The next day, a Wednesday, he wakes early, as if at a shout that quickly dies away. In the kitchen, in the dark before six o'clock, he encounters his mother, who is back on the morning shift at Saint Francis. She wears, chastely, a beige street dress and a blue cardigan thrown across her shoulders; her footsteps pad silently in the white Nikes she wears for the miles she traverses the hospital's hard floors. He gratefully senses that her recent mood-the short temper and distraction caused by one of those obscure disappointments whose atmospheric repercussions have bothered him since early childhood-is lifting. She wears no makeup; the skin beneath her eyes is blanched, and her eyes are reddened by her swim in the waters of sleep. She greets him with surprise: "Well, you're an early bird!"
"Mother-"
"What, darling? Don't make it long, I'm on duty in forty minutes."
"I wanted to thank you, for putting up with me all these years."
"Why, what a strange thing to say! A mother doesn't put up with her child; die child is her reason for being."
"Without me, you would have had more freedom to be an artist, or whatever."
"Oh, I'm as much of an artist as I have talent for. Without you to care for, I might have just sunk myself in self-pity and bad behavior. And you've been such a good boy, really- never giving me real trouble, like I hear about at the hospital all the time. And not just from the other nurse's aides but from the doctors, with all that education they have and the lovely homes. They give rfieir children everything, and yet they turn out horribly-self-destructive and other-destructive. I don't know how much credit to give your Mohammedanism. Even as a baby, you were so trusting and easy. Everything I suggested, you diought was a good idea. It worried me, even, you seemed so easily led, I was afraid you'd be influenced by the wrong people as you grew older. But look at you! A man of the world, earning good money just as you said you would, and handsome besides. You have your father's lovely lanky build, and his eyes and sexy mouth, but nothing of his cowardice, always looking for a shortcut."
He does not tell of the shortcut to Paradise he is about to take. He tells her instead, "We don't call it Mohammedanism, Mother. That sounds as if we worshipped Mohammed. He never claimed to be God; he was just God's prophet. The only miracle he ever claimed was the Qur'an itself."
"Yes, well, darling, Roman Catholicism is full of these fussy distinctions too, about all these things nobody can see. People make them up out of hysteria and then they get passed on as gospel. Saint Christopher medals and not touching the wafer with your teeth and saying the mass in Latin and no meat on Fridays and crossing yourself constantly, then it all got tossed out by Vatican Two as cool as you please-stuff that people had believed for two thousand years! The nuns put such ridiculous stock in all of it, and expected us children to, too, but all I saw was a beautiful world around me, for however briefly, and I wanted to make images of its beauty."
"In Islam, diat's called blasphemy, trying to usurp God's prerogative of creation."
"Well, I know. That's why there aren't any statues or paintings in mosques. To me that seems unnecessarily bleak. God gave us eyes to see what, then?"
She talks while rinsing her cereal bowl and slapping it into the drainer in the sink, and hurrying her toast up out of the toaster and slapping on jam between gulps of coffee. Ahmad tells her, "God is supposed to be beyond description. Didn't the nuns say tiiat?"
"Not really, that I remember. But, then, I only had tJiree years of parochial school before switching to public, where they were supposed not to mention God, for fear some Jewish child would go home and tell his atheist lawyer parents." She looks at her watch, thick-faced like a diver's watch, with big numbers she can see while taking a pulse. "Darling, I love having a serious conversation, maybe you could convert me, except there are all these baggy hot clotb.es they make you wear, but now I'm truly getting late and must run. I don't even have time to swing you by work, I'm so sorry, and anyway you'd be the first one tJiere. Why don't you finish up your breakfast and the dishes and tben walk over to the store, or even run? It's only ten blocks."
"Twelve."
"Remember how you used to run everywhere in those little track shorts? I was so proud, you looked so sexy."
"Mother, I love you."
Touched, even stricken, sensing some abyss of need within him but able only to dart to the edge and away, Teresa pecks a kiss on her son's cheek and tells Ahmad, "Well, of course, you sweet thing, and I do you. What is it the French say? Qa va sans dire. It goes without saying."
He is blushing, stupidly, hating his own hot face. But he must get this out: "I mean, all tJiose years, there I was obsessing about my father, and you were the one taking care of me." Our mother is the Earth itself, from which we drew existence.
Her hands flit over herself to check that everything is in place; she looks at her watch again, and he can feel her mind flying, flying away. Her response makes him doubt that she heard what he said. "I know, dear-we all make mistakes in relationships. Can you possibly see to your own supper tonight? The Wednesday-evening sketch group is starting up again, we have a model tonight-you know, we each kick in ten dollars to pay her and have five-minute poses followed by a longer sitting, you can bring pastels but they discourage oils. Anyway, Leo Wilde called the otber day and I promised to go with him. You remember Leo, don't you? I used to go out with him, a little. Stocky, wears his hair in a ponytail, funny little granny glasses-"
"I remember him, Motber," Ahmad says coldly. "One of your losers."
He watches her rush out the door, hears her rapid padded steps in die hall and die muffled heave of die elevator answering her call. At the sink he washes his dirty bowl and orange-juice glass with a new zeal, the thoroughness of a last time. He leaves tbem in the drainer to dry. They are utterly clean, like a desert morning, die crescent moon sharing die sky with Venus.
At Excellency, out on die lot, witb the freshly loaded orange truck between themselves and the office window from which old, bald Mr. Chehab might see diem talking and sense a conspiracy, he tells Charlie, "I'm in."
"I heard. Good." Charlie gives Ahmad a look, and it's as if his Lebanese eyes are new to the boy, crystalline in complexity, tbis part of us not quite flesh, brittle witb its amber rays and granulations, die area around the pupil paler than the dark-brown ring rimming the iris. Charlie has a wife and children and a fadier, Ahmad realizes; he is tied to diis world in a way Ahmad isn't. His substance is knottier. "You sure, Madman?"
"As God is my witness," Ahmad tells him. "I burn to do it."
It always faintly embarrasses him, he does not know why, when God arises between himself and Charlie. The man makes one of his intricate quick mouths, a pinching of the lips together and then puffing them out, as if something inside has been regretfully kept from escaping.
"Then you'll need to meet some specialists. I'll arrange it." He hesitates. "It's a little tricky, it may not happen tomorrow. How're your nerves?"
"I have placed myself in God's hand, and feel very serene. My own will, my own cravings, are at rest."
"Right." Charlie lifts his fist and punches Ahmad on the shoulder with it, in a gesture of solidarity and mutual congratulation such as when football players bump helmets, or basketball players exchange high-fives even as they backpedal into their defensive positions. "All systems go," Charlie says; his wry smile and wary eyes mix in an expression in which Ahmad recognizes the mixed nature- Mecca and Medina, the rapt inspiration and the patient working-out- of any holy enterprise on Earth.