American Taliban (26 page)

THE TURKEY WENT INTO THE OVEN
at noon, roasted for three and a half hours, rested on the counter for half an hour. Between the hours, every hour, Barbara went to the door, opened the door, looked up and down the street. After four in the afternoon, she and Bill sat down to eat. And ate little. There were only the two of them. They’d invited no one. Anxious and heartsick and sleep deprived, they’d declined invitations to give thanks with others and hoped only for the joy of John’s last-minute arrival.

How about a movie? Bill asked, sorting through the rented movies.

Barbara found the remote, turned the TV on, heard again about the prison uprising that left an American CIA agent dead, the first American casualty of the Afghan war. And then a commercial break. U.S. military fighter planes, they heard, were sent in to help the Northern Alliance regain control of the prison compound. And again a commercial break. This is awful, she said. How can they?

Turn it off, Bill said. That’s all the information they have, and they’re going to make it last all night.

I’ll get more details on the Internet, Barbara said.

Let’s watch the movie, Bill said. He pressed
PLAY
and the black-and-white lion roared. Paper curtains parted. Hollywood starlets wrapped in ermine materialized. And with darkened eyes and stained lips lived. And two hours later died. And again the news offered no news: On
CNN, a rerun of Larry King interviewing the widowed and the suffering. On CNN2, a rerun of Larry King interviewing a fatherless son. On CNN3, a rerun of Flight 11 flying toward the first tower, in slow motion. On CNN4, a rerun of the tower collapsing, in slow motion, and again the towers fell, again people jumped and died. On CNN5, a rerun of Larry King interviewing a motherless daughter, a daughterless father, interviewing the motherless, fatherless, wifeless, husbandless, childless, shameless—disgusted, Bill pressed
POWER
and beheaded King, exiled CNN, and the world went dark. They sat relieved in the silence and dark. Not much road traffic now, but somewhere in the distant overhead the honk and flap of southbound geese, instinct bound, in vees for victory. The turkey was still on the table; the sides were still out. Let all who are hungry come and eat. Let all who are tired come home.

Bill tied on his red Coca-Cola apron and cleared the table and washed up. Barbara pulled the laptop into her lap and read:

She went to tell Bill. She loaded the dishwasher and told.

We’re at war, Bill said, which means this is only one story. There are surely ten unreported variations on this one.

He sliced the rest of the turkey, and Barbara filled a collection of leftover refrigerator containers with food that only John could demolish.

They washed up, they went to bed, but sleep, elusive sleep, stayed away. Awake, Barbara opened her laptop and read:

ON DECEMBER 3
, early morning, Barbara opened the door and retrieved the daily bundle of newspapers, set it down on the counter, and went to make coffee. She separated the
Post
from the
Times
, the
Times
from the
Herald Tribune
, the coffee dripped, she unfolded the papers, slowed by sleep, by the need for sleep. She smoothed and straightened the papers, stared at the covers. But who was this? John? She was asleep, she was dreaming. She poured coffee. She swallowed coffee. She was afraid to look. She looked and read. An American. Named John. Naked. All bones. And bleeding. But why were his hands twisted and bound between his legs? And why had he arrived on the front pages, under this banner, this headline,
AMERICAN TALIBAN?

Bill, she wailed. And ran to the bedroom trailing the front page. Bill sat up, groped for his glasses. What? What’s wrong?

But the paper was crushed in her hand and had to be uncrushed.

American, he read. Taliban?

Look, Barbara keened. Look.

Bill swung his legs off the bed, found ground, the cold floor on his sleepy feet. He snatched the newspaper from Barbara’s hand and looked, shook his head.

This isn’t John, he said.

Read it, Barbara heaved. It’s John.

Yes, but not our John, not John Jude.

It could be, she sputtered.

But it’s not.

It might be.

What do you mean? Bill asked. What are you talking about?

I don’t know, Barbara sobbed. Call it a mother’s intuition. I feel that John’s there, alive, somewhere, that somehow he’s gotten himself caught up in this mess. And I must go to Pakistan. Today. We waited. He didn’t show up for Thanksgiving. He probably couldn’t. So we have to go there. We have to help him.

Bill promised to make the necessary calls.

AT SIX THAT EVENING
, Barbara and Bill and the people of the United States sat stunned in front of their television sets tuned to CNN:

Barbara wept. If only this were John Jude. It would be enough. To know her son was alive. To hear him talking. Smartassing. Like this John. If only our John like this John were in the hands of the United States Army, a prisoner of the United States Army. Mouthing off. Badassing. They probably know each other with their same smartass talk.

They watched the replays. Late night, after replays and tears and repeated
replays, and after seeing Barbara to bed with a Demerol, Bill sent another e-mail to Khaled asking him if he’d found Yusef and demanding all available information about Yusef. Then he dialed the best criminal defense lawyer he knew. They would need him. If and when John Jude turned up, if he turned up in the hands of the United States Army, they would need the best.

EARLY THE NEXT MORNING
, better rested and calmer than she’d been in weeks, Barbara scanned the headlines of the
Times
, the
Washington Post
. She paged through Glenn Reynolds’ Instapundit, Gunzberger’s Politics1.com, the Kausfiles, and Andrew Sullivan’s blog. She went to the Israeli intelligence conspiracy site, Debka.com, to see what they might be revealing about yesterday’s headline: American Taliban. Homegrown. She and every American, probably every citizen of the world with access to CNN, had watched and listened, repelled, attracted, and afraid all at once, and had gone to bed profoundly disturbed.

To be an American and speak so calmly of your own death, to offer yourself up as a martyr for Islam, to make martyrdom your goal, it was incomprehensible, especially for a contemporary American, unaccustomed to such sacrifice. But she needed to understand. She’d read Hegel, Hegel for whom overcoming one’s fear of death was the only way to achieve true freedom. How else to understand the martyr’s impulse? Self-consciousness, she knew, comes with beginnings. This was true for societies and nations as well as individuals. When the Middle East freed itself from its colonizers and came into independence, it became self-conscious about itself, its nationality. It was this long ongoing struggle toward self-realization that drove its politics now.

She looked again at the cover of the
Times
, the photo of this long-haired, bush-bearded American Taliban who, with his wounds and his
nakedness and the bindings that nailed him to the stretcher, resembled Jesus Christ, resembled her own John. And it was a photo-op for jihad. That was what was so disturbing. In other words, the White House should not have permitted its dissemination. If she were working PR for the White House, she would have censored this image for evoking what every child knows as Christ on the cross, what every child comes to understand: that Christ fulfills himself in his crucifixion, becomes distinguished in death. Without his death, he could not have become Christ. In one of his papers for World Religion, John had argued for Judas as enabler rather than betrayer. Judas, his thesis stated, sacrificed himself and not Christ as the church has claimed. If Judas had refused Jesus this service, if he had put self-interest first, Christ would not have become the Savior God. Therefore without Judas, no God. Therefore without Judas, no Jew to blame and hate. But Christianity needed an enemy, a religion against which to fulfill itself, and found what it needed in Judas.

And this kid, Barbara wondered, this John Walker Lindh, with his wild hair and beard, resembling Jesus, Jeremiah, John Brown, resembling all martyrs, proving himself their descendant, what does he know? He has created himself in the image of martyrdom, with features in symmetry, eyes well paired with nose, nose with mouth, a harmonious face good to look at. The White House should have censored this photo, would surely have censored it given half a chance.

And John Jude? She hoped, she prayed, that their John, wherever he was, had made better decisions than this kid. If only he would call or write. If only he would come home.

THE STATE DEPARTMENT
strongly advised against travel in northern Pakistan. It’s where the Taliban is hiding. It’s where Osama bin Laden’s friends are. It’s where the CIA thinks he might be hiding.

We’re at war in Afghanistan, someone at the office of Richard Armitage informed Bill, but the North-West Frontier of Pakistan qualifies as within the theater of war.

Over Barbara’s protestations, over her accusations of coldheartedness and unfatherly unconcern, Bill canceled plans for their trip to Pakistan.

Getting ourselves trapped in a war zone, he snapped, possibly the same war zone John’s trapped in, would be completely stupidly ludicrous. He’s my son, too, and I want to find him as much as you do, but hysterical irrational behavior will get us nowhere. Careful thinking and planning will. For example, this: I’m debating whether to file a missing person report for an American abroad with the State Department’s Office of American Citizens Services and Crisis Management. On the one hand, given Ashcroft’s decision to try Lindh as an enemy of the state, filing could leave John similarly charged. That is if he too foolishly took up arms against Americans. But then I think no matter what, I’d rather have John in the custody of the U.S. Army than anywhere else.

I don’t know how you can even hesitate about this, Barbara exploded. I’d rather have my son incarcerated anywhere in the U.S. than leave him rotting in some tribal prison.

Bill went ahead and filed.

————

BARBARA AWOKE
, heaved her Demerol-deadened limbs out of bed and onto the cold dead floor, and lurched down the hard hall into her study, to her laptop, where she hoped an envelope hovered telling her she had mail, an e-mail from John Jude, or at the very least, a Red Cross letter, which would mean secondhand word from John. It was now four months since she’d heard from him. She was a mother who hadn’t heard from her son, who didn’t know whether he was still alive, and not knowing, she was stuck marking minutes, hours, and days, with only the daily papers, the news, and the postings, stuck in chronology, not life: