A Disorder Peculiar to the Country (21 page)

Not until they had ordered the pie and taken a table did Joyce notice just how awful Marshall’s pizzeria was: strewn with
wax paper and soda cups, overbright, flyblown, rank, and hardly bigger than a walk-in closet. Part of the low dropped ceiling had been removed to reveal bare fluorescents; the rest of the tiles were water-stained. Travel posters from Italy were carelessly fastened to the chipped paneling, though the swarthy, unshaven men behind the counter appeared to have no connection to any indigenously pizza-making nation. They had seemed wary when she gave them her order. The eyes of the bearded man at the register watched her sadly from deep within their sockets. The kids ran to claim a red Formica table. Joyce saw the long, coruscating tomato sauce smear right before Viola dumped her sweater on it.

The kids shot straw wrappers at each other, further littering the unswept floor as their pizza was being prepared. Joyce looked away and tried to focus on some unsoiled, serene space and time beyond the pizzeria, a green place unknown and un-contested, and then she saw Marshall at the front of the shop, by the register, waiting. He hadn’t seen them. He was intently watching one of the guys remove a slice from the oven. He had his wallet out with a bill in his hand. She stood and advanced on him.

“You were supposed to be home by six.”

Marshall slowly revolved his head as if out of idle curiosity, as if not surprised by her presence, as if he barely knew her, as if she were some bag lady. It took enormous self-control. He regarded her for less than a moment before turning back toward the oven.

“Where were you?” she demanded. “We had an agreement! Sonya was nearly in tears. Why didn’t you at least call?”

In fact, as Joyce would remember later, the week’s child-care arrangements had been altered to accommodate an appointment she had set for Friday. They had discussed it the day before yesterday. But Marshall, congratulating himself for the
maddening aplomb with which he had just brushed her off, didn’t want to be drawn into an argument just now. He held the moral advantage. Let her stew. He told the bearded counterman, “Some extra napkins please.”

“Marshall!” She could barely keep from screaming.

“Daddy!”

The kids had seen him and rushed to wrap their arms around his legs. “Eat with us, Daddy!” said Victor. “We’re getting double cheese.”

Marshall smiled weakly, disconcerted by Victor’s plea. He thought the boy accepted that they never ate together. He pulled himself from the children’s embraces. It was bad luck that they had gone to the same pizza place.

“No, not tonight, honey. I can’t.”

Joyce reached over and snatched the bill from his hand.

“You owe me,” she said, seething. “I had to give Sonya cab fare.”

He made a move to take back the bill, a twenty, but she was too fast. She pivoted on her heels and returned to the table. The children didn’t go with her, standing uncertainly in the space between them.

“Joyce! Not now. Let’s talk later.”

“One dollar ninety cents,” said the counterman grimly. He put the slice in a white paper bag and placed the bag on the counter.

“Actually,” Marshall said, smiling at the counterman in a self-deprecating way. There was no response. He turned to Joyce. He hated talking across the pizzeria. Everyone was watching. “Joyce, really, please. That was all I had on me. I’ll pay you back later.”

She ignored him, her face very dark, her hands and arms on the table with her palms down.

“Joyce!” he insisted.

He turned back to the counterman. “Can I give you a credit card?”

“No credit,” the man said, deeply offended.

“American Express? Visa? Come on, you know me, you see me here three times a week. After I eat I’ll go to a cash machine and bring you the money. I’ll eat on the way to the cash machine, how about that?”

But the counterman was already sliding Marshall’s frugally plain pizza from the bag and returning it to the piles of other slices with assorted toppings beneath the glass, to be re-reheated at some future hour. He also put back the bag and napkins, folding them with care.

At that moment everything and everyone in the pizzeria became still. Even the children remained in place, Victor on tiptoe, unsure of what was being negotiated above their heads. Joyce’s unfocused eyes watched something in an unseen world, on an unknown channel. At other tables several young men were hunched over their slices and sodas, but they had looked up when Joyce grabbed the money. Now they were in mid-chew or mid-sip, their Adam’s apples in mid-bob. The three pizza guys stood behind the counter, one with a disk of raw pizza dough rising from his hands. Deep within the moist, throbbing folds of Marshall’s brain tissue, something turned over: their crappy, disordered existences, these shameful skirmishes, this soiled money, this debasement, this cruelty, this insensitivity, this impiety had become intolerable to God. A black, egg-laden fly hovered, about to deposit its larvae on a Parmesan canister. God saw it all.

“Bitch!” he exploded, storming out.

EXACTLY HOW GREAT
would sex with seventy-two virgins be? Thinking it over later, Marshall presumed that the lovemaking would not have to take place in a single night and that in Paradise the martyr would be allowed to work his way through the list over several months or years, if Paradise al
lowed for the counting of months and years or any passage of time at all—and without time, within a static, eternal Present, how could the sex act even be conceived? These considerations aside, he imagined that limiting your sexual partners to virgins would become as tedious as being married; well, nearly. In Marshall’s experience, which encompassed a single virgin, a high school friend, sex with a virgin tended to be clumsy, frustrating, and humiliating (it had been his first time too). Even in the skillful hands of a martyr-lover you might expect those celestial houris of perfect virtue to be especially skittish and inexpert. And afterward, after those seventy-two ex-virgins were carted away, would the martyr ever be allowed to have sex again or would he spend the rest of eternity without it, consumed by the same foolish conceits and unrealistic, tormenting desires that had occupied his existence on earth?

No, the martyrs weren’t in it for the sex.

Marshall worked at his bedroom desk diligently for the next week, spending hours at a time on the Internet. In the darkened room he searched through scores of news reports and commentary until he found a site that offered what he wanted. The site was in Arabic, but it contained a printable diagram. The Internet also directed him to a mining equipment company in Reading, Pennsylvania, where he bought a box of dynamite sticks and blasting caps on his credit card and took them home in a rented car.

The diagram called for a complicated detonation system built for concealment and quick use. At RadioShack he picked out two dry cells, wiring, alligator clips, and switches. When he went to pay, the clerk asked for his name and address.

“You don’t need it,” Marshall declared, annoyed.

He couldn’t see the clerk’s eyes beneath his flaxen bangs,
which hung over his face as he worked the register’s computer. He had been plugged into an MP3 player. Now that he had removed the earpieces he still seemed to be listening to the music, conscious of Marshall’s presence as the smallest distraction.

“Name and address,” the youth mumbled.

“What do you need my name and address for? I’m paying cash! I don’t want your junk mail, I don’t want to get calls from telemarketers, I don’t want you to know who I am. Aren’t there enough assaults on our privacy as it is? Does every last piece of data about us have to go into a computer? It’s bad enough the government is doing it.”

The clerk looked up and winced at Marshall’s speech. He was a good-looking boy, with gentle, clear blue eyes and an unblemished complexion. Marshall was surprised by the delicate little blond ringlets that spiraled down in front of his ears.

The youth said, almost plaintively, “You don’t have to give me your real name. I just have to type something in.”

Marshall was embarrassed that his objections were so easily met. He attempted to compose a made-up name. All he came up with was Yasir Arafat. That wouldn’t work: Marshall understood that the deal the youth was offering, in order to permit him to purchase these few electrical parts, required a name that was not so obviously not his own. But who knew if another human eye would even see the form he was filling out? What was the point of this exercise? Marshall’s annoyance compounded itself, yet he was unable to generate a name that was not already attached to a celebrity. Saddam Hussein, he wanted to say. Muammar Qaddafi. Rin Tin Tin.

At a complete loss, he gave the clerk his real name and address, including the zip code, made his purchase, and went home.

Their divorce negotiations had stalled again. Court dates were set and postponed, the lawyers continued to coo and bill, and then nothing would be decided. Still they lived together. Every once in a while an outside party would come up with a stratagem to break the deadlock—a simultaneous exchange of major concessions, a splitting of the differences—but Joyce and Marshall closed ranks against it. Their positions had shifted shape to exactly meet and oppose the contours of each other’s interests. Meanwhile Marshall worked in his bedroom, his hands, a wire cutter, and a pair of pliers maneuvering in the spotlight cast by his halogen work lamp. He had taped the diagram to the wall in front of him. Joyce and the children stirred elsewhere in the apartment. Passing feet cast long shadows from beneath the door. The phone rang, the TV went on and off, pots were dropped, and drinking glasses broke. Each sound assaulted his nerves: it was dangerous, it was wrong, it was evil. Their apartment was the world of derangement and chaos.

Several days later Marshall finally emerged from his bedroom, the package wrapped around his chest beneath his gray bathrobe. He held the two alligator clips apart, one in each hand. The children were watching television. He stood behind them for several minutes, gazing on their delicate skulls. They were unaware as he reviewed their vulnerability to their parents’ failings, as well as the tragic childhoods they had been bequeathed. He left and found Joyce in the kitchen preparing the kids’ lunches for the next day, store-bought falafel balls. As always, she tried to ignore his presence.

He approached in slow, steady steps, his hands heavy with electrochemical potential. She had picked up a carrot and was peeling it over the sink.

“God is great,” he announced. He took a moment to inhale and brought the clips together.

She looked up, annoyed that he had spoken to her, apparently without necessity. It was against their ground rules.

“Since when?” she snapped.

“God is great,” he repeated, again touching the clips. He opened one and clipped it around the other, but it slipped off. He then squeezed both clips and snagged one in the other, jaw to jaw. They held.

“What are you doing? What is that?”

“A suicide bomb.”

His bathrobe had opened and the explosives wrapped around his midsection were visible. She raised an eyebrow. “Really?”

“I made it myself. I have enough dynamite to blow up half the block. God is great.”

He put the two clips between his thumb and forefinger, squeezing hard. He imagined, for a moment at least, that he could feel a tickle of a shock.

“Why doesn’t it work then?”

“I don’t know,” he said, irritated. “The wiring is tricky.”

“Did you follow the instructions?”

“They were in Arabic. But there was a diagram.”

She put down the carrot and the peeler and sighed wearily. “Let me see.”

“I can fix it myself,” he declared.

“Don’t be an asshole.”

“Too late.”

She said, “Do you want me to look at it or don’t you?”

He grimaced and shook his head. But he said, “If you want to.”

She thoroughly dried her hands on a dish towel and came over. He pulled back his robe to reveal the wires passing through the firing caps and leading to the two linked dry cells resting in the hollow of his back. The explosives carried an acrid odor, like leaves in late autumn.

“Where’d you get dynamite?”

“A mining supply factory. The electrical stuff comes from RadioShack.”

“RadioShack,” she said. “That’s why they started sending junk mail. Hmm, the red wire’s slipped off the terminal.”

“Okay then. Would it be too much to ask you to reattach it?”

The children had risen from their places by the television and had silently filed into the hallway next to the kitchen. Viola’s expression was thoughtful as she assessed the situation. Victor probably had no memory of ever seeing his parents like this, nearly touching. Marshall felt self-conscious.

Joyce asked, “And then it’s going to explode?”

“It should.”

The four were in a tight space at the entrance to the kitchen, virtually huddled there. Victor squinted as if the overhead light had become unnaturally intense. Joyce hooked the loose wire around its terminal. She said, “There you go.”

“God is great. Crap.”

“Watch your language.”

“It’s not working.”

“Let me check the other wiring,” she said. He scowled and wriggled halfway out of his robe. The intertwining wires for the device looked about as logically ordered as a bowl of spaghetti. She ran her fingers along the black and red. Against his will his body grew warm. Her fragrances were like second nature to him, even now. He was breathing hard; he realized that she too had quickened her breath. A drop of perspiration trickled down his side. She murmured, “I’ve never seen dynamite sticks before. They look just like in the cartoons.”

“What cartoons?” Viola asked, her interest sharpened. She was wearing the cute little navy sundress Joyce’s mother had just sent her.

Joyce said, “Oh, you know, Road Runner. Powerpuff Girls. Dexter. All the cartoons, really.”

“Uh-uh,” Victor objected. “Not Arthur.”

Viola told him, “You haven’t seen every one.”

Marshall said, “Can you fix it?”

“Hold your horses. I have to look at this. Don’t move.”