The Terrorist’s Son by Zak Ebrahim Read Free Book Online Page B

He’s grinning broadly and waving for me to run faster, faster, faster. He’s standing in front of a white, suburban, one-story house that’s been plunked down inside Attica’s walls so families like ours can spend the weekend together. There’s a picnic table, a swing set, an outdoor grill. I’m out of breath when I reach my father. I throw my arms around his waist, and he reaches down to pick me up. He pretends I’ve gotten too big for him to lift—“Ya Allah,” he groans, “Z must be short for Z-normous!”—and he falls on his back in the newly cut grass. We wrestle for a few moments, then my brother calls from the swing set, “Push me, Baba, push me!”
    The weekend is perfect—even the boring moments are perfect, because they’re normal . We play soccer with the family from the house next door. We have spaghettiand meatballs for dinner, and a plate of Entenmann’s for dessert. Then my parents say goodnight early and disappear into a bedroom. My sister tells our little brother he should go to bed but he says he’s not tired, not even the tiniest bit—then falls asleep within thirty seconds on a black leather couch in the living room. So my sister and I seize the moment and watch a videotape of Cujo , which I snuck into our basket at the prison library. It’s about this sweet Saint Bernard that gets bitten by a bat and gets rabies, then starts going mental in Connecticut. My sister and I snuggle close as we watch. Our mother would go mental herself if she knew we were watching it, which adds to the thrill.
    So for one weekend we actually are the family that Baba insists we will always be. Yes, the phone rings each night at six PM , and my father has to recite his full name and his prison identification number and some other stuff to prove that he hasn’t tried to escape. Yes, there’s a fence topped with barbed wire running along the perimeter of our green suburban yard. And yes, beyond that, there’s a colossal, gray thirty-foot wall. But the five of us are together, and the world doesn’t seem like a threat. It’s as if the big gray wall is protecting us—keeping other people out , rather than my father in .
    As always, there’s more to the picture than I understand. Baba may be a gentle Saint Bernard when he’s with us, but the moment we leave he turns rabid again. When we pile back into the station wagon for the endless drive back to New Jersey—dazed and happy andfull of all that dangerous hope—my father returns to his cell and rants about the Jewish judge who sentenced him to prison and instructs visitors from the mosque to murder him (“Why should I be merciful with him? Was he merciful with me?”). When that plan fails, he turns his attention to an even more vile plot. While I am fantasizing about being a real family, he is fantasizing about bringing down the Twin Towers.

7
February 26, 1993
Jersey City, New Jersey
    I’m about to turn ten, and I’ve been bullied at school for years. I can’t pretend it’s just because of who my father is. For reasons I will probably spend my whole life trying to unravel, I seem to be a magnet for abuse. The bullies’ latest trick is to wait until I’ve turned to open my locker and then slam my head against it and run. Whenever this happens, the principal says he wants to be “fair to all parties,” so I usually get sent to detention along with the bullies. The anger and dread have made a permanent nest in my stomach. Today’s a Friday, and my mother has let me stay home from school to recover from what we agree to call “a stomach bug.”
    I’m camped out on the couch, watching Harry and the Hendersons , a movie about a family who’s hiding a Bigfoot-type creature from the police because the police won’t understand how kind and gentle he is. In the middle of the movie, there’s breaking news.