“Then last year he turned eighteen and left for college. I was so proud when he chose U of L, it never occurred to me the real reason he wanted to go to Beirut was because the Marine training center is there. The friend who was supposed to be Salim’s roommate played along, taking phone messages and forwarding his emails, so we wouldn’t realize he was at boot camp. Nasrin did get suspicious when Salim came home for winter break—he’d lost weight, and his hair was very short—but he told her he’d joined the wrestling team. Then in May, after he’d finished his advanced training and was about to deploy, he sent us this letter . . .” He drew two wrinkled sheets of paper from his suit jacket. “You should read it,” he said, setting the letter on the table, but Amal made no move to take it. “Salim apologizes for misleading me and for not being the person I wanted him to be.” Anwar looked at her. “His choice of words is . . . very familiar.”
Amal closed her eyes. “Anwar,” she said, “I am sorry if my blood caused your son to act against your wishes. But I don’t see—”
“Salim is in Washington now. Posted to the Green Zone. They say it’s relatively safe there, but no place in America is truly safe. Not for a Muslim boy who craves excitement.”
“What is it you want from me, Anwar? What is it you think I can do?”
“Get Salim transferred back to Arabia, of course.”
“How?”
“Your mother is a senator.”
“My mother!” Amal laughed. “Do you know what my mother will say if I tell her you came to see me?”
“You don’t have to mention me at all. Ask her to do this as a favor to you. It’s a small thing.”
“Why don’t you ask your father, then? Surely an ex-diplomat has friends who can do such favors.”
“I did ask him,” Anwar told her. “And he is trying, but his friends all supported the invasion, and those who still have influence are worried about the appearance of hypocrisy . . .”
“Maybe they should be worried about that,” Amal said.
Anwar’s face reddened. “How can you be so selfish?”
“Selfish? Do not speak to me of selfishness!”
“I know what you think of me, Amal,” Anwar said. “You think that when I insisted you give birth to Salim, it was because I thought it would make you stay with me. Well, you are right: At the time, I did think that. But that wasn’t my only reason. I believed then, as I know now, that Salim was a human soul who deserved to be born for his own sake . . .”
“An easy thing for a man to say.”
“An easy thing for a father to say,” Anwar countered. “Salim is a good boy, Amal. I have tried to be a good father to him. You don’t know, I’ve made sacrifices . . . And I would do it all again, and more if I could . . .
“I don’t ask you to feel the same way,” he continued. “Regard Salim as the stranger he is to you. A stranger’s life is still worth protecting. Isn’t that what you do in Homeland Security, save the lives of people you don’t even know? Do that, then. Save one more.”
“And if I can’t?” Amal said. “Or won’t?”
“Then peace be unto you,” Anwar replied. “If your answer is no, I’ll go my way and trouble you no more. Perhaps my father can still do something . . . But please, Amal. In God’s name, I beg of you, don’t just say no. Look into your heart first. God willing, you’ll find some mercy there. A little mercy for our child, that’s all I ask.”
He stood abruptly, trembling on the verge of tears, and walked away, barreling past a waiter who was just then coming to check on them. The breeze of his sudden departure lifted the pages of the letter that he had left behind on the table. Seeing this, Amal started to call him back, but he was already at the door and anyway she thought better of it. She watched him go out, watched through the restaurant window as he marched off, head bowed, back the way he had come.
“Ma’am?” The waiter, a Pashtun, stood beside the table with his hands folded, looking embarrassed for her.
“It’s all right,” she said. “Can you get me some coffee?”
“Of course . . .” Amal watched him hurry away too.
Then she picked up Salim’s letter and began to read.
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The young woman sat before the imam with her head bowed. “My uncle is no longer my uncle,” she said. “He stays out all night at jazz clubs, gambling and drinking alcohol. He is cruel to my aunt—he won’t go to the mosque anymore, and mocks her when she does. He’s stopped praying . . .”
“Sadly, what you describe is not unfamiliar to me,” the imam said. “These days, all too many children of Islam have been seduced by the modern world.”
“No!” The woman looked up suddenly, eyes wide. “No, you don’t understand! My uncle would never abandon his faith!”
“But . . .”
“The man living in our house, pretending to be my uncle, is not my uncle. He’s someone else. Perhaps . . . some thing else.”
Poor doomed girl, Samir thought, as this scene played out on the break room TV. By the time the imam next saw her, she’d be a pod person, worldly and soulless, her chaste headscarf exchanged for a decadent ’50s hairstyle. The imam would fare little better: Locked in the muezzin’s tower of his own mosque, fighting sleep, he’d leap to his death rather than be turned. And so it would be left to the imam’s son—a dissolute jazz saxophonist, played by an improbably young Omar Sharif—to defeat the alien menace. Returning to his faith in the last reel, he’d load up a truck with explosives and drive through the gates of the dockside warehouse from which the invaders were preparing to infect all Arabia.
Samir could remember staying up late to watch Invasion of the Body Snatchers with his father when he was just six years old. He’d huddled close to his father’s side and covered his face during the scary parts, then cheered as the tide turned against the invaders. Good times.
The film had been remade in color in the late 1970s, with the Israeli actor Leonard Nimoy playing the part of the doomed imam. The remake had attracted controversy for its more explicit sexuality—which made the “worldliness” of the original Body Snatchers’ pod people seem quaint—and also for its more pessimistic ending. In the new Body Snatchers, the attempt to stop the invaders failed. The closing shot showed the imam’s son marching in a crowd, emitting the characteristic shriek of a pod convert. The implication, that aliens could actually conquer Islam—that God would allow that—struck a number of real-life imams and sheikhs as blasphemous. There were calls to ban the film and demonstrations outside some theaters that showed it.