He has taken to searching television for traces of God in this infidel society. He watches beauty pageants where luminous-skinned and white-toothed girls, along with one or two token entrants of color, compete in charming die master of ceremonies with their singing or dancing talents and their frequent if hasty expressions of gratitude to the Lord for their blessings, which tJiey intend to devote, when their singing days in bathing suits are done, to their fellow-man in the form of such lofty vocations as doctor, educator, agronomist, or, holiest calling of all, homemaker. Ahmad discovers a specifically Christian channel featuring deep-voiced, middle-aged men in suits of unusual colors, with wide, reflective lapels, who leave off their impassioned rhetoric ("Are you ready for Jesus?" they ask, and "Have you received Jesus in your hearts?") to break suddenly into sly flirtation with the middle-aged female members of the audience, or else jump back, snapping their fingers, into song. Christian song interests Ahmad, above all gospel choruses in iridescent robes, the fat black women bouncing and rolling with an intensity that at times appears artificially induced but at others, as the choruses go on, appears to be genuinely kindled from within. The women hoist high their hands along with their voices and clap in a rocking, infectious manner that spreads even to the smattering of whites among them, this being one area of American experience, like sports and crime, where darker skins unquestionably prevail. Ahmad knows, from Shaikh Rashid's dry, half-smiling allusions, of the Sufi enthusiasm and rapture that had anciently afflicted Islam, but finds not even a faint echo of it in the Islamic channels beamed from Manhattan and Jersey City- just the five calls to prayer broadcast over a still slide of the great mosque of Mohammed Ali in Saladin's Citadel, and solemn panels of bespectacled professors and mullahs discussing the anti-Islamic fury that has perversely possessed the present-day West, and sermons delivered by a turbanned imam seated at a bare table, relayed by a static camera from a studio strictly devoid of images.
It is Charlie who broaches the subject. One day in the cab of the truck, as they pass through an unusually empty piece of northern New Jersey, between an extensive cemetery and a surviving piece of the Meadows-cattails and shiny-leaved reeds rooted in brackish water-he asks, "Something eating you, Madman? You seem quiet lately."
"I am generally quiet, no?"
"Yeah, but this is different. At first it was 'Show me' quiet, now it's more a 'What's up?' kind of quiet."
Ahmad does not have so many friends in the world that he can risk losing one. There is no going back from this juncture, he knows; he has little to go back to. He tells Charlie, "Some days ago, when I was doing deliveries alone, I saw a strange thing. I saw men removing wads of money from that ottoman I delivered to the Shore." "They opened it in front of you?"
"No. I left, and then crept back and looked in the window. Their manner made me suspicious, and curious." "You know what curiosity did to the cat, don't you?" "It killed it. But ignorance can also kill. If I am to deliver, I should know what I am delivering."
"Why so, Ahmad?" Charlie says, almost tenderly. "I saw you as not wanting to know more than you can handle. In truth, ninety-nine percent of the time the furniture you are delivering is just that-furniture."
"But who are that fortunate one percent who win a bonus?" Ahmad feels a tense freedom, now that the juncture is behind them. It is like, he imagines, the release and responsibility a man and a woman feel when they first take off their clothes together. Charlie, too, seems to feel this; his voice sounds lighter, having shed a level of pretense. "The fortunate," he says, "are true believers." "They believe," Ahmad guesses, "in jihad?" "They believe," Charlie carefully restates, "in action. They believe that something can be done. That the Muslim peasant in Mindanao need not starve, that the Bangladeshi child need not drown, that the Egyptian villager need not go blind with schistosomiasis, that the Palestinians need not be strafed by Israeli helicopters, that the faithful need not eat the sand and camel dung of the world while the Great Satan grows fat on sugar and pork and underpriced petroleum. They believe that a billion followers of Islam need not have their eyes and ears and souls corrupted by the poisonous entertainments of Hollywood and a ruthless economic imperialism whose Christian-Jewish God is a decrepit idol, a mere mask concealing the despair of adieists."
"Where does the money come from?" Ahmad asks, when Charlie's words-not so different, after all, from the world-picture that Shaikh Rashid more silkily paints-have run their course. "And what are the recipients to do with these funds?"
"The money comes," Charlie tells him, "from those who love Allah, both within the U.S. and abroad. Think of those four men as seeds placed within the soil, and the money as water to keep the soil moist, so that some day the seeds will split their shells and bloom. Allahu akbar!"
"Does the money," Ahmad persists, "come somehow through Uncle Maurice? His arrival here seems to make a difference, though he disdains the daily workings of the store. And your good father-how much is he part of all this?"
Charlie laughs, indulgently; he is a son who has grown beyond his father but continues to honor him, as Ahmad has done to his own. "Hey, who are you, the CIA? My father is an old-fashioned immigrant, loyal to the system that took him in and let him prosper. If he knew any of what you and I are discussing, he would report us to the FBI."
Ahmad in his new capacity tries a joke: "Who would swiftly mislay the report."
Charlie does not laugh. He says, "These are important secrets that you have extracted from me. They are life-and-death stuff, Madman. I'm wondering right now if I've made a mistake, telling you all this."
Ahmad seeks to minimize what has passed between them.
He realizes that he has swallowed knowledge that cannot be coughed back up. Knowledge is freedom, it said on the front of Central High. Knowledge can also be a prison, with no way out once you're in. "You've made no mistake. You've told me very little. It was not you who led me back to the window to see the money being counted. There could be many explanations for the money. You could have denied knowledge of it, and I would have believed you."
"I could have," Charlie concedes. "Perhaps I should have."
"No. It would have put falsity between us, where there has been trust."
"Then you must tell me this: are you with us?"
"I am with those," Ahmad says slowly, "who are with God."
"O.K. Good enough. Be as silent as God about this. Do not tell your mother. Do not tell your girlfriend."
"I have no girlfriend."
"That's right. I promised to do something about that, didn't I?"
"You said I should get laid."
"Right. I'll work on it."
"Do not, please. It is not yours to work on."
"Friends help each other out," Charlie insists. He reaches over and squeezes the young driver's shoulder, and Ahmad does not entirely like it; it reminds him of Tylenol's bullying grip that time in the high-school hall.
The boy states, with a new-won man's dignity, "One more question, and then I will say nothing until I am spoken to on these matters. Is there a plan developing, with these seeds that are being watered?"
Ahmad knows Charlie's facial expressions so well he does not have to look sideways in the truck to see the man's rubbery lips work around as if exploring the shape of his own teeth, and then heavily exhale in an exaggerated sigh of exasperation. "Like I said, there are always a number of projects under consideration, and how they develop is somewhat hard to predict. What does the Book say, Madman? And the Jews plotted, and God plotted. But of those who plot, God is the best."