American Taliban (28 page)

When people stopped coming to the phone, she determined to go where they went. Mornings she scanned the day’s lists of events, circled the ones likely to attract the most powerful, and attended. She made herself available to bloggers and gossip columnists for the most outrageous quotes. At a book party for a young dot.com editor noted for her witty political discourse interspersed with frequent references to gin and anal sex, Barbara offered an explanation for the prevalence of sex abuse in Washington:
Caligula
is the politician’s guide to D.C. They watch the film so often, they come to know it as their gospel. Remarking on the number of politicians at the party who were either losing or had lost their voices and therefore couldn’t comment on her questions about the American Taliban, she offered a Freudian analysis:
their penises were rising up into their throats. On the phone with a young intern who refused to connect her to his boss, she suggested he imagine himself in Nazi Germany. They weren’t all evil, she ranted, just weak in character and dignity, like you, people unwilling to do what’s right, afraid to pursue justice. You would have been one of the millions who performed their jobs and asked no questions; in essence, you would have been, as you are now, a collaborator.

At home, she continued scanning postings and blogs, both the reliable and ridiculous, and staying close to online rumor mills and postings and blogs, she learned about another American Taliban, a young man named Yasir Hamdi, born in Texas to Saudi Arabian parents. Hamdi, she reported to Bill, was captured alongside Lindh, but he didn’t make headlines or even the news.

It’s possible there are others, Bill said. It’s entirely possible, he thought, that John had kept his wits about him and remained silent. A lawyer’s son, he knew not to talk without a lawyer, not to the military or the press.

ON APRIL 5
, Yasir Hamdi was scheduled for transfer from Guantanamo to a naval brig in Norfolk, Virginia. This headline served Barbara as the burning bush served Moses, and the angel Muhammed, illuminating the unknowing dark. She suddenly KNEW. John is going by a different name, as he has before. He might be Attar or Ishmael or Abdul. He might even be going as Yasir Hamdi. He might BE Yasir Hamdi. How could she not have thought of that: he wouldn’t use his real name. She canceled her appointments for the day and drove down to Norfolk, riding and deriding Bill all the way down, Bill and his paper attempts at finding their son. Then she turned on herself: how could she have overlooked something this obvious? She worried about what else she might be missing. She tried thinking John’s thoughts. What did he want her to know, say, think, do?

This was his adventure of becoming. But what was the use of becoming, if you ended in annihilation?

You’re not fully alive unless you’re risking death, he’d say.

And what would you say we’re doing, Dad and I? she’d ask.

She arrived early this time, prepared for the tight security, expecting the angry crowd. This time, she would get in. Wearing a smart dress and sensible heels and dark Chanel sunglasses, and carrying a journalist’s bag, flap open just enough to reveal a journalist’s props, the notebook,
the recording device, and authentic-looking ID, she stepped up to the pier gates with as much official know-how as she could muster. She smiled at the guard, reached for the flap to show her pass.

Reporting for whom? the guard asked without looking.

Washington Times
, Barbara said, with authority.

And miraculously, the gate opened, miraculously she was waved through. It’d worked. She’d managed it. She walked toward the group of reporters gathered under an awning. She nodded greeting and inserted herself into the side flank of the huddle, mindful of the others, careful not to attract much notice.

He’s expected to arrive in an armored vehicle, one journalist offered. And we are not to expect to speak with him.

Any family members present? Barbara asked.

Only an uncle, with a lawyer.

A limousine pulled up to the gate, and a suited man stepped out to speak with the guard, but the vehicle would not be allowed through. The lawyer opened the door and escorted a thin wiry man out. The uncle, presumably. Which meant there was a Yasir Hamdi. Which meant he wasn’t John.

Desperate, Barbara moved quickly. This was her only chance. She had to know whether this kid had met John, knew John. She had to ask him. She separated herself from the journalists and walked toward the two men, stepping between them. She kept her eye on the young straight-backed marine leading the way toward the gangplank that led onto the brig. He didn’t turn around.

Who are you? the lawyer asked, taking her arm.

A journalist who wants to bring this story to the public, Barbara murmured. A mother suffering the absence of her son. Mr. Hamdi? she asked, bending her head to bring it closer to him. Is there a Mrs. Hamdi? she asked, but got no response.

I need to talk to your nephew, she persisted.

A-hem, the lawyer said, taking her elbow, though he kept walking. For whom are you covering this story?

That remains to be seen, Barbara said. The more access, the better the story; the better the story, the higher the odds of selling it. Publicity could be useful to your case.

The lawyer nodded. He’d already thought of that. FYI, he said. We haven’t been guaranteed access to the boy ourselves. Decisions—or perhaps I should say indecisions—are made case by case, which means they’re taking their time. In the meantime, the boy remains in lockup.
In the meantime, his parents are losing sleep, losing their health, losing everything they have. And this is taking place in the United States of America.

I know all about it, Barbara said.

The young marine stood aside and ushered them onto the brig and into a bare inner chamber. Wait here, he said and left.

She was in. She’d made it in. She waited. They waited. They were made to wait long enough for Barbara to have second and third thoughts.

Half an hour later, the marine returned to say not today, and Barbara exploded. What do you mean, not today?

The navy isn’t prepared, the marine said. They need time to set it up. The meeting might be rescheduled to take place off-site.

It means, the lawyer translated, that they’re not allowing a face-to-face. They want some kind of screen, the standard prison setup.

She’d gotten so close, she was inside, standing with those closest to the prisoner, and inside, close as she was, she had missed Yasir Hamdi’s arrival outside. As a journalist huddled outside, she would have at least seen the boy. Even the crowd outside the gate had seen more. Somewhere in her stomach a strange rumble gathered and came up her throat and emerged hysterically. She laughed. She cried. She laughed and cried.

Hamdi’s uncle backed away. The lawyer escorted her. Get ahold of yourself, he said.

He directed her down the plank, onto the pier, and onward, through the gates. The familiar clack of her heels on metal comforted and calmed her. Reminded her of who she was. She’d gotten in once; she could do it again. The limousine pulled up and the lawyer handed her in, not so gently.

Now, he said, tell me who you are.

Barbara reached into her bag for a tissue and noted that her hands were shaking. She couldn’t talk. This strange hysteria was still in her throat, choking her. She’d come so close. Hamdi must have met John Jude. Of this she was certain.

My son, she hiccuped, is missing. I’m doing everything I can to find him.

She heard Hamdi’s uncle exhale. He seemed to have been holding his breath. She turned to speak with him, but he turned away. He has nothing to say to a fellow sufferer, a hysterical woman, Barbara thought.

Where’s your car? the lawyer asked. We’ll drop you off.

————

BARBARA CAME ACROSS
a story reporting on the interrogation of John Walker Lindh. Included in the story were a number of Radack’s e-mails. Phone calls and e-mails to and from the reporter were traced to the Hawkins law firm, and the Department put Radack under investigation.

This is good for us, Bill said. And good for this country. There are also rumors of illegal detentions. These stories will start turning public opinion against Ashcroft and the Bush administration. Which could help us. Now we just have to wait for John to turn up.

He will turn up, Bill said, for which Barbara kissed him.

MAY 1, 2002
. Every age, the Hegelian theory of history goes, is a progression toward better, an improvement over what came before. This is May 1, of
A.D.
2002. This is the age of oil, the age of the corporation, the age of terrorism, the age of martyrdom. It is surely not an accident that I am describing one and the same age. This is the Virginia Correctional Facility of Alexandria City, VA, 1212 Alexandria Station, cell block P. On a cot in his cell, John Walker Lindh awoke at dawn without the muezzin call, without an alarm, with only his inner clock borne of faith and passion, and washed his hands and face at his urinal of a sink and kneeled on number two of two towels provided by prison housekeeping. He knows the way to Mecca and prays toward it. Twenty years minus six months already served minus three years for good behavior, that is, sixteen and a half years from now, in the year 2019, perhaps he will make the pilgrimage in person, in body as well as mind. That is, if his lawyers get what they hope for. He will be thirty-eight years old. By then it might be the Muslim era:
M.E.
2019.

From another cell down the hall, and another cell around the bend, and from the next hall, and the next cell the voices of other Muslims in prayer echo, altogether twenty Muslims praying, giving voice to belief, la illaha il’allah, no god but god, et Muhammed rasulu, twenty Muslim men bearing witness to the God of the prophet of Islam in, lalalalala, an American facility—

Prison Guard: Where do you think you are? Where DO they think
they are? This is no mosque in Medina, this is an American prison goddammit paid for by the American people, so keep it down, shutthefuckup—

in an American facility nine miles from the White House, where our president worships his own God.

IT IS MAY 1, 2002
, early morning on visitor’s day at the prison in Alexandria, and Barbara is already in line, hoping to meet Lindh’s mother, hoping to one day be a mother waiting to see her son, knowing he is alive. She is preparing herself for this future, for this false incarnation of her baby, her John Jude, in baggy prison jumpsuit and shuffling slippers, ears made prominent by a close prison shave, and in the extreme bareness of his head and face, temples overwide and eyes too close, LYING FACTS. They will remake him in the common image of the common criminal housed in a maximum-security facility, though he is her beautiful, her gentle son. His crime: an ability to immerse himself in the new and other and become, a selfless ability to
other
himself, though he’d started life as her baby, though he was her scholarly John Jude, her Goofy-Foot John, summa cum laude graduate of John Harlan High. By the time he turned sixteen, he’d already been collector of various things collectible, rapster, songwriter, skater, and honor student of world cultures. At eighteen, he was a surfer, mystic, student of Arabic, and more. He was known online as Sun-T for Ice T, as Attar for the Sufi poet Fariduddin Attar, as Ibrahim for the father of Ishmael, as Abdul for—she couldn’t remember for whom. He was perhaps unduly influenced by books. Reading, he became hero, narrator, adventurer, and walked and talked the parts. In Psych 101, this is known as role-playing; in literature, empathy. Also the source of Shakespeare’s genius. But in the twenty-first century, genius
has become a crime, and for this crime he will be sentenced just as he is coming of age as a man, a danger to non-man, the system.

It seems to Barbara now that John had been thrust into this mode of becoming through no fault of his own when she and Bill named him for their favorite Beatle. On December 8, 1981, the first anniversary of Lennon’s death, the day she learned she was one month pregnant. She was on her way home from the doctor in her old orange Datsun 510 with only AM radio, because Bill had an afternoon meeting at his firm’s Baltimore office and needed the Toyota to get there. She was driving and praying that this Datsun on last legs would give her another year, though it had always been something of a lemon and she’d long suspected that its first owner, her long-haired professor of economics, had replaced the Japanese parts on this car with cheaper American ones which were constantly cracking and breaking; she had broken down on every street and street corner in the area, and she and this orange lemon were notorious for toxic spillages of every kind, motor oil, gas, fatally sweet green radiator fluid. You don’t need this heartache, the mechanic advised. Get yourself a reliable little Honda and dump this bad job somewhere. But they had put all their savings on the house in Adams Morgan and taken out a mortgage and now they were bringing a child into the world, and she wanted not to work its first three years. On the radio Hey Jude came on just as the car stalled at the light on California and Eighteenth Streets, and the honking behind her threatened to drown the music, and she turned up the volume and placed her hand on her soon-to-be-kicked belly and didn’t care that she was draining the battery. After which she might just get out and abandon this orange turncoat. In college she’d played the song over and over and over again until Caitlin her roommate threatened to smash the LP. So they’d middle-named John for it, Hey Jude …Take a sad song and make it better. MAKE THIS SONG BETTER INDEED. Better better better better—