich, the woman was saying-you should see some kind of specialist if you're so miserable."

"A Weltschmerz Weltschmerz specialist." Jack turns and smiles at her. Though she too is over sixty-sixty-one to his sixty-three- her face is wrinkle-free; what in a lean woman would be deep creases are on her round face lightly etched, smoothed to a girlish delicacy by tiie fat keeping her skin taut. "No thanks, honey," he says. "I dish out wisdom all day, I have no tolerance for absorbing it myself. Too many antibodies." specialist." Jack turns and smiles at her. Though she too is over sixty-sixty-one to his sixty-three- her face is wrinkle-free; what in a lean woman would be deep creases are on her round face lightly etched, smoothed to a girlish delicacy by tiie fat keeping her skin taut. "No thanks, honey," he says. "I dish out wisdom all day, I have no tolerance for absorbing it myself. Too many antibodies."

He has found over the years that, fended off by him on one topic, she will, rather than lose his attention entirely, quickly resort to another. "Speaking of antibodies, Herm was saying on the phone yesterday-this is in strict confidence, Jack, even I shouldn't know, promise you won't tell anybody-"

"I promise."

"-she tells me these things because she has to vent and I'm out of the loop that's down there-she said that her boss is about to elevate the terror-threat level for this area from yellow to orange. I thought it might be on the radio, but it wasn't. What do you think it means?"

Hermione's boss is the Secretary of Homeland Security, a born-again right-wing stooge with some Kraut name like Haffenreffer, down in Was.h.i.+ngton. "It means tbey want us to feel they're not just sitting on our tax dollars. They want us to feel they have a handle on this thing. But they don't."

"Is that what you're worrying about, when you worry?"

"No, dear. It's the last thing on my mind, to be honest. Bring 'em on. I was thinking, looking out the window, this whole neighborhood could do with a good bomb."

"Oh, Jack, you shouldn't even joke about it, those poor young men up there on the top stories, calling their wives on cell phones to tell them they loved them."

"I know, I know. I shouldn't even joke."

"Markie keeps saying we should move out to be closer to him in Albuquerque."

"He says it, honey, but he doesn't mean it. Us moving closer is die last thing he wants." Fearing that his enunciating this trutb might have hurt the boy's mother, he jokes, "I don't know why diat is. We never beat him or locked him in a closet."

"They would never bomb the desert," BetJi goes on, arguing as if they are a few debating points away from going to Albuquerque.

"That's right: they, they, as you call them, as you call them, love love the desert." the desert."

She takes enough offense at his sarcasm to get off his case, he observes with mingled relief and regret. She manages an old-fas.h.i.+oned haughty toss of her head and says, "It must be wonderful, to be so unconcerned about what worries everybody else," and turns back to the bedroom to make the bed and, on the same scale of pillowy exertion, to get herself dressed for her day at the library.

What have I done, he asks himself, he asks himself, to deserve such fidelity, such wifely trust? to deserve such fidelity, such wifely trust? He is disappointed, slightly, that she hadn't disputed his rude claim that their son, a thriving ophthalmologist with three dear sun-kissed, dutifully bespectacled children and a bottle-blonde, pure Jewish, superficially friendly but basically standoffish wife from Short Hills, doesn't want his parents nearby. He and Beth have their myths between them, and one is that Mark loves them as much as they-helplessly, their nest holding only one egg- love him. In fact, Jack Levy wouldn't mind calling it quits around here; after a lifetime of an old-time industrial burg dying on its feet and turning into a Third World jungle, a s.h.i.+ft to the Sun Belt might do him good. Beth, too. Last winter had been a brute in the Middle Atlantic region, and there are still, in the constant shadow between some of the neighborhood's close-packed houses, little humps of snow black with dirt. He is disappointed, slightly, that she hadn't disputed his rude claim that their son, a thriving ophthalmologist with three dear sun-kissed, dutifully bespectacled children and a bottle-blonde, pure Jewish, superficially friendly but basically standoffish wife from Short Hills, doesn't want his parents nearby. He and Beth have their myths between them, and one is that Mark loves them as much as they-helplessly, their nest holding only one egg- love him. In fact, Jack Levy wouldn't mind calling it quits around here; after a lifetime of an old-time industrial burg dying on its feet and turning into a Third World jungle, a s.h.i.+ft to the Sun Belt might do him good. Beth, too. Last winter had been a brute in the Middle Atlantic region, and there are still, in the constant shadow between some of the neighborhood's close-packed houses, little humps of snow black with dirt.

At Central High, his guidance counselor's room is one of the smallest-a former long supply closet whose gray metal storage shelves remain, supporting a scattering of college catalogues, telephone directories, handbooks of psychology, and stacked back issues of a no-frills, Nation-sized Nation-sized weekly t.i.tled weekly t.i.tled Metro Job Market, Metro Job Market, tracking the region's employment needs and its inst.i.tutions of technical education. When the palatial building was erected eighty years ago, no separate s.p.a.ce set aside for guidance was thought necessary: guidance tracking the region's employment needs and its inst.i.tutions of technical education. When the palatial building was erected eighty years ago, no separate s.p.a.ce set aside for guidance was thought necessary: guidance was everywhere, loving parents innermost and a moralistic popular culture outermost, with lots of advice between. A child was fed more guidance than he could easily digest. Now, routinely, Jack Levy interviews children who seem to have no flesh-and-blood parents-whose instructions from the world are entirely imparted by electronic ghosts signalling across a crowded room, or rapping through black foam earplugs, or encoded in the intricate programming of action figures twitching their spasmodic way through the explosion-producing algorithms of a video game. Students present themselves to their counselor like a succession of CDs whose s.h.i.+mmering surface gives no clue to their contents without the equipment to play them.

This senior, the fifth thirty-minute interview of the weary long morning, is a tall, lean, dun-colored boy in black jeans and a strikingly clean white s.h.i.+rt. The whiteness of the s.h.i.+rt a.s.saults Jack Levy's eyes, his head a bit tender from his early awakening. The folder holding the boy's student records is labeled on the outside Mulloy (Ashmawy), Mulloy (Ashmawy), Ahmad. Ahmad.

"Your name is interesting," Levy tells the young man. There is something Levy likes about the kid-an unblinking gravity, a wary courtesy in the set of his soft, rather full lips and the careful cut and combing of his hair, a wiry crest that seeks to rise straight up from his brow. "Who's Ashmawy?" the counselor asks.

"Sir, shall I explain?"

"Please do."

The boy speaks with a pained stateliness; he is imitating, Levy feels, some adult he knows, a smooth and formal talker. "I am the product of a white American mother and an Egyptian exchange student; they met