The Mirage: A Novel (30 page)

Perhaps he was trying to make a joke. Perhaps he was being overly candid about his own habits. No one ever really knew for sure, and once the remark was leaked to the public by Al Darir’s enemies, he refused all further comment. Morally, of course, the suggestion made no sense: The Quran condemns all intoxicants, not just alcohol. But a much bigger problem was that it displayed, yet again, the administrator’s complete ignorance of American racial sensitivities.

Like cocaine and opium, cannabis had long been illegal in the CSA—not for religious reasons, but out of a belief that its consumption inflamed the lust of black men. In many white communities, Al Darir’s “let them smoke hash” comment was interpreted as an incitement to mass rape. This did not go over well.

It was only a week later that a white mob in Langley hanged the bodies of four Arab civilian contractors from a highway overpass. For Boulos al Darir’s superiors, it was the last straw; as the Marines went into Fairfax County, the administrator was recalled to Riyadh, and his pending Order Number 9, which would have outlawed pork products, was quietly shelved. But the damage had been done, and on one issue at least, white Americans and black Americans were now in total agreement: The Coalition Authority had outstayed its welcome.

Mustafa got up to stretch his legs. He noticed Amal laughing at something from her own reading packet and asked, “What is it?”

“Our tax dollars at work,” Amal said. She showed him a pamphlet,
Thirteen Simple Rules for Dealing with Americans
, designed for first-time visitors with short attention spans.

Rule #1 was
DON’T EXPECT THANKS
: “Americans are a proud people. Though their civilization is still in its infancy, they consider themselves equal, if not superior to, older and more established cultures. The fact that they had to be liberated by outsiders is a source of great shame to them, and while the vast majority are grateful for the gift of freedom, they are extremely reluctant to show it.

“You may feel that Americans complain too much. Try to ignore this. Pointing out the many ways in which their lives have improved will only make them complain more.
Never
tell an American that they ‘ought to be thankful.’ In American culture this is considered a grave insult and may lead to violence.”

The accompanying cartoon illustration showed a tank parked on the lawn of a house. The tank driver stood beside his vehicle, smiling and holding out a hand of friendship, but the owner of the house, a sullen black man in a tri-cornered hat, had his arms crossed. In the background a woman could be seen peeking out the house’s front window, looking frightened—as well she might be, Mustafa thought, with a cannon pointed at her living room.

“Isn’t it brilliant?” Amal said. She indicated the byline on the pamphlet’s back cover. “The American Culture Initiative, I remember my mother showing me the budget earmark for this. They got three million riyals just for research. Three million riyals, to figure out that people won’t say thank you if you drive a tank into their yard. That’s money well spent, don’t you think?”

“It might have been,” Mustafa said, “if anyone in the Coalition had paid attention.”

Two hours later they crossed the Moroccan coastline. As the cargolifter headed out over the Atlantic, Mustafa opened a folder marked
TOP SECRET
. Inside was a summary and partial transcript of the interrogation of Lyndon Baines Johnson.

The Coalition had not planned on taking the American president alive. The opening move in the “shock and awe” campaign had been an attempted decapitation strike: Arabian stealth bombers based out of Houston had targeted the White House, the Capitol Building, and seven command bunkers scattered throughout the District of Columbia. The attacks on the Capitol and the bunkers had been successful, but the smart bombs dropped on the White House had all either missed the target or failed to detonate—a statistical unlikelihood that verged on the miraculous and convinced the Coalition air commander not to bother with a follow-up strike.

LBJ must have seen the hand of God in the White House’s survival as well. Rather than go into hiding once the invasion started, he remained in the executive mansion until ground forces arrived to apprehend him. Two different stories were told about his capture. In one version, reported by FOX News and dismissed by the Arab government as propaganda, a defiant Johnson was waiting in the Oval Office when the UAS Army Fourth Infantry entered the White House. The president saluted the soldiers, then thwacked his cane against the unexploded thousand-kilo bomb that had crushed his desk, asking, “Did you gentlemen lose this?”

In the other version, as told to Al Jazeera by an Army corporal who claimed to have been there, Johnson was found upstairs, cowering in the Lincoln Bedroom. Frightened and confused, he had seemed unable at first to comprehend the presence of foreign troops in his home. “What are you doing here?” he demanded, over and over again. Mustafa had always suspected that this version of events was propaganda as well, the notion of a senile dictator fitting too neatly with the official rationale for the war. But according to the folder in his hands, the story was accurate, except for one detail: The question Johnson asked his captors was not “What are you doing here?” but “What am
I
doing here?”

The Coalition’s leaders debated what to do with LBJ now that he was in custody. The consensus was that he should be turned over to the Americans for trial—once the country had a functioning legal system again—but before that happened there were some questions that needed answering, about 11/9 and about the elusive WMDs. A few hardliners advocated sending him to the Chwaka Bay detention camp on the island of Zanzibar, but that plan was rejected for fear that the ninety-four-year-old Johnson was too frail to survive the trip, let alone the standard interrogation process. Instead he was flown by helicopter to Cape Cod, to the old Kennedy Compound. There, attended by a team of Navy doctors, he slept in a real bed and ate decent food. He was permitted books, music, and DVDs, though he was denied newspapers and live television. Twice daily if he wished he was allowed to go for walks on the beach, frogmen in the surf making sure he didn’t try to drown himself.

With this gentle treatment, his physical and mental health improved, as did his mood. By the time an intelligence officer named Abd al Rahim al Talib arrived to interview him, Johnson was ready to talk.

AL TALIB:
Please tell me if you would, Mr. President, what is the Domino Theory?

JOHNSON:
An idea of William Westmoreland’s. Kissinger and McNamara weren’t enthusiastic about getting involved in a land war, but Westmoreland was all for it. His theory was that each piece of territory we took on the way to Texas would be like a domino falling, helping us knock down the next one, and by the time we got to Austin we’d have built up so much momentum that we could just keep going, all the way to the California coast. Bring the whole country under one roof like God intended.

AL TALIB:
The whole country? Don’t you mean the whole continent, Mr. President?

JOHNSON:
The country and the continent are one, Mr. Al Talib. That’s destiny.

AL TALIB:
It would seem many of your would-be countrymen didn’t agree.

JOHNSON:
You mean the Pentecostals? It was a mistake to pick on them first. People who believe the Holy Spirit grants them magic powers are inclined to be stubborn. Still, I wouldn’t be too sure about what they do or don’t agree with. You’re a man of faith, Mr. Al Talib. Don’t you find yourself fighting hardest against those things you know in your heart to be true?

AL TALIB:
Yes. But the struggle you are alluding to is not one that can be won with violence. At least I don’t believe so.

JOHNSON:
I regret the violence. I know history will regard me as a warmonger and that was never my intention. Everything I did was to defend my country.

AL TALIB:
But you do feel remorse?

JOHNSON:
Of course I do. How could I not? I have the blood of thousands of Americans on my hands. I’m going to have to answer to God for that, and soon, and I am not looking forward to it.

AL TALIB:
And what about Arabian blood, Mr. President? What about the thousands killed in Baghdad and—

JOHNSON:
There you lose me, sir.

AL TALIB:
Do I, Mr. President? As you say, soon you must answer to God, from whom nothing is hidden. Why not make a full confession now?

JOHNSON:
I can only confess to my own sins, Mr. Al Talib, just as I can only acknowledge my own faults. One thing I am not is a fool.

AL TALIB:
I’m not suggesting you’re a fool, Mr. President.

JOHNSON:
That’s exactly what you’re doing, when you accuse me of attacking your country. Why would I do that?

AL TALIB:
As revenge for the Gulf War, of course. We stopped your dominoes from falling. Surely this made you angry?

JOHNSON:
Yes, it did. And when I get angry at someone, I call him a son of a bitch. I don’t burn down his house and start a feud with his whole family. Especially a feud I know I can’t win.

“The prisoner remains adamant that he had no involvement in 11/9,” Al Talib wrote to his superiors in Riyadh. “When I suggested that the mountain Christians who claimed responsibility for the attack were too backward to have carried it off without help, LBJ replied that it wasn’t long ago that ‘the Ay-rabs’ were ‘riding around on camels,’ and yet only a bigot would argue that we were incapable of ‘both great and terrible deeds.’ I then asked him to speculate: If it wasn’t the mountain men, who might be responsible? He reminded me that the hijackers were all traveling on Texas passports and noted that the Evangelical Republic’s leaders were obviously pleased to see him out of power. ‘I’m not saying they did it, but that’s what I’d look for in a culprit: Someone who wanted to start a war, or a jee-had as you call it.’

“As to the other matter, I regret that I’ve made no better progress, though here the problem isn’t denial but rather the inability to have a coherent conversation. Johnson as you know suffers from incipient dementia. Though generally lucid, he has episodes in which he becomes delusional and believes that his dream of ‘uniting America’ has already come to pass. These episodes are typically random, but they can also be triggered, and the subject in question appears to be one of the most potent triggers.”

AL TALIB:
I am sorry, Mr. President, but once again I must raise the subject of the WMDs.

JOHNSON:
WMDs?

AL TALIB:
[Sighs.] Yes sir, weapons of mass destruction. Nuclear, biological, and—

JOHNSON:
Nuclear? You’re asking me whether America has nuclear weapons?

AL TALIB:
Yes.

JOHNSON:
Of course we do. What do you think a superpower
is
, son?

AL TALIB:
And where are these weapons, Mr. President?

JOHNSON:
Out west.

AL TALIB:
West of the capital?

JOHNSON:
No,
west
west. Wyoming, Montana, the Dakotas—

AL TALIB:
Montana? In the Rocky Mountains?

JOHNSON:
—and Missouri.

AL TALIB:
But how could that be, Mr. President? Missouri is Mormon territory, is it not?

JOHNSON:
Mormons? What do the damn Mormons have to do with it?

At no point during the interrogation or in any of his communiqués with Riyadh did Al Talib give any sign that he thought Johnson’s “delusions” might reflect a broader mythology shared by others, nor was there any explicit mention of the mirage. But perhaps in response to the “triggers,” Johnson’s mental state began to deteriorate again, and as his statements became more cryptic and oracular, gaps appeared in the transcript.

The last interview took place following a five-day period during which Johnson was ill with a fever. The Riyadhis, having accepted by this point that they were not going to get a confession, and fearful of having LBJ die in their custody, decided to terminate the interrogation process after one final exchange.

AL TALIB:
How are you today, Mr. President?

JOHNSON:
[Inaudible.]

AL TALIB:
“Bushed”? You are tired? Here, have some water.

JOHNSON:
Thank you.

AL TALIB:
I won’t stay long today.

JOHNSON:
No, it’s all right. Sit down, sir. I know we’re running out of time. Or rather, I am.

AL TALIB:
Has someone told you something, Mr. President?

JOHNSON:
The Almighty and I have been in consultation.

AL TALIB:
God spoke to you?

JOHNSON:
After a fashion. Would you like to hear about a dream I had?

AL TALIB:
If you wish.

JOHNSON:
I was back in Stonewall, in a one-room schoolhouse.

AL TALIB:
This is the school you attended as a boy?

JOHNSON:
The schoolhouse itself was a set, from the LBJ Library in Washington. But in the dream it had been moved to Stonewall, and because there was no roof I could look up and see the sky that I was born under.

I was alone, sitting in a pupil’s desk. There were ten desks in all, arranged in three rows of three, with the last desk in the middle of what would have been the fourth row. I was directly in front of that one, in seat number eight. And at the front of the room was a blackboard with ten digits written on it, one through zero . . . Your English is so good, Mr. Al Talib, I assume you’re also familiar with how we Americans write our numbers?

AL TALIB:
You call them Arabic numerals for a reason, Mr. President.

JOHNSON:
Oh yes, of course. Well, I was sitting there, looking at the numbers on the blackboard, and the sky above got very dark and there was an . . . earthquake, I guess, only more than that, as if God had picked up the whole planet in His hands and was shaking it. My desk stayed put, and I myself couldn’t move, but most everything else went flying. The blackboard came right off the wall and went tumbling end over end, whirling around the room. Even when it went behind my head, though, I could still see it, as though it were reflected in a mirror.