"You don't know what dirt is, brat. You have never seen dirt."
"I've seen you, and I would say that is plenty."
"Yeah ... I guess I'm pretty scurvy anymore. Sorry about that."
It sounds almost sincere. She can sound very sincere for a moment or two. I wait for her to explode into some deplorable punch line, but she doesn't this time.
"Why don't you get some help, Aleese? Why don't you go to a rehab clinic?"
"Because." She picks up her jelly arm and lets it flop down again like she sometimes does to amuse herself. "Did you know that even if I came up with the money for an amputation, this would still hurt? Did you know it would hurt all the way down to here?" She makes a swiping motion at her hip.
I feel a stab of pity and continue around, picking up whatever she had dropped, thrown, or left around that week. She's manipulative. Oma had always whispered that. I had to be careful not to get sucked in to her pity parties.
"There's got to be something you can do so that you're not always—" I stop. I was going to say, "so horrid. You're like a person possessed by the devil."
She sits up, and at this point I do get scared, because her dark eyes blacken, like they can when she decides to fly at me. She's always stopped short of hitting somehow, but she gets me in death grips—by the arm, the neck. She can be amazingly strong, even with one bad limb.
"So that I'm not always what? What, Cora! So I'm not always bothering you? You have no idea how good you have it! You were raised so goddamn spoiled, you need to visit a few other countries. And do you know how easily I could have had an abortion?"
I smooshed Baba tighter under my chin and wished for sleep, but my mind refused to shut down. Jeremy Brandruff Ireland. September 1, 1957–. I reached for the notebook again, to stare at this name, to see if the air still spun when I thought, "My father." My eyes glazed over, unable to focus enough to read, though I was pretty certain that if the name Jeremy Ireland had passed by my eyes, I would have noticed. But one half-interesting fact came clear: You could tell when Aleese was needing her drugs, because her pretty, rounded handwriting would turn squarish and jagged, and her sentences became twisted and full of embittered words.
I'd heard enough of that in five years, so my eyes sought a passage that was rounded and pretty. Very few at the end were, but toward the beginning, they were about half and half. I stared at one dated just a few days before the first one I'd read ... it looked like she was also on an airplane. My eyes zeroed in, maybe because it was melodious, almost rocking me and Baba...
It's as if this airplane is soaring upward, upward, upward, through the reaches of space, presenting the grand overview of our troubled planet as the sun sets behind it. I think of the wars and the rumors of wars, and I see little pinpricks of orange blink and bulge on the Dark Continent, as the blazes of war snuff out dozens more lives before returning to black.
Then Asia flickers—first Palestine, then Iran, then Jordan, then Iraq, then back downward to the Nile again, and over Africa. I can hear a million voices—victims on tenor, terrorists on bass, soldiers on baritone, civilians on alto, children on soprano. As we used to say in school choir, "God, somebody's off!"
We are, all of us, conjoined in sad song, committed to our marriage of bad harmonies. We're linked as closely to those whom we hate as those whom we love. Film and photo and e-mail and planes—they pull our faces together as tightly as beads on a string. A hand waves in North Africa; a wind ripples in America. A gun designed in Virginia, with metal purchased from China, sends its bullet through the guts of a foot soldier in Somalia. The hateful collide with the loving; the wise collide with the foolish; the loving are sometimes hateful; and the simplest of people often seem to be most wise. And as I've already proposed, the dead collide with the living, and if I'm not proof of that, then nothing is.
I'm returning to America, because I want to die there, because for me, there is nothing left. Nothing except some memories, and One Nation under God, which, in spite of all its little hypocrisies and ill-bred boorishness, still appears to have Providence on its side. It's the one place where, from up here, I don't see the orange flickers of civil unrest, political upheaval, or invasion. America has managed to keep its dignity. Even though I have not, I want to be part of it again. I want to die in my own backyard, where dignity persists, like the wildflowers that bloom regardless of what men can do...
And that was it. Just a thoughtful passage. It was hauntingly prophetic as concerned her, and yet so very strange—reminding me in its poetic language of what I had tried so hard to sound like while trying not to sound like her. I didn't know what to make of that.
I snapped the book shut. Aleese had been coming home to America—probably knowing she was coming to Oma and me—and she never mentioned me at all. I didn't know why that should hurt me at this point. I had never dared to love her.
The book fell out of my arms, and I realized, as sleep hazed in, that my headache was gone and the chills of fever had turned to a clammy, drenching sweat. I threw the blankets off and tossed Baba down the mattress so we were joined only by my fingertips. And I enjoyed a moment of feeling that at least my body barometer was working right again. I hoped my bout with sickness was going away for good.
I prayed for that, picking at Baba's belly, until sleep took me away from sad thoughts, away from sickness. Suddenly, I was the one flying in a plane, looking down on our planet at dusk and seeing, instead of deadly orange flickers, an endless trail of beautiful white dots, as if one person were joined to the next, holding candles with tiny flames that flickered and glowed, ending in America and extending backward across the ocean, and to the farthest corners of the world, away from Trinity....
KARACHI, PAKISTAN
SIX
SHAHZAD HAMDANI
FRIDAY, MARCH 1, 2002
4:30 P.M. KARACHI TIME
IN MY VILLAGE near Karachi, the sun comes up red. Before my parents died, I loved to watch it while walking to school, before the bazaar opened and all the yelling and traffic began. I had to walk for an hour on gravel road, past the Arabian Sea, to school. Wild grass and bits of dune protected the fishing boats on the beach that looked like oxen asleep. I would look from the peaceful beach ahead to the sun rising red over the brown clay roofs of the city.
I would look at the sun and say, "You are all mine; you belong only to me."
Then, three years ago, I was introduced to some phrasing that has become central to my very existence: "Computers have blurred the line between child and adult, because in the land of computers, children are the men, and the men are the children."
My father spoke those words when I was thirteen. At that time, I left school and went to work at his and my uncle's Internet café in our village. I did so because my father decided to go to "school," and someone needed to help Uncle. My father trained to become a Middle Eastern technology specialist for the FBI in New York. This is a spy who understands computers as well as many Asian languages. It is a rare person.
I am sixteen and a part owner of the Internet café, and that has been rewarding and part of my pride. But much tragedy has struck. Lately I feel like a giant cross wire with crackling circuits, and my asthma bothers me all day. I think my brains and chest are turning into a World Wide Web.
I watched on the Internet six months ago as the World Trade Center toppled, not knowing if my father, mother, and brother were safe, living just nine blocks away. My chest filled with relief when I found out they had not been injured. But then, just two weeks later, a gas line broke in their apartment building, claiming the lives of all eighteen tenants. Uncle Ahmer calls the loss of my family an act of God, and I know this to be true. But I feel the building's gas lines were compromised when the Towers fell. I have trouble sorting the two tragedies out.
Today, I told visitors to the café that my family died inside the World Trade Center. I could feel Uncle Ahmer stare at me, though I did not recognize my error until he turned me by the shoulder, pushed me towa
rd the door, and said, "Go to the sea and clear your head!"
So, I walked the beach and watched the late afternoon sun, and after a while the facts in my mind returned to their normal positions. I had hoped to see the sun again as I had at thirteen, at my last times of saying, "The sun is all mine. It belongs only to me."
My mind roared, instead, to the programs I'd left open on my hard drive and to the extremists gathered around terminal five. They were seated just one row in front of my workstation. Pakistan hosts many wanderers these days—both harmless and dangerous. When extremists come to the café, I often capture their screens, script their chatter, and sell it to USIC, as my father had sold intelligence to the FBI in Karachi, back when he was a policeman.
My mind roars also to Hodji, a USIC agent seated at terminal nine pretending to be Egyptian. I am letting Hodji down while I am out here trying to be a boy. I hurry back in embarrassment.
At my terminal, I realize that I still have my earpiece in place. Hodji's terminal is away from the rest, in the back. I do not expect him to whisper his American humor and complete my humiliation.
"Hey, kid. Shahzad. You work too much, ya know. In America, you'd be going to school and playing football and going to parties with hot babes."
He is pretending to read AlJazeera.net. He only has to mutter, and it fills my whole head. I cannot speak back to him. The Americans have only given me an earpiece, no hidden piece for my voice. They are afraid I will forget myself and speak too loudly to them. They think sixteen is not a man yet.
I appreciate Hodji's humor, despite that he sometimes says dirty words like "hot babes." His joking makes these extremists around terminal five seem like just other guys, not natural-born killers who would be happy to saw off my limbs if they knew what I was up to. Americans use the term "terrorist" to describe such men, but Americans are far more terrified than most people. "Extremist" suits my culture's thinking.
Safely behind them, I still have their screen captured on my terminal, and I watch the extremists' chatter. For the moment, they are merely joking with a contact in London about how you can buy and sell amazing things on eBay if you live in Europe or America. The London contact bought blue jeans for a dollar and sandals for two dollars. It is not interesting yet. So I send an instant message to Hodji:
You Americans, you treat your children like sacred cows. SEND.
I smile as his chair suddenly squeaks. He is not expecting me to be so brazen, to lay a message right on his screen, what with these extremists right under our noses. It is enough that I have their screen captured on my screen. I am myself again—puffed up and exhilarated like the American cowboy.
If I send Hodji more messages, he will tell Uncle Ahmer, who would later smack my lungs loose or grab my hair for a lecture. He helps the Americans because he likes the money and gifts. He feels no sense of loyalty to them as my father did.
But I can't resist my own urges sometimes. Hodji's constant lectures about what I should be doing at sixteen, they seem condescending. He acts like America sets all the laws in this world. I must straighten him out. I start an e-mail to him in scramble mode.
You treat your children like sacred cows. Of course, I would very much like to go to school and play football, but I like my job very much more, thank you. If you are correct and I am the best programmer/hacker you have ever met personally, why do you protest to my doing it? Here in Pakistan, people don't care so much that I am sixteen. I don't want to go where I am not a man, thank you. No more than you would like to go back to school pants and vars...varsh...
I cannot remember the word they had tried to tempt me with, last time they offered to send me to live with my aunt Alika and cousin Inas on Long Island, New York. Hodji says my father made him swear to do this if something happened to him, and Hodji is now torn. He is an honorable friend to my father—but he needs me as a spy right now. Americans will not let minors spy, not on their own turf. So, if I went, I would have to become an American schoolboy, and it is hard to find informants with both computer skills and knowledge of many languages. Hodji doesn't want to lose me yet.
And I do not want to go. You don't swap your manhood for appealing trinkets, no matter how good they are—like flat-screen monitors and education and Wendy's Double Double Cheese Cheese and yarsh ... varsh...
...varsity letter sweaters. It is very ironic, Hodji, but for me to become American, I would lose much liberty. As you in your eloquence have stated: "Americans would shit themselves before letting a teenager spy on their turf." So, I will have my fun over here where the rules are not so rigid, and rely on you and Roger to bring America to me with your tempting gifts, thank you. I am a v-spy, now and forever.
V stands for virtual, and v-spy is what online informants like me are called.
As part of my reward, Hodji's boss in Karachi, Roger O'Hare, sends me gift boxes of American things. He cannot come to our village often, because he has blond hair and would make notice of himself. I have only met him twice, late at night, but I sometimes awaken to find a sizable box by my bed with no note. In the last were two fat Starbucks coffee sacks, a Snoop Dogg CD, a Red Sox cap, Nestlé Crunch bars, Instant Quaker Oatmeal, Oreos, video games Doom and Doom II, a John Grisham novel translated to Urdu, and Slim Jims.
What I really want I cannot have, which is Gap jeans and Prada sneakers. In this village, expensive clothing might imply we are doing enormous favors for Americans, and considering some of our clientele of late, I would not like to wear them at my funeral.
I send my message scrambled, which will drive Hodji crazy upon receiving it in Karachi when he returns to his office late tonight. He will think I have important news and unscramble it to find only my eloquent speech. I find this quite funny. It is a serene afternoon. The extremists are not stirred up.
I switch screens because I hear them grow quiet, which means they are no longer looking on eBay. Sure enough, they are watching reverently as screen name StarFind, who USIC has discovered is a high school mathematics teacher in Hamburg, chats away about Americans decreasing certain gifts to Israel. It makes the listeners grunt with satisfaction. I have read it all before on many of the sites where I seek intelligence to sell to Roger and Hodji.
I check upward in their chatter, just to be sure I have not missed anything. Then I plug keywords into one of the search engines I initially designed for my father: "Colony One," "vinegar," "rivers," "run red," and click GO.
I have been strategically put by Uncle Ahmer to find chatter containing these words after Hodji paid eight hundred dollars for one scripted conversation I sent them last November. I had seen chatter posted by a log-in VaporStrike, though I could dig up no information as to his identity. It read, "They will anoint the waters with Red Vinegar—rivers will run red in Colony One." As it sounded like a threat, I flagged it, translated it from Arabic to English, and sent it to Uncle Ahmer, who sent it on to Roger and Hodji in Karachi. Hodji showed up within twenty-four hours, with the eight hundred dollars and specific instructions for Uncle Ahmer to keep an eye out for further chatter containing these terms.
Roger and Hodji know that Uncle Ahmer does not hack or v-spy. He is nothing but a voice box for my computer skills. But the USIC officials cannot get past my age. They always approach him, not me. He is content with this arrangement, because he gets to keep most of the dollars that way. I don't care about dollars as much. I care more for my adrenaline rushes.
My program automatically searches not only this chat room but 217 others I have recorded because extremists have been known to chat in them. It searches them in both Arabic and languages using the English alphabet. The agents tell me very little, but I can figure out much just from my own searches.
It is obvious to me that "anoint the waters with Red Vinegar" is a terroristic threat, possibly to do with poisoning a water supply. Another post, to VaporStrike by an Omar0324, read, "Waters will run red in Colony One ... Waters will run red three hours from Home Base in December ... They will drink in December and die
like mangy dogs in April." Hence I know that probably somewhere on this planet, people are drinking poisoned water that is slowly compromising their health, and they may not become aware of it until April. I don't believe the chatter is a hoax, but finding the flesh and blood behind these log-ins is a problem. Omar0324 hides behind a Yahoo! address, which is untraceable even to me, same as VaporStrike. These extremists and Colony One could be anywhere on this planet.
I know USIC has searched in Africa for Home Base because another chat room I scripted had this English in its chatter: "American intelligence agents took three of our comrades in for questioning in the Sudan yesterday and tested six wells. They almost fell in, pfwaal" I don't know what led USIC to the Sudan, but because of another post, I believe Colony One is in America. VaporStrike told two online cronies on December 29, "Waters ran red yesterday on the Dark Continent, three hours from Home Base." Home Base would be the location of the terror cell headquarters. And granted, the Dark Continent means Africa, but I have been v-spying on VaporStrike for weeks, and I know he has a love/hate obsession with America. I believe he is being coy.
I nagged and trumpeted my deep sense that Home Base was New York, and Colony One therefore was within three hours of it. I sent them other e-mails from VaporStrike, referencing America as that "Dark and Unruly Habitat" In January, USIC was formed, and almost immediately the new supervisors decided to test all these water supplies. After all the towers came up clean, Hodji's nickname for me was "Expensive." I did not care. My instincts are not given to misinterpretation of so much chatter. A few weeks later, I sent Roger link after link to news pages of a strange outbreak of illness in California. Check this! Many alarms! Colony One??? I repeatedly nagged.