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- Herausgeber: Orenda Books
- Kategorie: Abenteuer, Thriller, Horror
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2015
A former intelligence agent is accused of terrorism, and his memoir assessed by an eccentric, erratic psychologist to establish the reality of an event that changed everything … A beautifully written, mesmerising, shocking and sophisticated debut novel'Smart and searing' Publishers Weekly'Captivating, remarkably original … it is a book of our time' Edward Wilson'An exquisitely drawn debut that twists and turns to its stunning conclusion' Cal Moriarty____________________A former intelligence agent stands accused of terrorism, held without charge in a secret overseas prison. His memoir is in the hands of a brilliant but erratic psychologist whose annotations paint a much darker picture. As the story unravels, we are forced to assess the truth for ourselves, and decide not only what really happened on one fateful overseas assignment, but who is the real terrorist.Peopled by a diverse and unforgettable cast of characters, whose reliability as narrators is always questioned, and with a multi-layered plot heaving with unexpected and often shocking developments, Jihadi: A Love Story is an intelligent thriller that asks big questions.Complex, intriguing and intricately woven, this is an astonishing debut that explores the nature of good and evil alongside notions of nationalism, terrorism and fidelity, and, above all, the fragility of the human mind.____________________'If it was Yusuf Toropov's intention to leave us pondering good and evil, right and wrong, love and loss, wondering who the good guys were, he certainly succeeded. I know one thing for sure, he's a wonderful writer and a born storyteller' Mari Hannah'With echoes of Bellow, Pynchon and Kafka, Toporov's tale is a modern classic that challenges our perceptions at every turn' Cal Moriarty'Jihadi is a gripping tale if a clash of cultures and individuals told with panache, dazzling wit and remorseless intelligence' Willian Ryan'Intelligently written and multi-layered … simply enchanting' Qaisra Shahraz'Bold and skilfully executed … bravely tackles a complex and timely subject' Frankie Gaffney
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Jihadi
A Love Story
YUSUF TOROPOV
From the Desk of R.L. Firestone
This is no love story, though the late author would have had it so. A sad tale, a tale of treason, Jihadi, an encrypted memoir posing as a novel, is the work of the terrorist Ali Liddell, upon whom the justice of God descended on July 3, 2006. This date marked both his forty-fifth birthday and the fourteenth anniversary of the star-cursed day that I recommended we hire him. I here seek formal immunity against prosecution for his death.
Although my detractors never fail to note that the terrorist’s last name rhymes with ‘riddle’, the case against him could not be clearer cut. Much has been made of the imagined legal and moral dilemmas presented by Liddell’s American citizenship. Yet the three facts driving his case remain indisputable.
First, that Liddell received briefings on classified material of the most sensitive kind on an almost daily basis.Second, that he suffered a nervous breakdown prior to writing Jihadi.And third, that he was the first and only senior staffer in our history to convert to Islam. This travesty occurred after his final overseas mission, during which a series of unpardonable security breaches resulted in his being targeted, seduced, renamed, and reprogrammed by a female jihadi, now in custody: Fatima Adara.We may expect more such attempts at subversion, not only from overseas operatives, but from stateside religious extremists as well – see my essay The Liddell Syndrome.
Thelonius Liddell drafted Jihadi during his final months, in the demented script of a masochist, using an ink of water and charcoal, and occasional specks of his own blood (minute amounts of which served as some kind of thickening agent). The work is thus attributable solely to him via DNA, graphological and forensic evidence.
The facsimiles from which I work correlate precisely with Liddell’s original pages, each now encased in Lucite and held within a temperature-controlled basement at Directorate headquarters in Langley, Virginia. The sheets were impounded by Operations only minutes after I discovered them in Liddell’s cell.
A full embargo on this material has been set in place, and for good reason, yet my detractors – emboldened, perhaps, by the recent resignation of Mr. Unferth – now debate, with apparent seriousness, whether this should be lifted. In so doing, these misguided simpletons aid and comfort the (obvious and unseen, late and living) enemies of our nation. And enemies is indeed the proper word.
Why does the manuscript even exist? A difficult question. Enemy combatant Liddell, under surveillance at Bright Light, a technically nonexistent resort for violent religious extremists, was, per our protocols, forbidden writing implements. He somehow obtained several reams of letterhead from an unauthorized source. Post-mortem, a syringe, repurposed to create his book, was found in his quarters. Such was his arsenal.
To date, the manuscript has been seen by less than a half-dozen persons, all senior members of the Directorate. Some argue that we are this book’s only intended audience, or that its message is merely an extended, largely incoherent insult, not worthy of deep classification. I offer, with this commentary, my respectful dissent.
The reasons for this dissent begin with the work’s now-infamous opening page: Liddell’s dedication. It has attracted almost as much attention as the similarly obscure reference within the work to a mythical ‘hundredth chapter’. Is the dedication a call to action – or some harmless literary ruse? Until we can answer such questions with certainty, we must not risk compromising our assets or our nation’s security. For the sake of the innocents, not to mention the ideals of democracy, free enterprise, and good sportsmanship that we are sworn to protect, Liddell’s hidden fatwas, his paranoid ravings, his absurd accusations, must never reach their intended audience: terrorists in training.
A few more words are in order before I close this prefatory note. This commentary is not merely a personal defence, but also a labour of love. It is dedicated to the nation and the Directorate to which I have sacrificed more than can be recounted here. I hope and pray that that nation, that Directorate, may yet see fit to show me some compassion.
It pains me to ask for this. I feel entitled to do so because I took a stand. By dedicating my expertise to the cause of freedom – I was the only official assigned to interrogate Liddell privately – I did my duty. Not always perfectly, but always out of a profound love for our country and its values.
I saved lives. I do not deserve prosecution for having done so. Those who claim I do, those who challenge my love for America or for the Directorate because a terrorist died, are wrong.
You who accuse me of murder and torture (hateful, hateful words!), know that I did all of this for you, too, even though positions such as yours are unlikely to be softened by appeals such as mine. Know that the terrorists count on our uncertainty, on our wasting time on debates like these before we take action.
A question for you. You must choose between: A) flying on a plane whose route and security procedures benefit from intelligence gathered by means of ‘torture’; or B) flying on a plane whose crew have no such intelligence.
Would you ever choose the latter? You clear your throat. You turn the page. You press the button and summon the stewardess for another coffee.
We who cared for you, who risked our lives for you, and who occasionally erred in the service of your journey’s sacred tedium, who put your well-being before our own, we selected for you the sweet boring (A) that we knew you would select for yourself, over the potentially more eventful (B). We seek absolution now because we did our duty. Because we took care of you. Took Care Of You.
We ask now only for the same security and respect that our detractors within the Directorate enjoy each day, and barely notice.
A final housekeeping note: Our condition appears to have occasioned some intermittent loss of short-term memory. (Never, as far as we can tell, long-term.) This has complicated the project somewhat and necessitated multiple careful inspections of the material. We apologize for the delay in forwarding this.
R.L Firestone
DEDICATED TO KHADIJAH – You know I limp now, and move slower than I once did. One way or another I will get out of here. Get home.
I am the dead guy telling you this story. Stories are all I have left. Stories will get me out of here, get me back where I belong. Once upon a time, you believed that man who said, ‘Justice is the first virtue of social institutions, as truth is of systems of thought.’ Justice will have to do for this story, because none of what follows is true. It is all one long lie. If you come across something seemingly true in these pages, remember this: Only the Word of Allah is true. I pray that Word guides us.
i. Khadijah.
Bucharest, United 101 last night. Didn’t get much sleep until the layover at Kennedy. Passport viable after all. And then that exhausting drive through the desert! To the purpose: Liddell’s text is in English, as is the transcript from which I work, but readers embarking upon this text must nevertheless note two points: first, that the English phonemes KH and H are expressed by precisely the same letter in the language of the Koran; second, that the reproduction of vowels within the written text of the Muslim Holy Scripture is forbidden. KHADIJAH thus becomes an anagram for JIHAD, which Ali (aka Liddell) personifies and invokes here. Look at these swollen feet.
This story begins with a prayer and ends with a prayer, Khadijah. I pray our destinies may yet intertwine to our benefit. I pray we may forgive each other. I pray our trials in this world may benefit us in this life and the next. And despite my falsehood, my guilt, I pray the Lord liberates us both, guides us to His Straight Path and spares us the fires of Hell.
Contents
1In Which the Terrorist Describes his Surroundings
ii. (lacuna! Almost missed my own index card on this, only saw it while reviewing materials on plane)
The next passage of the manuscript is, my notes remind me, marked ‘Chapter One’ in parentheses set within Liddell’s ample margins. This faint but visible two-word notation, confirmed by personal evaluation of both the facsimile and the Lucite-encased originals, does not appear in the otherwise faithful official transcript compiled by the Directorate. The attentive eye of an editor has been wanting! All ninety-nine of the terrorist’s chapters are numbered, but no text from Liddell describes them.
I have supplied, or am in the process of supplying, all of the present chapter titles.
He tried not to write this book, but, as a dead guy, felt he had an obligation to do so. He owed her that.
He counts as a dead guy, even though his heart beats, his blood flows, and his mind races, six out of every seven days, within a ten-metre-by-ten-metre cell in the containment unit he calls The Beige Motel. He used to live in a place called Salem, Massachusetts. Now he lives here.
They pride themselves on consistency at The Beige Motel. They see to it that your fluorescent lights never go out. They make certain the brittle, E-flat hum of the place never varies. They follow a strict time scheme, confirmed daily by whether or not you have just been served scrambled eggs on Styrofoam. The plate of scrambled eggs is set on a tray that they place in a creaking, rotating compartment built right into your locked door. Scrambled eggs mean morning. Anything else means later.
He supposes they could switch things up and serve him scrambled eggs at dinnertime to mess with his sense of time. If they wanted, they could. They do mess with his sense of time. So far they have never done that, though.
He misses his wife.
Every seventh day he hears the door groan: Sunday. It opens, and someone leads him away. He inspects a soundproofed enclosure of linoleum and echoes called the Yard. In the Yard, he discusses world affairs with the other guests and reconfirms that morning remains morning by staring at a rectangular sheet of glass set so high into one wall that the place feels, to him, ever so slightly like a church. The glass is probably bulletproof. Only sky is visible through it.
He has concluded that this sheet of glass in the Yard’s wall happens to have exactly the same length-to-width ratio as the nineteen leaves of blank paper AbdulKarim smuggles to him each week. Sometimes, when he is writing, he imagines he can see the gold of early dawn through the window in the Yard. He imagines this sheet, on which he now writes, as that impossibly high-mounted window. He imagines it has just lowered itself and opened for him. He imagines golden light, imagines flying toward it.
Whatever he actually sees through that big, inaccessible, rectangular window in the Yard – sleet or clouds or, lately, swirling dust – means a new week has begun. Ten hours into that week, his day has vanished, and he makes his way, escorted, back to his own little corner of the Beige Motel. There are two beds there, but no one lives in the tiny compartment with him. Strictly speaking, he doesn’t live in it, either. He died months ago, or might as well have.
Somehow, he got on the bad side of a network of unjust institutions. These institutions interrogate people and make them disappear.
He just wrote, ‘somehow’. But he knows how he got on their bad side, why he was interrogated when he arrived, why he will be interrogated again. It was because he spoke justice. When you do that, they say you are gone. When they say you are gone, you are gone; you’re simply waiting around for a muscle in the middle of your chest to stop sending spurts of freshly oxygenated blood through your arteries. You are a dead guy in an orange jumpsuit, sitting in a room, patiently waiting for scrambled eggs, strolling one day out of seven among other patient dead guys in orange jumpsuits, who are also sitting in a room waiting for scrambled eggs. All of you are dead.
iii. patient dead guys
Liddell, as noted above, created this manuscript while confined at Bright Light. He did his work in a remote corner of that beige cell of his, during daily six-hour periods when the video surveillance system, more primitive than the American unit one would have preferred, was set to ‘stationary’ rather than ‘scan’. This was meant to permit sleep for those who had earned it. He imagined he could elude our system of controls. Patient patient.
The dead guy telling this story remembers Fatima, in a gold headscarf, her weeping eyes wide, begging him to tell the truth.
iv. Fatima.
No comment. Yet. Haven’t the energy. Need to nap. Errors likelier when tired. Note about control systems goes here?
(Continued) I still recall with a chuckle the first active Jihadi I interrogated at Bagram Air Force Base. The dusky, defiant Habibullah, an unreliable front-line informant, proved as taciturn with me as he had with his three previous interlocutors. I administered a series of peroneal strikes as he hung by both wrists from the sturdy ceiling of his questioning room (one area of my expertise is compliance blows). I later learned that a pack of imprudent, thrill-starved Green Berets imitated my technique and took turns delivering careless strikes to the limp, increasingly exhausted Habibullah. The story goes that they kept this up for twelve or fourteen hours (a statistically ineffective application), and found his cries of ‘Allah! Allah!’ amusing. Boys will be boys. True to his own wish, Habibullah passed away in captivity. A simple duty to circulate best practices compels me to record here that my avoidance of any paperwork connected with this episode spared the Directorate involvement in the (minor) legal flap and so forth that ensued stateside. A pasting error. But retain last sentence?
It isn’t so much that he started writing this book in order to keep himself from going crazy, which is what AbdulKarim, who smuggles him paper in the Yard, always says. Everybody goes crazy somewhere down the line. Writing a book won’t stop that. Writing a book can repay a debt, though. Writing a book can confirm one’s guilt.
The dead guy telling this story remembers two human bodies of contrasting sizes, face down on busy Malaika Street. A spreading pool of mingled blood. The sound of an approaching siren. A gun in Thelonius’s hand.
Thelonius made a promise, not to Fatima, but to himself. To cut through the bullshit. To plead guilty. The book does that. ‘Hi, Becky,’ he writes now.
The dead guy telling this story remembers redflowinghaired Becky recruiting him into the Directorate in 1992. Smiling green eyes from behind the barrier of her desk. His certainty that she would soon touch him. That she would take good care of him. That there was no shame in that. That there could be honour in being taken care of, a home in that. Becky came from a long line of caretakers. Her mother, Prudence, had been a caretaker. Prudence’s husband had needed taking care of, too, having been raised by alcoholics.
Becky’s caring, green eyes smiling at Thelonius. Making everything okay. He only killed people when specifically instructed to do so by the United States of America.
See how the small white milk carton on that breakfast tray is vibrating?
2In Which Liddell Engages in Fashionable Howling
During the first hour of September 9, 2005, he showered, dressed, ate his breakfast in the middle of the night, gathered his things, stared out the window to make sure his limousine was there, and, after a suitable delay, climbed into the back. He enjoyed making the limousine wait, then making it hurry. He told the driver he preferred to do at least eighty on these predawn jaunts to Logan.
When his plane touched down in the Islamic Republic, nineteen hours later, Wafa A––, a twenty-one-year-old pregnant mother-to-be, had not yet begun her breakfast. Wafa happened to live in a disputed region of the Islamic Republic. She did not have an appetite. She was thinking about her sister Fatima.
Wafa reminded herself that she must call Fatima and congratulate her for being hired as a translator for the Bureau of Islamic Investigation. Wafa sat on a plastic lawn chair in an overgrown green area, at a bone-white plastic table she shared with her husband and mother-in-law, drinking tea with them in the sun, thinking this thought of reaching out to her sister Fatima, of warning her again about the dangers of working with men, when hundreds of tiny metal darts, their points tight and sharp as needles, tore into her flesh and the flesh of her unborn baby.
According to Wafa’s husband, the tea drinkers heard a strange collapsing sound. Almost an inhalation.
PLOOF.
Followed by screams. He turned in his chair, intending to see whatever it was that had made the odd noise, but never had the chance. He only heard the sound of metal projectiles finding their way, at high speed, into his body, leaving him in a state of shock.
THWOCK.
There were not enough darts embedded in Wafa’s husband’s flesh to kill him. Nor was Wafa’s mother-in-law hit by enough darts, in the necessary points, to lead to major organ damage or blood loss. Wafa, however, facing that wave head-on, strafed by that barrage of tiny darts, saw herself and her unborn, unnamed daughter shredded.
The miniature metal darts were called flechettes. Flechettes are less than an inch in length, about the size of a finishing nail. Pointed at the front, they carry four fins in the rear, designed to accelerate their speed. To the casual observer, they resemble small sporting darts.
On that warm, pleasant morning in the village of D—, seven thousand five hundred flechettes had been packed into a shell which was fired from a tank rolling behind a stand of trees near Wafa’s home. The shell disintegrated in midair with that PLOOF sound, the sound of air sucking into itself.
The shell scattered its darts in a conical pattern over an area about nine hundred feet long and three hundred feet wide. Only about four feet of that three-hundred-foot-wide arc had disrupted the tea drinkers.
Flechettes are designed to maim and kill concealed enemy soldiers: soldiers hiding in dense vegetation, for instance. Flechettes will pierce a pine plank or a thin sheet of steel. Once they reach high velocity, they curve and hook into every available surface, including human flesh. When flechettes reach maximum speed, they travel with such force that sometimes only the fins at the back are left sticking out from walls.
At the moment Wafa and her unborn child were being peppered with flechettes, Thelonius Liddell was not yet ready to deplane. His aircraft was coasting to a stop on a runway no one was supposed to know about. He was reading, scribbling in the margins of a long briefing about his mission in the Islamic Republic. Thelonius, uncertain about this mission and preoccupied with it, read his brief for the third time. He found something in it unpersuasive, and suspected it contained factual errors.
A few miles away, Wafa and her daughter were preoccupied with dying.
As Wafa died, another shell from another tank penetrated the room where laughing Hassan D., aged two and a half, sat with his taciturn eight-year-old brother, whose given name will not be repeated here.
Their father, Atta D., an attentive man, had spotted two American soldiers on a hillside, gathered up both boys, and escorted them inside for safety’s sake. When Thelonius Liddell’s unnumbered plane touched down on its unnamed runway in support of its classified mission, Atta’s boys were preoccupied with learning a new board game. Atta was teaching this game to them when he noticed a large hole in the side of his home.
The shell that made that hole in Atta’s home disintegrated and released its own thousands of flechettes, hooking into the toddler, his brother, and his father.
KA-THOK.
Little Hassan, who resembled his late mother, was the closest person to the brand-new hole in the wall. Despite being the smallest one in the room, he accumulated the largest number of flechettes. Hassan, who was Atta’s favourite, was preoccupied with dying, too.
Of the three, Atta, the father, took the fewest hooks. None of his flechettes was fatal.
Much later, investigators from the United Nations examined the bloody wall near which Hassan was killed. They noted that it was studded with flechettes, but that there were some blank spots. Some of the investigators conjectured that these blank spots on the wall corresponded to the positions of the two boys as they had crouched on the floor.
The game they had been playing there was called Sorry!
Sorry! is an American board game adapted from something Muslims invented and started playing in about the year 1400. Sorry! was first sold in 1940 by Parker Brothers, a company based in Salem, Massachusetts.
v. Sorry!
And awake. Here, the first of many fatal discrepancies. There are scores, hundreds of examples of Liddell’s clinical disregard for plain fact from which to choose, but the one offered here, his embarrassingly verifiable ignorance of the datum that the British version of the board game Sorry! was patented in 1929 and marketed in the UK under that title the following year, is worth examining closely. Sorry! was first sold, under licence, in the United States in 1934 – not 1940, as Liddell claims. On such slips empires fall. The sheer volume of such factual errors in the manuscript, many of which take the form of seditious libel, gives rise to a host of grave security concerns. Note that Liddell used verifiable names for all his main characters, and then, lacking internet access, simply made up whatever information he could not research properly in captivity. I operate under no such constraints. This telling Sorry! slip is brought to you by our Wi-Fi-enabled Motel 6, to which we are warming. Here, inexhaustible white stacked sugar packets attempt to atone for the execrable coffee. Clean white sheets, clean white sink, postcard-perfect view of the pool: loving shades of aquamarine and deep blue, colours Mother favored.
At the moment Thelonius’s plane landed, sixteen-year-old Islam D., Atta’s third son, was walking home from a friend’s house. Islam knew the road well and was staring into space, not attending to where he was going. He was preoccupied. Focused as he was on the physical beauty of the female human form, he did not hear the PLOOF or notice any of the nearby tanks.
Islam happened to be standing at the very furthest edge of a vast wave of incoming metal projectiles. At the moment he was struck by his flechette, he was thinking of a pretty girl he liked. That girl was Fatima A—, Wafa’s sister, the one who had just gotten that job at the Bureau of Islamic Investigation. She had visited yesterday. Islam had seen her. He had never spoken to her.
Fatima was out of Islam’s league and he knew it, but he liked thinking about her just the same. He’d been thinking about her a great deal lately. The very last thought he had before getting hit by his flechette took the form of a question mark and an exclamation point about Fatima.
Islam had posed a question to himself, and answered it for himself, in less than a hundredth of a second. The question concerned the quality and placement of Fatima’s hair. Because she wore a headscarf, usually gold, Islam had never seen it. That was the question mark.
vi. Islam
Presumably Islam Deen, eldest son of a known terrorist leader. Liddell’s straight-faced claim to have insights into this (dead) young man’s amorous longings during his final moments suggest the scale of his, Liddell’s, broadening problems with schizophrenia.
Islam imagined Fatima’s hair as fine and silky, straight black and very long, extending down to the precise midpoint of her back. He imagined a small mole on the small of Fatima’s back, just below the point where her hair stopped. That was the exclamation point. He happened to be right about all of that, which was remarkable.
In Islam’s case, there was only one wound. A single flechette struck a vulnerable spot in his neck. He began the process of bleeding out from a tear in his jugular vein, which takes less time than you might think. Within just a couple of minutes, Islam was preoccupied with dying, too.
There was something different about this mission. Something wrong with it. Thelonius couldn’t quite put a finger on what it was. He got off his plane.
3In Which Liddell Hallucinates
On the morning of October 14, 2005, Thelonius Liddell, having just returned from the last overseas assignment of his career, noticed that the milk carton on his dining-room table was vibrating.
This was forty-three years, three months, and seven days after Thelonius Liddell was born – thirty-six days after the unpleasantness with the flechettes – and exactly two months before he would be escorted into the Beige Motel.
Thelonius tried not to think about why a gallon of milk would be vibrating all by itself.
Ever since he’d returned from the Islamic Republic the previous day, things had been vibrating inexplicably. In the garage, a clear, tightly capped plastic jug of antifreeze had shaken long after he kicked it away. He saw it waver for ten full seconds, heard it shiver, still half-full and still insistent, from behind a rake that had fallen in front of it. Becky walked right past. Antifreeze is not supposed to vibrate at any time. He took a deep stress breath and walked away.
And a framed photo of Child the Cat. That had been vibrating, too.
Tough it out, kid. Tough it out. Stick with Sarge.
Becky did not need to know about the vibrating. Not yet. He recorded these incidents in a tiny book he might or might not decide to show Becky.
I know something is happening, Thelonius wrote.
vii. I know something is happening
A ludicrously inappropriate Bob Dylan reference.
He wrote a sentence with quote marks, ‘Where then are you going???’
He scratched that last sentence out. Then he put the little book in his back pocket.
In the kitchen, Becky could be heard but not seen. She was on the phone, negotiating something complex. Becky was good at negotiating complex things.
The dead guy telling this story wants you to imagine Fatima’s neighbours.
He never met them. He has to imagine them, just like you do. Every day, he writes this book you’re reading. Today he wants you to imagine them drinking tea, opening their discussion about how scandalous Fatima did not spend any time grieving her pregnant sister, Wafa.
The two had been quite close, her mother always said, but the women on the block insisted that one would never know that. For the neighbours, Fatima’s lack of emotion was troubling, and her lack of propriety more so. She was nineteen, a woman now. Her sister had passed. Her niece had passed. She had obligations to her family. Yet she appeared to live only to mount stairs and close doors. She lived for solitude. Why?
The neighbours had many conjectures. They settled on a theory put forward by Mrs. H., who lived directly across the narrow street from Fatima: She preferred the company of lustful men, conversed with them online for hours at a time. She sat in her room staring at the computer, no doubt typing out and receiving messages from unwholesome fellows.
Her typing was visible from Mrs. H’s bedroom window: the distracted girl neglected to close her blinds. The messages themselves were not legible from that distance, but Mrs. H had opinions as to their content. At any rate, no one had seen her weep.
Fatima had always been regarded as unusual. It was not surprising to them that she would avoid doing what a woman should do.
viii. Fatima had always been regarded as unusual.
Now regarded as a captured terrorist and a major operative within Liddell’s network in the Islamic Republic. Bitch.
Through my window, I note a family of Brazilians congregating by the swimming pool for what appears to be some sort of musical reunion. Barking orders between verses, feigning unawareness of the late hour, their drunken, overbearing paterfamilias sings badly and too loud, and spouts occasional English profanities. Makes passes at the help. Points to where his daughter must sit.
It is ever thus.
Abominable.
Wait until I get him back. Fucking control freak.
4In Which Victory Is Defined
Thelonius was trying to decide whether he wanted Becky’s insights on that rattling milk container, a persistent blur of colour and a wash of sound that was increasing in volume and raising the stakes of his morning, when he saw the word CHANGE writing itself in milk in midair. The word collapsed into a puddle on the dining-room floor. He put down his coffee cup and covered his mouth with his palm.
Whenever something is vibrating, you’re supposed to stop and look at it, according to the weirdo back in the Republic: ‘Vibration is change.’
ix. the weirdo
Another member of Liddell’s cadre. Entered in the prison records as one Abd’al Dayem, ‘slave of the eternal’. Codename Raisin. Died December 2005, of lung cancer.
The Plum, for instance, is change.
Complicating everything that follows (the guilty dead guy telling this story acknowledges) is the deepening illness of Thelonius’s wife.
Becky has a grey tumour, larger than a plum by now, surely, that the Directorate’s physicians isolated. They reported a clear pattern of accelerating growth. This type of tumour mimics schizophrenia with increasing accuracy. It culminates in blindness and, some unknown number of weeks later, death. It is located alarmingly near the centre of Becky’s brain. No one can get at the Plum. It has been expanding with dark purpose, they guess, for about five years.
Doctors caught the Plum during an MRI for a nerve problem Becky inherited from her mother, Prudence. This was an entirely separate problem that also required periodic monitoring. As it broadens, that Plum, Becky’s behavioural and mood swings become more pronounced. A change.
What to write next.
The guilty dead guy telling this story decides he doesn’t feel like writing anything else on this page. He plans to start fresh with a new sheet tomorrow.
x.
Dad opted to make Becky’s final years count. Thelonius went along. He justified this silence by thinking, ‘We decided not to tell her.’ But whenever Thelonius thought ‘we’ about that kind of thing, he meant Dad.
Thelonius called Becky’s father Dad. He could’ve pushed Dad on certain secrets, could’ve objected earlier and harder. But Dad always had the final word on secrets.
xi. the final word on secrets
Diagram here of the human heart, wounded.
The dead guy telling this story notes that Dad is dead now. Another change.
‘Everything changes,’ the Raisin said, ‘except the face of God.’
‘Whenever something changes, the first moral and legal imperative is to consider the new development closely; simply look at it without preconception,’ Fatima typed in a message box on the website IslamIsPeace.com.
‘We must stop and look in order to determine whether that which is new is halal or haram. Not everything new is haram. Not everything familiar is halal.’
xii. halal, haram
One means illegal, the other legal. I forget now.
Ever with the patient and blah, blah, blah. All on your own now, though, aren’t you, bitch?
The discussion thread in which she posted was called SORRY, SISTERS. A man had started that discussion thread. Fatima was defending her right, as a Muslim woman, to use the internet to organize public protests, a right some members of the group had questioned.
Fatima reminded herself that Allah was ever with the patient and struck the Enter key.
Thelonius looked at his hands, so as to avoid looking at the milk carton. Then he didn’t want to look at his hands. So he looked at the floor.
Well. Maybe it would stop that shaking. If he just stopped and looked at it. Like what that wacko back in the Republic promised.
No, kid. Eyes front. That’s an order. Stick with Sarge.
Well. Suppose he just tried it. Once. To see whether that would do anything to slow down that freakish rattling noise.
No.
Well. He had to do something. The noise hurt his knee now. It was spreading through his body. Why not look? What was the harm in looking?
Just no.
The ache broadened. He grabbed his knee. As he did so, he looked at the milk carton. He didn’t know whether he meant to look or not.
The noise stopped. The milk carton calmed itself to stillness.
There, on the panel of the plastic jug facing him: a still colour photograph. It was clear, remarkably high in resolution. It showed his peach-and-black bathrobed wife Becky, in their kitchen.
Becky wearing that robe. Becky in that kitchen. Becky having a conversation on that landline, its actual cord leading to Becky, stretching and bobbing as she spoke. In the photo: Becky’s pale, delicate profile and long, bare neck, exposed. Becky’s massive wave of deep-red hair, slung motionless over one angled, robed shoulder.
The picture on the carton had to have been taken within the last minute or so. It stopped his breath.
Lookaway, kid. Machine.
Thelonius did not look away, though. He waited for the photo to vanish, as certain elements of dreams vanish upon inspection. It refused. He felt a dark tightening and buzzing in his chest.
Thud. Then a smaller thud. What the hell?
Of course: the sound of Becky bumping into something, then recovering.
Her field of vision was receding.
When Thelonius looked toward the direction of the noise, he heard the carton begin rattling again. In the kitchen, he saw only that taut, white, trembling phone cord, parallel to the floor. Becky stood, certainly, on the other end of it. She had in fact been wearing that very black-and-peach patterned satin bathrobe, his gift to her on her most recent birthday. Thelonius had seen it flash as she spun past him to answer the kitchen phone. Now he could only hear her.
He looked back at the carton. The shivering stopped.
The photographic image of Becky was so clear, so impossible to refute, that it made his mouth go dry. The plastic jug showed Thelonius his own kitchen in high definition, and Becky’s profile playing soft in its shadow against the green, butterfly pattern of the wallpaper, and Becky within it, on the phone, her eyes narrowed in concentration.
‘You can count on him,’ Thelonius heard his wife say from the next room. ‘We all know how much the banquet means.’
Above the photograph was a headline: LOST WOMAN.
xiii. LOST WOMAN
Whatever. These crude personal attacks – many more follow – constitute a special category of strategic misdirection, a tactic in which Liddell specialized. We politely decline the invitation to hurl ourselves down such rabbit holes. Every war is a puzzle, an unbroken code, a kind of chaos waiting to be put in order, and this war more than most. In warfare, my distracted colleagues, victory does not come on the battlefield. Not victory that matters, anyway. Real victory comes to the side that creates and sustains the most persuasive solution to the puzzle. I raise a glass of wine. A toast. To victory.
5In Which the American Embassy Is Very Nearly Stormed by a Mob of Terrorists and Terrorist Sympathizers
The dead guy writing this story ponders the timeline and concludes that two long, busy days after the passing of her sister Wafa and her unborn, unnamed niece, Fatima attended a big protest at the U.S. Embassy in Islamic City, one she had helped to organize.
Islamic City was, and may still be, the capital of the Islamic Republic.
This protest took shape quickly. It had been arranged in less than forty-eight hours by just under a dozen people. As the crowd gathered, Fatima was veiled and (she hoped) anonymous. She did not want to jeopardize her new job as a translator for the Bureau of Islamic Investigation, also known as the BII.
The Bureau of Islamic Investigation was, and may still be, the national intelligence-gathering apparatus of the Islamic Republic. It was full of spies and military men who lacked basic English skills. Fatima’s English was perfect. She and her sister Noura had dual citizenship. They spoke English like Americans because that’s what they were: Americans.
Fatima’s new boss, who did not speak English, wanted her to help him keep an eye on the Americans. He would probably have put her in prison if he’d known about her work organizing the protest, his own organizing principle being that no one should organize anything he didn’t know about.
In SERGEANT USA #109, THE HERO THAT WAS (the dead guy recalls), Sarge takes down the Mutant Machines. The Mutant Machines are part of an evil plot spun by the enemies of America. Sarge disables all seven by flinging his Expand-A-Shield at them.
PLOOF. THWOCK. KA-THOK.
Before her promotion to translator, Fatima had been a typist for the BII. With a little help from Ummi, who worked part-time in a fabric shop, Fatima had been (barely) supporting the family for more than a year. She had to work, at least until she got married, and she didn’t feel like getting married. She was fine with work. She didn’t like Ummi working at all. Ummi’s back was giving her trouble.
When Fatima was ten, her Baba – an obstetrician from Massachusetts who prayed all mandatory and optional prayers, who read the Koran aloud every day to his daughters, who told Fatima Paradise lay beneath the feet of her Ummi, who knew Fatima was destined by God to be a good girl and a patient woman and a true believer, and told her so every night – was in a car accident. The accident was serious, and he passed. They set him into his grave, to be questioned by angels there.
A few months after Fatima’s Baba died, Ummi returned to the Islamic Republic, dragging her three daughters along with her, saying, ‘That’s where family is.’ Ummi had never liked Massachusetts much.
Fatima didn’t like the Islamic Republic much.
Fatima withdrew into herself and prayed and read the Koran.
The guilty dead guy telling you this story does that now, too.
In Islamic City, Fatima’s schoolyard opponents had called her the Ugly American. This was before she grew into her features. Fatima told her sister Wafa about the insults, and Wafa reminded her that what mattered was not what people called her, but what she answered to. It was something Baba would have said.
xiv. the Ugly American
A grim joke at our nation’s expense. But I might add that it’s quite correct concerning Fatima’s physical appearance.
Baba had also said Fatima should take her time getting married.
In her Koran, Fatima kept a photograph of Baba kissing the top of her little-girl head. After each evening prayer, when she was alone, she took out the photo of that kiss and studied it.
Ummi always said she wanted her girls to get married, just not to Americans. There were a lot of American soldiers since the invasion, but Ummi considered none of them appropriate son-in-law material. These days, her mom had taken to introducing Fatima to total strangers. She brought them right in the house. Fatima waited until her mother left the room on some imaginary errand, then, whispering, threatened to pour boiling water on the man’s private area while he slept. This was something she never would have done, but lies in warfare are permitted. The man always left, never to return.
More people now. Fatima prayed no one would die at the demonstration.
Thelonius, who had only killed people when specifically instructed to do so by the United States of America, sipped his coffee, closed his eyes, took a deep breath, then said to Becky, ‘Honey, have you seen Child?’
xv. Child
Meaning the cat. As Mother used to say: Good Gravy. We here encounter one of the subject’s favorite themes, betrayal. I am still asked, will apparently always be asked, whether Liddell’s US citizenship gave, gives, or ever will give me pause. My concise answer: no. He betrayed our nation, not vice versa. This position’s unassailability is detailed in notes xl and xlv, the latter for mature audiences only.
Within fifteen minutes, the protest Fatima helped organize had drawn about twenty thousand people, double what she had prayed for.
She stood chanting Allahu Akbar with everyone else. Allahu Akbar is one of those hard-to-translate phrases. You hear people saying it means ‘God is great’, but that’s wrong. In fact, it means, ‘God is greater than anything that might have ever happened, or is happening now, or could happen in the future’. That’s too long for a translation, though.
Fatima took deep breaths each time she said it, used it to avoid crying tears of rage.
xvi. breaths
She breathes now only sour air, our Fatima.
xvii. tears of rage
The name of a Dylan composition recorded by The Band, based loosely on (I swear) King Lear. Relevant because the title inspired ‘track twenty-eight’, one of John Lennon’s endearing experiments in Carrollian wordplay, of which more in due course. Liddell wept to that track.
More noise outside from that damn grey-haired tyrannical Brazilian. I have plugged in the CD player, donned my earbuds, and placed the earphone jack in its little black socket. This jack yields a satisfying click whenever I insert it. A powerful, indescribable sense of being in control of events can occasionally, as now, render even the insertion of a CD unnecessary.
6In Which Liddell Provides Inappropriate Biographical Detail
The dead guy telling this story wants you to know Thelonius was born in 1961 in Los Angeles, California, the only child of a suspicious, hard-working, well-read, bourbon-loving, wife-beating truck driver, George, and a homemaker with low self-esteem, Irene. Back then, you called a homemaker a housewife. They moved to San Francisco. Made a home there. George said he was tired of the road.
By 1966, Thelonius’s father, now a suspicious, hard-working alcoholic, had used the savings of five years to buy himself a small bookstore. In which he cut his wife’s throat. Thelonius happened to observe that, which wasn’t in George’s plan.
Thelonius moved in with his grandparents Hal and Louise B. in La Pine, Oregon, right after what his grandparents agreed to refer to as The Accident, when they referred to it at all. Which wasn’t often.
He kept asking when he would be able to go home. They always changed the subject. When they did, he read his copy of SERGEANT USA #109. THE HERO THAT WAS.
Nine months after Thelonius arrived in Oregon, his father went to prison. Read a lot there, according to the initial, and only, letter. Didn’t write back when Thelonius responded to that letter nine times.
In La Pine, Thelonius craved approval, created a series of alarmingly violent hand-drawn comic books, and described himself to teachers and everyone else who would listen as a ‘bright, active, and curious child’. Whoever heard that had to agree.
At some point during the confusing years following The Accident, Thelonius established a certainty: the necessity of victory. Everything else became a blur. The more things Thelonius made happen, the dead guy recalls, the more chances there were for winning. Winning mattered.
Two of his teachers, Miss Tokstad (Arts and Crafts) and Mr. Hess (Everything Else) described him as ‘extremely competitive’.
He blamed others with a deep ferocity, and was always in a hurry. Preventing him from attaining goals, or being perceived as doing so, was dangerous. He devoured a book on memory techniques, with the aim of always securing the highest grades on tests. Coming in second on an exam produced an unwholesome expression on the boy’s face. One recess, during a foot race, he elbowed a much smaller, younger boy, who had scored one hundred on a math test, out of the way, causing a fall that broke the boy’s wrist.
Thelonius insisted, with apparent seriousness, that his opponent was an android.
Mr. Hess did not send his star pupil to see the principal – Thelonius had, after all, reported the collision – but he did suspect some kind of problem. Back in the early seventies, students with excellent grades who had extreme competitiveness issues were not referred to psychologists.
Thelonius finished first in that race, got more A’s, made more things happen. He refused to wait for anything. He became a bright, active, curious boy scout, then a bright, active, curious class president, then a bright, active, curious high school swimming star.
Thelonius worked out a lot, developed serious upper body strength, made All-Everything, made the Honor Society, and was extremely patriotic. His grandparents told him how proud they were about the way he’d bounced back from The Accident. Thinking his grandson was sleeping, Hal said to Louise late one night that George had no right to see how well his son was doing, that George never inspired anyone, never won anything, and never amounted to anything but a killer.
George died in prison, trying to kill someone who’d threatened him. Thelonius was nineteen when Hal and Louise sat him down to tell him. He went to his room and reread THE HERO THAT WAS.
A voice said, If you kill, make sure you kill for America, kid.
Thelonius captained the winning swimming team in the 1980 Oregon State High School Championships, a special moment of triumph. It was followed by enrolment in the army in 1982, an even bigger triumph, given Hal’s status as an army veteran. That was followed by winning a spot in the Special Forces in 1983: the biggest triumph of Thelonius’s young life. That was followed by a vasectomy in 1985 by an army doctor who had been nervous about performing the procedure on a twenty-four-year-old. Thelonius said, ‘Just get started.’
xviii. nervous
Needlessly so. A vasectomy is reversible, with some clinics reporting a 97% fertility rate.
Thelonius had almost gotten somebody pregnant. That was not going to happen again.
Two years in Special Forces. Then off to school to study international relations, which the army paid for, because they saw potential in Thelonius. Then more time in school, also paid for by the army. Then, on an application form, a request that he ‘briefly summarize’ his ‘life philosophy’, which he shared and, later, framed.
Followed by certain members of the intelligence community seeing potential in Thelonius, like the army had.
And falling in love with Becky.
Followed by his entry into the exciting world of espionage. Followed by a fast track at the Directorate, which he loved. Followed by various hush-hush assignments.
Followed, in 2005, by the mess he ran into in the Islamic Republic, which got complicated both for himself and for Child the cat, a mixed-breed whose uncertain parentage Becky could never excuse.
Followed by his murder during an interrogation session in (he predicts) the early summer of 2006.
xix. early summer of 2006
A sober mystery yet to be unravelled, and certainly beyond the realm of the civilian justice system. It pains me to be forced to reiterate that everything – absolutely everything – I did while interrogating T had ample operational precedent.
7In Which the Reader Is Assumed to Have Access to a Track List
The grey-suited man with grey hair, reduced to shouting from the hood of a black Lincoln Continental and clearly not used to this kind of duty, was a friend of Thelonius Liddell’s.
He flicked off the bullhorn by accident, then flicked it back on. It popped, too loud, as it reawakened. The embassy, he informed everyone, had investigated the incident with the flechettes. It had been a tragic accident. People should return to their homes.
Sorry!
No one returned home.
The crowd had grown to thirty thousand now. It surged with firm, unintelligible purpose against three of the four massive iron gates that surrounded the embassy compound. No one paid attention to the man in grey. They all kept chanting Allahu Akbar.
The earnest man on the Lincoln, having reached the limit of his effectiveness, asked if there was anyone in the crowd who could translate for him so that he could do a better job of clarifying the situation. Fatima did not even think about raising her hand.
She found herself in a corner, pushed by the throng’s ceaseless, expanding geometry into an obscure convergence of two angles of the embassy gate. There were many such nooks surrounding the embassy. This particular nook had a locked service entry. It barricaded a dumpster.
A heavyset woman next to Fatima jabbed her in the side.
xx. A heavyset woman
Ringo Starr appears dancing with such a woman on the White Album’s photo-illustrated lyric sheet. Provide White Album track sequence here for ease of reference in later chapters? (No, don’t think so, too much information, but see if this omission still makes sense on next pass.)
8In Which Liddell Abuses Certain Confidences
Fatima assumed at first that the jab in her side was just an over-energetic spike in the chaotic, respectful movement of the huge crowd, but when the heavyset woman elbowed her a second, and then a third time, Fatima turned and glared. The woman’s eyebrows arched upward in alarm, and she pointed toward a segment of the immaculately manicured embassy lawn before them.
Adjacent to that lawn was a small rectangle of concrete, right behind the dumpster: a flat place that looked like a loading area. The rectangle was cut off from the view of the rest of the crowd. There, a few feet away from them on the rectangle of cement, a U.S. marine, his back to Fatima, stood above a large, open Koran.
He was urinating on it.
xxi. urinating
That cat pissed all over the house whenever Liddell was on assignment. And left great tufts of fur about.
No answer from Becky. The milk carton was still, but it bore her picture.
Thelonius and Becky had been married since 1993, which was twelve years now. In all of that time, Thelonius had refused to have a baby with her, his reasons not always open for discussion. She had certainly worked them all out for herself by now. Both Becky and Thelonius, of course, had lost their mothers at a young age.
‘I don’t understand why you’re so worried about repeating your father’s mistakes,’ Becky had said on their honeymoon, her smile wide. ‘Just don’t make my father’s mistakes. Don’t disrespect me. Don’t betray me. Don’t micromanage me. Don’t screw the help. Or I’ll kill you.’
They laughed at that, raised their glasses of red wine, clinked them, drank to his promise, laughed at Dad, and (Thelonius having sworn credibly enough that he had no intention of screwing the help) made love.
Becky talked a lot during sex, something Thelonius didn’t and couldn’t do. She even told fitful, whispered stories that focused him while he was inside her. She was all about stage management, all words and knees and words and elbows and words and green eyes to die for. He did what she told him to do. Why not? She made him feel, for a moment at least, like he was home.
The whirring blades of a helicopter sent to monitor the crowd drowned out what would have been the splash of a stream of urine hitting the Koran’s open pages.
When he finished, the marine rearranged himself, picked the Koran up by a dry corner, heaved it into the dumpster, and stalked away in an arrogant, loose-limbed manner that made Fatima’s flesh crawl. He had kept his back to them the whole time. Neither Fatima nor the heavyset woman could have accurately described his face.
Fatima fought a powerful urge to flee. Given the crowd, she could not have run away, even if she’d allowed herself to try. She stood her ground.
Perhaps she was brave. Or perhaps the moment was structured in such a way as to instil courage.
xxii. courage
These hagiographic passages make me physically ill. An airplane roars overhead, and into my temple, presaging synchronistically the all-important note xl. A need for a lie down.
Naked Becky held Thelonius in her arms in 1993 and said, ‘Big boys don’t cry.’
It was a night of stars, counted through a big window overlooking a broad, unnameable Massachusetts lake happy to reflect starlight. Becky, whose mother had read her Shakespeare, pointed out the constellations she knew, of which there were many: the lesser lights, the greater ones, and even her slim hand, the same shade of even flame as the moon. She counted that as a constellation, too. The night was luminous. She was luminous. Her story of Prospero. Her kiss on his forehead. Her love.
‘We won’t be talking about this again. Time goes in one direction. Do you hear?’
He nodded.
‘Say it out loud, Thelonius. Time goes in one direction.’
‘Time,’ Thelonius said, ‘goes in one direction.’
He closed his eyes and tried to believe it. His face was still wet all over. In La Pine, Oregon, his grandmother Louise wiped his face, told him that his mother had loved him very much. Told him he would be fine. The boy was not so sure. He had begun to have flashbacks, found himself, without warning, watching his father cut his mother. He was terrified he would have one at school.
‘Say it out loud, Thelonius,’ his grandmother Louise said. ‘Everything is going to be all right.’
‘Everything,’ Thelonius said, ‘is going to be all right.’
Haste and hard work, he found, stopped the flashbacks.
The era of Just Getting Started had begun.
In the late spring of 2000, Thelonius, sleeping poorly, exhausted with Becky’s lectures on the subject of parenthood, Just Got Started. He brought a little charcoal fluffball of a kitten to their ample Salem foursquare. He unboxed him in the living room for Becky’s inspection, announcing him, mock-pretentiously, as Child.
Becky refused to call him that at first, but everything she proposed over the next week or so – Marx, Stalin, Castro, Lenin, Lennon – brought unacceptable cultural and geopolitical baggage that Thelonius rejected as unsuited to the animal’s genial, baffled personality. So he remained Child.
xxiii. unacceptable cultural and geopolitical baggage
And back. How much the traitor Liddell papers over with these five words! He was, of course, a serious Fab Four devotee before the virus overcame him, however much he may attempt to conceal the fact here.
Child, Becky said, played into Thelonius’s ‘deep need to be responded to’. Child saw things that were not there and expressed his concerns about them until Thelonius stroked his furry back to calm him. Then he purred in gratitude. Child noticed when Thelonius was not around, and, more often than not, went to whatever room Thelonius occupied. Child became skittish and anxious whenever Thelonius went off on assignment, relaxed again when he came home. Child was family.
