Shaikh Rashid is pleased. He tells Ahmad, “Appearances can deceive. Though I know our mosque appears, to youthful eyes, shabby and fragile in its external trappings, it is woven of tenacious strands and built upon truths set deep in the hearts of men. The mosque has friends, friends as powerful as they are pious. The head of the Chehab family, just the other day, told me that his prospering business has need for a young truck driver, with no unclean habits and firmly of our faith.”
“My rating is only a ‘C,’” Ahmad tells him, backing a step from what he senses is too easy and swift an entry into the adult world. “I can’t drive out of state or carry hazardous materials.”
He has been enjoying, in the weeks since graduation, living with his mother in a condition of idleness, working his desultory, harshly lit hours at the Shop-a-Sec, faithfully performing his daily salat, venturing to a movie or two and marvelling at the expenditure of Hollywood ammunition and the beauty of its explosions, and running in his old track shorts through the streets, sometimes into the region of row houses where he had walked that Sunday noon with Joryleen. He never sees her, just girls of similar color with her way of sauntering, knowing they are being watched. As he flies through the run-down blocks, he remembers Mr. Levy’s vague talk of college and its vague but grand subject matter, “science, art, history.” The guidance counselor has come by the apartment, actually, once or twice, but, though friendly enough to Ahmad, was quick to leave, as though forgetting what he came for. Without listening carefully to the answer, he asked Ahmad how his plans are coming and whether he intends to stick around here or to go out and see the world, the way a young man should. This sounded curious coming from Mr. Levy, who has lived in New Prospect all of his life, except for college and the spell in the Army that American men used to have to do. Though the doomed American war against Vietnamese self-determination was progressing at this time, Mr. Levy was never assigned to leave the United States, remaining in desk jobs, a fact he feels guilty about, since even though the war was a mistaken one it offered a chance to prove his courage and to show his love for his country. Ahmad knows this because his mother talks to him now and then about Mr. Levy—what a nice man he seems to be, though not a very happy one, and underappreciated by the school administrators, and no longer of much importance to his wife or his son. His mother lately is unusually talkative and inquisitive; she takes more interest in Ahmad than he has come to expect, asking him, whenever he goes out, when he is coming back, and sometimes acting annoyed when he answers, “Oh, sometime.”
“And when might that be, exactly?”
“Mother! Get off my case. Pretty soon. I might poke around over at the library.”
“Would you like some money for a movie?”
“I have money, and I just saw a couple movies, one with Tom Cruise and one with Matt Damon. They were both about professional assassins. Shaikh Rashid is right—movies are sinful and stupid. They are foretastes of Hell.”
“Oh, my, how holy we’re getting to be! Don’t you have any friends? Don’t boys your age usually have girlfriends?”
“Mom. I’m not gay, if that’s what you’re implying.”
“How do you know?”
He was shocked. “I know.”
“Well, all I know,” she said, combing her hair back from her forehead with the bent fingers of her left hand in a swift gesture acknowledging the dishevelled nature of this conversation and signalling a willingness to end it, “is I never know when you’re going to pop back in.”
Now, with somewhat the same testy tone, Shaikh Rashid answers, “They don’t want you to drive out of state. They don’t want you to carry hazardous materials. They wish you to transport furniture. The Chehabs’ firm is Excellency Home Furnishings, on Reagan Boulevard. You must have noticed it, or heard me mention the Chehab family.”
“The Chehabs?” At times Ahmad fears that, wrapped in his sensation of God standing beside him—so close as to make a single, unique holy identity, closer to him than his neck-vein, as the Qur’an expresses it—he notices fewer mundane details than other people, unreligious people.
“Habib and Maurice,” the imam clarifies, with an impatience that bites off his words as precisely as his beard is trimmed. “They are Lebanese, non-Maronite, non-Druze. They came to this country as young men in the ’sixties, when it looked as if Lebanon might become a satellite of the Zionist entity. They brought some capital with them and put it into Excellency. Inexpensive furniture, new and used, for the blacks, was the basic idea. It has proved successful. Habib’s son, informally called Charlie, has been selling merchandise and performing deliveries, but they wish him to play a more significant role in the office, now that Maurice has retired to Florida, save for a few summer months, and Habib’s diabetes takes an increasing toll on his stamina. Charlie will—what’s the phrase?—show you the ropes. You’ll like him, Ahmad. He’s very American.”
The Yemeni’s feminine gray eyes narrow in amusement. To him, Ahmad is American. No amount of zeal and Qur’an studies can change his mother’s race or his father’s absence. The lack of fathers, the failure of paternity to keep men loyal to their homes, is one of the marks of this decadent and rootless society. Shaikh Rashid—a man slight and slim as a dagger, with a dangerous slyness about him, implying at moments that the Qur’an may not have eternally pre-existed in Paradise, to which the Prophet during one night-journey travelled on the supernatural horse Buraq—does not offer himself as a father; there is in his regard of Ahmad something fraternal and sardonic, a splinter of hostility.
But he is right, Ahmad does like Charlie Chehab, a thick-set six-footer in his middle thirties, his swarthy face deeply creased, with a broad and flexible mouth much in motion. “Ahmad,” he says, giving the syllables equal weight, broadening the second “a” as in “Baghdad” or “mad.” He asks, “So what’re you mad about?” Expecting no answer, he goes on, “Welcome to Excellency, so called. My dad and uncle didn’t quite know English when they named it; they thought it meant something excellent.” His face as he talks expresses complicated mental currents like disdain, self-disparagement, suspicion, and (with lifted eyebrows) a good-humored awareness of himself and his listener being placed somehow in a compromised situation together.
“We knew English,” his father beside him protests. “We knew English from the American School in Beirut. ‘Excellency’ means something classy. Like ‘new’ in New Prospect. Doesn’t mean prospect is new now, it was new then. If we call it ‘Chehab Furnishings,’ people ask, ‘What means that, “Chehab”?’” He softly hawks the “ch,” a sound Ahmad associates with his Qur’an lessons.
Charlie stands a good foot taller than his father, and easily encircles the older, paler man’s head in his arm and gives him a fond hug, a harmless enactment of a wrestling hold. Thus cradled, old Mr. Chehab’s head looks like a giant egg, hairless on top and thinner-skinned than his rubber-faced son’s. The father’s face is somewhat translucent and puffy, perhaps because of the diabetes Shaikh Rashid had mentioned. Mr. Chehab’s pallor is glassy but his manner is not sickly; though older than, say, Mr. Levy, he seems younger, plump and excitable and willing to be amused, even by his own son. He appeals to Ahmad: “America. I don’t understand this hatred. I came here a young man, married but my wife had to be left behind, just me and my brother, and nowhere was there the hatred and shooting of my own country, everybody in tribes. Christian, Jew, Arab, indifferent, black, white, in between—everybody get along. If you have something good to sell, people buy. If you have job to do, people do it. Everything is clear, on surface. Makes business easy. From the beginning, no trouble. We thought in the Old World to set our prices high, then be bargained down. But nobody understands, even poor zanj come in to buy sofa or easy chair, they pay the price on sticker just like in grocery store. But few come. We understand, and put on the furniture prices we expect getting—lower prices—and more come. I say to Maurice, ‘This is honest and friendly country. We will have no problems.’”
C
harlie has released him from his hug, looks Ahmad in the eye, for the new employee was his height though thirty pounds lighter, and winks. “Papa,” he says, with a snarl of patience. “There are problems. The zanj weren’t given any rights, they had to fight for them. They were being lynched and not allowed in restaurants, they even had separate drinking fountains, they had to go to the Supreme Court to be considered human beings. In America, nothing is free, everything is a fight. There is no ummah, no shari?a. Let the young man here tell you, he’s just out of high school. Everything is war, right? Look at America abroad—war. They forced a country of Jews into Palestine, right into the throat of the Middle East, and now they’ve forced their way into Iraq, to make it a little U.S. and have the oil.”
“Don’t believe him,” Habib Chehab tells Ahmad. “He says this propaganda, but he knows he has it good here. He is good boy. See, he smiles.”
And Charlie does more than smile; he laughs, throwing back his head so the horseshoe arc of his upper teeth is displayed, and the grainy muscle of his tongue, like a broad worm. His flexible lips close upon a contemplative smirk; his eyes, watchful beneath his thick brows, study Ahmad.
“How do you feel about all this, Madman? The imam tells us you’re very pious.”
“I seek to walk the Straight Path,” Ahmad admits. “In this country, it is not easy. There are too many paths, too much selling of many useless things. They brag of freedom, but freedom to no purpose becomes a kind of prison.”
The father interrupts, speaking loudly. “You have never known a prison. In this country, people have no fear of prison. Not like Old World. Not like Saudis, not like Iraq before.”
Charlie says soothingly, “Papa, the U.S. has the biggest prison population in the world.”
“Not bigger than Russia’s. Not than China’s, if we knew.”
“Plenty big, though—going on two million. The young black women don’t have enough guys to go around. They’re all in jail, for Chrissake.”
“They are for criminals, the prisons. Three, four times a year they break into store. If don’t find money they smash the furniture and make shit everywhere. Disgusting!”
“Papa, they’re underprivileged. To them, we’re rich.”
“Your friend Saddam Hussein, he knows prisons. The Communists, they knew prisons. In this country, the average man knows nothing about prisons. The average man has no fear. He does his job. He obeys the laws. They are easy laws. Don’t steal. Don’t kill. Don’t fuck another Mrs.”
A number of Ahmad’s classmates back at Central High broke the law and were sentenced in juvenile court, for having drugs and breaking-and-entering and DWI. The worst of them thought of court and jail as part of normal life, holding no terrors; they were already reconciled to it. But his wish to contribute this information to the debate is stifled by Charlie’s saying, with a clever stretched expression that simultaneously seeks peace and yearns to make his clinching point, “Papa, what about our little concentration camp down at Guantánamo Bay? Those poor bastards can’t even have lawyers. They can’t even get imams who aren’t snitches.”
“They are enemy soldiers,” Habib Chehab says sulkily, wishing the discussion to end but unable to surrender. “They are dangerous men. They wish to destroy America. That is what they say to reporters, even though they are better fed by us than ever by the Taliban. They think Nine-Eleven was a great joke. It is war for them. It is jihad. That is what they say themselves. What they expect, Americans to lie down flat under feet and make no self-defense? Even bin Laden, he expects being fought back.”
“Jihad doesn’t have to mean war,” Ahmad offers, his voice shyly cracking. “It means striving, along the path of God. It can mean inner struggle.”
The elder Chehab looks at him with new interest. His eyes are not as dark a brown as his son’s; they are golden marbles, in watery eye-whites. “You are good boy,” he says solemnly.
Charlie claps his strong arm around Ahmad’s thin shoulders as if to express solidarity among the three of them. “He doesn’t say that to everyone,” he confides to the new recruit.
This interview takes place at the back of the establishment, where a countertop separates some steel desks and, beyond them, a pair of frosted-glass office doors from the rest of the building. All the rest of the space serves as a showroom—a nightmare room containing chairs, end tables, coffee tables, table lamps, standing lamps, sofas, easy chairs, dining tables and chairs, footstools, sideboards, chandeliers hanging thick as jungle vines, wall sconces in various metallic or enamelled finishes, and large and small mirrors from stark to ornate, their frames gilded or silvered amalgams of leaves and chunky flowers and carved ribbons and eagles in profile, with lifted wings and clasping talons; American eagles stare back above Ahmad’s startled reflection, a lean boy of mixed parentage in white shirt and black jeans.
“Downstairs,” says the short, plump father, with his gleaming arched nose and pockets of tired dark skin below his golden eyes, “we have the outdoor furniture, lawn and porch, wicker and folding, and even some aluminum cabanas, screened to set yourself off from the bugs in the back yards, for when the family wants a change of air. Upstairs is for bedroom furniture, the beds and bedside tables and bureaus, dressing tables for the lady, armoires for where there aren’t enough closets, chaise longues for the lady to put up her feet, upholstered side chairs and stools for the same relaxed mood, little table lamps softer, you know, to go with what should happen in a bedroom.”
Charlie, perhaps seeing Ahmad blush, says gruffly, “Used, new, we don’t make that much of a distinction. The price tag tells the story, and the condition of the piece. Furniture isn’t like a car; it doesn’t have a lot of secrets. What you see is what you get. Where you and I come in is, anything over a hundred dollars we deliver free in any part of the state. People love that. It’s not like we get many drop-in customers from Cape May, but people love the idea of free.”
“And rugs,” says Habib Chehab. “They want Oriental rugs, as if Lebanese are from Armenia, from Iran. So we keep selection downstairs, and any on floor you can buy and we clean. There are special carpet places along Reagan, but people believe in our bargains.”
“They believe in us, Papa,” Charlie says. “We have a good name.”
Ahmad smells arising from all this massed equipment for living the mortal aura, absorbed into the cushions and carpets and linen lampshades, of organic humanity, its pathetic six or so positions and needs repeated in a desperate variety of styles and textures between the mirror-crammed walls but amounting to the same daily squalor, the wear and boredom of it, the closed spaces, the floors and ceilings constantly measuring finitude, the silent stuffiness and hopelessness of lives without God as a close companion. The spectacle revives a sensation buried in the folds of his childhood—the false joy of shopping, the tempting counterfeit lavishness of man-made plenty. He would go with his mother up the escalators and through the perfumed aisles of the last, failing emporium downtown or, trotting to keep up with her energetic strides, embarrassed by the mismatch of her freckles with his own dun skin, across tar parking lots into the vast spaces of hastily slapped-up hangars in the “big box” style, where packaged goods were stacked up to the exposed girders. On those trips, narrowly aimed at replacing a certain irreparable home appliance or some boys’ clothing his relentless growing demanded or, before Islam rendered him immune, a long-coveted electronic game obsolete within a season, the mother and son were besieged on all sides by attractive, ingenious things they didn’t need and could not afford, potential possessions that other Americans seemed to acquire without effort but that for them were impossible to squeeze from the salary of a husbandless nurse’s aide. Ahmad tasted American plenty by licking its underside. Devils, these many gaudy packages seemed to be, these towering racks of today’s flimsy fashion, these shelves of chip-power expressed in murderous cartoons prodding the masses to buy, to consume while the world still had resources to consume, to gorge at the trough before death closed gr
eedy mouths forever. In all this wooing of the needy into debt, death was the bottom line, the counter where the diminishing dollars clattered. Hurry, buy now, since the afterlife’s pure and plain joys are an empty fable.
There were goods for sale in the Shop-a-Sec, of course, but mostly bags and boxes of salty, sugary, deleterious food, and plastic fly-swatters, and pencils, made in China, with useless erasers; but here in this great showroom Ahmad feels himself about to be enlisted in the armies of trade, and despite the near presence of the God of whom all material things form the mere shadow, he is excited. The Prophet himself was a merchant. Man never wearies of praying for good things, says the forty-first sura. Among these good things the world’s manufacture must be included. Ahmad is young; there is plenty of time, he reasons, for him to be forgiven for materialism, if forgiveness is needed. God is closer than the vein in his neck, and He knows what it is to desire comfort, else He would not have made the next life so comfortable: there are carpets and couches in Paradise, the Qur’an affirms.
Ahmad is taken to see the truck, his future truck. Charlie leads him beyond the desks, down a corridor dimly lit by a skylight strewn with the shadows of fallen twigs and leaves and winged seeds. The corridor holds a water cooler, a calendar whose numbered squares are scribbled solid with delivery dates, and what Ahmad will come to understand is a dingy time clock, with a rack for each employee’s repeatedly punched time cards on the wall beside it.