Man of the Hour Read online

  “You saved her?”

  “Well … Yeah. I mean. Okay.” David fumbled with the words, not wanting to exaggerate his bravery, but at the same time wanting the boy to be proud of him. “You could say I saved her.”

  Arthur’s face lit up with that enraptured look again. “And did they catch the bad guys who did it?”

  “No, but they will. I’m sure.”

  Arthur sat quietly for a few seconds, processing the information, his face a matrix of little-boy emotions. Back and forth went the leg, five more, ten more times, until his heel hit me bottom of the bench.

  One of the museum guards came over, a stubby little man with pumped-up shoulders and a brutish-looking small mustache. David was sure he was about to tell Arthur to stop kicking the bench. But instead, he handed David a little pencil and a museum program.

  “I wanted to know if I could get your autograph,” he said with a low, hoarse Bronx accent. “I seen you on the Today show.”

  “No problem,” said David, relieved and bemused, aware of Arthur’s eyes on him as he took the program and started to sign.

  What must my boy be thinking? The guard took back the signed program, smiled with gold-capped gratitude, shook his hand, and scurried away. Does he think I’m somebody important? David wondered.

  “Daddy, I want to live with you,” Arthur said suddenly.

  “Why? Because someone asked for my autograph?”

  “No, because Mommy keeps acting crazy.” Arthur assumed that screwed-up little cartoon voice he always used when things were bothering him and he didn’t want to show it.

  “How crazy?”

  “She thinks the neighbors are listening to us.”

  “Well, Mrs. Harris next door is kind of nosy.” David remembered the old crone’s stem disapproving looks on the elevator around the time he moved his things out.

  “And Mommy burnt herself,” said Arthur.

  “Ayyyy …” The alarm clock went off in David’s head again, a little louder this time. “Are you sure it wasn’t an accident?”

  “It wasn’t an accident. She fights with Anton all the time and then she stays in her room and cries and she won’t come out. And she keeps singing that dumb song, ‘Kimono My House.’”

  “Oh great,” David hissed, like a tire running out of air.

  Arthur looked disturbed. “Why did you say ‘Oh great,’ Daddy?”

  “No reason.” He shook his head. “It’s just a stupid grown-up expression.”

  In the back of his mind, he’d always feared this day would come, but he’d put off thinking about it. She was beginning to unravel.

  He looked down and saw that Arthur’s frayed white Converse sneakers were now about a size too small for him. “Is she getting you to school in the morning and making you dinner?”

  “Sometimes.” Arthur wiggled his feet. “But she’s sick a lot.”

  So here was the new issue. Up until this point, David had been going along thinking he could share custody with Renee amicably until they finally reconciled and got back together. A boy needs his mother the way a deep-sea diver needs oxygen, someone once told him. But now the line was getting tangled.

  Reconciliation was looking unlikely, but a vicious custody fight with Renee was the last thing he wanted. She was sick; she needed help. He hoped she wasn’t falling into a druggy thing with Anton.

  And what would happen if he won anyway? Raising a child by yourself wasn’t a one-shot deal like dragging somebody off a burning school bus. Arthur’s life was all niggling little details—making sure he had his inhaler at all times, getting him ready for school, arranging play dates and doctor’s appointments—you had to plan like Machiavelli and execute like Parton. But in his own life outside the classroom, David had never shown much aptitude for details like paying his bills on time or getting his apartment painted. He’d been too preoccupied waiting for Something Great to happen.

  “You know, if I tell Mommy that you want to come live with me full-time, she’s going to be very upset,” said David.

  Arthur just looked at him, as if to say: So are you going to betray me or not?

  “And I’d have to get a bigger apartment.”

  At the moment, he had exact duplicates of most of Arthur’s toys jammed into the corner of his little $798-a-month apartment on West 112th Street and two dresser drawers full of the boy’s clothes in his bedroom closet. How would he swing it, anyway? He was making just a shade over $50,000 a year and spending most of that on support payments and lawyers. Ten thousand dollars each for his attorney and Renee’s. And what were his prospects for doing better with an unpublished novel and an unfinished dissertation in the milk crate in his closet? At Coney Island High School, he was a great teacher. But on the social scale of the average Upper West Side playground, he was near the bottom.

  It was going to be a tough sell to the court-appointed psychiatrist, whom he was seeing with Renee tomorrow. Fathers generally didn’t get full custody of their kids. But then he saw Arthur was still giving him the look. The one that said, if you saved that girl on the bus, you could save me.

  “You know, I’m still hoping Mommy and me can work things out,” he said wistfully.

  Arthur shook his head. “I don’t think so,” he said in his best approximation of a dubious big-boy voice.

  “Well, we’ll see.”

  David patted him on the shoulder and they went to look at more knights, stopping at a diorama of Italian noblemen in chain mail and sharp-looking visors. Can I really do this? David asked himself. Can I start a war with Renee and not get everybody hurt in the process?

  It was useless to wonder, he realized. Momentum was already carrying him forward. He couldn’t let the boy down by not trying. Arthur tugged on his wrist. “Hey, Daddy. Can I ask you something?”

  “What?”

  “Can I have your autograph too?”

  22

  THE SMALL MAN in the dark suit without a tie did not stand when Youssef brought Nasser into the living room on Friday night. He only sipped his coffee and looked to the side of Nasser a little, as if checking to see whether anything of greater interest was going on behind him.

  “Keef halik? How you doing?” Nasser tried to introduce himself and offer his hand, but Youssef’s friend ignored him and kept looking off to the side.

  “So this is the idiot who puts bombs under school buses,” he said in Arabic, putting down his little cup.

  Nasser found he couldn’t respond; his mouth was full of dust. Here was the great hero of the Afghanistan war, the Cairo bus shootings, and Flight 502. He was shorter and thinner than Nasser had expected, with hot black eyes, a narrow, long, horse-like face, and a sharp dagger of a beard. Youssef said they should call him Dr. Ahmed, though he didn’t say what his degree was in.

  He’d been everywhere and nowhere at all, according to Youssef. He had five different passports and five different names. He’d been Egyptian, Palestinian, Iranian, Syrian, even a citizen of Kuwait. He’d led student revolts against the Shah in the seventies, fought the Soviet oppressors, and before falling out of favor with his fellow terrorists he’d planted bombs that killed dozens of Jews in Israel. But there was something finicky, almost fussy about him. He did and said everything twice as fast as necessary as if to emphasize his impatience to get on with his great comeback.

  “You say you are going to put the hadduta in the school and then you put it under a bus,” said Dr. Ahmed, pulsating slightly in the easy chair Youssef never let anyone else sit in and viciously working a handkerchief around the bottom of his nose.

  “There was a lot of security, sheik.” Nasser sat down on the couch and started to defend himself. “There were too many witnesses and even cameras …”

  “You are an idiot, my friend,” the doctor said, quickly putting the handkerchief away and picking up the coffee again. “On this, we are all agreed.”

  Nasser looked around the room and realized Youssef had hidden all of his weight-lifting equipment and bootlegged video
s, instead putting up a picture of the al-Aksa Mosque. There weren’t any McDonald’s containers either. Sheik, how can you believe so fervently and live so comfortably in this godless country? Nasser had asked Youssef before. It’s all just a ruse to fit in, the Great Bear had told him with a shrug. Always have two faces—one for your friends and one for your enemies—but never get them mixed up. Clearly the visitor had little tolerance for such excuses.

  “To target a school is not such a bad idea,” said the doctor, blowing on his coffee and looking at a spot just below Nasser’s chin. “But to do it so badly. To make it into a joke. What is the point? Can you tell me?”

  “Tell him, sheik,” said Nasser, turning to the Great Bear for support. “Tell him why we thought of it.”

  But instead of explaining how they meant to disrupt the governor’s visit, Youssef just coughed and took another pill. “I think it was you who brought it up, my friend,” he said softly.

  Nasser stared at him. So this was how it would be. He was to take all the blame himself and Youssef the warrior, the father he never had, would not help him.

  The corners of his eyes burned and his tongue thickened. But he swallowed hard and said no more.

  “Now there is only confusion and no point has been made.” Dr. Ahmed crossed and uncrossed his legs, seeming suddenly disgruntled by his own smallness. “I was watching the CNN International News in Egypt and this was hardly mentioned at all. There was nothing about it in al-Hayat newspaper. A hadduta like this should be in the news for weeks and weeks. Instead, the only thing you accomplish is maybe you have the police looking for you now.”

  “They don’t know nothing,” Nasser mumbled, again bewildered by what the others had expected to see on the news.

  “And neither do you!” The doctor cut the air with an angry slash of his hand. “What do you do this for? To kill one bus driver? You son from a mother’s asshole. We should not even take credit for this.”

  “I am very sorry,” said Nasser.

  For the briefest moment, he wondered if in fact Youssef had brought him here tonight not to help with the doctor’s comeback, but to be killed for his mistake.

  “Where did you find this imbecile, anyway?” Dr. Ahmed asked Youssef. “Look at him. Look how pale he is! Is he even an Arab?”

  “Both my parents are from Palestine, sheik.” Nasser rested a hand on his cheek, again feeling ashamed of his inability to grow a proper beard.

  “Crusaders must have fucked your ancestors.” The doctor glanced down, sneering at Nasser’s Timberlands. “And what about these boots? Is this what the cowboys wear?”

  “A gift from my father. I thought they were only work boots.”

  “It’s like an infection, America. It works its way into you and makes you weaker. It destroys you if you’re not careful.” Dr. Ahmed stood up and began to walk in a circle around Nasser, limping slightly and taking him in from all angles. “Youssef tells me your father is married to an American woman. Are your sisters being raised as Americans?”

  “No, sheik. They still have their honor.”

  “Well. That is something, at least.” Dr. Ahmed sighed and blew on the coffee again. “There’s nothing more important than a family’s honor.”

  “Allahu akbar,” said Nasser.

  It was amazing how quickly he’d fallen into the rhythm of wanting to impress this man. Part of it was knowing the visitor’s history, but another part was simply the way the doctor was staring at him. As if he found the whole idea of human beings tiresome. You either crumbled before such a look or found a way to stand up before it. He reminded Nasser of the hard men back home. The ones who didn’t let Israeli guards slap their faces.

  “Sheik, I know I’ve done wrong,” Nasser said. “But I’m ready to make up for it.”

  “I wonder if this is so.” Dr. Ahmed kept limping around him, faster and faster, as if he were trying to make Nasser dizzy. The black coffee swirled and smoldered in his cup. “I wonder if you know what it means to have jihad. To have a Holy War.”

  “Yes, I know.”

  He stopped and put his face right next to Nasser’s. He smelled like stale crackers and airport lounges. “This means we don’t stop. Okay? We kill all the bad ones and make them afraid every minute of their lives.”

  “It’s what I tried to do.”

  “You failed. This is not jihad. It’s humiliation.” Dr. Ahmed’s nostrils flared, as if he could actually smell failure. Nasser wondered if the little man was about to throw the hot coffee in his face.

  “I know. It won’t happen again.”

  “Well, it’s okay,” Dr. Ahmed said with an expression that suggested the opposite. “Some of our supposed leaders make mistakes too and don’t acknowledge the warriors who’ve done and sacrificed the most for them.” He paused and looked bitter. “But all of that is going to end now. So are you going to be part of this?”

  “Yes, but …” Nasser began.

  “No God but God,” the doctor cut him off, starting to limp in a circle again, his fingers tensing on the cup. “This fight we have has been going on for fourteen hundred years. Okay? Maybe you know a guy, an American guy, and you get to be friends with him. All right? So you fight once and then you get along, and you’re friends again. But it’s not like that with us. Okay? We fight to the end. This next thing we do won’t be just one school bus. Many, many more people will be involved. Bodies and bodies everywhere. We kill as many as we can. Do you understand? Even the women and children die. Okay? They’ll be lying in the street with their arms and legs blown off. Just like at the Jerusalem mall.”

  “Of course,” said Nasser, trying to ignore the shaking in his knees.

  “Some people will say, ‘This is not right, this is haram. The Koran forbids this. You should not kill the innocent.’ But this is not a regular war with the soldiers. This is jihad, this is Holy War. And everyone is a soldier in the Holy War. We could kill their mothers and fuck their sisters nine hundred thousand times and it wouldn’t make up for what they’ve done to us. Am I right?”

  “No God but God,” Nasser said.

  “Insh’allah.” Dr. Ahmed nodded and sipped his coffee some more.

  “Allahu akbar,” Youssef added.

  Nasser hesitated, not sure if it was his turn to praise God or not.

  He found himself imagining what it must have been like when the doctor shot the tourists on the bus in Cairo. He could picture this angry little man curling his lip at a wounded woman begging for her life, letting her crawl away a little, and then pulling the trigger. He was afraid to associate with such a man, but even more afraid not to associate with him. His fate had been decided the other day with the girl in the back of the cab. If God had a better path for him, He would have revealed it by now.

  “So do you have the heart of steel?” Dr. Ahmed stopped and looked down into his cup, as if wondering whether the coffee was still hot enough to scald anyone.

  “Yes, I do,” said Nasser.

  “God is greatest!” said Youssef.

  But for some reason, Nasser found he could no longer look at the Great Bear. In a very small way, he felt his friend had betrayed him by not doing more to defend him. On the other hand, he had survived it on his own and was that much closer to being accepted by this man Dr. Ahmed.

  “So you’re going to be ready to do whatever I ask you, right?” said the doctor, finishing the coffee and circling one last time. “You’re going to be a soldier in the Holy War, so no sacrifice is too much. You do whatever it takes. And you don’t get scared about people dying. Understand?”

  “I understand.” Though as he said this, a part of Nasser was still struggling, still wanting to back away from all the destruction.

  Somehow Dr. Ahmed seemed to pick up on his lingering reluctance. He paused to the right of Nasser and carefully put his cup down on a white saucer with a delicate blue border. “Of course, if this is not okay with you, you should just walk away,” he said. “Nothing will happen.”

  Nass
er noticed a stillness in the room, a quiet hissing awareness of death. The doctor was weaving in and out of his peripheral vision. “It’s all right,” he said. “If it’s God will, I’ll do it.”

  23

  THE WEEKEND WITH ARTHUR had so far been full of joy and apprehension for David. Everywhere he went with the boy, people recognized him from the news. Two passengers on crowded subway cars offered him their seats, a waitress at a restaurant called Lucky’s on 57th Street brought Arthur a special ice-cream dessert with luscious cherries and extra fudge on top, and guys in a Con Ed work crew on Columbus and 86th climbed out of a hole in the street to ask for David’s autograph. As he signed their newspapers, Arthur hopped up and down next to him, declaring, “That’s my daddy! One day I’m going to do what he does!”

  Back at his apartment on 112th Street, his answering machine was bursting with manic energy. He sat on the rug, eating potato chips with Arthur, while Matt Lauer’s people asked if he’d be available to play golf next week; Geraldo invited him to dinner; Barbara Walters’s people wanted to put him up at the Waldorf for a few days. He knew it couldn’t last, this orgy of attention. But still it was hard not to get caught up in it, as he sat in his cramped apartment surrounded by half-painted walls, books falling off shelves, and the few pieces of ratty furniture he’d managed to salvage from the old place.

  On the other hand, there was Renee to deal with. When David called her Friday night to talk about the conversation he’d had with Arthur at the museum that afternoon, she’d sounded tense and distracted. And when he repeated Arthur’s comment about wanting to live with him full-time, she hung up the phone.

  Now, at a special Saturday session, sitting next to her in the Upper East Side office of Dr. Allan Ferry, he was full of dread.

  Dr. Ferry wore a white Paul Stuart shirt with red stripes that alarmingly matched the color of his office walls and carpet. His tie had pictures of small panda bears on it, and when he smiled his teeth looked slightly brown. He was a forensic psychiatrist, whose job was to interview both David and Renee before consulting with the judge about custody arrangements. Originally this was just supposed to be a formality. Husband and wife were going to work this out on their own.