Man of the Hour (15 page)

“Larry King’s people just called and there’s a camera crew from NBC downstairs,” she said softly, her lips near his ears. “They want to talk to you. The President just mentioned you in a speech.”

“Well, it’s really going to have to wait,” David answered quietly, looking up at the clock.

Yes, it was nice, all this excitement, but he was still a teacher. Though a part of him was curious:
What did the President say about me?

“The principal thinks it might be good if you spent some time with these newspeople this afternoon.” Michelle breathed against his neck. “He thinks it can only help the image of the school.”

“So I’ll try to make time for them,” David said.

“He wants you to do it
now
.”

“Are you sure?” David glanced at the restless faces, the swinging legs.

“Oh yeah, I’m sure.”

“Okay, guys.” He faced the group. “You’re getting early dismissal. Don’t all start crying at once.”

He could barely be heard above the racket of students laughing, giving each other high fives, and still using their clickers. He scanned the faces again. Still wondering: could one of them have done this? He’d only hurt their trust in him by asking too directly, but he decided to leave the door open a little. “And listen, guys. I know there are counselors in the library today, but if one of you wants to come by later and talk
to me
about what happened, I’ll have office hours.”

If any of them were interested, they weren’t letting on. No one wanted to look weak or needy in front of the other kids. Instead, the students rose as one body and began their lemming-like trudge toward the door, ignoring David as he called out a reading assignment to finish the excerpt from the
Odyssey
.

From the corner of his eye, he saw Elizabeth Hamdy was lingering, still sitting in the third row, fidgeting with her books and staring at the blackboard.

“Hey, what’s up?” he asked her.

She stood up and came to him with her head bowed. “I wonder if you have a minute so I could talk to you about something now,” she murmured.

“Sure,” said David. “I always have time for you.”

“Oh no you don’t.” Michelle Richardson pulled on his sleeve. “The principal wants to see you with these media people
right away
.” She lowered her voice.
“He got a call from the superintendent’s office.”

David looked back and forth between the two women, not sure what to do. The kids needed him. The camera crews were waiting. Things were changing and he realized he would have to reach an accommodation with this new multilayered reality.

“Can I catch up with you a little later?” he asked Elizabeth.

“I guess you’ll have to.” She drifted out of the room, like a sunstruck rain cloud.

14

THE GIRL FROM
the bus as was staring at Nasser again. Only this time, she was atop a building in Times Square, with a hand thrust suggestively down the front of her unbuttoned jeans.

He tried to ignore her as he drove his Town Car down Broadway just before noon, through the valley of billboards and video screens. All these pictures and words trying to force themselves into his mind. Children in designer jeans behaving like adults; pulsating advertisements for camera equipment, computers, semiconductors, cable television, music stores. A huge American Express Card wearing a pair of black mouse ears. “Autumn in New York, presented by Diet Coke.” The effect was to make him want everything, and then nothing at all. But what confused him most of all was the information circling the immense white building just ahead, One Times Square.

Police continue investigation into Coney Island High School explosion …
, said the yellow lights speeding by on a rotating black beltway.
President praises schoolteacher David Fitzgerald …

What was the sense in this? When he’d slipped the
hadduta
under the school bus, Nasser had thought it was God’s will. But had it been God’s will that this man he deplored, Mr. Fitzgerald, should become a hero instead?

He turned right on 42nd Street, where a giant Oreo cookie was revolving on top of a building, and stopped the cab for a young woman in a cream-colored pants suit standing in front of a tourist office with her arm raised.

He was still wondering what to do about Youssef’s friend coming into town, whether he should continue with the bombings. Maybe it would take a while for God’s will to fully manifest itself.

“How much to take me to Fifty-first Street and Fifth Avenue?” the girl in the pants suit asked, climbing in.

Nasser turned down his radio calls from the dispatcher and craned his neck to see her in the rearview mirror. “Four dollars.”

What a stroke of luck, to pick up a fare in midtown. Perhaps Allah was smiling on him after all. He looked around cautiously, checking for police cars since only yellow cabs were supposed to pick up passengers off the street in this part of Manhattan.

“Why don’t you take Eighth Avenue uptown?” the girl in the back said. “There’s construction and traffic on Sixth.”

“Okay, boss.”

He wasn’t about to argue. Most of his regular fares were radio calls from Brooklyn and Queens, which either landed him in slow-moving traffic or left him stranded in remote and dangerous neighborhoods.

The livery cab gave a little shudder as he started it west on 42nd Street. The girl in back checked her silver watch, a glint of moonlight on her wrist. Something about her reminded him of Elizabeth. Her poise, the length of her neck. But she was different too. A little older, a little darker.

Across the street, a backhoe and a pile driver were laboring in a vacant lot next to an old theater. Mickey and Minnie Mouse grinned down from the front of the Disney Store. Furious-looking men and women in dark business suits hurried by carrying navy Gap bags and attaché cases. Black clean-up men in red jumpsuits swept up trash for the Times Square Business Improvement District. A hellfire preacher with a little microphone stood under an enormous cartoon Superman, braying about damnation. A double-deck tour bus nearly sideswiped Nasser on the left. Everything here was commotion for the soul. Nasser decided he had to shut it all out for a while and concentrate on the girl in the back.

“Is okay, without the air conditioner?” he asked her.

“Yes, I’m fine,” she said, rearranging herself on the seat. “It’s not that hot outside.”

“You want I should leave on the radio?” He craned his neck, trying to catch her eye in the rearview mirror, eager to make her comfortable.

“Sure.” She busied herself with her briefcase, really only half-listening. “Just turn it down a sec while I make a call.”

He turned the volume knob the wrong way and a blast of trumpets jerked him back against his seat. He lowered the sound instantly and apologized as a mattress commercial came on. “What I am thinking?” he said, the words coming out in an awkward rush.

But she was preoccupied, trying to make a call on a little gray cell phone. He watched her in the backseat, turned sideways with one leg tucked up under her, brushing raven-black hair out of her eyes with long graceful fingers. Yes, she was like Elizabeth, a little. He sensed there were secret places inside her.

“Excuse me,” he said, as she gave up on her call and closed the phone. “I do not want to be rude. But please may I ask you a question?”

“What is it?”

“You are Arab? Yes?”

In the mirror, she smiled in just a small way as traffic finally started to move and a breeze stirred her loose-fitting clothes. “Yes,” she said. “I am Arab.”

“Palestinian?”

“Yes, as a matter of fact.”

“Ah, very good. This is the best.
Allahu akbar.
”

He half-turned his head, waiting for her to return the blessing. But instead she lowered her eyes in embarrassment and began rotating a ring on her finger. “I’m sorry, I don’t …”

“It’s okay.”

They swept past milk-fed tourists gawking at posters for
Les Miserables
and
The Sound of Music
. Another Arab girl who didn’t speak any Arabic, he thought. Just like his sister. He decided not to let his disapproval show, for the moment. She was young and pretty. She didn’t know any better, he told himself.

“Please, if you don’t mind for me to ask, where are you from?” It irked him having to speak English to her, the words feeling heavier than usual in his mouth today.

“Queens Village.”

“No, I mean before that. Where is your family from?”

“East Jerusalem.” She put away her cell phone and started looking for something else in her briefcase.

“Ah, Ras al-Amud? Upper Silwan?”

She pulled out some papers. “I don’t know. I haven’t been back there very often.”

He looked at her in the mirror again, and felt that great loneliness once more. He’d had other Arab girls like this in the back of his car and still had not really found a way to talk to them.

“So,” he said, “you are working?”

“Yes.” She allowed herself just a little more of a smile but didn’t look up from her papers. “I do have a job. In computers.”

“My sister. She is wanting to work too. After she leaves school.”

She picked up on me tension in his voice. “And that’s not okay with you?”

He simply raised his hands from the wheel, as if to say, ah, what can I do?

Work and his sister. The subjects went around and around in his head. He’d never been able to get a good job in this country, and his sister was always saying it was his own fault. “You’re too rigid,” she’d tell him. Perhaps so. He wouldn’t work for his father at the grocery store on principle. But then he wouldn’t work at most restaurants either because he was trying to adhere strictly to Muslim dietary laws (except for the occasional McDonald’s lapse). Working in the garment district was also out of the question since there were too many Jews involved. Finally, computer work was impossible because he hadn’t graduated from high school. And of course, he didn’t finish high school because of teachers like this Mr. Fitzgerald, who wouldn’t leave him alone.

Around and around he went. It was easier, in some ways, being back home in the days of the
intifada
. At least he knew who he was then, throwing stones in the street. But this country had spun him around and made him dizzy.

“And now here’s a song about a dwarf at a smorgasbord,” said the announcer on his radio. “‘I Can’t Help Myself’ by the Four Tops!”

The girl in the backseat smiled again, but he didn’t know why. Some of the phrases here still baffled him. A dwarf at a smorgasbord? What could this possibly mean?

He wanted to ask her to explain, but he felt shy.

“You like this song?” he said.

“Yes, I do. Why don’t you turn it up?”

She’d put her papers away and he watched her applying lipstick in her makeup mirror. Somehow she’d solved the American dilemma. She’d figured out a way to live here without tearing herself apart.

“Sugar pie, honey bunch, I’m weaker than a man should be!” The song on the radio moved his knee with its solid thwocking beat. He hated this country, yet he found himself humming its song, feeling the heat in the singer’s voice.

Maybe he should ask her out. The idea crept up on him unexpectedly. He would approach her gently about it, respectfully. He’d ask her out for coffee.

She was singing along softly with the song and he began to daydream at the wheel, letting himself get carried away in the river of his thoughts. Yes, they would sit and they would talk about things, and maybe he would ask her out again before evening prayers at the mosque. And eventually he would meet her parents and somehow come up with money for a dowry and they would be wed. They’d move to a house in the suburbs. She’d help him understand things, smooth his way, maybe help him get a proper American job.

If only she’d say yes. This would be the first step.

On the other hand, why should she agree to see him? Would she understand the life he’d come from? The throwing of stones. The freezing water. The stinking bag over his face. And worst of all, the horribleness they’d done to his friend Hamid in jail, which he could barely stand to think about. They’d tempted him with a woman too. How could anyone who hadn’t been there understand it?

Nasser made a right on Eighth Avenue, passing a Sbarro pizza restaurant with a red-green-and-white canopy out front and gleaming gold surfaces and pink marble inside. He pursed his lips, still not sure if he had the courage to ask this girl in the backseat to have dinner with him. It was crazy; he had enough guts to plant a bomb, but not enough to ask an Arab girl out.

Things were so much simpler in Bethlehem, where parents would find mates from good families for their children. But here everything was a mad scramble. You had to prove yourself day by day. And he was so broke all the time. It was costing him $350 a week to rent the Lincoln Town Car and after giving 50 percent of his fares back to the car service—not to mention paying for tolls, gas, and insurance—he’d managed to save less than $250 in the last three months. Even though he was living rent free in his father’s basement, he’d barely been able to buy a birthday present for his sister Elizabeth. Now he wasn’t sure if he’d have enough to buy this pretty pants suit girl dinner at Sbarro. And would they have anything
halal
anyway?

“So,” he said, trying to work up to the subject, “you are still living at home with your parents?”

“For the moment.” She sighed and stared out the window as they passed more construction sites encroaching on the old boarded-up Eighth Avenue porn parlors and steak houses.

He realized his heart was pounding, almost as much as it had yesterday with the
hadduta
at the school. Would he ask her? Wouldn’t he ask her? All of a sudden, everything was riding on it. If she said yes, maybe this new life would open up to him and he would forget all about the
hadduta
and Youssef and all the other rage and bitterness. He’d be able to live like Elizabeth.

If she said no, well, this was God’s will, telling him to go ahead with
jihad
.