Mr. Levy destroys the moment, saying, “Well, what else can we talk about? Giants Stadium. Did you catch the Jets game yesterday? When that kid Carter fumbled the kickoff, I thought to myself, Here we go again, just like last season. But no, they pulled it out, thirty-one to twenty-four, though you couldn’t relax until that rookie safety Coleman came up with the interception in the last minute of the Bengals’ final drive.” This is presumably Jewish comedy, which Ahmad ignores. In a more sincere voice, Levy says, “I can’t believe you’re seriously intending to kill hundreds of innocent people.”
“Who says unbelief is innocent? Unbelievers say that. God says, in the Qur’an, Be ruthless to unbelievers. Burn them, crush them, because they have forgotten God. They think to be themselves is sufficient. They love this present life more than the next.”
“So kill them now. That seems pretty severe.”
“It would to you, of course. You are a lapsed Jew, I believe. You believe nothing. In the third sura of the Qur’an it says that not all the gold in the world can ransom those who once believed and now disbelieve, and that God will never accept their repentance.”
Mr. Levy sighs. Ahmad can hear moisture, little droplets of fear, rattle in his breath. “Yeah, well, there’s a lot of repulsive and ridiculous stuff in the Torah, too. Plagues, massacres, straight from Yahweh to you. Tribes that weren’t lucky enough to be chosen—put them under the ban, show them no mercy. They hadn’t quite worked out Hell yet, that came with the Christians. Wise up—the priests try to control people through fear. Conjure up Hell—the oldest scare tactic in the world. Next to torture. Hell is torture, basically. You really can buy into all this? God as supreme torturer? God as the King of genocide?”
“As the note attached to Charlie said, He will not deny us our recompense. You mention the Torah, in your own tradition. The Prophet had many good words for Abraham. I am interested: Did you ever believe? How did you fall away?”
“I was born fallen away. My father hated Judaism, and his father before him. They blamed religion for the world’s misery—it reconciled people to their problems. Then they subscribed to another religion, Communism. But you don’t want to hear this.”
“I don’t mind. It is good for us to seek agreement. Before Israel, Muslims and Jews were brothers—they belonged to the margins of the Christian world, the comic others in their funny clothes, entertainment for the Christians secure in their wealth, in their paper-white skins. Even with the oil, they despised us, cheating the Saudi princes of their people’s birthright.”
Mr. Levy heaves another sigh. “That’s some ‘us’ you’ve worked up, Ahmad.”
The traffic, already congested, slows and thickens. Signs say NORTH BERGEN, SECAUCUS, WEEHAWKEN, ROUTE 495, TO THE LINCOLN TUNNEL. Though he has never done this before, with or without Charlie, Ahmad follows the signs easily, even as 495, at a spasmodic crawl, performs a complete loop, bringing the traffic down the Weehawken cliff to the level of the river. He imagines a voice at his side saying, Easy does it, Madman. This isn’t rocket science.
As the roadway descends, mobs of other vehicles are being funneled in from feeder roads south and west. Ahmad sees above the car roofs their eventual common destination, a long face of tawny stonework and white tiles framing three round archways for two lanes each. A sign says TRUCKS TO RIGHT. Other trucks—brown UPS, yellow Ryder, motley tradesmen’s pickups, tractor trailers chuffing and squealing as they tug forward their mammoth loads of fresh produce of the Garden State on its way to the kitchens of Manhattan—press right, working their way a few feet at a time, and braking.
“Now is the time to jump out, Mr. Levy. I can’t stop once we’re in the tunnel.”
The guidance counselor puts his hands on his thighs in their mismatched gray trousers so that Ahmad can see he isn’t going to touch the door. “I don’t think I’ll get out. We’re in this together, son.” His pose is brave, but his voice is hoarse, weak.
“I’m not your son. If you try to get anyone’s attention I’ll set off the truck right here, in the traffic jam. It’s not ideal but it’ll kill plenty.”
“I’m betting you won’t set it off. You’re too good a kid. Your mother used to tell me how you couldn’t bear to step on a bug. You’d try to get it onto a piece of paper and throw it out the window.”
“My mother and you seem to have had a lot of conversations.”
“Consultations. We both want the best for you.”
“I didn’t like to step on bugs, but I don’t like touching them either. I was afraid they’d bite, or defecate on my hand.”
Mr. Levy laughs offensively; Ahmad insists, “Insects can defecate—we learned that in biology. They have digestive tracts and anuses and everything, just like we do.” His brain is racing, battering at its own limits. Because there seems no time left in which to argue, he accepts Mr. Levy’s presence beside him as something immaterial, half real, like the sense he has always had of God being closer to him than a brother, of himself as a double being half unfolded, like a book with its two sets of pages bound together, odd and even, read and unread.
Surprisingly, here at the three mouths (Manny, Moe, and Jack) of the Lincoln Tunnel, there are trees and greenery: above the traffic jam, as its tangled seethe of brake lights and directional lights blink on and off, an earth embankment supports a triangular piece of mown grass. Ahmad thinks, This is the last piece of earth I will ever see, this little lawn that no one ever stands on or picnics on or has ever noticed before with eyes about to go blind.
A few men and women in blue-gray uniforms are standing around the edges of the coagulated, forward-inching traffic flow. These police appear to be benign onlookers rather than supervisors, chatting in pairs and basking in the reborn, but still hazy, sunshine. For them this jam occurs every weekday in these hours, as much a part of nature as sunrise or tides or the planet’s other mindless recurrences. One of the officers is a sturdy female, her cap allowing her bundled fair hair to show at her neck and ears, her breasts pushing against the shirt pockets of her uniform, with its badge and bandolier strap; she has attracted two uniformed males, one white and one black, their teeth exposed in lustful smiles and their waists heavy with dangling weapons. Ahmad looks at his Timex: eight-fifty-five. Forty-five minutes have passed in the truck. It will be over by nine-fifteen.
He has maneuvered the truck to the right, expertly using his mirrors to exploit the merest hesitation in a vehicle beside him. The jam, which felt for a while impenetrable, has sorted itself out into lanes feeding into the two Manhattan-bound tunnels. Suddenly, Ahmad sees, only a half-dozen vans and autos are between him and the right-hand tunnel entrance. There are a U-Haul ten-foot rented van and then a lunch wagon in quilted aluminum, all buttoned-up and latched against the moment when it unfolds its counter and activates its kitchen to feed unfastidious crowds from the sidewalk, and a number of ordinary autos, including a bronze-colored Volvo station wagon holding a family of zanj. With a courteous wave Ahmad bids the driver slip in ahead of him into the line that has formed.
“You won’t get by the booth,” Mr. Levy warns him. He sounds tense, as if a bully is squeezing his chest from behind. “You look too young to be driving out of state.”
But there is nobody in the booth built to hold a toll-taker. Nobody. A green light flashes E-Z PASS PAID and Ahmad and the white truck are admitted to the tunnel.
The light inside is instantly strange: tiles not quite white but a sickly cream form close walls around the double stream of trucks and cars. The noise thus contained generates an echo, an undercurrent that slightly dampens it, as if with a watery distance. Ahmad feels himself already to be under water. He imagines the Hudson’s black weight overhead, above the tiled ceiling. The artificial light in the tunnel is ample yet not cleansing; the vehicles move, at the speed of the slowest, through a kind of blanched darkness. There are trucks, some so vast the tops of their trailers seem to scrape the ceiling, but also automobiles that in the metallic scramble at the entrance have
mixed themselves in with the trucks.
Through his windshield Ahmad looks down through the back window of the bronze station wagon, a V90. Two children seated backward look up at him, hopeful for entertainment. They are not neglectfully dressed but in the same carefully careless, ironically gaudy clothes that white children would be wearing on a family expedition. This black family was doing well, until Ahmad waved them ahead of him into line.
After an initial spurt, a glide into the space won at last by the untangling of the congestion outside the tunnel, the traffic flow is balked by some unseen obstacle or stickiness ahead. Smooth progress has proved to be an illusion. Drivers brake, brake lights glare. Ahmad finds himself not ungrateful for the slowdown, the stop and go. The downward slant of the road surface, which was unexpectedly rough and bumpy for a surface that never saw the weather, threatened to carry him and his passenger and their load too quickly toward the tunnel’s nadir, beyond which lay the theoretical weak point, two-thirds of the way through, where, he was advised, the tunnel will bend and be weakest. There his life will end. A shimmer like a heat mirage has possessed his mind’s eye: that triangle of tended yet unused grass hung above the tunnel mouth hangs in his mind. He had felt pity for it, so unvisited.
Clearing his dry throat, he uses his voice. “I do not look young,” he explains to Mr. Levy. “Men of our Middle-Eastern blood—we mature quicker than Anglo-Saxons. Charlie used to say I looked twenty-one and could drive the big rigs without anybody stopping me.”
“That Charlie, he said a lot,” Mr. Levy replies. His voice sounds tight, a hollow teacher’s voice.
“Would you rather I did not talk, as the time draws near? It is possible that, though fallen away, you would like to pray.”
One of the children in the back of the Volvo, a girl with her bushy hair up in two curious round balls, like the ears of that cartoon mouse once so famous, is trying to attract Ahmad’s attention with smiles; he ignores her.
“No,” Levy says, as if even that monosyllable hurts to get out. “Talk away. Ask me something.”
“Shaikh Rashid. Did your informant know what has happened to him, in this uncovering?”
“For now, he’s vanished. But he won’t make it back to Yemen, I can promise you. These pricks can’t get away with everything forever.”
“He came to visit me last night. There seemed a sadness to him. But, then, there always has been. I think his learning is stronger than his faith.”
“And he didn’t tell you the jig was up? Charlie was found early yesterday morning.”
“No. He assured me Charlie would meet me as planned. He wished me well.”
“He left you in sole charge.”
Ahmad hears the scornful tone and asserts, “I am in charge.” He brags, “This morning, there were two strange cars at the Excellency lot. I saw a man who had the loud voice of authority talk on a cell phone. I saw him but he did not see me.”
At the girl’s instigation, she and her little brother press their faces against their curved window with pop eyes and contorted mouths, to make Ahmad smile, to achieve recognition.
Mr. Levy is slumping in his seat, feigning insouciance or cowering beneath images in his imagination. He says, “One more screw-up from your Uncle Sam. The fuzz was busy getting cups of coffee, telling dirty jokes to each other over the intercom, who knows? Listen. There’s something I need to say to you. I fucked your mother.”
The tile walls, Ahmad notices, are glowing a rosy red in the reflection of so many taillights coming on as people repeatedly brake. Cars jerk forward a few feet, and brake again.
“We were sleeping together all summer,” Levy goes on when Ahmad does not reply. “She was fantastic. I didn’t know I could fall in love with anybody ever again—get all those juices flowing again.”
“I think my mother,” Ahmad tells him, after consideration, “sleeps with people easily. A nurse’s aide is at home with the body, and she sees herself as a liberated modern person.”
“So don’t get all bent out of shape about it, you’re telling me: it was no big deal. But it was to me. She became the world to me. Losing her, it’s like I had a big operation. I hurt. I’m drinking too much. You can’t understand.”
“No offense, sir, but do understand,” Ahmad says, rather loftily, “that I am not thrilled to think of my mother fornicating with a Jew.”
Levy laughs—a coarse bark. “Hey, come on, we’re all Americans here. That’s the idea, didn’t they tell you that at Central High? Irish-Americans, African-Americans, Jewish-Americans; there are even Arab-Americans.”
“Name one.”
Levy is taken aback. “Omar Sharif,” he says. He knows he could think of others in a less stressful situation.
“Not American. Try again.”
“Uh—what was his name? Lew Alcindor.”
“Kareem Abdul-Jabbar,” Ahmad corrects.
“Thanks. Way before your time.”
“But a hero. He overcame great prejudice.”
“I think that was Jackie Robinson, but never mind.”
“Are we approaching the low point of the tunnel?”
“How would I know? We’re approaching everything, eventually. The tunnel doesn’t give you much guidance, once you’re in here. There used to be cops stationed along these walkways, but you never see them any more. It was discipline detail, but I guess the cops gave up on discipline when everybody else did.”
Forward progress has been halted for some minutes. Cars behind them and in front of them begin to honk; the noise travels along the tiles like breath in a huge musical instrument. As if this halt gives them endless leisure, Ahmad turns and asks Jack Levy, “Have you ever, in your studies, read the Egyptian poet and political philosopher Sayyid Qutub? He came to the United States fifty years ago and was struck by the racial discrimination and the open wantonness between the sexes. He concluded that no people is more distant than the American people from God and piety. But the concept of jhiliyya, meaning the state of ignorance that existed before Mohammed, extends also to worldly Muslims and makes them legitimate targets for assassination.”
“Sounds sensible. I’ll assign him as optional reading, if I live. I’ve signed up to teach a course in civics this semester. I’m sick of sitting in that old equipment-closet all day trying to talk surly sociopaths out of dropping out. Let ’em drop out, is my new philosophy.”
“Sir, I regret to say you will not live. In a few minutes I am going to see the face of God. My heart overflows with the expectation.”
Their lane of traffic nudges forward. The children in the vehicle ahead have grown bored with trying to attract Ahmad’s attention. The little boy, who wears a billed red cap and an imitation Yankees shirt with pinstripes, has curled up and dozed off in the relentless stop and go, the squealing and chuffing of truck brakes in this tiled Hell of refined petroleum being turned into carbon monoxide. The girl with bushy pigtails, a thumb in her mouth, leans against her brother and gives Ahmad a glazed stare, no longer courting recognition. Ahmad was three when his father turned his back on him and fled: he has often reflected that at three a child can talk, he can run, he is a person, he can plead and grieve and shed sore tears. He must have wept but remembers nothing of this time.
“Go ahead. See the bastard,” Jack Levy is telling him, ceasing to slump, sitting up, his sickly color chased from his cheeks by excitement. “Go see God’s fucking face, for all I care. Why should I care? A woman I was crazy about has ditched me, my job is a drag, I wake up every morning at four and can’t get back to sleep. My wife—Jesus, it’s too sad. She sees how unhappy I am and blames herself, for having gotten so ridiculously fat, and has gone on this crash diet that might kill her. She’s in agony, not eating. I want to tell her, ‘Beth, forget it, nothing’s going to bring us back, us when we were young.’ Not that we were ever anything out of the ordinary. We had a few laughs, we used to make each other laugh and enjoyed the simple things, eating out together once a week, going to a movie when we had the
energy, now and then taking a picnic up to the tables by the falls. The one child we had, his name is Mark, lives in Albuquerque and just wants to forget us, and who can blame him? We were the same with our own parents—get away from ’em, they don’t get it, they’re embarrassing. That philosopher of yours, what was his name?”
“Sayyid Qutub. Properly, Qutb. He was a great favorite of my former teacher, Shaikh Rashid.”
“He sounds good on America. Race, sex—they spook us. Once you run out of steam, America doesn’t give you much. It doesn’t even let you die, what with the hospitals sucking all the money they can out of Medicare. The drug companies have turned doctors into crooks. Why should I hang around until some disease turns me into a cash cow for a bunch of crooks? Let Beth enjoy the little I can leave her; that’s the way I feel. I’ve become a drag on the world, taking up space. Go ahead, push your fucking button. Like the guy on an airplane on Nine-Eleven said to somebody on the cell phone, it’ll be quick.” Jack reaches across his body toward the detonator and Ahmad for the second time seizes his hand in his own.