Man of the Hour (20 page)

But his father never told him much of anything, never really taught him anything. The closest he came to imparting any wisdom about life or war was one night when David was home from college and they went to see
Apocalypse Now
together. In the middle of the psychedelic bridge scene—with fireworks streaking the night, soldiers painting their faces, and no one knowing who was shooting at whom—his father had grabbed his arm, pointed at the screen, and gasped: “That’s it! That’s what it was like! Nothing happens and then everything happens! All you can do is
just keep going
.”

David hoped he was offering his own son more sustenance than that, but he wasn’t sure. The separation had drawn a curtain around parts of the boy’s life.

“So how you getting along with Anton?” he said, following Arthur over to a display of samurai warriors.

“He’s a dickhead.”

David stopped in his tracks, an alarm clock ringing between his ears. “Who taught you that word?”

“Anton did.” The boy pressed his nose against the glass, making a pig face to the samurais.

“Well, I don’t like it. And take your face off the glass. They’ll throw us out of here.” David took the boy’s shoulder and turned him a little. “So why don’t you like Anton?”

“I just don’t.”

“Why?”

Arthur wriggled away from his father and went to sit on a bench. “He said you didn’t save the bus driver.”

“Hmm,” said David, thinking: screw him. What did Anton ever do? “So did Mommy tell you what happened the other day?”

“Sort of. And we talked about it at school.”

David sat down and watched Arthur swinging his leg, the toes of his sneakers barely brushing the stone floor. The boy was a bit scrawny for his age, which made David feel fiercely protective of him, especially in light of his own size. What made it almost unbearably poignant was that Arthur went to the playground every day chin up, shoulders back, imagining himself a tough little soldier, but inevitably came home wheezing and tearstained after some bully stole his tank.

“Well, I probably should have told you more when I came over the other night, but I didn’t want to worry you,” David said, looming over the boy. “I guess you heard the bus blew up and I had to help get one of the girls off it.”

“You saved her?”

“Well … Yeah. I mean. Okay.” David fumbled with the words, not wanting to exaggerate his bravery, but at the same time wanting the boy to be proud of him. “You could say I saved her.”

Arthur’s face lit up with that enraptured look again. “And did they catch the bad guys who did it?”

“No, but they will. I’m sure.”

Arthur sat quietly for a few seconds, processing the information, his face a matrix of little-boy emotions. Back and forth went the leg, five more, ten more times, until his heel hit me bottom of the bench.

One of the museum guards came over, a stubby little man with pumped-up shoulders and a brutish-looking small mustache. David was sure he was about to tell Arthur to stop kicking the bench. But instead, he handed David a little pencil and a museum program.

“I wanted to know if I could get your autograph,” he said with a low, hoarse Bronx accent. “I seen you on the
Today
show.”

“No problem,” said David, relieved and bemused, aware of Arthur’s eyes on him as he took the program and started to sign.

What must my boy be thinking? The guard took back the signed program, smiled with gold-capped gratitude, shook his hand, and scurried away. Does he think I’m somebody important? David wondered.

“Daddy, I want to live with you,” Arthur said suddenly.

“Why? Because someone asked for my autograph?”

“No, because Mommy keeps acting crazy.” Arthur assumed that screwed-up little cartoon voice he always used when things were bothering him and he didn’t want to show it.

“How crazy?”

“She thinks the neighbors are listening to us.”

“Well, Mrs. Harris next door is kind of nosy.” David remembered the old crone’s stem disapproving looks on the elevator around the time he moved his things out.

“And Mommy burnt herself,” said Arthur.

“Ayyyy …” The alarm clock went off in David’s head again, a little louder this time. “Are you sure it wasn’t an accident?”

“It wasn’t an accident. She fights with Anton all the time and then she stays in her room and cries and she won’t come out. And she keeps singing that dumb song, ‘Kimono My House.’”

“Oh great,” David hissed, like a tire running out of air.

Arthur looked disturbed. “Why did you say ‘Oh great,’ Daddy?”

“No reason.” He shook his head. “It’s just a stupid grown-up expression.”

In the back of his mind, he’d always feared this day would come, but he’d put off thinking about it. She was beginning to unravel.

He looked down and saw that Arthur’s frayed white Converse sneakers were now about a size too small for him. “Is she getting you to school in the morning and making you dinner?”

“Sometimes.” Arthur wiggled his feet. “But she’s sick a lot.”

So here was the new issue. Up until this point, David had been going along thinking he could share custody with Renee amicably until they finally reconciled and got back together. A boy needs his mother the way a deep-sea diver needs oxygen, someone once told him. But now the line was getting tangled.

Reconciliation was looking unlikely, but a vicious custody fight with Renee was the last thing he wanted. She was sick; she needed help. He hoped she wasn’t falling into a druggy thing with Anton.

And what would happen if he won anyway? Raising a child by yourself wasn’t a one-shot deal like dragging somebody off a burning school bus. Arthur’s life was all niggling little details—making sure he had his inhaler at all times, getting him ready for school, arranging play dates and doctor’s appointments—you had to plan like Machiavelli and execute like Parton. But in his own life outside the classroom, David had never shown much aptitude for details like paying his bills on time or getting his apartment painted. He’d been too preoccupied waiting for Something Great to happen.

“You know, if I tell Mommy that you want to come live with me full-time, she’s going to be very upset,” said David.

Arthur just looked at him, as if to say: So are you going to betray me or not?

“And I’d have to get a bigger apartment.”

At the moment, he had exact duplicates of most of Arthur’s toys jammed into the corner of his little $798-a-month apartment on West 112th Street and two dresser drawers full of the boy’s clothes in his bedroom closet. How would he swing it, anyway? He was making just a shade over $50,000 a year and spending most of that on support payments and lawyers. Ten thousand dollars each for his attorney and Renee’s. And what were his prospects for doing better with an unpublished novel and an unfinished dissertation in the milk crate in his closet? At Coney Island High School, he was a great teacher. But on the social scale of the average Upper West Side playground, he was near the bottom.

It was going to be a tough sell to the court-appointed psychiatrist, whom he was seeing with Renee tomorrow. Fathers generally didn’t get full custody of their kids. But then he saw Arthur was still giving him
the look
. The one that said,
if you saved that girl on the bus, you could save me.

“You know, I’m still hoping Mommy and me can work things out,” he said wistfully.

Arthur shook his head. “I don’t think so,” he said in his best approximation of a dubious big-boy voice.

“Well, we’ll see.”

David patted him on the shoulder and they went to look at more knights, stopping at a diorama of Italian noblemen in chain mail and sharp-looking visors. Can I really do this? David asked himself. Can I start a war with Renee and not get everybody hurt in the process?

It was useless to wonder, he realized. Momentum was already carrying him forward. He couldn’t let the boy down by not trying. Arthur tugged on his wrist. “Hey, Daddy. Can I ask you something?”

“What?”

“Can I have your autograph too?”

22

THE SMALL MAN
in the dark suit without a tie did not stand when Youssef brought Nasser into the living room on Friday night. He only sipped his coffee and looked to the side of Nasser a little, as if checking to see whether anything of greater interest was going on behind him.

“
Keef halik?
How you doing?” Nasser tried to introduce himself and offer his hand, but Youssef’s friend ignored him and kept looking off to the side.

“So this is the idiot who puts bombs under school buses,” he said in Arabic, putting down his little cup.

Nasser found he couldn’t respond; his mouth was full of dust. Here was the great hero of the Afghanistan war, the Cairo bus shootings, and Flight 502. He was shorter and thinner than Nasser had expected, with hot black eyes, a narrow, long, horse-like face, and a sharp dagger of a beard. Youssef said they should call him Dr. Ahmed, though he didn’t say what his degree was in.

He’d been everywhere and nowhere at all, according to Youssef. He had five different passports and five different names. He’d been Egyptian, Palestinian, Iranian, Syrian, even a citizen of Kuwait. He’d led student revolts against the Shah in the seventies, fought the Soviet oppressors, and before falling out of favor with his fellow terrorists he’d planted bombs that killed dozens of Jews in Israel. But there was something finicky, almost fussy about him. He did and said everything twice as fast as necessary as if to emphasize his impatience to get on with his great comeback.

“You say you are going to put the
hadduta
in the school and then you put it under a bus,” said Dr. Ahmed, pulsating slightly in the easy chair Youssef never let anyone else sit in and viciously working a handkerchief around the bottom of his nose.

“There was a lot of security, sheik.” Nasser sat down on the couch and started to defend himself. “There were too many witnesses and even cameras …”

“You are an idiot, my friend,” the doctor said, quickly putting the handkerchief away and picking up the coffee again. “On this, we are all agreed.”

Nasser looked around the room and realized Youssef had hidden all of his weight-lifting equipment and bootlegged videos, instead putting up a picture of the al-Aksa Mosque. There weren’t any McDonald’s containers either.
Sheik, how can you believe so fervently and live so comfortably in this godless country?
Nasser had asked Youssef before.
It’s all just a ruse to fit in
, the Great Bear had told him with a shrug.
Always have two faces
—
one for your friends and one for your enemies
—
but never get them mixed up.
Clearly the visitor had little tolerance for such excuses.

“To target a school is not such a bad idea,” said the doctor, blowing on his coffee and looking at a spot just below Nasser’s chin. “But to do it so badly. To make it into a joke. What is the point? Can you tell me?”

“Tell him, sheik,” said Nasser, turning to the Great Bear for support. “Tell him why we thought of it.”

But instead of explaining how they meant to disrupt the governor’s visit, Youssef just coughed and took another pill. “I think it was you who brought it up, my friend,” he said softly.

Nasser stared at him. So this was how it would be. He was to take all the blame himself and Youssef the warrior, the father he never had, would not help him.

The corners of his eyes burned and his tongue thickened. But he swallowed hard and said no more.

“Now there is only confusion and no point has been made.” Dr. Ahmed crossed and uncrossed his legs, seeming suddenly disgruntled by his own smallness. “I was watching the CNN
International News
in Egypt and this was hardly mentioned at all. There was nothing about it in
al-Hayat
newspaper. A
hadduta
like this should be in the news for weeks and weeks. Instead, the only thing you accomplish is maybe you have the police looking for you now.”

“They don’t know nothing,” Nasser mumbled, again bewildered by what the others had expected to see on the news.

“And neither do you!” The doctor cut the air with an angry slash of his hand. “What do you do this for? To kill one bus driver? You son from a mother’s asshole. We should not even take credit for this.”

“I am very sorry,” said Nasser.

For the briefest moment, he wondered if in fact Youssef had brought him here tonight not to help with the doctor’s comeback, but to be killed for his mistake.

“Where did you find this imbecile, anyway?” Dr. Ahmed asked Youssef. “Look at him. Look how pale he is! Is he even an Arab?”

“Both my parents are from Palestine, sheik.” Nasser rested a hand on his cheek, again feeling ashamed of his inability to grow a proper beard.

“Crusaders must have fucked your ancestors.” The doctor glanced down, sneering at Nasser’s Timberlands. “And what about these boots? Is this what the cowboys wear?”

“A gift from my father. I thought they were only work boots.”

“It’s like an infection, America. It works its way into you and makes you weaker. It destroys you if you’re not careful.” Dr. Ahmed stood up and began to walk in a circle around Nasser, limping slightly and taking him in from all angles. “Youssef tells me your father is married to an American woman. Are your sisters being raised as Americans?”

“No, sheik. They still have their honor.”

“Well. That is something, at least.” Dr. Ahmed sighed and blew on the coffee again. “There’s nothing more important than a family’s honor.”

“Allahu akbar,”
said Nasser.

It was amazing how quickly he’d fallen into the rhythm of wanting to impress this man. Part of it was knowing the visitor’s history, but another part was simply the way the doctor was staring at him. As if he found the whole idea of human beings tiresome. You either crumbled before such a look or found a way to stand up before it. He reminded Nasser of the hard men back home. The ones who didn’t let Israeli guards slap their faces.

“Sheik, I know I’ve done wrong,” Nasser said. “But I’m ready to make up for it.”