31 Hours (6 page)

He went into the kitchen, opened the refrigerator, and took a photograph of his own hand reaching into its emptiness. He was already sick of this ground-floor studio apartment with its anorexic bed, its yawning gray walls, its floor naked save for the prayer rug Masoud had placed in a corner. It seemed that once he was gone, they wanted nothing to show he’d ever been here. The result, though, was that nothing proved he was here right now. That felt like an erasure come too soon.

He wondered what Deirdre had done the day before she’d driven that bomb-laden car to Armagh, in Ireland. He imagined her calm, focused, sleeping normally, her wavy auburn hair fanned out over her pillow. He doubted she’d needed rituals to calm her; she’d had a boyfriend nearly a decade older than she who, she told Jonas, had simply been using her. She could live with being used, though, she said, because she believed what she did at the tail end of the Troubles helped to resolve them. She believed in the rightness of her actions. He’d been crazy about her—her sexual appetite, her milky skin and green eyes, her grasp of European history, even the ways in which she was messy, with piles of dirty clothes next to plates of half-eaten food. But he knew
now he must have seemed like a child to her. He was nineteen; she was thirty-one. He was briefly exotic to her—this intense blond traveling boy from America who found himself in Belfast—and then she wearied of him.

But when she heard about this, she’d think more of him. She might even admire him.

He tugged up his jeans—he’d lost twelve pounds in the last three weeks—and pulled on his water-resistant, down-filled parka. Before leaving, he held the camera away from his face and took another picture, this one of his head and shoulders reflected in the bathroom mirror. In his mind, he titled the photograph
Jonas, hungry for gyro.

Outside the tall red-brick building of stacked apartments, the wind ignored his high-technology parka and went right for the bone. This was serious cold. In most towns, the streets would be bare on such a day, but no one who lived in New York City could afford to take time off and stay cozy inside, and nothing deterred the endless tourists in their frenzied, thoughtless race from museum to restaurant to theater. So the streets were still full enough, though each face was etched with a matching grimace and each body charged forward as if lingering could kill.

Jonas headed toward the tip of Manhattan, where the East River mates with the Hudson. His ungloved fingers quickly began to sting from the cold, but he only had to walk two and a half blocks before he found a deli, windows slightly steamed. Three bells hanging from a rope clanged as he shoved open the door. The deli, squeezed into a railroad-car-sized space, carried a thick scent of coffee. Beyond a display crammed with single-serving bags of chips, Jonas saw meat spinning on a kebab over a grill. The man behind the counter wore a white apron with an oil stain on his left chest, near his heart. He nodded once at Jonas, the only customer.

“Hey,” Jonas said.

The man watched him, impassive.

“A gyro,” Jonas said. “Lamb. Extra white sauce and extra hot sauce.”

“You got it, bud.”

The man reached for the pita bread, and Jonas noticed he had dark, fur-like hair on his arms, almost matted to his skin. This guy would have a tough time doing what Jonas had just done, shaving much of his body; it would probably take him hours, and even then, he almost certainly had hair in places that he couldn’t reach, places Jonas didn’t want to consider.

“Carrotsonionstomatoes?” the man asked, as if they were one word.

Jonas nodded. “The works.”

It occurred to Jonas that maybe Masoud had chosen him simply because he didn’t have a mass of body hair, so no one would have to help him shave. He smiled at that thought. On the other hand, as much as Jonas wanted to believe his passion and intellectual clarity were what had singled him out, he knew the deciding factor was probably that he came from privilege. At least relative privilege, American-style. A home, a laptop, an iPod, plenty of food, clothes, education. And this, his comparative wealth, would increase the public impact of his deed. Its marketability, if you will. It gave his actions greater meaning. Masoud had explained this, and Jonas believed him. He understood that if people saw someone like him—like
them
—moved to carry out such a mission, to make such a sacrifice, then they would have to ask themselves why. They would have to question their assumptions because Jonas would not be so easy to dismiss. And the act of questioning would force people to realize how America’s powerful triteness undermined not only the
country but the world itself. The climax was coming. Jonas had been aware of this well before he’d met Masoud. For a long time, in fact, he’d found himself unable to ignore the flawed and increasingly frail pretend-wizard behind the curtain. Oz was a made-up place, and more and more of his countrymen were beginning to realize that. The momentum caused by his act—well, that was in the hands of something greater than Jonas, but he believed it could lead to a consequential awakening in America.

His ability to spot the wizard behind the curtain had for years plunged Jonas into periodic depressions. How did everyone else manage their lives without being brought to a halt by the government’s lies, its narrow-mindedness, its violence against those who did not believe or adhere? Maybe he’d just been born with some gene—either one extra or one missing—that left him deformed for American life. Either way, the fact that he recognized the situation meant he had to do something. Something significant. The Gandhi alternative seemed grandiose and improbable in the current day. This was an age of sanctioned violence—air strikes, not hunger strikes. Deirdre had made that clear long before Jonas had met Masoud. And so, although Masoud had approached him, Jonas believed
he
had actually done the choosing. His personal search had led him to precisely this moment.

“Here you go, bud,” the man said, handing over a sandwich wrapped in foil. Jonas didn’t want to eat while walking the icy streets—difficult to manage and clearly a poor choice for his last New York gyro. Though this was not a sit-in deli, a table with one folding chair stood in the far corner.

“You mind?” Jonas asked, motioning toward the chair with his head. The man shrugged, and Jonas sat.

As he peeled back the foil from the stuffed pita, Jonas decided to
bring a Buddhist approach to eating the gyro; he wanted to be fully present and taste each bite. He thought about Buddhist monks in Tibet who ate very little but chewed so slowly that a twelve-bite meal could take an hour. He’d learned this particular detail from a former monk he’d met in the comparative religion class at SAWU—the same place he’d initially met Masoud. Harold was a surprise—a middle-aged guy in jeans and a T-shirt with a hole in the right sleeve and a slogan reading, “Bud, King of Beers,” who’d spent a year and a half as a novice monk, living in a monastery near Lhasa in a room the size of a walk-in closet, trying to make sense of things. That was the way he’d expressed it, without elaboration: “Trying to make sense of things.” Then he’d decided to shove it in and come back home, where he’d ended up in a class with Jonas and they’d begun talking food.

“New Yorkers wolf down breakfast and lunch and only slow down for dinner half the time. There, living with the monks, I consciously tasted every bite.” Harold scratched his head thoughtfully. “Made me appreciate the mouthful, sure. Problem was, I was also slowly starving.” Jonas and Harold enjoyably split hairs, then, over the various ways of starving. Jonas said too much food could also lead to starvation, and Harold said, “Listen, you goddamn idealist, a man can’t even recognize the metaphorical unless he’s got a belly full enough,” and their argument continued, good-naturedly and off-and-on, for a couple weeks.

Now Jonas grinned, thinking about telling Masoud, the pious Muslim who’d completed the hajj in Mecca, that he’d spent his last day trying to eat Buddhist-style. On second thought, Masoud would probably appreciate that—Masoud was not an extremist as Jonas had once thought of them—except that he was extremely well-educated. He’d studied topics that swept from the earth to the sky and had easy access
to facts that seemed obscure to Jonas. In one of their early discussions, Masoud casually mentioned that Socrates was the Western world’s first recorded martyr, ordered to die for insisting that all men and women possessed souls of their own and thus were obliged to question authority and discover truth for themselves. “The martyr is the offspring of a community at war with itself,” Masoud said. “The martyr helps the right side win. And so beyond his death, he continues to live in two realms, Paradise and Earth.”

Masoud was often open-minded as well; in fact, the main difference between Masoud and, say, Jonas’s dad was that Masoud, having lost his older brother, had thought through the meaning and purpose of his life, and that consciousness guided his actions, whereas Jonas’s dad’s life, like most people’s, had been shaped by chance and longing and failure. To the outside world, Masoud might look like a struggling grad student and Jonas’s father like a thriving art dealer, but looks deceived.

The pita felt warm against Jonas’s lips. He hesitated long enough to consciously absorb the heat and then bit down. Delicious—it was moist and spicy, and he imagined he could distinguish the individual flavors: tomatoes, and onions, and green peppers. And the lamb, the sacrificial lamb. He ate slowly, savoring each bite, feeling the carrots crunch and the tender lamb give way under his teeth, and after a few bites he tried to catch the eye of the man in the apron, wanting to nod his appreciation, but the man had lost interest in him; he was standing at the other end of the deli, gazing out the window at the street. Just then the bell hanging from the door rang again and two young women walked in, one wearing a black coat and the other a red jacket and mittens. The red-jacket woman had black hair, pale skin, and saucy full lips.

The man behind the counter grew suddenly more attentive. “Yes, ladies?”

“I’ll take a hot pastrami on rye,” the black coat said. “And a cup of coffee, to go.”

“And you, miss?”

“Oh, I guess . . .” The red-jacket woman hesitated, reading the menu from a board above the man’s head. “Swiss on a roll?”

“Sure thing,” the man said.

“So anyway,” the red-jacket woman turned to her friend, clearly picking up midconversation, “it was disgusting. He pressed himself up against me and—” She hesitated, glancing toward Jonas, then apparently decided to disregard him. “I could feel his dick against my back.”

“Oh, God,” the other woman said. “What did you do?”

“I waited a second until I was sure I wasn’t imagining it, and then I said in a loud voice, ‘Get the fuck away from me.’ And he said, ‘What are you talking about, lady? The subway is crowded. I can’t get away from you.’ He started talking to the other passengers: ‘What is this lady, crazy? Doesn’t she know this is rush hour?’ God, he was an asshole.” The woman looked at Jonas again and scowled while her friend murmured sympathetically. Jonas averted his gaze to his lap. After a moment, the woman resumed talking. “I said, ‘Don’t fuck with me; you’re fuckin’ feeling me up.’ ”

Jonas felt his cheeks flush with a sudden rush of fury. He felt incensed with the man who had harassed this woman on the subway, certainly. But he was also angry with the woman in the red jacket for expressing herself so crudely in a deli so tiny that he was forced to hear every word. He glanced over at the man making the sandwiches, and this time the man returned his gaze, winked, and nodded toward the women with a leering smile. The moment reeked of vulgarity—precisely the trait that was undermining this country and had to change.

We never destroyed a population that had not a term decreed and assigned beforehand. Neither can a people anticipate its Term, nor delay it.
Sura 15: 4–5.

Jonas’s appetite had vanished. He left the last piece of his gyro on the table and paused near the women, waiting until they looked at him before pushing his way out the door.
I want you to remember me
, he thought.
Remember when you see me on TV
.

The street seemed a bit warmer, whether because of the sandwich in his stomach or because of his anger. He felt suddenly aimless. These were the hours in between. Nearly all the time and for a long time now—for the last ten or twelve weeks of study, at least, and certainly during the final intensive training with Masoud—he’d had no chance to feel aimless. In fact, as the weeks had passed, he’d grown increasingly focused. He’d felt remarkably clear-headed since converting to Islam, a simple ceremony carried out in a small mosque with Masoud present several days before Jonas left for Pakistan. The conversion involved stating his intention in a ritual way and then washing to symbolically rinse away his previous life. Jonas recognized that he converted primarily out of a sense of brotherhood with Masoud, who’d lost his own birth-brother. But he did love certain things about Islam—the physical act of praying, for instance, bowing together, rising, a human wave of committed energy, an act of beauty on both the micro-and the macroscale. He liked the discipline of Islam’s daily routine, and its intimacy, that there were few human intercessors between him and Allah. He very much liked that Islam offered him a path to finally make a difference, and how it seemed to anticipate his doubts, his crisis of confidence, and be ready with answers. When it came to religion, he was happy to pick and choose parts of each he encountered.

Over the last weeks, Jonas and Masoud had discussed religion and
philosophy for hours each day. Masoud repeatedly described the Ka’ba in Mecca, always dense with prayer, and together they pondered what Mohammed’s life must have been like there and what the world might be in ten years. They talked politics, too, and discussed the death of Masoud’s brother Ifraan, and the vast numbers of others killed by American bombs and rockets. Masoud explained
qisas
, the Islamic law that requires equality in punishment, much like the biblical mandate to take an eye for an eye. Sometimes Masoud woke Jonas at 2 or 3 in the morning to offer more instruction, and Jonas wasn’t sure whether Masoud’s goal was for him to think more or to become so sleep-deprived that he stopped thinking. In between all this, Jonas read aloud an English translation of the Qur’an, focusing especially on six suras: Baqara, Al Imran, Anfal, Tawba, Rahman, and Asr. A phrase raced through Jonas’s mind now:
And some people say, “We believe in Allah and the Last Day.” Yet they are not believers. They seek to deceive Allah and the believers, while in fact they deceive not but their own souls.
Sura 2: 9–10.