31 Hours (21 page)

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 extinguished 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.

Jonas thought, then, of the dialogue group he’d once attended: New Yorkers gathered to share near-death experiences. A friend had invited him, a man in one of his meditation classes. The group met in an apartment on the Upper East Side, maybe seventy people crowded into two rooms, and everyone, it turned out, wanted to talk. The experiences, recited one after the other, were remarkably similar and by now wildly familiar: the sensation of floating above one’s body, moving down a tunnel toward light, being bathed in bliss, experiencing a panoramic life review. Perhaps by now, Jonas thought, everyone had heard of these
sensations so often that they were programmed to remember those stories as their own.

A scientist who’d had his own near-death moments when he’d fallen down a mountainside in the Italian Alps was among those gathered, and someone in the group asked him if there might be a physical explanation for the shared near-death phenomena. Jonas leaned forward in his seat as the man spoke, using expressions like “neuro-physiological factors” and “stimulation of the temporal lobe.” He talked of the possibility that certain chemicals bounced off a part of the brain and activated neurons, creating the commonly reported near-death sensations. The scientist finished by saying that research remained inconclusive, but he personally thought it most likely that love and light were simply typical elements encountered on the path between what he called, genially and neutrally, “here and there.”

Here and there. Love and light. Jonas tried to sedate himself with those thoughts. He lay back on the red bedspread and encouraged his shoulders to unclench. He tried to drain his mind of nostalgia. He tried to imagine himself as light and love, sacred, devoted, exploding.

NEW YORK: 6:46 A.M.
MECCA: 2:46 P.M.

Jake awoke to the sound of Carol’s calm, steady voice seeping from the kitchen, where she was speaking on the telephone. It filled him with optimism: they would find Jonas today; they would resolve this; it would, in the end, be understood as a typical parenting trial. Carol had closed the door to the living room, so it was a muted version of her words and intonations that slipped through the crack between the door and the wall, falling into his ears. Hearing that, waking up in her presence—well, more or less in her presence—and feeling more secure about Jonas, he found himself swallowed by a wave of nostalgia and longing.

Sometimes Jake still felt himself to be a teenager in his cravings. He wasn’t proud of this; he simply observed it. He still had the teenager’s desire to dive headlong into a rush of reckless intimacy that would, each time, surprise him with its inventions and awe him by its intensity. He loved the vibrations that radiated from his center out to his fingertips, and he loved the sense that something was being revealed to him, another curtain pulled back for this boy from Ohio who as a child had been so loved, yes, and so sheltered.

But he was changing. Here he was, after all, fifty-two.
So, finally
. He could almost hear Carol, laughter floating beneath her words.
You’re growing up, old man
.

Yes, okay, I see my own mortality now. I can start to see the arc of my own life. But
, old man?
I still want romance at the edge of a lake, or with candles lit late when it feels like no one else in the world is awake
.

What he wanted was probably impossible: freshness and imagination and exhilaration, but now he wanted it coupled with reliability and serenity. If any of his relationships had the possibility of embodying it, it was the one with Carol, except, of course, that relationship had long gone cold. Until now.

The kitchen, he realized, had fallen silent. She was off the telephone. So he rose, ran his fingers through his hair, and pushed open the door that separated them. She sat at the kitchen table, her head in her hands. A pen and paper lay next to her; she’d been doodling. She’d always doodled when she was worried. Even now, he remembered those kinds of details about Carol.

He squeezed her shoulder once, not wanting to overstep the boundary that she’d built between them, that he knew he’d caused her to build. “It’s going to be okay. You want a cup of coffee?” he asked. She didn’t answer, so he went to the cabinet and opened the door that held the can of coffee.

“Jake.”

He turned to her. She’d raised her head now. “Everything,” she said. Her hands were both lying palm-down on the table, fingers spread. “Everything gets lost so easily.” Her eyes were wide and very silent. Her body, too, was completely motionless, but the muscles in her arms looked strained, as though keeping them immobile required enormous effort.

“What?”

“And there’s too much to understand. The world’s too big, and the Internet makes it seem like we’re connected, but we aren’t really. We can’t possibly understand.”

“Carol,” he said, “what are you talking about?”

“I have something to tell you. Last night, before you got here, I called the police.”

Jake felt a rush of irritation that surprised him with its force. Must be he still had an ingrained suspicion of cops, stemming from nothing more than his pot-smoking days. The days when cops, even those his age, had seemed like the staid, corrupt establishment. Carol responded to the objections written on his face before he could speak.

“I had to,” she said. “I’m scared, Jake, and I couldn’t hold myself back any longer. I told them it might be premature. They put me on with this detective, very nice, who sounded soothing and said to call him again if Jonas didn’t show up in twenty-four hours.”

Jake nodded. “Our original plan anyway.” He poured a potful of water into the coffeemaker.

“But after you told me about the airline ticket, I called back again.”

“Last night?”

She nodded. “The detective wasn’t there anymore. So I told the officer who answered about Jonas and Pakistan, and I gave him the detective’s name, and they put me on hold for five minutes and then they patched me through to the guy’s cell phone or his home or something, and I told him.”

Jake turned to the counter and scooped some coffee grains into a filter, aware of his sense of optimism draining away, trying to resist its loss. “We still need to give it today, Carol,” he said.

“He just called back,” Carol said.

Jake flipped on the coffeemaker. He sat down across from Carol.

“It turns out the man’s name . . .”

“What man?”

“Jonas’s friend from the class. His name is Masoud . . .” She glanced at a paper resting under her elbow. “Masoud al-Zufak. Or close enough.
Anyway, the name means something to them. The detective didn’t say, exactly, but they’re interested in the guy; that much is clear.”

“Hell, they’re interested in anyone with an Arab-sounding name,” Jake said. “That doesn’t convict him of anything.”

“The detective listed these characteristics . . .” She trailed off.

“Characteristics?”

“Profile, he said, of a homegrown terrorist.”

“What? They are
already
accusing this guy Masoud—”

“Not Masoud, Jake,” she said. “Jonas.”

“What?”

“Or at least, people who get talked into things, which is what he thinks Jonas is. He was describing the personality type. Often naive, he said. From a liberal background.”

“Oh, yeah. It’s so fucking dangerous to be liberal.”

“Just listen. Seeking to fill a void. Distressed or angry about something they believe to be unjust.”

“What the hell are you getting at?”

“The detective is getting a warrant, Jake. He wanted to let me know. He’s going to search Jonas’s apartment. This morning.”

“Jesus. This isn’t making sense.”

“I know. I know, it’s like a foreign language, but—you remember that Christmas Eve, years ago, when I was robbed?”

He remembered. It had been after midnight, and she’d headed home from a friend’s apartment. They had so little money in those days, certainly not enough for a taxi, and yet it didn’t matter. They were two bohemians, living their way. She took the bus and walked down the dark street to their apartment. She was jumped. Two guys and a girl. They wanted cash, and she didn’t have any. She was saved by a neighbor who’d just returned from a party and came rushing out his front
door when he heard her scream. He shouted, and the muggers ran. The neighbor walked her home. And when she arrived and told Jake, he felt his own knees weaken.

“My God, I could have lost you,” he’d said, pulling her into his arms.

It was as if all the moments he’d unconsciously avoided thinking about were flooding him, an abundance of memories, one leading to another and another.

“Yes, I remember,” he said now.

“The cops were barely attentive,” she said, her words indicating that she wasn’t remembering the same moments Jake did. “
Another mugging. Big deal
. That was their attitude.”

“Times are different,” Jake said, doubting himself that the cliché applied when it came to the police.

“They’ve jumped all over this, Jake. They aren’t treating it like some case of a mom overreacting. They want a list of Jonas’s friends. They want to question you. This morning. They asked to come here. Something’s happening.”

Jake got up. He poured them both cups of coffee, adding a splash of milk to hers. Then he hit his fist on the counter, surprised by his own ferocity. “Goddamn it, Carol. Jonas is not a fucking terrorist. And I don’t want to talk to anyone who thinks he is.”

“They’re on their way.”

“I thought we were going to go back to his apartment to look for clues. Try to locate friends we didn’t know about.”

“They’re doing that.”

“What if,” he said, and let those two words sit there for a moment. “What if my girlfriend theory is right or Jonas has just been busy or even if he’s in the throes of some late-adolescent rebellion and doesn’t want to talk with us?”

“I know.” She took a sip of her coffee. “It’s so hard to know your kids at this age. He’ll be so pissed at me if this is all getting out of hand.” She reached out and touched his arm. “Let it be getting out of hand. But that detective’s response,” she pulled back, “it scares me more than anything else.”

Jake, too, felt long tendrils of fear in his stomach, like a foot of thick rope being pulled from his throat through his chest and stomach, down toward his feet. He sat down across from her and took a deep breath. “If you’re right, and something is very wrong, do we want to trust the cops to handle it? I don’t know, Carol. This is our son. Shouldn’t
we
talk to his friends? Shouldn’t
we
call this center where he took the class and see if we can find out anything more instead of sitting here answering questions while cops write down stuff we already know?”