Part 12 (1/2)
”I mean, you have volunteered out of the fullness of your faith?”
”Yes, and out of hatred of those who mock and ignore G.o.d.”
”Excellent. You do not feel manipulated by your elders?”
It was a surprising idea, tliough Joryleen also had expressed it. ”Of course not. I feel wisely guided by them.”
”And your path tomorrow is clear?”
”Yes. I am to meet Charlie at seven-thirty at Excellency Home Furnis.h.i.+ngs, and we are to drive together to the loaded truck. He will accompany me in it part of the way to the tunnel. Then I am on my own.”
Something ugly, a disfiguring little twist, crossed the shaikh's clean-shaven face. WitJiout his beard and richly embroidered caftan, he appeared disconcertingly ordinary- slight of frame, a bit tremulous in manner, a bit withered, and no longer young. Stretched out on the rough blue blanket, Ahmad was conscious of his superior youth, height, and strength, and of his teacher's fear of him, as one is afraid of a corpse. Shaikh Ras.h.i.+d, hesitating, asked, ”And if Charlie by some unforeseen mischance were not to be there, could you proceed with the plan? Could you find the white truck by yourself?”
”Yes. I know the alley. But why would Charlie not be there?”
”Ahmad, I am sure he will be. He is a brave soldier in our cause, the cause of the true G.o.d, and G.o.d never deserts those who wage war on His behalf. Alldhu akbar!” Alldhu akbar!” His words mixed with the distant musical phrases of the City Hall clock. Everything had a distance to it by now, a receding vibration. The shaikh went on, ”In a war, if the soldier beside you falls, even if he is your best friend, even if he has taught you all you know about soldiering, do you run and hide, or do you march on, into the guns of the enemy?” His words mixed with the distant musical phrases of the City Hall clock. Everything had a distance to it by now, a receding vibration. The shaikh went on, ”In a war, if the soldier beside you falls, even if he is your best friend, even if he has taught you all you know about soldiering, do you run and hide, or do you march on, into the guns of the enemy?”
”You march on.”
”Exactly. Good.” Shaikh Ras.h.i.+d lovingly yet warily gazed down upon the boy on the bed. ”I must leave you now, my prize pupil Ahmad. You have studied well.”
”I thank you for saying so.”
”Nothing in our studies, I trust, has led you to doubt the perfect and eternal nature of the Book of Books.”
”No, indeed, sir. Nothing.” Though Ahmad had sometimes sensed that his teacher in his studies had been infected with such doubts, now was not the time to question him, it was too late; we must each meet death with what faith we have created within, and stored up against the Event. Was his own faith, he had asked himself at times, an adolescent vanity, a way of distinguis.h.i.+ng himself from all those doomed others, Joryleejfi and Tylenol and the rest of the lost, the already dead, at Central High?
The shaikh was hurried and troubled, yet had difficulty in leaving his pupil, searching for the final word. ”You have your printed instructions for the final cleansing, before . . .”
”Yes,” said Ahmad when the older man could not finish.
”But most important,” Shaikh Ras.h.i.+d urged, ”is the Holy Qur'an. If your spirit were to weaken in the long night ahead of you, open it, and let the only G.o.d speak to you through His last, perfect prophet. Unbelievers marvel at the power of Islam; it flows from the voice of Mohammed, a manly voice, a voice from the desert and the marketplace-a man among us, who knew earthly life in all its possibilities and yet hearkened to a voice from beyond, and who submitted to its dictation though many in Mecca were quick to ridicule and revile him.”
”Master: I will not weaken.” Ahmad's tone verged on impatience. When the other man at last was gone, and the chain lock secured, the boy stripped to his underwear and performed ablutions in the tiny bathroom, where the basin nudged the shoulder of anyone sitting on the toilet. On the inside of the basin a long brown stain testifies to years of a faucet dripping rusty water.
Ahmad takes the room's one chair to the room's only table, a bedside table of varnished maple scarred by ash-colored troughs of cigarettes allowed to burn down beyond its top's bevelled edge. Reverently he opens the gift Qur'an. Its flexible gilt-edged pages fall open to the fiftieth sura, ”Qaf.” He reads, on the left-hand side where the English translation is printed, a distinct echo of what Shaikh Ras.h.i.+d has said: They marvel forsooth that one of themselves hath come to them charged with warnings. ”This,” say the infidels, ”is a marvelous thing: What! when dead and turned to dust shall we ... ? Far off is such a return as this?”
The words speak to him, yet make insufficient sense. He studies the Arabic on the facing page, and realizes that the infidels-how strange it is that they, the devils, have a voice in the Holy Qur'an-are doubting the resurrection of the body, which the Prophet has been preaching. Ahmad, too, can scarcely picture the reconst.i.tution of his body, after he succeeds in leaving it; instead he sees his spirit, that little thing inside him that keeps saying ”I... I...,” entering the next life immediately, as if pus.h.i.+ng through a swinging gla.s.s door. In this he is like the unbelievers: bal kadhdhabu hi 'l-haqqi lammd jd'ahum fa-hum ft amrin marij. They, bal kadhdhabu hi 'l-haqqi lammd jd'ahum fa-hum ft amrin marij. They, he reads in the facing English, he reads in the facing English, have treated the truth which hath come to them as falsehood; perplexed therefore is their state. have treated the truth which hath come to them as falsehood; perplexed therefore is their state.
But G.o.d, speaking in His magnificent third-person plural, brushes their perplexity aside: Will they not look up to the heavens above them, and consider how We have reared it and decked it forth, and that there are no flaws therein? Will they not look up to the heavens above them, and consider how We have reared it and decked it forth, and that there are no flaws therein?
The sky above New Prospect, Ahmad knows, is hazy with exhaust smoke and summer humidity, a sepia blur above the jagged rooftops. But G.o.d promises that a better sky, a flawless sky, exists above it, with its blazing patterns of blue stars. ”We” goes on, As to the Earth, We have spread it out, and have As to the Earth, We have spread it out, and have thrown the mountains upon it, and have caused an upgrowth in it of all beauteous kinds of plants, for insight and admonition to every servant who loveth to turn to G.o.d.
Yes. Ahmad will be G.o.d's servant. Tomorrow. The day which is almost upon him. Inches from his eyes, G.o.d is describing His rain, which causeth gardens to spring forth, and the grain of harvest, and the tall palm-trees with date-bearing branches one above the other for man s nourishment. and the tall palm-trees with date-bearing branches one above the other for man s nourishment.
And life give we thereby to a dead country. So also shall be the resurrection. A dead country. That is this country. A dead country. That is this country.
As simple and unanswerable as the first creation shall the second be. Are We wearied out with the first creation? Yet are they in doubt with regard to a new creation? Are We wearied out with the first creation? Yet are they in doubt with regard to a new creation?
We created man: and We know what his soul whispereth to him, and We are closer to him than his neck-vein.
This verse has always borne a special, personal meaning for Ahmad; he closes the Qur'an, its pliant leather cover dyed the uneven red of a rose's streaked petals, certain that Allah is present in this small, strange room, loving him, eavesdropping on the whispers of his soul, its inaudible tumult. He feels his neck-vein beat, and hears the traffic of New Prospect, now murmuring, now roaring (motorcycles, corroded m.u.f.flers), circulating some blocks away around die great central lake of rubble, and hears it dwindle after the City Hall clock chimes eleven. He falls asleep waiting for the next quarter-hour, though he expected to stay awake all night in the blanched, hovering tremble of his high, selfless joy.
Monday morning. Sleep slips suddenly from him. There is again that sense of a shout dying away. A lump of soreness in his stomach puzzles him, until within seconds he remem- bers the day, and his mission. He is still alive. Today is the day of a long journey.
He consults his watch, carefully laid on the table next to the Qur'an. It is twenty to seven. Traffic is already audible, traffic whose unsuspecting flow he will join and disrupt. The entire East, G.o.d willing, will be paralyzed. He showers in a stall equipped with a torn plastic curtain. He waits for the water to heat up, but when it does not he forces himself into the cold dribble. He shaves his face, though he knows that debate rages over how G.o.d prefers to see men face to face. The Chehabs preferred him to shave, since bearded Muslims, even teen-agers, alarmed the kafir customers. Mohammed Atta had shaved, and most of the eighteen other inspired martyrs. The anniversary of their feat was last Sat.u.r.day, and the enemy will have relaxed his defenses, like the men of the elephant before the a.s.sault of birds. Ahmad has brought his gym bag and from it takes clean underwear and socks and his last fresh-laundered white s.h.i.+rt, pleasantly stiffened by a number of pieces of cardboard.
He prays on the prayer rug, the mock-mihrab in its abstract pattern orienting him toward, in the distracting geography of New Prospect, the sacred black Ka'ba in Mecca. In touching his brow to its woven texture, he notices that same faint human odor present in the blue blanket. He has joined a procession of those who have stayed for whatever hidden purpose here in this room before him, showering in the cold rusty water, smoking their cigarettes as the clock chimed. Ahmad eats, though his appet.i.te has vanished within the tension of his stomach, six segments of the orange, half the plastic cup of yogurt, and a significant portion of the bread of Abbas, though the sweetness of its honey and anise seeds strikes him as less than delicious at this hour, with his mighty deed pressing close upon him and crowding upward into his throat like a battle cry. He places the uneaten portion of the sticky holiday bread in the refrigerator, on the biggest piece of s.h.i.+rt cardboard, with the yogurt cup and half-orange, as if for the next tenant, but without attracting ants and roaches to a feast. His mind works through a haze like that which precedes the event described in the Meccan sura called the Blow, on the day when man shall become like scattered moths and the mountains like tufts of carded wool. on the day when man shall become like scattered moths and the mountains like tufts of carded wool.
At seven-fifteen he closes the door behind him, leaving behind in the safe room the Qur'an and the cleanliness instructions for another shahid shahid but taking his gym bag, packed with his soiled underpants, socks, and white s.h.i.+rt. He pa.s.ses through a dark hallway and emerges onto an empty side street that was moistened by a small rain sometime in the night. Orienting himself by the steeple of City Hall, Ahmad walks north, toward Reagan Boulevard and Excellency Home Furnis.h.i.+ngs. He deposits his gym bag in the first corner trash can he sees. but taking his gym bag, packed with his soiled underpants, socks, and white s.h.i.+rt. He pa.s.ses through a dark hallway and emerges onto an empty side street that was moistened by a small rain sometime in the night. Orienting himself by the steeple of City Hall, Ahmad walks north, toward Reagan Boulevard and Excellency Home Furnis.h.i.+ngs. He deposits his gym bag in the first corner trash can he sees.
The sky is not crystal-clear but damp and gray, a furry low sky bleeding downward tails of vaporous fuzz. The night that has pa.s.sed has set a gleam on the asphalt streets, their manholes, their s.h.i.+ny dribbles and patches of tar. Dampness adheres to the still-green leaves of bushes straggling beside front steps and porches, and the overlapped strips of aluminum siding, its color baked in. Most of the close-packed houses he pa.s.ses are not yet fully stirring, though from weakly lit windows at the back, where the kitchens are, sounds of plates and pots and the Today Today show and show and Good Morning America Good Morning America signal breakfasts being consumed, and a Monday like many another in America beginning. signal breakfasts being consumed, and a Monday like many another in America beginning.
An unseen dog in a house barks at the shadow-sound of Ahmad pa.s.sing on the sidewalk. A ginger-colored cat with one blind eye like a crazed white marble is huddling close to the front screen door as it waits to be let in; it arches its back and flashes a golden spark from its narrowed good eye, sensing something uncanny in this tall young stranger pa.s.sing. The air tingles on Ahmad's face but there is not enough of a drizzle to soak his s.h.i.+rt. The starched cotton feels crisp across his shoulders; his black stovepipe jeans sheathe the long legs that float in the watery s.p.a.ce below his belt. His running shoes lick up the distance between himself and his fate; where the sidewalk is smooth, the elaborate relief of their soles leaves moist prints. Who shall teach thee what the Blow is? Who shall teach thee what the Blow is? he remembers, with the answer: he remembers, with the answer: A raging fire! A raging fire! The distance to Excellency is half a mile, six blocks of tenements and small enterprise-a Dunkin' Donuts open and a corner grocery ungrated but a p.a.w.n shop and an insurance agency still closed. Reagan Boulevard is already loud with traffic, and the school buses have begun to prowl, their angry red lights blinking in rapid seesawing alternation as they swallow the cl.u.s.ters of children waiting with dieir bright backpacks. For Ahmad there will be no return to school. Central High now seems, witii all its menacing clatter and impious mockery, a toylike miniature casde, a childish place of safety and deferred decision. The distance to Excellency is half a mile, six blocks of tenements and small enterprise-a Dunkin' Donuts open and a corner grocery ungrated but a p.a.w.n shop and an insurance agency still closed. Reagan Boulevard is already loud with traffic, and the school buses have begun to prowl, their angry red lights blinking in rapid seesawing alternation as they swallow the cl.u.s.ters of children waiting with dieir bright backpacks. For Ahmad there will be no return to school. Central High now seems, witii all its menacing clatter and impious mockery, a toylike miniature casde, a childish place of safety and deferred decision.
He waits for the traffic light to display its walking man before he crosses the boulevard. Its oil-stained concrete is more familiar to him as the surface supporting the tires of his truck than as this silent, enigmatically speckled plane beneath his feet. He turns left and approaches from die east, walking past the funeral home widi its wide porch and white awnings-unger & son, a strange unctuous hungry name- and then the tire store that was once a gasoline station, the pumps uprooted but its island intact. Ahmad halts on the curb of Thirteenth Street, looking over to the Excellency lot. The orange truck is not there. Charlie's Saab is not there. Two unknown cars, one gray and one black, are there, diagonally parked in a heedless, s.p.a.ce-consuming way, amid signs of mysterious activity: a litter of Styrofoam coffee cups and clamsh.e.l.l-style take-out containers that have been dropped on the cracked concrete and then flattened, in a coming and going of tires, like road kill.
Overhead, the sun burns through the overcast and throws a weak white light, as of a failing flashlight. Before Ahmad can be seen-though no one appears to be sitting in the strange, arrogantly trespa.s.sing cars-he ducks right, up Thirteenth Street, and crosses it only when he is hidden behind the screen of bushes and tall weeds that have grown up behind the rusting Dumpster, on property belonging not to Excellency but to the rear of a long-defunct diner in the shape of an old-fas.h.i.+oned trolley car. This boarded-up relic lies at the corner of a narrow street, Frank Hague Terrace, whose row houses, semi-detached, are quiet during the weekdays, until school lets out.
Ahmad consults his watch: seven twenty-seven. He decides to give Charlie until quarter of eight to show up, though their schedule had called for seven-thirty. But then it bears down upon him more and more strongly as the minutes pa.s.s that something has gone wrong; Charlie will not show up. This lot is poisoned. This empty s.p.a.ce behind the store used to give him a sensation of being watched from above, but now it is not G.o.d watching, nor G.o.d's breath he feels. He, Ahmad, is watching, with held breath.
A man in a suit abruptly comes out of the back of the store, onto the loading platform some of whose thick planks still ooze pine sap, and comes down the steps where Ahmad would often idly sit. Here he and Joryleen exited together that night and then parted forever. The man walks boldly to his car and talks to someone over a kind of radio or cell phone in the front seat. His voice, like a policeman's, doesn't care who hears it, but amid the swish of traffic it carries to Ahmad with no more meaning than birdsong. For a second his white face turns full in Ahmad's direction- a well-fed but not happy face, that of an agent for infidel governments, powers that feel power slipping away-but he doesn't see the Arab boy. There is nothing to see, just the Dumpster rusting in the weeds.
Ahmad's heart beats as it did that night with Joryleen. He regrets now the waste, not using her when she had been paid for. But it would have been evil, exploiting her in her fallen condition, though she saw her condition as not so bad and only temporary. Shaikh Ras.h.i.+d would have disapproved. Last night, the shaikh seemed troubled, something was pressing on him he didn't want to share, a doubt of some kind. Ahmad could always sense his teacher's doubts, since it was important to him that there not be any. Now fear invades Ahmad. His face feels swollen. A curse has been laid on this peaceful place, which had been his favorite spot in the world, a waterless oasis.
He begins walking, down silent Hague Terrace-its children at school, its parents at work-for two blocks and then cuts back to Reagan Boulevard, toward the Arab district, where the white truck is hidden. There has been some mix-up, and Charlie must be meeting him there. Ahmad hurries, breaking into a light sweat under the hazy sun. The businesses along Reagan Boulevard deal in big goods-tires, carpeting, wallpaper and paint, major kitchen appliances. Then there are car agencies, mammoth lots holding new automobiles parked as tight as military formations, cars by the acre, winds.h.i.+elds and chrome glittering now that the sun is wearing through, reflecting light as if across a wind-tossed wheat field, striking sparks off of strings of s.h.i.+ny triangles and streamers twisted in spirals that slowly turn. A new style of attention-getter, a creation of recent technology, are these weirdly lifelike segmented plastic tubes that when blown full of air from underneath wave their arms and jerk back and forth in torment, in constant beckoning agitation, begging the pa.s.serby to pull in and buy an automobile or, if posed at an IHOP, a stack of pancakes. Ahmad, the only person walking on the sidewalk along this stretch of Reagan Boulevard, meets such a tube-giant twice as high as he, a hysterically gesturing green djinni wearing a fixed, pop-eyed smile. Pa.s.sing it warily, the lone pedestrian feels on his face and ankles the hot air that makes this importuning, agonized, grinning monster appear to live. G.o.d givetb you life, G.o.d givetb you life, Ahmad thinks, Ahmad thinks, then causeth you to die. then causeth you to die.
At the next traffic light he crosses the boulevard. He strides down Sixteenth Street toward West Main, through a mostly black section like the one he walked Joryleen home to that time after hearing her sing in church. The way her mouth opened so wide, the milky pinks of it. That time on the second floor, all those beds packed in side by side, maybe he should have let her blow him like she offered to. Less mess, she said. All girls, not just hookers, learn how to do it now, at school there had always been loose crude talk about it, which girls were willing to do it, and which said they liked to swallow it. Separate yourselves therefore from women and approach them not, until they be cleansed. But when they are Separate yourselves therefore from women and approach them not, until they be cleansed. But when they are cleansed, go in unto them as G.o.d hath ordained for you. Verily G.o.d loveth those who turn to Him, and loveth those who seek to be clean.
As Ahmad walks along, swift and scissoring in black and white, yet with a native trace of the American lope, he sees shabbiness in the streets, the fast-food trash and broken plastic toys, the unpainted steps and porches still dark from the morning's dampness, the windows cracked and not repaired. The curbs are lined with American cars from the last century, bigger than they ever needed to be and now falling apart, cracked taillights and no hubcaps and tires flat in the gutters. Women's voices rise from back rooms in merciless complaint against children who were born uninvited and now collect, neglected, around the only friendly voices in their hearing, those from the television set. The zanj zanj from the Caribbean or Cape Verdeans plant flowers and paint porches and take hope and energy from being in America, but those born here for generation after generation embrace dirt and laziness as a protest, a protest of slaves that now persists as a l.u.s.t for degradation, defying that injunction of all religions to keep clean. Ahmad is clean. His cold shower this morning lives as a glowing second skin beneath his clothes, a foretaste of the great cleansing he is hurrying toward. His watch says ten of eight. from the Caribbean or Cape Verdeans plant flowers and paint porches and take hope and energy from being in America, but those born here for generation after generation embrace dirt and laziness as a protest, a protest of slaves that now persists as a l.u.s.t for degradation, defying that injunction of all religions to keep clean. Ahmad is clean. His cold shower this morning lives as a glowing second skin beneath his clothes, a foretaste of the great cleansing he is hurrying toward. His watch says ten of eight.
He moves swiftly, without running. He must not attract attention, he must slip through the city unseen. Later would come the headlines, the CNN reports filling the Middle East with jubilation, making the tyrants in their opulent Was.h.i.+ngton offices tremble. For now the tremble, the mission are still his, his secret, his task. He remembers himself running, crouching and shaking out his naked arms for looseness, waiting for the starter's pistol to go off and the knot of boys to unravel forward with an angry hail of thumping feet on Central High's antiquated cinder track, and until his body took over and his brain dissolved itself in adrenaline he was more nervous then than he is now, because what he does now occurs within the palm of G.o.d's hand, His vast encompa.s.sing will. Ahmad's best official time for the mile had been 4:48.6, on a springy composition track, green with embedded red lane lines, over at a regional high school in Belleville. He had come in third, and his lungs afterwards felt scorched in the fire of his finis.h.i.+ng kick over the last hundred yards; he had pa.s.sed two boys, but two more stayed out of reach of his legs, mirages ahead that kept receding.
After five blocks Sixteenth Street comes into West Main. Elderly Muslims stand around like soft statues in their dark suits and the occasional dirty gallabiya. Ahmad finds the Pep Boys and the Al-Aqsa True Value storefronts, and then the alley behind tiiem that he and Charlie had walked along to what had been Costello's Machine Shop. He makes sure there is no one watching as he draws near to the small side door of quilted metal painted a vomitous tan. No Charlie stands outside. There is no sound within. The sun has burned through, and Ahmad feels his shoulders and back sweating; his white s.h.i.+rt is no longer pristine. The Monday is astir a half-block distant on West Main. There is some traffic, cars and pedestrians, in the alley. He tries the new bra.s.s k.n.o.b on the door, but it doesn't turn. He keeps twisting it, in exasperation. How can little unthinking bits of metal balk the will of as-Samad, as-Samad, the Perfect? the Perfect?
Fighting panic, Ahmad tries the big door, the sliding door. It has a handle down low that when turned makes two rods release a pair of side latches. The handle turns; the door shocks him by sliding up with a counterweighted ease that feels like flight, a curved moment of flight before it settles rattlingly into its rails above, in the gloom near the ceiling.
Ahmad has let light into a cave. Charlie is not inside the grimy s.p.a.ce, nor are the two operatives, the technician and his younger support. The workbenches and pegboards are just as Ahmad remembers them. The litter and drifts of discarded parts in the corners seem less than before. The garage has been cleaned up, tidied toward some finality. There is a hush as of a tomb that has been robbed the last time. The traffic in the alley throws into the cave dangerous flickers of reflected light; pa.s.sersby idly glance in. No one is here but the truck is here, die boxy GMC 3500 unprofes-sionally hand-lettered Window Shades Systems.
Ahmad opens the driver's door gingerly and sees that the military-drab box still sits there between the two seats, duct-taped to the milk crate. The ignition key dangles from the dashboard, inviting an intruder to turn it. Two thick insulated wires still trail from the detonator into the truck body. The access door, no higher than a crouching man, slides open only six inches before the wires threaded through it begin to pull tight. Through the six-inch opening Ahmad smells the mixture of ammonium-nitrate fertilizer and nitro-methane racing fuel; he sees the ghostly-pale plastic drums, each as high as his waist and each holding one hundred sixty kilograms of die explosive mixture. The glossy white plastic of the containers glimmers like a species of flesh. Spliced yellow wires loop from the blasting caps, enhanced by aluminum powder and pentrite, which are embedded in the bottom of each drum. The twenty-five containers, he can make out in the shadows, have been arranged in a five-by-five square, neatly roped together with doubled clothesline and secured against sliding by taut attachments to the cleats and side bars within the truck body. The whole const.i.tutes a work of modern art, a.s.siduous and opaque. Ahmad remembers the squat technician, the dainty smooth gestures of his oil-tipped hands, and imagines him smiling, gap-toothed, with a workman's innocent pride. They are all, all in this scheme, parts of a beautiful machine, fitted one against another. The others have vanished but Ahmad remains, to put the final piece into its place.
Gently he slides back the little wooden door, restoring the array of loaded plastic drums to their fragrant darkness. They have been entrusted to him. Like him, they are soldiers. He is surrounded by fellow-soldiers even though they have gone silent, leaving no instruction behind. The door at the back of the truck has been padlocked. The big hasp has been swung over and its slot closed over the thick protruding staple and a heavy combination padlock snapped shut there. Ahmad has not been told the combination. He understands the message: he must have faith in his brothers, just as they have faith in him, in their unexplained absence, to proceed with the plan. He has become the surviving lone instrument of the All-Merciful, the Perfect. He has been provided with a truck the twin of one he habitually drives, to make his path straight and smooth. Tentatively, he sits in the driver's seat. The old imitation black leather feels warm, as if just vacated.
An explosion, he remembers from his physics cla.s.s at Central High, is simply a solid or liquid being rapidly turned into a gas, expanding in less than a second into hundreds of times its former volume. That is all it is. As if from the rim of such an impa.s.sive chemical event he sees himself, small and precise, climb into the unaccustomed truck, start the engine, rev it gently, and back it out into the alley.
One small thing nags. Getting out to lower the rattling garage door behind them-him, the truck, and the invisible company of his collaborators-Ahmad feels the juice of the breakfast orange and a suppressed nervous excitement press upon his bladder. He had best lighten himself for the journey ahead. He parks the truck, with its motor idling, on one side of the alley, raises the garage door again, and finds the machine shop's toilet behind a smirched unmarked door in a corner beside the workbench and the pegboard. There is a string that turns on the naked bulb, and a bright porcelain receptacle with an oval eye of dubious water to be flushed when he is done adding the little stream out of himself. He washes his hands scrupulously, using the dispenser of grease-cutting detergent in readiness on the sink. He returns outside and pulls down the rattling door on its knotted cord and realizes with an inner lurch how foolish and dangerous it had been to abandon the truck, its motor running, even for a minute or two. He is not thinking normally, in this exalted yet thin atmosphere of last things. He must keep his head level by conceiving of himself as G.o.d's instrument, cool and hard and definite and thoughtless, as an instrument must be.
He consults his Timex: it says eight-oh-nine. Four more minutes lost. He rolls the truck forward, trying to avoid potholes and sudden starts and stops. He is behind the schedule that he and Charlie set, but by less than twenty minutes. Calmer now that the truck is moving, part of the flow of the daily traffic of the world, he turns right out of the alley and then left on West Main, pa.s.sing again the Pep Boys, with its disturbing cartoon image of three men, Manny, Moe, and Jack, conjoined in one three-headed dwarf body.
The fully awakened city twinkles and swerves around him. He imagines his truck as an encircled rectangle in a heli- copter view of a car chase, threading through the streets, stopping at lights. This truck handles differently from Excellency, which had an easy sway to it, as if the driver were sitting on the neck of an elephant. Driving Window Shades Systems, he feels no organic sympathy. The steering wheel doesn't fit his hands. Every irregularity in the road surface jars the whole frame. The front wheels persistently tug to the left, as if some accident left the frame bent. The weight- twice what McVeigh had, greater and denser than any load of furniture-pushes him from behind when he brakes at a red light and holds him back when he pulls out on green.