31 Hours Read online

  He put the cell phone back under his pillow then, removed his jeans, and set himself up under the table lamp next to his bed, placing one leg and then the other under its diffuse yellow light.

  Use tweezers to remove stray hairs missed in shaving.

  He only did this for a short while because he discovered that pulling hair with tweezers hurts a lot, and besides, it was kind of obsessive behavior. He tugged his jeans back on.

  Then he flipped through the magazine he’d bought. The cover showed a grinning man in reflective glasses skiing during a snowfall, the photograph so vivid Jonas could imagine airy flakes the size of cotton balls falling into his mouth. The cold, sweet taste of them. The excitement of the speed, cutting through virgin snow. The articles had titles that began with phrases like “Survival Guide” and “Tricks and Tips.” Jonas studied an advertisement for a particular brand of skis he’d once tried on. Then he ripped out an artsy photograph of a run crisscrossed with ski prints and inhabited by one lonely skier in red casting a narrow shadow. He taped it to the wall.

  Jonas loved to ski. His father had taught him years ago, when he’d been a boy. Those skiing lessons may have been the closest he’d ever felt to his dad, and probably the reason he initially loved the sport so much. Separated from his mother, his father was an odd parent: jovial, friendly, but only mildly interested in his son. Jonas couldn’t remember his father ever disciplining him. There’d been something unexpectedly nurturing about the times they’d skied together. Once Jonas’s father had placed Jonas’s skis inside his own and together they’d slalomed down the hill, a strange four-legged creature leaning from side to side simultaneously, and he’d felt safe.

  After thinking about the time with his father, Jonas prayed. He pulled a frankincense incense stick from a pocket in his backpack, lit it, and stuck it in a ceramic holder he’d also brought. He photographed the incense several times, trying to capture the thin smoke-needle floating upward. He fingered his prayer beads and recited the hundred names of Allah, which he’d memorized over two days back in July. Then he bowed his head to the floor and presented himself, murmuring partial prayers: “O Great, O Merciful, all thanks . . . your will.” The words felt, even to him, a bit perfunctory. Masoud encouraged him to face toward Mecca and chant prayers five times per day, but Mecca, Jonas had decided, was not a city near the Red Sea coast but a state of mind, and he was more likely to reach it if his prayer was as spontaneous as possible and called upon a mix of traditions: Islam, his father’s Judaism, the Catholicism he’d been exposed to by a childhood friend, the Buddhism he’d studied briefly. If he were lucky, as he prayed, an image occurred to him, or he felt supported, or tugged in a certain direction. This time he felt nothing. He listened to the call to prayer on his iPod and tried again. He felt nothing still, but he refused to let that worry him.

  He thought again of calling Vic. Instead he decided to lie back on the bed to try to locate the tension in his body and release it. Jonas’s body tended to run cold; he normally needed extra blankets and several layers under his jackets, but now, though temperatures were low outside, he felt warm, almost like he was sweating beneath his skin, at the skeletal level. He lay on top of the red chenille bedcover, his head on the pillow. The bed was short; Jonas’s feet stuck off the end. He rose and moved a chair to support them. Then he lay back down, placed one hand at his chest and the other on his stomach, and tried to feel the flow of his own breath. His shoulders were tight; he tried to unknot them by envisioning the muscles softening. He could feel the grumble of passing subways and decided to think of it as a comforting sound, a lullaby the city was singing, and he breathed in and out and in and out until his body grew gently heavy. He napped.

  He awakened effortlessly, as though he’d slept for only five minutes—and maybe that was all it had been. He hadn’t checked his watch before he’d drifted. It had been a pure sleep, untroubled by dreams. He woke with total clarity about where he was and why. He felt like a man close to finishing a dense and illuminating novel, one that would leave him changed forever, and as if he needed to think carefully about what to do next because whatever he smelled and tasted and thought and felt would be, in his mind, imprinted on the story’s final pages and would be recalled to him every time he thought of the novel itself. He stretched his legs and arms, half-rolled off the bed, sat on the floor, reached into the box of crackers, and pulled one out but hesitated before biting into it. He wondered what he should do with the remaining hours, though he still hadn’t checked his watch, so he still didn’t know precisely how many hours remained. He decided he’d rather make his plan without thinking of time constraints and then trim or expand the agenda as needed. Yet, by the same token, he couldn’t stop thinking about time. He was guessing he still had plenty, not being specific about what “plenty” meant, and had just begun to eat when the tap came on the door.

  It must be Masoud; it could only be Masoud. Nevertheless, Jonas moved cautiously toward the door, trying to make his footsteps silent, to prevent his toe joints from cracking as he walked. He leaned forward. The door didn’t have a peephole. He hadn’t noticed that before. Didn’t all doors have peepholes?

  “Yes?” he said softly.

  “As-salaam alaykum.”

  “Masoud,” Jonas said, unlocking and opening the door.

  The two men embraced. Masoud kissed him three times on his cheeks. Masoud smelled fresh and citrusy, like he’d used lime-scented soap. He carried a briefcase and held in his arms a clipboard, a small Qur’an, and a pile of clean clothes, including underwear and socks. Behind Masoud, Jonas saw two men he didn’t know who looked to be in their twenties. They were both thin and could have been brothers. One had a scar on his right cheek and pulled a suitcase on wheels. The other carried a video camera and a high-powered portable light.

  The martyr’s video. It sent a shock through Jonas. It shouldn’t have. Though Masoud had never mentioned Jonas making one, he knew about martyr’s videos, of course. Somehow he’d thought he wasn’t the right sort of shaheed for a video. Then again, perhaps he was exactly right. Not looking the part could increase the video’s currency as a propaganda tool. But would he be allowed to say whatever he wanted? He hadn’t prepared anything.

  How, he suddenly wondered, had it come to this, gotten this far?

  Masoud followed Jonas’s gaze and spoke to the cameraman softly in Arabic. “I asked him to sit outside for a few minutes while we catch up,” Masoud said. He took the chair at the foot of Jonas’s bed, lifting it with one hand and putting it right outside the door to the apartment, and then he said something else to the cameraman.

  The man with the scar, whom Masoud also did not introduce, unzipped the suitcase. From between layers of bubble wrap, he removed the explosive vest tailored especially for Jonas. Jonas remembered going into the back of a dry cleaner’s not six blocks from here a month ago. He’d removed his shirt and had his measurements taken by a man in a thobe with a closed, silent face, a man who’d barely looked at him. The tailor wrote everything down, the measurements of Jonas’s waist, his chest, his armhole. Later, in the shop’s front room as Jonas and Masoud prepared to leave, the man handed the paper to a woman Jonas presumed was his wife. She had tiny hands, and although she didn’t meet Jonas’s eyes, she smiled at the floor in a crooked, distant way. Jonas still remembered that odd smile. He realized then that she was actually the seamstress and that her husband had taken Jonas’s measurements because it would have been haram for the woman to do so. Now Jonas saw that she’d made what looked like a white cotton wedding vest with three-inch padding all around the middle. The padding, Jonas knew, carried explosives packed with ball bearings. The man put the vest carefully on a hanger in a closet next to the door, said something in Arabic to Masoud, and left, closing the door behind him.

  Masoud hugged Jonas again, held him at arm’s length, and looked into his face. “Kayf haalak, habibi?” he asked.

  “Fine,” Jonas said. “I’m fine, I’m . . . I’m good. Pr
aise be to Allah.”

  Masoud gestured to the cot, and both men sat as though it were a couch. “I am honored to be in your presence,” Masoud said. “I am also envious that you have been called upon in this way. You are about to make an enormous difference, my brother. What you are doing will give you a position of honor in the kingdom of Allah, glory be upon Him, but it will also save your country. How many people dream of doing something to change the world? You are a hero. And you will be honored not only here but in Yemen, and the Sudan, and Saudi Arabia. Also in the mosques of Kandahar and in Khyber Pass, which you have visited yourself.”

  Jonas listened silently to the start of what seemed to be a practiced speech. He felt interested but disconnected, as though Masoud were giving the canned spiel to someone else.

  “Are you strong within, brother?” Masoud asked.

  Jonas nodded once.

  “Does anything worry you now?”

  Jonas wondered how honest to be. “Missing people.” He hesitated. “I worry about disappointing them, but not too much. I think they’ll get it after a while. I do worry about the missing part, though.”

  “You know,” Masoud said after a moment, “that you’ll be able to watch them from where you are. And time there is different; it will only be the blink of an eyelash before they join you. Also, you know, there are many others there. The richest of pleasures with the most enlightened of beings awaits you.”

  Jonas was unconvinced by any of this afterlife theology, but that was not what motivated him in the first place, and he had no desire to argue it now, if he ever had. He shrugged and straightened out his legs, stretching them.

  “Fighting is ordained for you, though you dislike it, and it may be that you dislike a thing which is good for you and that you like a thing which is bad for you. But Allah knows, glory be upon Him, and you know not,” Masoud said, quoting, Jonas guessed, from the Qur’an. “I want to give you two things to carry,” he went on. He reached under some papers on his clipboard and removed a small ziplock bag like those that hold children’s sandwiches. “This is rare and precious dust from the Dome of the Rock, where Mohammed, blessed be His name, ascended to Heaven,” he said. “Also a paper with a line from the Qur’an to speed your entry.”

  Jonas took the bag. “Thank you,” he said.

  “The thanks are to you.” Masoud rose and walked toward the coat closet. “You remember,” Masoud pointed to the vest, “that you must put it on very carefully. And this.” Masoud pulled the detonator from his pocket and held it out as though for inspection. “You are ready, brother.”

  Jonas nodded. He felt suddenly extremely fatigued. If he changed his mind now, they would probably kill him. It sounded melodramatic, but he believed it. It would be a pointless death then. They might kill his parents, too.

  “The money,” Masoud said. “Have you decided . . .?”

  Jonas knew Masoud was asking if he preferred the ten thousand dollars to go to his mother or his father. Masoud had asked this question before, and Jonas knew he was supposed to pick. He’d been unable to choose, or even think much about it. His parents did not need the dollars that would be paid in compensation. His father had grown wealthy enough, and his mother, while far from rich, never complained of material want. “Vic,” he said. “Can you get it to her? I know she’s not family, but . . .”

  “Victoria? This is what you want? Not your parents?”

  “It will give Vic freedom,” Jonas said, “to keep dancing. Which is her passion.” And it would make her remember him, too. Always.

  Masoud studied Jonas a moment, then nodded. “Can you give me her phone number? And her address?”

  Jonas recited the information, and Masoud jotted it on the top paper attached to his clipboard. “She will have it, and she will know it is from you. Now, we don’t want to take up too much of your time,” Masoud said. “I know this is a night of intense preparation for you. Are you ready for the cameraman?”

  “I haven’t prepared . . . I didn’t know . . .”

  “Mafi mushkila. No problem.” Masoud patted his clipboard. “I’ve written something.”

  Jonas shook his head. “I don’t want—I’d rather just say what I want to in my own words.”

  “But . . .” Masoud hesitated. “Usually—” He broke off and studied Jonas for a second. “As you wish,” he said. He rose, opened the door, and gestured to the cameraman.

  They told Jonas to sit on the floor against a white wall. Behind him, they hung a cloth embroidered in gold thread with Arabic calligraphy, a line from the Qur’an.

  “What’s it say?” Jonas asked.

  “‘Allah, let us be at their throats, and we ask you to give us refuge from their evil,’ ” Masoud recited.

  The cameraman set up the light, which stood on spindly metal legs, and adjusted it several times. He spoke to Masoud in Arabic, and the two men laughed. Jonas looked at Masoud questioningly. “He doesn’t want your face in the shadows at all,” Masoud explained. “It’s a challenge in this room.” Jonas wasn’t sure he believed Masoud—perhaps the cameraman had told some joke at his expense—but then he decided this paranoia was unworthy of him, especially now. “I’m going to get a cup of tea first,” he said, knowing they would have to wait but willing to allow that because his throat felt dry and he wasn’t sure he could talk to a camera without sipping tea. He went to the kitchen and boiled water in a pot. Two chipped mugs stood in a cabinet. He put a bag of green tea in one and poured the water. He sweetened it with a spoonful of raw honey. Then he offered tea to Masoud and the cameraman, but the offer was made without conviction and, because of that or their own sense of urgency, they declined.

  “We want to intrude only briefly,” Masoud said. “Leave you to your own preparations.”

  “What will you do with the video?” Jonas asked as he sat cross-legged on the floor and put his cup beside him.

  “We’ll show it all over the world,” Masoud said. “As inspiration and instruction.”

  Jonas heard the sound of the camera running. “I am ready,” said the cameraman in heavily accented English.

  “Wait,” said Masoud. He walked to the right of Jonas and waved his arm through the air for a second, some kind of a ritual Jonas didn’t understand. He shook his head and then returned to stand next to the cameraman. “Go ahead,” he said to Jonas.

  Jonas took a sip of the tea. He put down the cup and straightened his back. “Tomorrow I will be a—a martyr,” he began. “I will be a martyr, yes, and I want to say . . . well, first, I’m doing this of my own will. It’s my free decision.” He remembered Masoud had told him once during training that this declaration was important to include in a martyr’s video, so he decided to start there. He cleared his throat. “I want to say . . . I love my family. I love my country, too. And Vic. Vic? I love you. So you might wonder . . .” He took a deep breath. You know why, he told himself. Just let it flow. “Something has gone wrong, seriously wrong, and many of us know it, but many also are sleeping. We have to stand for more than greed and individualism. Many have tried to raise these issues through demonstrations and letter-writing campaigns. But when you look at history, you see that times of critical change are always accompanied by bloodshed.” He wondered for a moment if that were completely true, always accompanied, or if he should make room for the odd exception, so he added, “Nearly always,” and then went on, “It is a failure of the human system that we do not make a shift except when forcefully compelled to do so, and nothing is more persuasive than violence.”

  His throat felt extraordinarily dry. He took another sip of tea. “Sorry,” he said to Masoud, who nodded encouragingly. The cameraman kept his eye to the lens, so Jonas felt he was being filmed by a camera with legs, with no human involvement at all. “For me, this is an ethical decision,” Jonas said, speaking again to the camera. “I love my life in many ways. I love the smell of pine in the woods, and I love . . .” he stumbled momentarily, “damn, I would never take a life without sacrificing my own—t
hat’s immoral—and so I’m giving up my own future. That’s how strongly I believe in what I’m doing.” He ran the fingers of his right hand through the hair on his head, the only hair he still had on his body. “There are no innocents anymore,” he said. “We are all complicit. If you are a survivor whose heart aches after this, please take that ache and transform it into change. Question our government. Question our state-sanctioned terrorism. Question the social values that have blinded us to what is real.” Jonas realized his voice had gotten louder. He paused and made an effort to speak calmly, sanely. “If you are a survivor whose heart aches, reach out and connect with another survivor on the other side of the world and see if together you can find a way to change all that alienates us from each other, and from the earth, and from our God, by whatever name we call Him.” He took a deep breath. Masoud leaned forward.

  “In the name of the Merciful . . .” he prompted in a stage-whisper.

  “So I guess I’m done,” Jonas said. “I act in the name of the Merciful, the all-Knowing, all-Seeing. Praise and glory be to Him, to Him belong the credit and the praise.”

  “Good,” Masoud said, and then he actually said, “Cut,” which almost made Jonas laugh, though he stopped himself in time.

  The camera clicked off. The cameraman emerged from behind the lens and went to close the portable light.

  Masoud reached forward to take Jonas’s hand, pull him to his feet, and embrace him. “You,” he said, “are a powerful man. So much wisdom.”