He is glad the safe room is clean of all clues to his person. This room is, he feels, his decompression chamber for the violent ascent before him, on an explosion as swift and strong as the muscular white horse Buraq.
Shaikh Rashid seemed reluctant to leave. He too, shaven and wearing a Western suit, was engaged in a departure. He fidgeted about the tiny room, tugging open reluctant bureau drawers, and making sure that the bathroom contained washcloths and towels for Ahmad's ritual ablutions. Fussily, he pointed out the prayer rug on the floor, its woven-in mihrab giving the eastern direction of Mecca, and emphasized how he had placed in the miniature refrigerator an orange, and plain yogurt, and bread for the boy's breakfast in the morning-very special bread, khibz el-'Abbas, the bread of Abbas, made by the Shiites of Lebanon in honor of the religious celebration Ashoura. "It is made with honey," he explained, "and sesame and anise seeds. It is important that you be strong tomorrow morning."
"I may not be hungry."
"Make yourself eat. Is your faith still strong?"
"I believe so, master."
"With this glorious act, you will become my superior. You will leap ahead of me on the golden rolls kept in Heaven." His fine gray eyes, with their long lashes, appeared to water and weaken as he looked down.
"You have a watch?"
"Yes." ATimex he bought with his first paycheck, a clunky one like his mother's. It has big numbers and phosphorescent hands to read at night, when the truck cab had been hard to see in, though easy to see out of.
"It is accurate?"
"I believe so."
There is a plain chair in the room, its legs wired togetJier since the rungs are no longer held by glue. Ahmad thought it would be discourteous to take the room's one chair, and instead, allowing himself a foretaste of the exalted status he will earn, lay down on the bed, lacing his hands togetJier behind his head to show that he had no intention of falling asleep, though in truth he did feel suddenly tired, as if the tawdry room had somewhere in it a leak of soporific gas. He was not comfortable under the shaikh's concerned gaze, and wished now the man would go. He yearned to savor his solitary hours in this clean, safe room, alone with God. The curious way in which the imam looked down upon him reminded Ahmad of how he himself stood above the worm and the beetle. Shaikh Rashid was fascinated by him, as if by something repellent yet sacred.
"Dear boy, I have not coerced you, have I?"
"Why, no, master. How could you?"
"I mean, you have volunteered out of the fullness of your faith?"
"Yes, and out of hatred of those who mock and ignore God."
"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 Furnishings, 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 Rashid, 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 God, and God never deserts those who wage war on His behalf. 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?"
"You march on."
"Exactly. Good." Shaikh Rashid 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 distinguishing 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 Rashid 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 God 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 Rashid 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 reconstitution 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 pushing through a swinging glass door. In this he is like the unbelievers: bal kadhdhabu hi 'l-haqqi lammd jd'ahum fa-hum ft amrin marij. They, he reads in the facing English, have treated the truth which hath come to them as falsehood; perplexed therefore is their state.