“Before you do,” said Mustafa, “I’ve got something to ask you.”
“Go ahead.”
“Are you still my friend?”
“Not a very good one I suppose.”
“The same could be said of me, the reckless way I’ve been acting,” Mustafa pointed out. “And you did save me from being burned alive by that Minuteman.”
Samir shook his head. “That doesn’t count. You and I were supposed to be dead already, along with everyone else in the convoy.”
“But we didn’t die. God gave us another chance—and you made good use of yours. Now I would like to do the same. Tell me you’re my friend and I can trust you, and whatever happened in America—whatever Idris forced you to do—it’s behind us. Forgotten.”
“Just like that, huh?” Samir barked a laugh, but then his throat hitched again and he began to cry. His shoulders shook as he wept, all the fear and shame that had been weighing on him releasing in a torrent. Mustafa took his hand and held it.
“Fuck, man,” Samir said, when the storm had passed. He swiped water from his eyes, wincing as the heel of his palm pressed the bruise. “You know God didn’t really give us another chance, don’t you? Just a little reprieve. Idris is going to kill us both, Amal too probably.”
“God willing, that is possible,” Mustafa conceded. “But I choose to be optimistic.”
“Remember what we were just saying about you being an idiot?”
“Yes,” Mustafa said smiling. “Your idiot friend.”
They were both laughing a few minutes later when Amal came in the tea shop. She approached the table slowly and asked Mustafa: “Do you need more time?”
“No.” He gave Samir’s hand a last squeeze. “We are good.”
“Good.” Amal nodded to Samir, noting the bruise but not saying anything about it. She sat down. “The coast looks clear outside. Or at least, if Al Qaeda is following us, they’re doing a good job hiding the surveillance.”
“We shall have to trust to God about that too,” Mustafa said. “Now, speaking of Al Qaeda: Tell Samir what you told me, about Osama bin Laden.”
The noon prayer had just ended and men and women were coming out of a mosque adjacent to Zawra Park, exchanging the blessing of peace as they headed off to lunch or back to work. Joe Simeon watched them from the back of an air-conditioned cab. He wiped condensation off the window to get a clearer view and stared at the mosque’s entrance, wondering what it was like inside. Would they have stained glass, like a real church?
The cabbie mistook the nature of his interest: “You are Muslim?”
“What?” said Joe Simeon. “No. I’m a Christian.” So there was no ambiguity: “I have a personal relationship with Jesus Christ.”
“Christian, I thought so,” the cabbie said nodding. “American?”
“Originally.”
“ ‘Originally,’ ” the cabbie repeated slowly, the word not in his lexicon. “This is your hometown, Originally?”
“Yeah,” Joe Simeon said. “Originally, New York. It’s just outside Manhattan.”
“Manhattan I have heard of.” The cabbie nodded again. “You know, the Muslims of Baghdad, we pray for the Christians of America, of Manhattan. Now that the war is over—now that you are free—we have very high hopes for you. That you will become, what is the word? Civilized!”
“Like the Arabs, you mean.” The crusader’s expression soured. “You really think we’re going to turn into you?”
“With God’s blessing, even the greatest miracle is but a trifle,” the cabbie said pleasantly. “You’ll see, my brother!”
Traffic began to back up as they got closer to Ground Zero. While Joe Simeon tracked their progress on his map, the cabbie switched on the radio, tuning in a flurry of Arabic that apparently constituted a weather report. “Shamal,” he said.
“What?”
“Sandstorm.”
Joe Simeon wiped off his window again. The sky overhead was blue and clear.
The cabbie chuckled. “Not yet. But it’s coming.”
“When?” A sandstorm, if it was anything like the movies, could disrupt the rally and screw up the plan. On the other hand, like the inside of a mosque, it’d be an interesting thing to see.
“A couple of hours,” the cabbie said.
He’d miss it, then. Or on second thought, maybe he wouldn’t—maybe he’d already be looking down when it happened. “OK,” Joe Simeon said. “Let me off at this next corner, here.”
“Are you sure? I can get you closer.”
“No, that’s all right, I’ll walk from here. I don’t want to be late.”
“According to Donald Rumsfeld,” Amal said, “in the real world Al Qaeda is a terrorist organization and Osama bin Laden is responsible for the September 11 attacks.”
“This is what Bin Laden has been trying to cover up?” Samir said. “The Americans think he did to them what they did to us?”
“I suppose it might be a political liability, if anyone in Arabia could be made to believe it.” Amal smiled. “Imagine the push-poll questions: ‘Would you be more or less likely to vote for Senator Bin Laden if you knew he had an evil twin?’ ”
“Not a twin,” said Mustafa. “The same man with a different history. Or the same history remembered differently.”
“Would it really be a liability, though?” Samir asked. “Suppose he did kill a bunch of Americans in some other reality. So what? In this reality, which is the only one most people care about, the Christians attacked us.”
“That is the official story,” Mustafa said. “And given the bloodthirstiness of some Christians, it might well be true. But remember a key element of the mirage legend: America is the real superpower, while the individual states of Arabia are just that, independent nations. Weak ones. When a weak state is drawn into a fight with a superpower, what happens to it?”
Samir shrugged. “It gets its ass kicked.”
Mustafa looked at Amal. “What did Rumsfeld say America did, in response to 9/11?”
“Invaded Iraq,” she said. “His story about what happened to the Hussein family was heartwarming, but when I asked what the war did to the rest of us he pretended not to understand the question.”
“Wait,” said Samir. “So you’re saying that in this alternate reality of Rumsfeld’s, Osama bin Laden is an Iraqi?”
“No, he’s still from Jeddah,” Amal said. “A ‘Saudi’ Arabian.”
“Then why the hell would America invade Iraq?”
“Because God put a Texan in charge,” Mustafa said. “The point I am getting at is this: A terrorist who attacks a Christian superpower in the name of Islam knows he is setting up his fellow Muslims for slaughter, because that is how superpowers react when they are struck. Which raises the question: If in one version of history, a man is willing to murder thousands of innocent Muslims by proxy, is it not plausible that in another version, he might be willing to commit the same sin more directly?”
“So we’re to become Truthers, now?” Amal said. “You think Osama bin Laden is responsible for the 11/9 attacks as well?”
“That is what I am suggesting.”
“But the November 9 hijackers were Christians. That’s documented—I don’t care what the conspiracy theorists say. And Al Qaeda won’t even recruit Shia Muslims, so how—”
“Oh God,” said Samir.
Amal looked at him. “What?”
“There are Christians in Al Qaeda. Or at least people pretending to be Christian . . .”
“What are you talking about?”
“The ambush on our convoy in Fairfax County,” Mustafa explained. “Al Qaeda was behind that.”
“No, that was Rumsfeld’s militia. I told you, he admitted to it. And Rumsfeld was not Osama bin Laden’s ally.”