Part 1 (1/2)
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.