31 Hours Read online

  As she lit the first candle, she murmured, “Sweet potato.” As she lit the second, she said, “Pumpkin.” She didn’t know exactly why she said those words, but it occurred to her that it would soon be Thanksgiving, and she couldn’t imagine Thanksgiving without her father living at home, so this had to be resolved before then.

  She continued forming the semicircle with a tiny vial of topaz stones that had been in her Christmas stocking one year. Then two marbles, one a “jasper,” white marbled with blue, and the other a “bloody,” a red-black-and-white swirl. She placed them close together, as though they were a couple. She added a pinecone and said, “Sky” and then “Earth.” Surely “sky” and “earth” were holy words. Next to the pinecone, she placed a little wooden frog, no larger than a muffin, with a ridged back that made a kind of music when rubbed with a stick stored in a hole that ran through its neck. She looked at the frog a few minutes, then took it away. Something about it struck her as unlucky for a prayer, though she couldn’t say precisely why.

  She wanted to finish soon because she wanted more sleep before dawn. She added a plastic bag full of chips of glimmering mica that she and Vic had collected on a family vacation to Arizona, and that was when she remembered poetry. Surely poetry was a prayer. Her father would agree with that. She went to the living room, straight to the built-in bookshelves that lined one wall and the two shelves where her father kept his favorite poetry books as well as those he’d edited. Mara didn’t read much poetry. Math and science were more natural than words to her, which was another reason she needed help now. She ran her hand along the spines of the books, looking for one in particular. A slim Rilke volume, and a specific poem her father used to read to her. When she found it, she returned to her bedroom, stood in front of the candles and read.

  “Praise the world to the angel, not the unutterable world;

  you cannot astonish him with your glorious feelings;

  in the universe, where he feels more sensitively,

  you’re just a beginner. Therefore, show him the simple

  thing that is shaped in passing. . . .”

  There was more to the poem, but that was enough. Mara could almost see her father sitting in a rocking chair by this very bed, reading her that translation of that poem. “You’re my little angel,” he used to say, “the sensitive one.” But what made Mara wonder was the idea that something could take its shape “in passing,” as though it were an accident. If that were true, couldn’t it be reshaped with relative ease? Was that what she needed to show her father?

  The semicircle required one last item. Nothing left on her shelf seemed right, though admittedly she was operating on gut instinct instead of logic. She took her white school MetroCard and put it at the end of the arc. The perfect choice: a prayer, of sorts, to the subway, the subway that Aaron loved, the subway he’d once told her carried 4,800,000 commuters every weekday, the subway that separated her parents, one in Manhattan and the other in Brooklyn, and that would, if she were very, very lucky, allow her to reunite them.

  NEW YORK: 5:53 A.M.

  MECCA: 1:53 P.M.

  It had been a long night of many moods. He’d packed a year of life into this night, Jonas thought. He’d been calm, then angry, then uncertain, then confident, then lost, then found. It had been an unpredictable night, a night, among other things, of great energy poured into written words.

  The letters Jonas finished were fewer than he’d hoped, but they expressed exactly what he wanted to say. He decided he would not waste much time explaining. There would be questions about meaning and morality later, from those who loved him best as well as those who’d never known him. But he didn’t want to create letters for intelligence operatives trying to untangle his motivation or, more likely, eager to label him disturbed or naive. These were personal letters: Vic’s a poem of passion, his mother’s an ode of gratitude.

  For Vic, Jonas recalled that August day, the first time, when the rain finally finished and the tentative sun tiptoed onto the lake. Soon the pine trees cast longing shadows at the lake’s edges. Its center reflected unselfconscious brilliance. And they emerged from the tent, first Vic, then Jonas, cautious but coupled. “I do not blame you for tiring of me,” he wrote near the letter’s end, “but I’ll always be grateful for that day.” For his mother, Jonas remembered winter afternoons and the warm kitchen, the two of them returned from a museum or a movie, sharing a late lunch of hot oatmeal with brown sugar melted on top, or miso soup, or noodles served in bowls she’d shaped and smoothed with her own hands, just as she’d shaped and smoothed him, her son. Then he apologized for not telling her the truth about NYU. “At first it was an accident that I didn’t get my papers in on time. But I think it happened the way it was meant to,” he wrote. He signed both letters identically: “Love and later, Jonas.”

  Just as he was about to slide his mother’s letter into the envelope, he was struck with an image of her slumped at the kitchen table, taking on guilt, so he unfolded the letter and added a postscript. “I have not been brainwashed, Mom,” he wrote. “I’m trying to prevent a larger destruction. I’ve struggled to understand the nature of our bloodstained world. I’ve had to look beyond simple definitions of ‘good’ and ‘evil’ and see symptoms in terms of their interconnectedness. This isn’t your fault. You’ve been the best.”

  He wrote to Deirdre on the back of one of the two postcards he’d bought: “Check the news. I think you’ll be proud of me. You were a lasting influence. Love, Jonas.”

  The physical act of writing pleased him as much as the notes’ content. His hand moved across the page vigorously, and the marks he left there, some in cursive and some in schoolboy printing, seemed almost alive. Each letter’s formation was fueled by a heave of anger he couldn’t analyze, didn’t even want to consider too deeply, but that seemed aimed at strangers who failed to understand the effects of their own actions. As he reached the end of his mother’s letter, he felt his fury draining away. He felt himself slowing down to the point of molasses dripping from a tree in late autumn, or as if he were a child who has spent all morning in the playground, sliding and swinging and climbing so relentlessly that one act blends into the other, the monkey bars becoming the slide becoming the rope swing and so on, and who now, at last, is ready to nap.

  This lull of weariness gave way to missing Vic again. By now his longing felt like a raw gape in his chest, yet his limbs were incongruously heavy. He couldn’t escape it; he felt, too, an ache in his temples, the base of his neck, his groin. And it spread so that soon he also missed his father as well as his mother, and then, in varying degrees, neighbors and classmates and old girlfriends, especially Deirdre in Ireland, but also Heidi, with whom he’d shared a couple of weeks, and Else, his first awkward relationship, who he’d heard taught elementary school now. Then he missed other people who ambled through his brain almost randomly, some he’d known barely at all. Harold the Buddhist along with the man in the stained apron who’d made Jonas’s final gyro. He thought of saying good-bye to them in his mind, one by one, but “good-bye” seemed a word that would kill him. The premature sense of loss paralyzed him.

  Ritual. Ritual: a time-tested tool to deal with any transition, be it between day and night, fasting and eating, breathing and relinquishing breath. This was not the moment to invent a personal entreaty to Allah; he needed established practices, weighted by age-old customs, which would strengthen him and connect him with great spiritual traditions.

  He began with the Islamic prayer ritual that he’d followed while training south of Peshawar. He went to the bathroom, lathered up the bar of soap, and went to work cleaning his hands. He lingered over the balls of his hands, each knuckle, the flesh between fingers, the skin above the nails, allowing his mind to be lulled with memories of Pakistan. He’d never been in that part of the world before, but he’d been eager when Masoud had suggested it. He flew to Islamabad, then took a train to Peshawar. There he was met by a taciturn man with a thin mustache that stretched acr
oss his face and pointed downward, like a persistent frown, who gave his name only as Ghalji and took Jonas to a madrassa, where they spent one night. Jonas was exhausted from the trip, the time difference, and nervousness. Yet he had trouble sleeping on the mat laid on the cement floor in a tiny room. He had just dozed when the call to predawn prayers came, and then he couldn’t get back to sleep, so he was awake as boys began filing into the building early in the morning, some looking no older than five years old. All sat in neat rows on the floor of a large room, heavy Qur’ans on their laps, and as he peeked into the room, they glanced at him with either curiosity or animosity. Then Jonas heard yelling outside and went out to see a man on a bicycle shouting and gesturing as someone from the school, dressed identifiably all in white, stood shaking his head. Then Ghalji was standing next to Jonas, putting a hand on his arm, drawing him to the side. “What is it?” Jonas said, motioning with his head toward the man, who had now let his bicycle drop to the ground and seemed to be arguing and wailing at once.

  “This man cannot find his son. He is blaming the school.” Ghalji paused, then added, “But none of it concerns us. Are you ready?”

  Jonas followed Ghalji to a jeep, and Ghalji drove past rice fields to a village called Darra Adam Khel. Jonas wrote the name down in a little notebook he’d brought with him. Now, scrubbing his arms to the elbows, Jonas recalled how awed he’d been by both the exoticism and the industriousness of the town’s sole dirt street lined with gun-making shops, the sound of metal meeting metal that rose into the green mountains behind Darra. He peeked into the slender rooms where gunsmiths dressed in shalwar kameez worked with primitive tools: pliers, hammers, small anvils. It felt like an adventure then, and he even forgot why he had come or how foreign he must look until he noticed the men lounging on rope beds who watched him with slitted eyes and murmured among themselves as he and Ghalji passed. He noticed, too, a boy wearing a turban as large as his own head and carrying an armload of oiled wood. The child stopped in the street’s center to stare sullenly. Occasionally the sound of gunfire punched through the air as a gunsmith or potential customer tested the product. Jonas felt distinctly that he would be unsafe were he alone. Then it occurred to him to wonder what made him consider himself safe now, in the company of this un-smiling stranger. What if this were a setup? Wouldn’t he be a prize to kidnap, dangle before the American people, and then behead? But he didn’t think of this until he was already walking down the street, already without choice, and besides, he knew once he began disbelieving any part of what he was doing, the whole would fall apart.

  “Few Westerners are permitted here,” Ghalji said, as though guessing Jonas’s thoughts. “Even despite our practice of melmastia.” He’d already explained to Jonas about the region’s famous commitment to hospitality. “But all our fighters are welcomed in Darra,” he continued. “From here, they see our strength, and it builds their own confidence.”

  “Confidence,” Jonas said aloud now to himself in the mirror, and then he started washing his mouth and nose. He could still vividly picture the shop he and Ghalji had entered near the street’s end. Jonas trailed Ghalji into the back section, separated from the front by a curtain, and Ghalji gave him a fifteen-minute class in armaments. He showed Jonas guns made for long-range accuracy: .30-06-caliber rifles with intricate sights and long, tapered boat-tail bullets. He pointed out weapons made for power, like the .45-caliber Tommy Guns favored for years by Chicago gangsters and .50-caliber Browning machine guns that had to be mounted on vehicles. There were guns, too, for secrecy, some resembling pens or walking sticks or cigarette lighters or even cell phones, others modeled on the two-shot Derringer, compact enough to slide into a shoe.

  “How many guns are here on this one street?” Jonas asked.

  “They produce perhaps seven hundred every day,” Ghalji said. “But they sell as quickly as they are made.”

  When they left, two armed men from Darra accompanied them, riding in the back of the jeep. Jonas asked no questions. They drove in the direction of Afghanistan, following a stony pass that ran beside several crumbled buildings. Ghalji interrupted the silence to tell him they were in a tribal area now, well beyond the rule of the Pakistani government or its army or its laws. Jonas made no comment. After perhaps thirty minutes, Ghalji parked the jeep and they traveled the last mile or so on foot, following a path so discreet that Jonas could not have retraced his steps alone.

  Jonas started in now on washing his feet and toes, beginning on the right one. This was the end of the ritual that he had carried out three times each day at the Pakistani camp. He lived in a cement barracks with twenty-seven other men, including some who’d been there for more than a year. There were others, Pakistani ISI officers, Ghalji told him, and one German engineer. All of them ate together, simple meals consisting mainly of chapati and lentils. Ghalji stayed with Jonas, serving as interpreter and guide but never for a second becoming personable.

  Despite that, Jonas felt far less isolated than he had back home. He felt part of something larger than himself. En masse, they rose each morning and prayed. Together in the evenings, they listened to what Jonas would call motivational lectures, sermons about the evil of the West, America in particular, and the virtues of jihad. Ghalji insisted Jonas attend and sat next to him, whispering a translation of each lecture in his ear. After the first couple of days, however, Jonas began to allow his mind to wander. It wasn’t only that the message struck him as simplistic. By that time of day, he was tired. In between the morning prayers and the evening lectures, they engaged each day in a nonstop variety of strenuous physical exercises and drills. Some days they trained with machine guns, firing weapons made in Darra as they hung from ropes or ran through obstacles. Some days they target-practiced with rocket-propelled grenades. For four days, Jonas and five other men were taken aside and given special training related to suicide bombing missions. They were taught how to handle delicate explosives made from hydrogen peroxide and nail-polish remover. They were instructed on methods to avoid suspicion, how to disguise the presence of the explosives on their bodies, what to do if they were stopped for questioning on their way to a mission, and how and when to use a detonator. Jonas did not yet know anything about November 9 and New York City, so the lessons had still seemed so—scrubbing himself in the bathroom, he hunted for the right word—so remote. Like learning the Heimlich maneuver in a high school PE class.

  Cleansed now, Jonas stood at the end of the prayer mat, tried to clear his mind, and then raised both arms and began the first rak’a. “Allah is most great.” He crossed his arms over his chest and bent at the waist and continued with the series of motions and gestures and words he’d been taught, prostrating himself and then rising to repeat it.

  When he finished, he touched his chest. The sting of anxiety felt different, perhaps, but not improved. Instead of radiating through his body, it had become a spasm convulsing in a painfully compacted region squeezed between his lungs.

  A smorgasbord of sacraments, then. He had to ease the paroxysm, so that was what he would try. He felt himself Muslim as much as Jewish, as much as Buddhist, or Christian, or Hindu, and he needed, now, their joint power.

  He sat cross-legged on the prayer mat, rotated his shoulders a few times, and began to meditate, clearing his mind by thinking “so” on each inhale and “hum” on each exhale. He did it for as long as he could, clearing his mind repeatedly. Then he recited a mantra aloud: “Om mani padme hum. Om mani padme hum.” He used his prayer beads to count, running them through his fingers loosely as he recited the mantra ninety times. Next he lit a smudge stick he’d brought in his backpack, a bundle of dried sage. He fanned the swirls of smoke around his feet, then his waist, and finally his head. He circled the room’s perimeter, smudge stick in hand, paying special attention to the wall connecting him to the subway’s underground life, the wall that vibrated with passing trains. Soon the scents of the Southwestern desert filled the studio apartment off the Avenue of the Finest. He exting
uished the smoldering herb bundle in the bathtub.

  It occurred to him that his behavior might be considered disturbed. Bordering on the obsessive. If he were being spied on through a keyhole, he imagined at this point Masoud would break in again and tell him simply that he was unfit to carry out the martyrdom. But he knew he was fit for that moment. The anguish of this one tormented him.

  He turned, finally, to the religion of his father. He took a pot from the kitchen, filled it with water, and began negal vasser, the traditional morning ritual washing of one’s hands three times, starting with the right hand. The purpose, as he’d been taught, was to cleanse oneself from the dust of death that attached to a person as he slept, and thus to achieve tumah, the Hebrew word for purification.

  He scrubbed more vigorously than before, so forcefully that he felt his left arm grow hot as his right hand rubbed it. It was as if he were trying to stimulate the flow of blood through the veins to cleanse his inner organs, as if he were massaging the muscles themselves. As he rinsed his hands for the third time, his skin stiffening from the cold water and the repeated friction, he realized his loneliness had intensified with each ritual. He stopped then. He stopped and dried himself and sat cross-legged on the floor so he could look out the window and see the night that was beginning to switch from black to gray. Morning. His last.

  Was he scared? Yes, he was. But when he broke it down, the largest part of what scared him was that he would fail. And then he would be arrested and tried, and his effort would become a joke instead of a sincere attempt to wake people up, to make them face the arrogant violence of their own country, the killing and maiming and torturing that had to end. Words had become as ineffectual in his country as the lectures parents gave their teenagers. Action was required. Of this he felt certain. It was harder to envision what lay ahead for him personally. What separation, what joining. Even though Masoud’s model of afterlife didn’t ring true for Jonas, to go from this vibrancy to nothingness seemed improbable. Too cruel. Being in limbo also seemed an unhappy prospect.