The first thing they did upon arriving in the capital a little before noon was get food from a drive-thru (cheeseburgers, fries, shakes), which they consumed in the backseat of the car on their way to view the target: a hospital named after an infidel saint. They did not go into the hospital, nor even get out of the car; but sat in the car and looked at the entrance to the emergency room, which, sometime between nine and ten o’clock that night, depending, said the dispatcher, upon how soon symptoms present in the general public, you are to walk through. Inside, you will be in a large room filled with people, perhaps several hundred of them. It will be loud and chaotic. Do not look into the faces of any of them. As we practiced, you will walk to the center of the room, cry Subhan’Allah as loud as your voice can go, and pull the cord. That is the hour in which you will meet God …
Then: single room with single window, table, television, a few carpet remnants where Karim and Yassim and the man knelt and said the afternoon prayer — in the midst of which the food Karim had eaten not two hours before, apparently not accepted by his stomach for digestion, hit the floodgate of his bowels with a sudden and merciless pressure. As he performed the actions of salat — bending at the waist, bowing, and saying Subhan’Allah — he tried to hold himself closed, clenching the muscles with all his might and eyeing the bathroom: only a few feet away, but also scarcely distinct from the main room itself and with no type of ventilation. You cannot walk away from prayers to take a shit. But what if one is physically incapable of prostrating, of kneeling and pressing one’s forehead to the carpet, without losing everything one is trying so desperately to keep in? Just a few more minutes, five at the most. But his control slipping with every passing second (that garbage he had eaten, wolfed down as if not having had a meal in days; like a drug while being chewed and swallowed, but afterward, almost immediately upon finishing, how queasy he had felt and full of regret) — every second an eternity and not even at the first prostration and thinking if you shit your pants right now and going already for the door, not knowing what in the world he had been thinking waiting so long, unbuckling his belt while angling his backside and going into a squat and begging his body to hang on for just one more fraction of a moment, not caring now about smell or sound, only that he get his pants down, but the body refusing to grant the self even that much latitude, so that what the body refuses to harbor, instead of being contained by clothing, explodes onto clothing and hands and toilet and floor …
And now, five hours later: he stands at the window with Yassim, looking down at the smoke shop.
“Wish we could do it one more time,” Yassim says.
“What.”
“Dream …”
And then a knock on the door and the uncle who is no uncle peers through the glassed hole of the door, then unbolts the door and opens it — and a second man comes in, carrying a duffel bag.
Sun going down.
Almost time to pray again. Last time to ever pray in this world. Two, three hours left now (depending on how soon symptoms present). In the duffeclass="underline" the belts. Not your decision. None of it by your own will. Not willed by you any more than what happened in that bathroom earlier in the day: a thing your body does and cannot be stopped from doing. For it has been written. Written that you would shit your pants from fear seven to eight hours before the achievement of your goal, shit all over your clothes and yourself and the floor of this ugly apartment the way that dog shat on the dusty ground of the barn as you bent over his bleeding body with the knife and held the edge to his neck, he looking into your eyes with his, seeming to know what was coming and seeming to desire it, and yet terribly frightened of it, too. But you must not think that those slain in the cause of Allah are dead. They are alive and well provided for by their Lord (Sura 3, verse 169). But what if you, after cutting the dog’s throat, instead of relinquishing the knife, had thrust it suddenly into the belly of the man now laying the belts out on the table and had stabbed the point of it into him with all your strength, picked up the gun he would have dropped and, holding it with two hands, pulled the trigger as he had pulled it against the dog whose throat you had already cut. What if you had done that. But more important, Karim: Why didn’t you?
And Mitch wishing he had not given in and let Dorian go (which he only did because his son confided in him that there was a girl involved and father-son sympathy won out over vigilance), because now he’s not sure where his son is, and, with the stress on the wireless networks, may not be sure of his whereabouts for some time if, as Mitch hopes, Dorian is sheltering in somewhere near the park rather than riding his bike in the open, in air through which something lethal could possibly be drifting right now …
As he drives, he tries the call again. Gets another dead beeping signal. On the radio, they are saying bioterror, but unknown whether food, water, or air. He finds the park deserted (though votive candles are lit and flickering all along the wall of the war memorial), then takes the route home his son would most likely take if riding home, which Mitch is confident Dorian is too smart to be doing, but then he remembers yesterday, the panic his son was in after riding through the rain, and he isn’t so sure if intelligence or even preparedness has much bearing on human behavior once the energy of an emergency has been released; and who is he, in any event, to be judging the decisions of a boy not even twelve years old when his own decisions yesterday and today have been so unintelligent, ill-considered, and driven by emotions he has no excuse, under the circumstances, for not being able to control … What emotions, what are you talking about? Don’t act dumb. Tell me you didn’t leave the house today because of her, to get away from her — after she had gone back into the bedroom and you went in there later and found her in the bed which you had deliberately not slept in the night before because of what she had said to Dorian at dinner (“don’t guilt trip me right now”), when all the kid had been trying to do was give her food. You looked at her in the bed: “What are you doing in here, Kate?” She, after a long delay: “I can’t keep my eyes open.” And you pushed the door closed and asked: “Is this really who you want to be to them?” Them meaning: Your children. This meaning: An image of weakness, of addiction to your belief in your own weakness, so invested in a sense of weakness that you can’t stand with the people who love you, much less stand up to the ones who hate you … Words not so much recalled as rephrased in thought as he drives the route his son would most likely be taking. Not seeing him. Which is a good thing (probably sheltering in, maybe in the old casino building in the center of the park), yet wishing, too, to converge with him on the road so he can get him into the car and bring him home and keep him close until this thing ends, however it ends. Never should have let him leave the house today, as Mitch himself never should have left it. What is wrong with him? With all of them? A family whose members have not only not been together on this defining and exacting day, but have, in fact, one by one, gone missing. She first, to some inner world of despondency. Then he to his office at the college — because when she is like this, she falls into herself like an imploding star that will pull anything in its vicinity over an event horizon of gloom. So he escaped to a place always quiet in these summer months but today nearly soulless, and he sat at the desk in his office and opened the file (listeningvessels.docx) and tried to work on what he’s been writing, if one can correctly call it writing, this phenomenon that, all along, has been more like a streaming of content than a composition of words. But how is he supposed to write when the nation is on high alert and he is so angry, not just about this latest episode of depression but also about an ancient history of which the document on his computer is nothing if not some kind of revision—