Terrorist by John Updike Read Free Book Online

evangelical Christians get my goat, blaming Darwin for the sloppy job God did, creating the universe."
    But the boy is not listening, pursuing his own point. "And because it has no God, it is obsessed with sex and luxury goods. Look at television, Mr. Levy, how it's always using sex to sell you things you don't need. Look at the history the school teaches, pure colonialist. Look how Christianity committed genocide on the Native Americans and undermined Asia and Africa and now is coming after Islam, with everything in Washington run by the Jews to keep themselves in Palestine."
    "Whew, " Jack says, wondering if the boy recognizes that
    he is talking to a Jew. "That's quite a bill of particulars, to get you off the college track." As Ahmad widens his eyes, staring into so much injustice, Jack notices that his irises are not plain black but with a greenish tinge in their brown, a pinch of the Mulloy in him. "Did the imam ever suggest," he asks, letting the chair's recoil lean him confidentially across the desk, "that a bright boy like you, in a diverse and tolerant society like this one, needs to confront a variety of viewpoints?"
    "No," Ahmad says with surprising abruptness, his soft lips bunching in a pout of defiance. "Shaikh Rashid did not suggest that, sir. He feels that such a relativistic approach trivializes religion, implying that it doesn't much matter. You believe this, I believe that, we all get along—that's the American way."
    "Right. And he doesn't like the American way?"
    "He hates it."
    Jack Levy, still sitting forward, braces his elbows on his desktop and his chin thoughtfully on his intertwined fingers. "And you, Mr. Mulloy? You hate it?"
    The boy shyly casts his eyes down again. "I of course do not hate all Americans. But die American way is the way of infidels. It is headed for a terrible doom."
    He does not say, America wants to take away my God. He protects his God from this weary, unkempt, disbelieving old Jew, and guards as well his suspicion that Shaikh Rashid is so furiously absolute in his doctrines because God has secretly fled from behind his pale Yemeni eyes, the elusive gray-blue of a kafir woman's. Ahmad in his fatherless years with his blithely faithless mother has grown accustomed to being God's sole custodian, the one to whom God is an invisible but palpable companion. God is ever witJi him. As it says in the ninth sura, Ye have no patron or helper save God. God is another person close beside him, a Siamese twin attached in every part, inside and out, and to whom he can turn at every moment in prayer. God is his happiness. This old Jewish devil, beneath his cunning, worldly-wise, mock-fatherly manner, wishes to disrupt that primal union and take the All-Merciful and Life-Giving One from him.
    Jack Levy sighs again and thinks ahead to the next appointment—another needy, surly, misguided teen-ager about to float away into the morass of the world. "Well, perhaps I shouldn't say this, Ahmad, but in view of your grades and SATs, and your way-above-average poise and seriousness, I think your—what's that word?—imam helped you to waste your high-school years. I wish you had stayed on the college track."
    Ahmad comes to Shaikh Rashid's defense. "Sir, there are no resources for any college expenses. My mother fancies herself an artist; she stopped her own education at the level of nurse's aide, rather than invest two more years in her own education when I was a pre-school child. "
    Levy ruffles his thinning, already mussed hair. "O.K., sure. These are tight times, what with heightened security and Bush's wars soaking up what used to be a surplus. But, let's face it, there's still a lot of scholarship money out there for smart, responsible kids of color. We could have gotten you some, I'm sure of it. Not Princeton, maybe, and maybe not Rutgers, but a place like Bloomfield or Seton Hall, Fair-leigh Dickinson or Kean, can be excellent. Still, for now, that's pretty much water over the dam. Sorry I