Man of the Hour Read online

Everything seemed so much faster and more offhanded than it did in real life. Watching it was beyond surrealistic; it made David feel slightly psychotic. Like he had no business still being in his body. The angle had finally shifted to the back of the bus; the cameraman had moved there just in time to catch Seniqua’s friends carrying her off and David jumping down after her.

  “Oh my God,” Renee was saying. “Is this really you?”

  The same question had occurred to David. He was aware of the fact that both she and Anton were looking at him strangely, as if they couldn’t quite connect the man in the living room with the image on the screen. In the meantime, the angle had shifted once more and he saw himself trying to resuscitate Seniqua. The video footage here was much more frightening because it was so stark and ordinary. The cameraman had been leaning right over David’s shoulder, and the feeling of death approaching jumped right through the camera lens. Without edits or dramatic music, the plainness of it was heart-stopping. And then David saw himself leaning over and breathing life back into the girl.

  Watching it from this angle, he first felt scared again, and then oddly detached. He sat down.

  “God!” Renee moved close to him and touched his arm. “Are you all right?”

  “Yeah, I’m fine. Everything’s fine.”

  “God!” She scrunched up her face, reabsorbing the shock of what she’d just seen. “What happened?”

  “I don’t know. The bus blew up. You know as much as I do.”

  He tried to tell her about the intensity of the flames and the detective who questioned him afterward, but she was staring at his forehead with a dreamy, faraway look.

  “Oh, David. I always knew you’d do something like this.”

  “You did?”

  She took his hand and squeezed it. For a second, the electricity of the contact bypassed his sense of time and reason, and he wished they could be alone for a few minutes to talk sense to each other. But then he noticed Anton staring over her shoulder with a mixture of dismay and disbelief.

  “So you’re the man of the hour,” he said.

  “Well, I don’t know.” David coughed.

  “You saved those kids.”

  “Actually only one kid. Somebody else died. The driver.”

  Renee let go of his hand and drew away from him. “Shit, man, this is so weird,” she said. “It’s like, all these levels of reality. I’m sitting here, watching this, thinking is this him or is this a movie?”

  She laughed a little wildly and he smiled to humor her. “Well, that was—”

  “You know, I’m sitting here, trying, trying, trying to learn these lines …” She gestured at an open copy of The Glass Menagerie on the coffee table. “And then I turn on the television and there you are. It’s like you were in a movie.”

  Her hands shook as she started to light a cigarette. He wondered if seeing the father of her child in danger had somehow unnerved her. Or did it mean she still cared for him?

  “It didn’t feel like a movie when it was happening, Renee,” he said gently. “It felt real. The driver died.”

  That seemed to calm her a little. “But you’re all right?”

  “I’m all right.”

  She hugged him once more and then drew back. She was looking at him with that old glitter in her eyes. That crazy connection between them, he was feeling it again. That sense that it was just the two of them against the rest of the world. The way they used to believe in each other and egg each other on. On this very couch, they’d made love one morning after he’d called in sick to school on a whim. He remembered the green robe slipping off her bare white shoulders, as he reared up over her, covering her with his body but trying not to crush her. Maybe it wasn’t too late to try to put things back together. They needed each other; a man needs his woman, a boy needs his mother and father. But then he recalled what Arthur had said a minute ago: Mommy cut herself.

  “So you doing okay?” He looked her over once more, checking her wrists and ankles for scratches and abrasions.

  “Of course.” Her smile turned to bewilderment. “But you’re the one who almost got killed today. So why are you asking me if I’m okay? Do I not seem okay?”

  “No, you seem fine.”

  No visible cuts. It’s all right, David thought. Kids make things up all the time.

  Anton put a hand on her shoulder, as if staking a claim on her. “Shouldn’t we be getting ready for dinner?” he mumbled.

  Renee drew up suddenly, like a cat arching her back. “I am speaking to David,” she said.

  “I know.” Anton sulkily played with his Navajo bracelet. “But it’s getting to be time.”

  “I know what time it is, Anton. But I am speaking to David.”

  So there was tension between them. Fine, thought David. Maybe their little West Coast swing wouldn’t come off after all and he wouldn’t have to fight to keep her and Arthur in the city.

  “Maybe I should go,” he said, starting to rise.

  “Did I ask you to go? Is that what I was saying?”

  “No, but it’s late.”

  He recognized the mood she was getting into and knew enough to stay out of its way. A half-eaten green apple was turning brown on a plate next to the open script. Let nature take its course, he thought. If we can reconcile, we’ll reconcile. No sense forcing the issue tonight.

  “So I guess I’ll see you Friday,” he said slowly, moving toward the door. “I’ll come by after school to pick up Arthur.”

  He decided not to remind her that they also had appointments with the psychiatrist and the judge in their divorce case next week. He didn’t want to set off any more emotional depth charges here. His chest ached and his limbs felt heavy. This day had already taken too much out of him.

  “God, David.” Renee ran across the room and kissed him on the cheek as he put his hand on the doorknob. “I’m so proud of you.”

  He got a static shock from her. “Are you really?”

  “Now I wish I could make someone proud of me.”

  10

  DOWN AT THE HOUSE on Avenue Z, Elizabeth Hamdy and the rest of her family were in the living room, sitting transfixed in front of the forty-inch-wide Pioneer home entertainment center, watching the Headline News at eight o’clock. Images of the bus burning in front of the school had already been repeated enough to become a kind of instant icon, a symbol of vulnerability. All over the country, millions of parents were seeing it and thinking about how much it looked like buses they’d put their own children on just this morning.

  “Jaysus,” said her stepmother, Anne, holding Elizabeth from behind. “Thank God you stayed home with the headache this morning. I’d be worried sick about you.”

  “Allahu akbar. God is good, God is greatest.” Her father stood there, hugging himself and murmuring, his neatly trimmed mustache rising and falling faster.

  The two younger girls, Leslie and Nadia, were giggling and doing each other’s hair as if they found the images silly and tedious.

  Elizabeth sat with the helmet Nasser had just bought her on her lap and turned to say something to her brother. But he’d already left the room.

  This was jihad. Holy War, and in a war, there were casualties. Still, it bothered Nasser that he remembered Sam the bus driver from school. He told himself it didn’t matter, that these were infidels, that there would have been far more casualties if he’d managed to get inside the school and put the hadduta in the boiler room as he’d originally intended. This would have been justified. The American people supported their government, and their government supported the Israelis, and the Israelis were the oppressors who stole land and broke his mother’s heart. They only understood the language of violence.

  Just the same, it was troubling to him, the way casualties that had so little to do with Palestine were mounting up. The three people in the check-cashing place, the bus driver.

  He got into his car, stopped by to pick up his paycheck as he did every Tuesday night, and then drove into Manhattan, trying t
o work it around in his mind so he’d feel at peace. On the radio, there was more news about the hadduta: “Officials are saying what appeared to be a bomb exploded in front of Coney Island High School today …” The announcer’s words made him too nervous, so he switched to an oldies music station—his secret vice—and found himself humming along with an insipid song about an achy-breaky heart.

  He was exhausted, but he knew he wouldn’t be able to sleep tonight. He was too upset. He needed to talk to someone older and more sensible to calm himself down. He’d heard his old cell mate, Professor Bin-Khaled, was in town, lecturing at City University, but he wasn’t ready to face the older man yet. They had too many hard things to talk about.

  Instead, he stopped by the Medina Mosque on East 11th Street, prayed for ten minutes with four full repetitions of the raka positions—standing, bending, putting his hands behind his ears, kneeling with his forehead on the floor—and then went to see Youssef at his residency hotel on West 23rd Street. He knew it would be a difficult talk too, but it was time to get it over with.

  He found the Great Bear in the living room of his little two-bedroom apartment, freshly showered, wearing a blue bathrobe and drinking a white protein shake. Weight-lifting equipment surrounded him. Youssef’s four children, whom Nasser had never met, were playing in another room, with their mother admonishing them to keep their voices down lest they make their father angry. On the television in the corner, a white-and-red fireball streaked across the city skyline. It took Nasser a few seconds to realize that he wasn’t watching another film clip of today’s bombing, but a bootleg video of the movie Independence Day. He remembered Youssef telling him he was doing a side business, making illegal duplicates of the tapes from the local video store to raise money for jihad.

  “Okay,” said Youssef, moving aside some American muscle magazines so Nasser could sit next to him on the sofa. “So let’s talk about it.”

  Nasser tried to speak but couldn’t for a few seconds. Fear still had his tongue locked up. His neck glands felt swollen and tired from having pumped so much adrenaline. The palm of his hand ached from having gripped the bag with the bomb so tightly.

  “So tell me again, why do you put the hadduta under the school bus?” said Youssef, picking up the remote control and turning down the volume. “I’m ready to listen now.”

  Nasser was aware of the Great Bear staring at him, seething. On the TV screen, a huge alien spaceship was hovering over the White House and the President was rushing to escape with his daughter on an airplane. With the sound off, the images seemed even more frenetic and violent.

  “I told you before, sheik, I had to put it there because they were all watching,” Nasser said quickly, looking at Youssef once and then looking away. “There was more security than I thought. It would’ve been a mistake to go ahead with the plan.”

  On the TV, a green beam of light from space was incinerating a skyscraper in Los Angeles.

  “Are you a fool? Is that what you are?” Youssef yelled.

  “No, sheik …”

  “Well then, why do you do this? Ha? The point was to put it in the boiler so it would have a greater impact. Instead, you put it under the bus where there isn’t anything to push against! Don’t you see?” He rubbed his forehead. “It’s like a wet firecracker. I was watching the news before, and we don’t get more than five minutes’ coverage!”

  “I saw it on the Headline News,” Nasser offered meekly, not sure what Youssef had expected.

  “Yes, but it should be on all the time, twenty-four hours. They should be in a total panic about this, talking about nothing else.” Youssef sighed in disgust. “Now I’m not even sure if we should take credit for this. Do you want them to think we’re clowns and incompetents? Is that what you want?”

  “No, sheik.” Nasser looked down and saw a long black-handled carving knife sitting on a stack of magazines on the coffee table. He pressed his back against the soft plush cushions. “I tell you, I’m sorry. I did what I could.”

  Youssef stared at him for a long time without speaking. He seemed to be swelling up with anger, right there on the couch. Nasser looked down at the knife again.

  Fear went running like a rat through his brain, eating through all old notions of friendship and security. He’d seen the Great Bear kill a mother in front of her child.

  Was it possible Youssef would stab him right here, with his own children in the next room? Nasser didn’t think so, but he tensed up, ready to jump from the couch.

  But instead of reaching for the knife, Youssef just picked up his protein shake.

  “Well, it’s okay,” he grumbled, taking a sip. “But not really, if you know what I mean. We’ll do better next time.”

  In the video, cars were flying through the air, women were screaming, and the White House was getting blown into matchsticks.

  “Does anyone see you leave this bag under the bus?” Youssef asked, putting down the shake and wiping his beard and mustache with the back of his hand.

  “I don’t think so,” said Nasser.

  We’ll do better next time. No, it was impossible for him to consider going through this again. Today had done too much violence to his insides.

  “Sheik.” Nasser looked up, folding his hands in humble beseechment. “I think I want out.”

  “What?”

  “I’m scared to do this again. I’m not sure if it’s right. The things we do.”

  The spaceship obliterated midtown Manhattan.

  “You can’t just walk away,” Youssef said sternly, picking up the knife and pointing it at Nasser’s face. “This is not possible.”

  “Why not?”

  Nasser leaned back and saw light glint off the side of the blade.

  “A man is already dead because of the bomb. You are the jackpot, my friend,” Youssef said, switching to English for the phrase.

  “I don’t think this is how you say this expression,” Nasser offered timidly.

  “Of course it is.” Youssef rebuffed him, switching back to Arabic. “Anyway, too much already is depending on you.” He picked up a mango that had been lying next to the magazines on the coffee table and started to peel it. “Not two hours ago, I was on the phone with this brother I told you about from Egypt. This man who taught me everything I know about guns and explosives in Afghanistan. You remember when they stop the tourist bus in Cairo and shoot thirty-three of the Germans?”

  “Of course,” said Nasser, relieved he was not about to be stabbed to death, but aware he was still under a cloud.

  “This was his operation. He personally shoots five of the passengers and two of the police before he gets away on a motorbike. And remember Flight 502 that blew up on the runway in Paris and killed seventy-five people?”

  “Of course.” Nasser remembered the film footage of ambulances and fire trucks screaming down the airport tarmac. The shrieking and crying relatives on the news.

  “He was part of that too,” said Youssef. “And he is coming here, next week. This good man. I told him all about you. How proud I was of you the other night. He’ll be very disappointed if he hears you want to quit.”

  Hearing this, Nasser felt a crushing weight on his chest. One of the men who bombed Flight 502. He felt both terrified and exhilarated by the prospect of meeting such a man.

  “But I’m just not sure I’m being effective,” he said haltingly. “I know I made a bad mistake today …”

  “Yes, it was a bad mistake!” Youssef slid the blade under the mango’s skin, making juice spurt. “This is why you have to make up for it. To prove yourself again. I have already discussed this with my friend. What to do about you.”

  “What do you mean?” Nasser wiped his eye nervously.

  “Well, he was very upset when I told him what happened at first. How you made a mistake. He’s had men killed for doing less. But I explained your situation to him. How you are young and eager to help. So I think he’s okay about it now. He’s very compassionate, you know. He’s made mistakes hims
elf. A lab blew up. He was out of favor for a long time with some of our so-called leaders, who wouldn’t work with him anymore. But now he’s coming here, to make a big comeback and show them.”

  “So what did he say exactly? About me?”

  Youssef leaned in and lowered his voice. “He says it sounds like you can still be useful and be a good soldier. If you can prove yourself. But I must tell you”—he cut off a thick slice of the mango—“you have a lot to make up for.”

  “I know, sheik. That’s why I think maybe you should get someone else.” Nasser stared at the pit sticking out through the pulp like a piece of bone.

  The Great Bear offered the slice to Nasser. “No, it’s too late to make a change,” he said, as the image of the Statue of Liberty lying sideways in New York Harbor flashed on the screen. “When my friend comes next week, you’ll see. Everything will be okay. He’ll speak to you kindly. He’s a very great man. He’ll give you strength in your heart again.”

  11

  THE SCHOOL WAS STILL in a collective state of shock the next day, with a quarter of the students absent and trauma counselors set up in the library for kids who wanted to talk. But David was determined to try to return to the landscape of reality.

  The morning had been insanity. All last night, television producers from the rival dawn talk shows had been tying up his phone line cajoling, begging, pleading with him to come on—one of them actually saying, “I’ll lose my job if I don’t have you on before seven-fifteen!” But as soon as he agreed to appear on all three network programs in the order in which they’d called, it was as if a clandestine war had broken out. They canceled one another’s limousine services, which were scheduled to pick him up in the morning, and men each tried to get him to stay overnight at a hotel near their studio. Finally, Stephanie Kwan, a booker from the third-rated Morning Program, showed up outside his apartment at quarter to six in the morning with a continental breakfast and a cappuccino. A petite young woman with a tight black leather skirt and stop-the-show-I-gotta-have-sex legs, she hustled him into a stretch limo, stroked his arm, and told the driver to take the West Side Highway while she made furtive triumphant calls on her cell phone and flattered David recklessly.