Man of the Hour Read online

  If any of them were interested, they weren’t letting on. No one wanted to look weak or needy in front of the other kids. Instead, the students rose as one body and began their lemming-like trudge toward the door, ignoring David as he called out a reading assignment to finish the excerpt from the Odyssey.

  From the corner of his eye, he saw Elizabeth Hamdy was lingering, still sitting in the third row, fidgeting with her books and staring at the blackboard.

  “Hey, what’s up?” he asked her.

  She stood up and came to him with her head bowed. “I wonder if you have a minute so I could talk to you about something now,” she murmured.

  “Sure,” said David. “I always have time for you.”

  “Oh no you don’t.” Michelle Richardson pulled on his sleeve. “The principal wants to see you with these media people right away.” She lowered her voice. “He got a call from the superintendent’s office.”

  David looked back and forth between the two women, not sure what to do. The kids needed him. The camera crews were waiting. Things were changing and he realized he would have to reach an accommodation with this new multilayered reality.

  “Can I catch up with you a little later?” he asked Elizabeth.

  “I guess you’ll have to.” She drifted out of the room, like a sunstruck rain cloud.

  14

  THE GIRL FROM the bus as was staring at Nasser again. Only this time, she was atop a building in Times Square, with a hand thrust suggestively down the front of her unbuttoned jeans.

  He tried to ignore her as he drove his Town Car down Broadway just before noon, through the valley of billboards and video screens. All these pictures and words trying to force themselves into his mind. Children in designer jeans behaving like adults; pulsating advertisements for camera equipment, computers, semiconductors, cable television, music stores. A huge American Express Card wearing a pair of black mouse ears. “Autumn in New York, presented by Diet Coke.” The effect was to make him want everything, and then nothing at all. But what confused him most of all was the information circling the immense white building just ahead, One Times Square.

  Police continue investigation into Coney Island High School explosion …, said the yellow lights speeding by on a rotating black beltway. President praises schoolteacher David Fitzgerald …

  What was the sense in this? When he’d slipped the hadduta under the school bus, Nasser had thought it was God’s will. But had it been God’s will that this man he deplored, Mr. Fitzgerald, should become a hero instead?

  He turned right on 42nd Street, where a giant Oreo cookie was revolving on top of a building, and stopped the cab for a young woman in a cream-colored pants suit standing in front of a tourist office with her arm raised.

  He was still wondering what to do about Youssef’s friend coming into town, whether he should continue with the bombings. Maybe it would take a while for God’s will to fully manifest itself.

  “How much to take me to Fifty-first Street and Fifth Avenue?” the girl in the pants suit asked, climbing in.

  Nasser turned down his radio calls from the dispatcher and craned his neck to see her in the rearview mirror. “Four dollars.”

  What a stroke of luck, to pick up a fare in midtown. Perhaps Allah was smiling on him after all. He looked around cautiously, checking for police cars since only yellow cabs were supposed to pick up passengers off the street in this part of Manhattan.

  “Why don’t you take Eighth Avenue uptown?” the girl in the back said. “There’s construction and traffic on Sixth.”

  “Okay, boss.”

  He wasn’t about to argue. Most of his regular fares were radio calls from Brooklyn and Queens, which either landed him in slow-moving traffic or left him stranded in remote and dangerous neighborhoods.

  The livery cab gave a little shudder as he started it west on 42nd Street. The girl in back checked her silver watch, a glint of moonlight on her wrist. Something about her reminded him of Elizabeth. Her poise, the length of her neck. But she was different too. A little older, a little darker.

  Across the street, a backhoe and a pile driver were laboring in a vacant lot next to an old theater. Mickey and Minnie Mouse grinned down from the front of the Disney Store. Furious-looking men and women in dark business suits hurried by carrying navy Gap bags and attaché cases. Black clean-up men in red jumpsuits swept up trash for the Times Square Business Improvement District. A hellfire preacher with a little microphone stood under an enormous cartoon Superman, braying about damnation. A double-deck tour bus nearly sideswiped Nasser on the left. Everything here was commotion for the soul. Nasser decided he had to shut it all out for a while and concentrate on the girl in the back.

  “Is okay, without the air conditioner?” he asked her.

  “Yes, I’m fine,” she said, rearranging herself on the seat. “It’s not that hot outside.”

  “You want I should leave on the radio?” He craned his neck, trying to catch her eye in the rearview mirror, eager to make her comfortable.

  “Sure.” She busied herself with her briefcase, really only half-listening. “Just turn it down a sec while I make a call.”

  He turned the volume knob the wrong way and a blast of trumpets jerked him back against his seat. He lowered the sound instantly and apologized as a mattress commercial came on. “What I am thinking?” he said, the words coming out in an awkward rush.

  But she was preoccupied, trying to make a call on a little gray cell phone. He watched her in the backseat, turned sideways with one leg tucked up under her, brushing raven-black hair out of her eyes with long graceful fingers. Yes, she was like Elizabeth, a little. He sensed there were secret places inside her.

  “Excuse me,” he said, as she gave up on her call and closed the phone. “I do not want to be rude. But please may I ask you a question?”

  “What is it?”

  “You are Arab? Yes?”

  In the mirror, she smiled in just a small way as traffic finally started to move and a breeze stirred her loose-fitting clothes. “Yes,” she said. “I am Arab.”

  “Palestinian?”

  “Yes, as a matter of fact.”

  “Ah, very good. This is the best. Allahu akbar.”

  He half-turned his head, waiting for her to return the blessing. But instead she lowered her eyes in embarrassment and began rotating a ring on her finger. “I’m sorry, I don’t …”

  “It’s okay.”

  They swept past milk-fed tourists gawking at posters for Les Miserables and The Sound of Music. Another Arab girl who didn’t speak any Arabic, he thought. Just like his sister. He decided not to let his disapproval show, for the moment. She was young and pretty. She didn’t know any better, he told himself.

  “Please, if you don’t mind for me to ask, where are you from?” It irked him having to speak English to her, the words feeling heavier than usual in his mouth today.

  “Queens Village.”

  “No, I mean before that. Where is your family from?”

  “East Jerusalem.” She put away her cell phone and started looking for something else in her briefcase.

  “Ah, Ras al-Amud? Upper Silwan?”

  She pulled out some papers. “I don’t know. I haven’t been back there very often.”

  He looked at her in the mirror again, and felt that great loneliness once more. He’d had other Arab girls like this in the back of his car and still had not really found a way to talk to them.

  “So,” he said, “you are working?”

  “Yes.” She allowed herself just a little more of a smile but didn’t look up from her papers. “I do have a job. In computers.”

  “My sister. She is wanting to work too. After she leaves school.”

  She picked up on me tension in his voice. “And that’s not okay with you?”

  He simply raised his hands from the wheel, as if to say, ah, what can I do?

  Work and his sister. The subjects went around and around in his head. He’d never been able to get a go
od job in this country, and his sister was always saying it was his own fault. “You’re too rigid,” she’d tell him. Perhaps so. He wouldn’t work for his father at the grocery store on principle. But then he wouldn’t work at most restaurants either because he was trying to adhere strictly to Muslim dietary laws (except for the occasional McDonald’s lapse). Working in the garment district was also out of the question since there were too many Jews involved. Finally, computer work was impossible because he hadn’t graduated from high school. And of course, he didn’t finish high school because of teachers like this Mr. Fitzgerald, who wouldn’t leave him alone.

  Around and around he went. It was easier, in some ways, being back home in the days of the intifada. At least he knew who he was then, throwing stones in the street. But this country had spun him around and made him dizzy.

  “And now here’s a song about a dwarf at a smorgasbord,” said the announcer on his radio. “‘I Can’t Help Myself’ by the Four Tops!”

  The girl in the backseat smiled again, but he didn’t know why. Some of the phrases here still baffled him. A dwarf at a smorgasbord? What could this possibly mean?

  He wanted to ask her to explain, but he felt shy.

  “You like this song?” he said.

  “Yes, I do. Why don’t you turn it up?”

  She’d put her papers away and he watched her applying lipstick in her makeup mirror. Somehow she’d solved the American dilemma. She’d figured out a way to live here without tearing herself apart.

  “Sugar pie, honey bunch, I’m weaker than a man should be!” The song on the radio moved his knee with its solid thwocking beat. He hated this country, yet he found himself humming its song, feeling the heat in the singer’s voice.

  Maybe he should ask her out. The idea crept up on him unexpectedly. He would approach her gently about it, respectfully. He’d ask her out for coffee.

  She was singing along softly with the song and he began to daydream at the wheel, letting himself get carried away in the river of his thoughts. Yes, they would sit and they would talk about things, and maybe he would ask her out again before evening prayers at the mosque. And eventually he would meet her parents and somehow come up with money for a dowry and they would be wed. They’d move to a house in the suburbs. She’d help him understand things, smooth his way, maybe help him get a proper American job.

  If only she’d say yes. This would be the first step.

  On the other hand, why should she agree to see him? Would she understand the life he’d come from? The throwing of stones. The freezing water. The stinking bag over his face. And worst of all, the horribleness they’d done to his friend Hamid in jail, which he could barely stand to think about. They’d tempted him with a woman too. How could anyone who hadn’t been there understand it?

  Nasser made a right on Eighth Avenue, passing a Sbarro pizza restaurant with a red-green-and-white canopy out front and gleaming gold surfaces and pink marble inside. He pursed his lips, still not sure if he had the courage to ask this girl in the backseat to have dinner with him. It was crazy; he had enough guts to plant a bomb, but not enough to ask an Arab girl out.

  Things were so much simpler in Bethlehem, where parents would find mates from good families for their children. But here everything was a mad scramble. You had to prove yourself day by day. And he was so broke all the time. It was costing him $350 a week to rent the Lincoln Town Car and after giving 50 percent of his fares back to the car service—not to mention paying for tolls, gas, and insurance—he’d managed to save less than $250 in the last three months. Even though he was living rent free in his father’s basement, he’d barely been able to buy a birthday present for his sister Elizabeth. Now he wasn’t sure if he’d have enough to buy this pretty pants suit girl dinner at Sbarro. And would they have anything halal anyway?

  “So,” he said, trying to work up to the subject, “you are still living at home with your parents?”

  “For the moment.” She sighed and stared out the window as they passed more construction sites encroaching on the old boarded-up Eighth Avenue porn parlors and steak houses.

  He realized his heart was pounding, almost as much as it had yesterday with the hadduta at the school. Would he ask her? Wouldn’t he ask her? All of a sudden, everything was riding on it. If she said yes, maybe this new life would open up to him and he would forget all about the hadduta and Youssef and all the other rage and bitterness. He’d be able to live like Elizabeth.

  If she said no, well, this was God’s will, telling him to go ahead with jihad.

  Finally he was ready. “I am wondering,” he said, taking a deep breath, “if maybe some time, you would take coffee with me.”

  There was a long pause as they pulled up at a red light on 51st Street, facing a Howard Johnson’s motel and Bagel Espresso cafe.

  “No, I’m sorry. I don’t think so,” said the girl in the back.

  “You don’t think so?” Nasser cocked his head to the side as if he hadn’t heard her properly.

  Pedestrians passed silently before his silver fender. He looked down and saw his fingers twisting around the grooves in the steering wheel. Long, broken Arab fingers. Perhaps she only wanted American fingers touching her body. He tried to put the thought out of his mind before he became enraged.

  “Okay!” He tried to pull himself up in his seat. “No problem!”

  “I am sorry.” In the rearview mirror, she’d gone back to looking through her papers.

  The song on the radio changed to one called “The Loneliest Man in the World,” and something about the singer’s sad deep voice pulled at Nasser and made him uneasy.

  She’d said no. He drove without speaking the next few minutes, trying to absorb the hurt. It was okay. He’d been rejected before in this country. In the streets, in the hallways at school, in Mr. Fitzgerald’s class. I can’t pass you with the kind of work you’re doing. God be merciful, this was a maddening place.

  “Okay, this is it,” she said. “Thank you very much.”

  They’d arrived at her address. The building with the statue of a man holding up the world. Wasn’t there a passport office around here? The girl handed him a five-dollar bill and jumped out of the cab before he could ask if she wanted change. A young black man was waiting for her on the sidewalk, with a shiny shaved head and a gold earring that winked in the sun. The girl in the pants suit ran up and threw her arms around him, kissing him passionately on the lips.

  Watching this, Nasser felt his heart incinerate. How he hated America. The things that looked beautiful turned out to be ruined inside. And things that seemed to be within easy reach were, in fact, a million miles away.

  He stuffed the money into his front pants pocket, not caring if it got crumpled or torn. The stench from a nearby food vendor cooking sausages on a grill turned his stomach. Thanks be to God that Youssef was giving him a chance to make up for the mistake at the school. This was mercy and forgiveness. Allahu akbar. The life of this world was but a sport and a pastime, its riches transitory. In just a few days, Youssef’s friend would come into town and there would be a much bigger hadduta, and everyone would forget about this schoolteacher. They’d be too busy with the Great Chastisement.

  He looked once more at the girl kissing the black man on the sidewalk and then stepped on the gas and drove away downtown, past St. Patrick’s Cathedral and Saks Fifth Avenue, with the Rolling Stones bursting from his speakers and the smell of burning flesh still in his nostrils.

  15

  “OF COURSE, WE’RE PROUD of David,” Larry Simonetti, the school’s waxy, cherubic principal was telling Sara Kidreaux, the television reporter. “But really, he’s typical of the kind of teacher we’ve been able to bring into our school. And we’re fortunate to have the kind of nurturing relationship that …”

  The media, David Fitzgerald was discovering, was a physical universe unto itself, with its own laws of gravity, velocity, and entropy. Entering its atmosphere changed you and charged you with special properties, which at
tracted some bodies and repelled others.

  He was standing in the school hallway with Larry and Sara Kidreaux, surrounded by a semicircle of cameramen, sound technicians, and light handlers. An outer ring of some three dozen students had formed around the media people to watch them watching Sara Kidreaux watching Larry watching David.

  Apparently, he’d become a potent political symbol in the last few hours, with the President and the governor, who’d probably be running against each other next year, both invoking his name. And in the euphoria of the moment, the morning’s tense state of alertness seemed to slip away, and David found himself beginning to let go of his own suspicions and apprehensions a little.

  So now there was not just one but four camera crews working the corridors and classrooms, trying to come up with footage to supplement the rescue video. It fascinated David to see how their presence altered his relationship to various people. Students he’d never seen before were speaking authoritatively to reporters about his presence in their lives. Gene Dorf, the department chair, who spent all his time avoiding students and playing the stock market, stood in a doorway, declaring that David was his best friend. David’s actual best friend, Henry Rosenthal, was outside the cafeteria, riffing to interviewers in ever so slightly biting tones about “David’s particular teaching philosophy.” Since the explosion, David had noticed a mild undertone of tension between them, as if he’d violated some agreement they’d had to remain ineffectual white guys together.

  And Donna Vitale, with her big frizzy hair and one errant eye, stood under the fire exit, simply saying she wasn’t surprised. Somehow David sensed she was the one person who would have said the same thing whether or not there were cameras present. He gave her a long, admiring look, deciding that once all this excitement was over, he was definitely going to ask her out.