Somebody walked in whose father had been on a flight that originated at Logan Airport, and I felt a grief much more real than any I had felt or could imagine feeling. This feeling of grief did not leave me when we discovered that the kid’s father was fine.
As the day went on, I wandered through campus, hugging acquaintances I would not have bothered to say hello to the previous day. Cesar Solomon, whom I had barely spoken to since we had lived together as freshmen, solidly embraced me.
“Today’s a day that shows you who you really are,” Cesar said. “I just want you to know that you are not DEPENDENT ON THE OPINION OF OTHERS.”
I tried not to show him how much it meant to me that he had said this, and we wandered together and were joined by other wanderers who convened in front of the library, on which the names of famous writers were tattooed. We all agreed that reality was real now. Though it would have been impossible to say out loud that we were grateful that this had happened, gratitude is exactly what we felt for the event that transformed the unreal feelings we had only sort of been feeling the previous day. There were many ways to interpret what was happening to us, which made it critical that we all come together and interpret it the same way: that we were innocents and we were under attack, that the smoke from downtown portended war, that the war would make us more serious, and that we were lucky to be made more serious.
I walked into more groups and more group hugs. I looked around for Rebecca but was overall relieved not to see her. Neither of us reached out to the other, both of us probably realizing that we would likely get back together if we spoke that day, and both of us finally realizing that that was not a good idea. I also decided not to contact Leah or Ismail, for reasons I could not quite articulate, but the events of this day seemed to give license to irrational decisions. I wandered into a vigil as night fell on what had after all been just one more day I had spent thinking about myself.
Over the two weeks that followed 9/11—which, I wrote in an email around that time, had been the true epiphany machine—I drifted along with the calls to rise to the historic occasion, at least insofar as rising to the historic occasion meant not going down into the subways. I spent most of my days surfing the web instead of doing my reading, which, even though this was exactly how I had spent my days prior to 9/11, now felt like a different activity altogether, one imbued with the national purpose of reading articles about how much national purpose everything was now imbued with.
I was going through these thoughts in a loop when two men knocked on my door and announced that they were with the FBI.
When they showed me their badges I felt an intense urge to cower, which I swallowed out of some kind of primal urge not to make a joke of myself.
“Please come in,” I said, which I knew from my father I was never supposed to say to law enforcement. “How can I help?”
“Sweet tattoo,” one of them said. “Where did you get it?”
I had opened the door wearing a short-sleeved shirt. Always a mistake.
“Um, downtown.”
“Downtown? At the World Trade Center? Couldn’t have been recent.”
“No, it was at this place . . .”
“Oh, you got it at a place. Places are my favorite places to get things.”
“It’s an epiphany tattoo. I got it at Adam Lyons’s apartment on Eighty-fourth Street.”
Another thing my father had told me was that if I was ever questioned by law enforcement or by a lawyer, I should answer questions as literally as possible. If someone holds up a pen and asks if you know what it is, you’re supposed to say “yes,” not “a pen.” This was probably the most useful advice he had ever given me, and I was not following it.
“Do you know Adam Lyons well?”
“I used to know him a little.”
“A little? We hear that you used to be his right-hand man.”
“Right-hand man? I hung out at his place when I was in high school.”
“And you were dependent on his opinion.”
“No. Maybe. But that was a long time ago.”
“Whose opinion are you dependent on now?”
“I’m sorry?”
“Back when you were dependent on Adam Lyons’s opinion and you were hanging out at his apartment a lot, do you recall meeting a man named Ziad Jarrah?”
“The 9/11 hijacker?” I had heard the name over the previous two weeks. Jarrah was the lead hijacker on Flight 93, the plane that had crashed into a field in Pennsylvania following a passenger revolt.
“Ziad Jarrah used the epiphany machine,” one of them said.
“Wait,” I said. “You’re saying that one of the 9/11 hijackers used the epiphany machine?”
“Good listening-comprehension skills. Now I can see why they let a former cult member into the Ivy League. Were you present when Ziad Jarrah used the machine?”
“If I was, I certainly don’t remember him.”
“You might remember the tattoo, though. We discovered his severed arm in the wreckage. Bruised and bloody, to say the least, so some of the letters were hard to read, but it said WANTS TO BLOW THINGS UP. Sound familiar?”
I felt like I had been turned inside out, and my arm was now inside my stomach.
“I really don’t think I met Ziad Jarrah,” I said.
“Doesn’t answer my question. Do you remember people talking about that tattoo?”
“Not that I can recall.”
“Do you remember anyone else receiving that tattoo? WANTS TO BLOW THINGS UP?”
I knew that if I gave the FBI his name, I would be condemning Ismail to, at the very least, intense interrogations. And Ismail was gentle, sensitive, not much more suited to interrogation than I was.
“What does it matter?” I asked. “The epiphany machine is a hoax. This is like asking me if I know anyone who got the same fortune cookie that Hitler got.”
“Technically it would be more like asking if you know who got the same fortune that Hitler got, not the same fortune cookie.”
I knew that I was being toyed with, but I didn’t know what to do about it, so I didn’t say anything.
“Cowed into silence by logic? The FBI isn’t so interested in fortune cookies. But if a guy gets a tattoo that says he wants to blow things up, that’s something we’re going to give a second look.”
“But Adam’s guests . . . epiphany machine users . . . don’t choose their tattoos,” I said. “Do you think DEPENDENT ON THE OPINION OF OTHERS is the tattoo I would have chosen?”
“Cult leaders often have deep insight into personality. If he thought somebody might want to blow things up, maybe he might have been right.”
“Or he might have been wrong,” I said. “Or WANTS TO BLOW THINGS UP might be vague and open to interpretation, like every other epiphany tattoo.”
“I know about three thousand people who wouldn’t think Ziad Jarrah’s tattoo was open to interpretation.”
I sat down on my bed, thinking about that number.
“Listen, Venter. Whoever you’re protecting, you don’t really know him. You want his approval, you want him to think well of you, so you haven’t noticed what he’s hiding. Imagine you pass up this opportunity to tell us about him, and then he does something terrible. What then? What if he decides to blow up a school bus? Can you imagine the faces of those kids in their last moments? Can you imagine their parents? Can you imagine what their parents would think of you?”
In my mind, I watched a braver version of myself look these men in the eye and tell them I was immune to this fear-mongering bullshit. But I also, as though on another screen in the multiplex of my mind, watched Ismail. Everything that he had done now seemed secretive, furtive, the behavior of an angry, violent youth trying to conceal his anger and violence. These two men had taken my life and shined a new light on it, and now I was looking at it their way. I looked at the floor a
nd mumbled that I did not want to talk to them anymore.
“So you do know someone who received that tattoo?”
“I don’t want to talk to you anymore,” I said. “I don’t have to talk to you anymore.”
“It’s actually not entirely clear what you do and don’t have to do anymore. The law isn’t exactly tattooed on anybody’s arms at this point.”
I was terrified, but I was not going to give up Ismail. “Please leave my dorm room. Otherwise, I’ll call security.”
“And you think that security will throw out FBI agents who are interrogating a terror suspect?”
“Excuse me?”
“If you know of someone with this tattoo and won’t give us his name, then some might wonder whether you’re giving aid and comfort to a terrorist.”
“There’s no reason for you to wonder that!”
“We’re not saying that we would wonder that. You seem like a solid young man who wants to help his country, but is too DEPENDENT ON THE OPINION OF OTHERS—if not on the opinion of the guy who got the tattoo, maybe on the opinion of some of his professors who are so dogmatic about due process that they’d keep clutching the Constitution while all of America burned around them. Or maybe you’re dependent on the opinion of friends who just don’t like the idea of cooperating with ‘the man,’ even when the man is the only one protecting you. To us, you seem like a solid young man who has gotten some bad guidance. But how will you seem to others?”
“So you are going to investigate me?”
“You tell us. Should we investigate a guy who’s protecting a terrorist?”
I felt many emotions, the most powerful of which was an intense wish that somebody else was making this decision.
“Look,” I said. “One person I used to know got that tattoo. But there’s no way he could be a terrorist.”
“And his name is?”
I gave them Ismail’s name and told them how to find him. The agents gave me a look that told me they liked this answer, and then they asked me if I had any other names. I did not, but if I did, I would have named them.
“One other thing: Did Ismail ever show any tendency to do something violent in the name of Islam?”
“No. I mean, there was one time when he started praying while he was driving us over the Tappan Zee Bridge and threatened to drive us off it, but that was just a joke.”
They looked at each other, and I immediately regretted having said anything.
“It was just a joke. He was just making a point about life being meaningless. Or death being meaningless. I mean . . .”
“Thank you. You’ve done a real service for your country today.”
“You’re just going to talk to Ismail, right? You’re not going to arrest him for a tattoo, are you?”
“We’ll talk to him,” one of the agents said. They left, and as soon as I closed the door, I sat on the edge of my bed and stared at my tattoo, trying not to understand that what had just happened was the simplest and oldest story there is: I had betrayed my friend.
Eventually, I left my room to walk to a party. I hugged people who did not know that I had just delivered a good man into Hell, and who if they did know would probably think that I had done the right thing.
“DEPENDENT ON THE OPINION OF OTHERS?” said some guy who was handing me a beer from the fridge. “I like that. It shows how connected we all are now. Cheers, man.”
I hated this guy while I drank his beer. I knew that before the end of the night I would somehow convince myself that I was some kind of hero, but for the moment at least I had a little bit of clarity, even if I had nothing else. Whether the machine was real or fake, whether Adam was just some good-hearted dude who had found a magic device in a trash heap or the cynical deceiver his tattoo advertised, for that moment I knew who I was and what I deserved.
CHAPTER
29
A week passed and I heard nothing, except for the rustlings of life failing to return to normal. I think it was already October, maybe we had already invaded Afghanistan, when I got a phone call from Ismail’s mother.
“He’s staying with you, isn’t he?” she asked.
“Mrs. Ahmed. Good to hear from you.”
“Don’t give me that. I worked hard to keep the two of you apart, but I knew I could never succeed. Ismail is sleeping in your room, and the two of you are . . . Just put him on the phone. Now.”
“I don’t know what you’re thinking, but you shouldn’t worry.” Neither half of this sentence was true, though it was true, on multiple levels, that she should not have been worrying about what she was worrying about.
“If he’s not with you, then where is he? He hasn’t attended classes or checked into his dorm in days. Leah hasn’t seen him. He must have told you something. You’re his best friend.” Her voice gave way to panic.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I haven’t heard anything from him.” The feeling of superiority that had been roused by her homophobia had evaporated, and now I was doing what was done only by the most egregious liars and by witnesses who followed my father’s advice: saying only things that are literally true.
She was sobbing now. “Then where is he? Do you think somebody just beat him to death and left him in a ditch? Because he’s a Muslim?”
“There’s absolutely no reason to believe that,” I said, though this did sound like a more likely explanation than the idea that the United States government had jailed him without so much as informing his mother. I didn’t want to think that my friend was dead, but there was something attractive in not being responsible for whatever had happened.
“You’ve always been such a good friend to him,” she said. This was not true, and she could not have believed it. But she was so terrified for her son that she must have found comfort in thinking that Ismail had a good friend in me. I told her that I was sure he was fine, and that I would call her if I heard anything. I knew I had been lying when I said I was sure he was fine, but I hoped that he was indeed fine.
My hope came to an end one late October morning when I booted up my computer and found this temporary tattoo across the New York Times homepage:
STUDENT’S PLOT DISRUPTED
The article described how Ismail Ahmed, a theater student at NYU, had been apprehended with a tattoo matching that of 9/11 hijacker Ziad Jarrah: WANTS TO BLOW THINGS UP. For years, Ismail had made contributions to charities “linked” to Al Qaeda supporting “jihadists” in Bosnia and Chechnya. I remembered those charities, which Ismail had taken a job at Blockbuster to send money to. It didn’t seem likely that they were in any way linked to Al Qaeda, and if they had been, it seemed almost impossible that Ismail had known about these links. There had to be more, there had to be more. Apparently, “plans” had been discovered on Ismail’s hard drive to detonate a series of bombs on the Queensboro Bridge during rush hour. As far as I could tell, those “plans” consisted of a draft of a play about a Muslim student in a creative writing workshop who had submitted a draft of a play about two Muslim students debating whether or not to detonate a series of bombs on the Queensboro Bridge during rush hour. “According to sources close to the investigation, Mr. Ahmed’s girlfriend and close collaborator, Leah Marx, was unaware of the existence of this play.” There were “reports” that he had once started praying while driving over the Tappan Zee Bridge, threatening to drive himself and a passenger off the bridge. There were also indications of “increasing investment in Islamic identity and of distaste with American culture” as well as “plans to cast himself as Shylock in a production of William Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice, widely considered one of the most anti-Semitic works in the Western canon.”
If this was all the FBI had found, they would never have arrested him. They must have found more, they must have found actual evidence of an actual plot that they couldn’t yet release to the public. If they had, then I had saved lives. If they hadn�
�t, then surely Ismail would be released or acquitted.
Except for the strange fact that it was not clear that Ismail was going to be given a trial.
Apparently, since his arrest—which had taken place in secret, several weeks earlier—he had been held as something called an “enemy combatant” in a naval vessel off the coast of South Carolina. He had not been given access to a lawyer, and there were no plans to grant him that right in the immediate future.
This was horrifying—an obvious assault on the basic tenets of the American judicial system—but there was no way that he had been apprehended simply because of his tattoo. America was not a totalitarian dictatorship and I was not a movie villain. Ismail must have been participating in an actual plot. Evidence would be released one day, once the authorities judged the releasing of that evidence to be safe. After all, the evidence against Ismail would probably implicate other terrorists who were still at large and active, and releasing the evidence against Ismail would alert those terrorists that they were being monitored and help them evade capture. Once all of the terrorists Ismail had been in contact with had been captured—and maybe once all the terrorists that those terrorists had been in contact with had been captured—then the evidence against Ismail would be released. And if no evidence against Ismail was ever released, that itself would be evidence that Ismail had been in contact with so many evil people, or that those people had been in contact with so many evil people, that the web of evil people could never be untangled, and if Ismail had been in contact with that many evil people, then his own evil must have been massive.
The Epiphany Machine Page 25
