“Thank you, holy warrior, for the Islamofascist lecture.”
“As Muhammad said, we do not know God as we should.”
“And whose fault is that? That’s not yours or mine! Maybe God has not stepped forward enough. Maybe God has not done a sufficient job of meet-and-greet.”
I suddenly felt like an old Indian chief, one who sees that the world has changed irrevocably, and that the younger generation would never know the old one, even the strongest, slumped on their horses at the end of some trail. But if Reynaldo could feel the uncertainty of his own path, perhaps we could feel our despair together. Despite everything, I had not thought of him as irretrievably religious. He would not eat a bratwurst, but who could blame him? The hot ones snapped with fat when you bit in. The cold ones were death itself …
“I didn’t know you had all this blasphemy in you,” he said. Was that a smile?
“Yeah, well, sometimes the creation exceeds the creator. You know? A computer can beat a chess champion, a son can outsmart a father.” I would not get into Frankenstein. “Maybe the Bible, with its vain, wailing God, is telling us that the creation, too, is more divine than the Creator. Look at that! I’ve said that and not been smote!”
“Sometimes these things take time,” he said.
“The smoting?”
“Sure. Everything.”
“Great.” And then I added, “How about a kinder, gentler jihad?”
“One must listen to God.”
“Well, God should speak up. He mumbles.”
“He has made us his messengers.”
“How nice for him that he has his own staff and some out-of-town offices.”
“We are his sheep—”
“I didn’t mean that kind of staff.”
“—as well as his wolves.”
“That sounds really, really complicated.”
“Mankind is the source of all suffering.”
“And the source of all God.” I had crossed a line. “But as I said, the creation is often greater than what created it.” Hubris or intelligent design?
He was silent, with a smile that wasn’t a smile. I found myself falling toward him, as if the rush of feeling tearing through me could magically be made into useful affection: perhaps if I tried to kiss him — but he pulled away. And then slowly I got up, stepped back, one careful step at a time as he spoke. My crab-apple branch had fallen near him.
“There are a billion Muslims in the world,” he said.
“So, what? I should be able to find another one?”
He fixed me with a powerful stare. He had that ability to summon up great concentration in his face and eyes. “There is that possibility.” For a moment pity for us both glistened his eyes. “You can’t get blood from a stone,” he said sadly. Referring, I supposed, to love. It was an expression he liked and had used before with me.
“Yes, you can,” I said. I was always trying.
“You can?”
“One can. You can.”
“How is that done?”
“You go to a quarry.”
“A quarry?”
“Yeah, if you go to a quarry there is always some body that’s been dumped there.”
He laughed.
“The Koran doesn’t prohibit you from laughing at gruesome humor?” I would mock him a little — why not?
“No,” he said.
“In every book there’s a lot of white spaces—”
“Silences …”
“So who knows what’s going on, really, between the lines? All those meaningful silences!”
But then, feeling he was being mocked, he let his face go bloodlessly stony, and suddenly he looked finally and completely packed up and gone. Locating the living him would be like finding a miner in a collapsed mine: I could drill and dig and shine lights into various passageways, but the likelihood of my seeing him again, at least as he once was, well, the chances were not that good.
“You avoid a lot of difficult things in conversation,” I said.
“I hope so!”
“You lied to me,” I said finally.
“A lie to the faithless is merely a conversation in their language.”
This sounded like one of the many fortune cookie fortunes marking time in the pages of my books. “I was never faithless to you.”
“Not in your definitions, no.”
“Is this where you go on about desiccated America? Don’t you understand? I agree with you!”
He said nothing.
“You’re not taking flying lessons, I hope!”
He shook his head. “No.”
A roll of toilet paper and two white pills shone from the windowsill near me as I backed away. “What are those?” I said, pointing at the pills. In my chest my heart had gone from the rapid flicking of a playing card on bike spokes to the loud erratic knock of a sneaker in a dryer.
“They are for emergencies. And for cleanliness, obviously. The pills? They’re from Brazilian potatoes — two interests of yours.”
“Really.”
“Potatoes and Brazil.”
“I understood what you meant.” Fear and sorrow flared up simultaneously like fires that put each other out. Feelings of any constructive sort deserted me. “As much as you want this world to end, it can’t. The seeds to everything are being stored, as we speak, in boxes in the permafrost of Norway.”
“Who will find them?”
“People will.”
“Yes, I’m sure you’re right.”
“You are?” On the other windowsill was a small package of tampons. “Why do you have those?”
“In case of emergencies. Worst-case scenarios: they stanch wounds.”
“Really.”
“When they ask you to name my friends, you will have to say you don’t know, because you don’t know.”
“I don’t know.” Why didn’t I know? “This kind of political and spiritual despair,” I said desperately, recalling something once heard on a Wednesday. “It’s mistaking a small world for a large one and a large one for a small.”
He smiled but he kindly didn’t laugh. “You have no idea what you’re talking about,” he said.
“Maybe. But maybe not.” These were the words of a child. But it didn’t mean they were untrue. “Perhaps you are being recruited by a plant. What if you are a victim of a scheme?”
“What if I am the plant,” he said, feigning playfulness. “What if I am the scheme?”
“Listen! The jihadist leaders — they don’t respect outsiders. They think these fervent recruits are all crazy, coming from another country as they do, and they use them and laugh at them.”
“Who told you that?”
“The Donegal don. On a day when you were absent.”
“What?”
“He knows Arabic and collects chatter. That’s what someone told me.”
“He ‘collects chatter’! Listen to you!”
I just stared at him, feeling this was it: that I would never see him again.
“It is not the jihad that is the wrong thing,” he repeated. “It is not a war that is the wrong thing. It is the wrong things that are the wrong things.”
It was like Gertrude Stein speaking from inside a burka. I continued to step backwards, and my bare toe hit something sharp, perhaps a tiny carpenter’s nail poking up from the floorboards. In a kind of yoga stance I lifted up my foot, which was bleeding. I squeezed and I could see blood drop darkly to the floor, though nothing was stuck inside. Lifting my foot, however, just seemed to cause it to drip more. There was that roll of toilet paper on the windowsill, and I hobbled over and ripped some off, winding it around my toe.
“Are you OK?” he asked, sounding almost like the sweet boy I knew him to be, deep down, although that part no longer mattered.
“Yeah. It doesn’t hurt,” I said.
“They think I’m part of a cell, but I’m not, I swear. I hope you will always believe that.”