Shaikh Rashid is pleased. He tells Ahmad, "Appearances can deceive. Though I know our mosque appears, to youthful eyes, shabby and fragile in its external trappings, it is woven of tenacious strands and built upon truths set deep in the hearts of men. The mosque has friends, friends as powerful as they are pious. The head of the Chehab family, just the other day, told me that his prospering business has need for a young truck driver, with no unclean habits and firmly of our faith."
"My rating is only a 'C,' " Ahmad tells him, backing a step from what he senses is too easy and swift an entry into the adult world. "I can't drive out of state or carry hazardous materials."
He has been enjoying, in the weeks since graduation, living with his mother in a condition of idleness, working his desultory, harshly lit hours at the Shop-a-Sec, faithfully performing his daily salat, venturing to a movie or two and marvelling at the expenditure of Hollywood ammunition and the beauty of its explosions, and running in his old track shorts through the streets, sometimes into the region of row houses where he had walked that Sunday noon with Joryleen. He never sees her, just girls of similar color with her way of sauntering, knowing they are being watched. As he flies through the run-down blocks, he remembers Mr. Levy's vague talk of college and its vague but grand subject matter, "science, art, history." The guidance counselor has come by the apartment, actually, once or twice, but, though friendly enough to Ahmad, was quick to leave, as though forgetting what he came for. Without listening carefully to the answer, he asked Ahmad how his plans are coming and whether he intends to stick around here or to go out and see the world, the way a young man should. This sounded curious coming from Mr. Levy, who has lived in New Prospect all of his life, except for college and the spell in the Army that American men used to have to do. Though the doomed American war against Vietnamese self-determination was progressing at this time, Mr. Levy was never assigned to leave the United States, remaining in desk jobs, a fact he feels guilty about, since even though the war was a mistaken one it offered a chance to prove his courage and to show his love for his country. Ahmad knows this because his mother talks to him now and then about Mr. Levy-what a nice man he seems to be, though not a very happy one, and underappredated by the school administrators, and no longer of much importance to his wife or his son. His mother lately is unusually talkative and inquisitive; she takes more interest in Ahmad than he has come to expect, asking him, whenever he goes out, when he is coming back, and sometimes acting annoyed when he answers, "Oh, sometime."
"And when might that be, exactly?"
"Mother! Get off my case. Pretty soon. I might poke around over at the library."
"Would you like some money for a movie?"
"I have money, and I just saw a couple movies, one with Tom Cruise and one with Matt Damon. They were both about professional assassins. Shaikh Rashid is right- movies are sinful and stupid. They are foretastes of Hell."
"Oh, my, how holy we're getting to be! Don't you have any friends? Don't boys your age usually have girlfriends?"
"Mom. I'm not gay, if that's what you're implying."
"How do you know?"
He was shocked. "I know."
"Well, all / know," she said, combing her hair back from her forehead with the bent fingers of her left hand in a swift gesture acknowledging the dishevelled nature of this conversation and signalling a willingness to end it, "is I never know when you're going to pop back in."
Now, with somewhat the same testy tone, Shaikh Rashid answers, "They don't want you to drive out of state. They don't want you to carry hazardous materials. They wish you to transport furniture. The Chehabs' firm is Excellency Home Furnishings, on Reagan Boulevard. You must have noticed it, or heard me mention the Chehab family."
"The Chehabs?" At times Ahmad fears that, wrapped in his sensation of God standing beside him-so close as to make a single, unique holy identity, closer to him than his neck-vein, as the Qur'an expresses it-he notices fewer mundane details than other people, unreligious people.
"Habib and Maurice," the imam clarifies, with an impatience that bites off his words as precisely as his beard is trimmed. "They are Lebanese, non-Maronite, non-Druze. They came to this country as young men in the 'sixties, when it looked as if Lebanon might become a satellite of the Zionist entity. They brought some capital with them and put it into Excellency. Inexpensive furniture, new and used, for the blacks, was the basic idea. It has proved successful. Habib's son, informally called Charlie, has been selling merchandise and performing deliveries, but they wish him to play a more significant role in the office, now that Maurice has retired to Florida, save for a few summer months, and Habib's diabetes takes an increasing toll on his stamina. Charlie will-what's the phrase?-show you the ropes. You'll like him, Ahmad. He's very American."
The Yemeni's feminine gray eyes narrow in amusement. To him, Ahmad is American. No amount of zeal and Qur'an studies can change his mother's race or his father's absence. The lack of fathers, the failure of paternity to keep men loyal to their homes, is one of the marks of this decadent and rootless society. Shaikh Rashid-a man slight and slim as a dagger, with a dangerous slyness about him, implying at moments that the Qur'an may not have eternally pre-existed in Paradise, to which the Prophet during one night-journey travelled on the supernatural horse Buraq-does not offer himself as a father; there is in his regard of Ahmad something fraternal and sardonic, a splinter of hostility.
But he is right, Ahmad does like Charlie Chehab, a thickset six-footer in his middle thirties, his swarthy face deeply creased, with a broad and flexible mouth much in motion. "Ahmad," he says, giving the syllables equal weight, broadening the second "a" as in " Baghdad " or "mad." He asks, "So what're you mad about?" Expecting no answer, he goes on, "Welcome to Excellency, so called. My dad and uncle didn't quite know English when tiiey named it; they thought it meant something excellent." His face as he talks expresses complicated mental currents like disdain, self-disparagement, suspicion, and (with lifted eyebrows) a good-humored awareness of himself and his listener being placed somehow in a compromised situation together.