The Girl at the Border

by Leslie Archer

  Have patience. We all must be xtra vigilant now. We will have another contact in place to move u. He is quite near u so it will be very soon.

  There was food in the wheezing refrigerator and the cabinets above the sink, whose spout dripped constantly. The toilet, though hideously stained, worked well enough, if she flushed two or three times. There was nothing to do, so she opened the copy of an English translation of the Qur’an Elin had given her and continued to read. But her mind kept drifting toward Salim. She had seen a picture of him: small, slender, eyes as dark as night, rimmed in kohl. He looked at once fierce and tender, though she was at a loss to explain how.

  Now u must make ur Shahada, ur declaration of faith. U will do this in writing. The 1st 2 of our family to read it will be ur witnesses.

  It is late at night, maybe three in the morning. Through the wall, she can hear the TV in Maggie’s bedroom. Maggie, she knows, falls into a drugged sleep with the TV on. Often, she is obliged to steal into Maggie’s room to shut it off. Sometimes, she’s in and out in fifteen or twenty seconds, hurrying as if the floor is a bed of glowing red coals. Once or twice, though, she stops at the foot of the bed, watching the nonperson lying in unnatural sleep, split off from her by a glass wall. In those moments, she wonders why Maggie cannot look her in the eye, why she speaks to her in monosyllables. She wonders what she has done to arouse such unspeakable enmity in her mother. She wonders why her father is almost never home and when he is, they spend all their time fighting. It’s as if he seeks to control her, as if he has a right to tell her what’s right, what’s wrong.

  The real truth of democracy is laid out before you like a poisoned feast. The so-called democratic elections touted by the west are nothing more than a gigantic fraud. Elected officials r all corrupt. This is fact, not fiction. They r all lazy, stupid & bigoted. U see 4 urself how unfairly Arabs & all Muslims r treated in ur country. They r spied on, hounded & harassed. Bella, hear me, there can b no justice for Muslims in the west.

  And there is her mother, sleeping like a sick baby—or, rather, the nonperson impersonating her mother. A pod person, a nonhuman who is doing a shit job of impersonating a human being. I don’t know where you came from, she thinks, but I sure as hell know where you’re going. And when you do, I want to be far, far away.

  I am sending u a prayer rug, Bella. And a hijab, which u must wear when u pray. I think u will treasure both. I picked them out myself. I have also enclosed 2 books that offer u a better interpretation of Islam. U may find the rules more stringent than in the edition of the Qur’an ur neighbor gave u. That 1 has been infected & perverted by western publishers. Pls throw it away. Read the books I send you seriously, eagerly, purposefully. B assured Allah, who loves & protects u, will reward the purity of ur intent.

  They knew nothing about the purity of her intent. The world of Dearborn had lived down to its cruel sobriquet of Deadborn. There was nothing for her here—less than nothing. She longed to escape, for something larger than she was, older, wiser—like a jinn to sweep her up in its arms and take her away to adventures, to everything that awaited her outside of this claustrophobic town where she felt drowned, plowed under by its unremitting normalcy, its unchanging small-town ways. She ached for this surcease to her agony the way she imagined a girl ached for her lover every moment they were apart.

  Now in her American cell, the darkness her constant companion, emptiness contracted the space within which she existed. She spent the endless hours reading about how ISIS was deliberately emulating the nineteenth-century anarchists, whose philosophy revolved around what they called the “propaganda of the deed”—that is to say, translating the bombing of Wall Street on September 16, 1920, to the bombing of a Russian airliner taking off from Sharm al-Shaykh; the Charlie Hebdo killings; the coordinated attacks in Paris, culminating in the Bataclan massacre. At its heart, the strategy took advantage of Newton’s third law of motion: an action will elicit an opposite reaction. As bin Laden sought with the 9/11 act of terror to lure the Americans into attacking the Middle East—it chose Iraq—to feed extremist insurgency, so ISIS was provoking a Western boots-on-the-ground reaction in Syria, an invasion of its ever-expanding caliphate, to accelerate the recruitment of the disaffected, the downtrodden, and those, like Bella, whose idealism drew them to a rebellion that echoed their own internal rebellion and discontent.

  But now she had read enough. Returning to her phone, she began again to reread her conversations with Salim. Her own personal history.

  Bella, I must tell you that the single most significant of Muhammad’s hadiths prophesizes the final battle between good and evil, between Muslims—and by Muslims I mean only Sunnis who, like us, adhere to the strictest of Sharia law—and Christians. Muhammad’s hadith calls for the battle to be fought in and around Dabiq, which is today in northern Syria, part of our caliphate. This battle, Muhammad predicts, is the precursor to the apocalypse.

  I haven’t read this hadith, Salim.

  What does it say?

  I will read it to you: “The Hour will not be established until the Romans—Christians—land at Dabiq. Then an army from Medina of the best people on the earth at that time will leave for them . . . So they will fight them. Then one third will flee; Allah will never forgive them. One third will be killed; they will be the best martyrs with Allah. And one third will conquer them; they will never be afflicted with sorrow. Then they will conquer Constantinople.” Today, that city is Istanbul, the gateway to the west.

  Bella wrote back: But what about love, Salim? Surely there must be love where you are, where I’m going.

  And this was Salim’s reply: There is no room for love when the infidel is rising. In this time the religion of war is the sole imperative.

  Gabriel, Elin’s eldest brother, in his room in the Shehadi house, read Bella’s secret history. He sat cross-legged on his bed, staring intently at his laptop’s screen. He had hacked into Bella’s email and Twitter accounts. Now he read everything that came her way, all the private, secret conversations she believed inviolable, as people did, despite the numberless stories of hacking and prying into online accounts. The universal mantra of “It won’t happen to me” was part of the human condition, hardwired, a natural firewall.

  But her conversations with Salim and the other online jihadi weren’t private. Her history was not her own. Gabriel followed every word with a studied avidity that would doubtless frighten her were she to be become aware of his ghostly presence hovering just over her shoulder.

  Laurel followed the directions Elin had given her to the letter. At some point, though she couldn’t gauge precisely when, she became aware that she was being followed. Resisting the urge to turn around and look behind her, she slowed her pace just a bit, glanced in the side mirrors of the parked cars she passed. She expected to see one of the SUVs with the blacked-out windows the FBI used, but in this she was disappointed. She did, however, glimpse a slim male figure slip into a doorway; then, seeing that she had neither stopped nor glanced back over her shoulder, he emerged and continued to pace her step for step. He wore jeans, sneakers, and a hoodie over his head, casting his face in shadow.

  From then on, she ignored her tail, as Jimmy Self would no doubt call him, and continued on to the library. The interior held the particular silence and serenity of all libraries. Dust motes danced in the shafts of sunlight streaming through the long windows. Being surrounded by shelves upon shelves of books brought her back to her days and nights in the library in the Village, before she had gone to sea, metaphorically, introducing herself to Orfeo; before she had met Dey, her great white whale, who embodied for her all society’s ills and evils.

  But now she had set sail on an altogether different sea, as perilous as the one before, perhaps more so. She had more to lose now: Bella’s life as well as her own. As she wandered the stacks, something that Elin had told her persisted like a burr under her skin. She knew she would not rest until she had drawn it out, hook by hook. She didn’t think Elin had lied
to her, at least not after the initial denial. It was something she had said. Laurel paused, stared at the spines of the books at eye level. She was in the philosophy section, titles dealing with ideology, dialectics, doctrines, and rational thought.

  Rational thought.

  Into her mind came the burr that had been making her so uncomfortable:

  “What exactly did she say? Can you remember?”

  “I was so shocked I . . . let me think. She said things like, ‘Don’t you see how this country is changing, how it treats you like second-class citizens?’ And things like, ‘I don’t know how you can buy into the falsity and materialism of this culture.’”

  “That sounds like pretty sophisticated thinking.”

  Laurel stared at the titles of the books again. Philosophy, ideology, dialectics, doctrines. “I don’t know how you can buy into the falsity and materialism of this culture.” Definitely not rational thought. Well, not for a sixteen-year-old girl from Dearborn, Michigan, anyway.

  At that moment, she felt a presence behind her. She spun on her heel. The man in the hoodie confronted her. She flinched as his hands came up. Looking quickly to either side, she saw they were alone. She was trapped.

  THIRTY-FOUR

  It was a cell that Bella found herself in now, no doubt about it. Unlike the vast majority of girls lured to Syria to become part of ISIS so quickly that they could not have second thoughts, she was stuck in limbo, alone and increasingly afraid. Apart from food, all she had to sustain her were the emails from Salim and Akima—and her father’s assistant, Angela. Apart from her, whose correspondence she read over and over, all these people seemed like ghosts, very far away. To be in America—indeed, in her own hometown—and yet to be at the border, ready for days to take that first step away from the West and toward a new life, a new family, a new home that would embrace her fully, that would allow her to be herself, whatever that might be, was excruciating. Right now, at this moment, she belonged nowhere, belonged to no one, and to be honest, she was far too young to be comfortable in such a terrifying position.

  Where was Angela? She knew she could easily find out. All it would take would be a single text. But the truth was she was afraid. What if Angela wasn’t the Angela she had built up in her mind? What if she was someone different altogether? She didn’t think she could bear it. And so she clung to the texts because they were familiar: they were from the Angela she wanted but was not sure actually existed.

  Even so. Even she, disaffected, easily turned, thinking herself ready for the adventure of a lifetime, at long last free of Deadborn, at long last belonging somewhere, being part of something larger—though she had no clear idea of what that meant; she was simply parroting what Salim and Akima had offered her—Angela’s texts made her suspect that she might have inadvertently taken the path of least resistance, the wrong path, that she had wandered into the fathomless deep. A shiver of fear passed through her. Now at the very end, when the gate had opened and she was about to step through, she wasn’t sure she wanted to go on. But she was terrified to go back, because there was nothing to go back to, no one to save her from herself. The thought that she was lost in every way she could be lost only frightened her all the more.

  Pulling out her father’s dog-eared copy of Moby-Dick, she opened it almost reverently. She was almost at the end, for the second or third time, but this time, when Captain Ahab, tangled up in the harpoon’s rope, was stuck fast to his titanic nemesis, Bella saw herself bound to her anger and rage, on the verge of drowning.

  Closing her eyes, she imagined a jinn coming to rescue her, a swirl of hot sand and smoke coalescing in front of her, wiping out the turbulent sea that was about to take her down. The jinn held out its hand, taking her away from the constant anxiety of unknowing, back to its crystal palace of certainty that only she could see. A place of magic where she would be safe, where she wouldn’t be alone. And there she would be loved and protected. What an idiot she had been! What a stupid little girl!

  Thinking of her own rage caused her to think of Gabriel, Elin’s oldest brother, so rageful, so ready to fight. Who knew what he was capable of? Maybe he was the backup; maybe he was the one coming for her. If that’s true . . . , she thought and shivered as if with a fever. Her split with Elin had been awful and, she knew, irrevocable. She had been systematically culled out of the herd like a bewildered calf, and now here she was paralyzed in no-man’s-land until she heard from—

  Her cell buzzed, making her start. Her heart pounded. She had disabled the GPS, as Salim had instructed. Her cell buzzed again. It slipped in her sweaty hand. Then the screen lit up with the text icon. She navigated to it. The text was short: two words.

  Prepare urself.

  That was when, shaking like a leaf in a storm, she texted her father—daddy help—and got a series of replies. She wanted to text back, but she was terrified that she was under surveillance, that somehow ISIS not only knew where she was but was watching every move she made, monitoring her cell phone. Well, why not? It was being done all the time, by everyone, everywhere. She wanted to leave; she wanted to stay. She didn’t know what she wanted and, as a consequence, did nothing but metaphorically fold into herself. Her mind folded like an accordion, shutting down in an attempt to protect herself from decision overload.

  And then the message she had been waiting for and now dreaded with every fiber of her being: I’m coming 4 u.

  Bella shivered until her teeth chattered. Then she began to cry.

  THIRTY-FIVE

  His fingers curled around the edges of the hoodie, drew it back off his face. He was a boy of maybe seventeen, not a man, despite the beard. She recognized him from the family photo in the Shehadis’ living room.

  “Gabriel.” Her voice verged on being hoarse.

  “We need to talk.” He had a man’s voice, not a boy’s. And there was something in his dark eyes that made him seem older than her first fright-skewed impression of him.

  “Go on,” she said, her voice just above a whisper.

  “You’re looking for Bella.”

  For an instant, Laurel’s tongue stuck to the roof of her mouth. “That’s right,” she finally managed. “How—”

  “I overheard your conversation with my sister.”

  Laurel had nothing to say to that, though his admission chilled her. Everyone was listening to everything, it seemed. Now it was Gabriel’s turn to glance from side to side. An older woman had entered their stack, and he led Laurel away, farther into the library.

  He wet his lips. “I need to ask you why.” He was dark and handsome, with his sister’s wide, sensual lips. They made him look somehow cruel.

  “I want to help Bella.” And because she did not know what else to say, because her friendship with Richard was complex and also profoundly private, because all her feelings were bound up in this line of questions—because, she had to face it, she was closer to Bella than she had ever been and, therefore, desperate, she said, “I promised her father I would find her.”

  He regarded her with a stony expression.

  Involuntarily, she took a step toward him. “Do you know where she is?”

  “No.” But he was young, after all, and his expression told her he was lying.

  “I want to help her.” Laurel could hear herself begging him, but she didn’t care. “Please. If you know where she’s gone, you must tell me.”

  There was a long silence during which she felt Gabriel’s scrutiny of her in a physical, MRI kind of way. Like God, it seemed, he was weighing her, holding her in the balance, trying to determine if she was worthy.

  Please, she begged silently. Please.

  “All right.” He nodded. “Come with me.”

  “I think something very bad is about to happen,” Gabriel said as they hurried along the street. “My sister told you about the incident at Ali’s. During the fight, I happened to glance up and glimpsed a light in the second floor corner window. It was just a sliver through pulled blinds; then it went off, and I forg
ot all about it until I began monitoring Bella’s online conversations.”

  Laurel was taken aback. She stopped him in the middle of the sidewalk. “Why would you do that?”

  “Just what the cops would have asked me had I told them. I didn’t say a word. They would’ve locked me up for the kind of hacking they do all the time. And they probably would’ve accused me of being ISIS.” He shook his head. “No, I couldn’t afford to tell them anything. But you—you’re like a jinni sent from Allah. I know you can help.”

  The afternoon was lengthening, reaching out toward its end. The western sun was copper, turning the shadows a strange, unnamable color. Newspaper leaves skittered across the sidewalk, along the street, caught in the corners of car windshields, house stoops. The day was unseasonably warm. Time seemed to slow down, to sigh, as if nearing its end. They started walking again at a more hurried pace.

  “Over the past several weeks, maybe as much as a month, I felt a change in Bella,” Gabriel said. “Elin’s too close to her, loves her too much to admit it. But I could tell. She started talking the way some of the guys I hang with talk. Ideology, hatred, the perversion of the Prophet’s teachings, peace be with him. As I began to pull away from them, she seemed to be moving into that orbit. It was just a sense at first, but it wouldn’t go away. I stayed up nights thinking about it. That’s when I hacked in.” His dark eyes searched Laurel’s. “She’d been corresponding with a cabal of ISIS recruiters. They have her head spun around—she doesn’t know whether she’s coming or going.”

  Laurel immediately thought of Elin’s comment that Bella lacked an inner compass. And now the words Bella had used in her terminal argument with Elin came back to her with an entirely new and sinister cast: “I don’t know how you can buy into the falsity and materialism of this culture.” That hadn’t sounded like her, Elin had said, and she was right.