Man of the Hour

by Peter Blauner

  “Mr. Fitzgerald?” The corners of Nasser’s mouth turned down. “I put the bomb right in his hands and run away. This would be perfectly all right.”

  The others started chuckling and he felt his ears bum. “No, you are getting laughing and I am getting serious,” he said indignantly. “If he gets hurt by the hadduta, it’s completely okay. Then they’ll know they were wrong about him and it’s another thing for them to feel insecure about. They’ll realize they have no idea what’s really going on in the world.”

  Ahmed and Youssef stopped laughing and regarded each other thoughtfully, each raising a thumb and then lowering it, weighing the decision. For a few seconds, Nasser felt like he had probably said too much.

  “You know, it’s not a bad idea,” Dr. Ahmed said finally. “To go back to the same place again, like Mehdi does back home? This could be tremendous, to do it in the United States. It shows them we can hit them anytime, anywhere we want. They can never feel safe.”

  “I still don’t know if I like it.” Youssef huffed and picked up his orange juice carton, not wanting to look at Nasser. “Too many things could go wrong again.”

  “Nothing will go wrong this time.” Dr. Ahmed leaned close to Nasser, suddenly wolf-like and intense. “You get inside the school building. You bring the hadduta to where it belongs, maybe the lunchroom or a classroom, and then that’s it.”

  “Still, I don’t know if it’s okay,” Youssef sulked. “If the plan didn’t work the first time, maybe it’s God’s will. Shouldn’t we ask the imam if this is permissible, to go back to the same target?”

  But this part of the conversation barely registered with Nasser. He was distracted by the television again. The camera showed a young bearded man lying dead near a jewelry store, half-covered in orange tarp with the top part of his body mysteriously intact. The announcer identified him as the suicide bomber. Two young Israeli soldiers stood guard over him with their Uzis raised, as if they expected him to spring back to life and attack them at any moment.

  Nasser held his breath, taking in the image. The young bomber seemed strangely calm in death. What kind of courage must it have taken to stand there, with the bomb ticking, knowing everything was about to end? What must his family be thinking? Would they understand what he’d done? Would they be proud at his martyr’s funeral?

  “Don’t worry about the imam,” said the doctor. “I’m sure he’ll give us permission. Now let’s go pray.”

  42

  POISONOUSLY HUNGOVER, EYES BLOODSHOT, pupils dilated, guts on fire, and balance seriously questionable, David somehow got himself into a cab and made it to the hospital in twenty minutes.

  He found the waiting room for the ER full of stupefied, devastated people watching the Psychic Friends Network on the TV. The nurse at the registration desk was a round, olive-skinned woman with bright-red blemishes and a tight, surly mouth.

  “I’m here to see Arthur Fitzgerald.” David leaned on the glass partition, feeling the heavy thump of his heart against his sternum.

  She shuffled some papers and tapped some computer keys. “What are you, a relative?”

  “Yeah, I’m his father.”

  “His father’s already here.” She reached for a ringing phone. “Ain’t nobody else allowed back.”

  His father’s already here? David stared at the smudged glass for several seconds, but there was no reflection. Was this it? Was this the final stage of dissociation? That not only was there a free-floating media image of himself that he didn’t recognize, but there was an actual person running around with his name? He waited until the nurse got off the phone.

  “What do you mean, ‘his father’s already here’?” he said angrily. “I’m the only father he has.”

  “Well, whose name is on the insurance?”

  “Mine, goddamn it.” He was perhaps two or three muscle movements away from breaking the glass and grabbing her by the throat. “It’s my insurance plan. I have it through the school system.”

  She turned and shouted something to a woman sitting behind her. Then she buzzed him in.

  “Is he all right?” David realized his hands were shaking as he came through the metal door and the quality of the air changed. “Is my son all right?”

  The nurse barely looked up from her keyboard. “You’re going to have to speak to the doctor on that,” she said, gesturing toward a corridor on the left. “He’s in Room A-121.”

  David headed down the scuffed hall, past bodies on gurneys, old men hanging on to IV poles, grotesque and desperate scenes of cutting and transfusing glimpsed through open doorways. A harsh antiseptic smell made his insides squeeze together. Okay, God, let’s make a deal.

  He found Room A-121 on the left side of the hall and went in. Arthur was sitting calmly on an examination table with his legs dangling over the side and a white nebulizer mask over his nose and mouth.

  “Hey, Daddy.” His voice was muffled. “It was the cloud again.”

  Renee and Anton were standing there talking to a nurse, a long-faced woman in papery green clothes.

  “What the hell happened?” David asked.

  “I had a fight.” The boy smiled with his eyes.

  David stared at him blankly. Arthur fighting? It was one of those images that was hard to visualize, like a Greenwich crack den or a riotous Jesuit.

  “Oh, David, I’m so sorry.” Renee came to him, her eyes smeared with mascara and her cheeks sunken.

  “Will somebody tell me what’s going on?” he said, looking over her head, not bothering to see if she was apologizing for the newspaper story or Arthur being in the hospital.

  His eyes fell on Anton, who just hunched his coat-hanger shoulders and tossed his long black hair. “Hey, don’t look at me, man,” he said. “He’s here because of you.”

  “What?” Instinct made David raise his fist.

  Anton held up his hands, as if he was staying out of it. “You’re the one in the newspaper.”

  Arthur, picking up on the conflict, began coughing and wheezing into his mask.

  “All right, all of you, out of here.” The nurse stepped between the three of them, her face etched in bitter sleeplessness. “Give us two minutes and then you can knock yourselves out.”

  “Just tell me if my son’s okay,” David said, his eyes returning to Arthur.

  “He’s fine.” The nurse was pushing all three of them out the door. “And he’ll be even finer if you get out of here.”

  They moved out into the corridor and took up positions near an emaciated gray-toned man with an IV pole, who looked like a wire sculpture in an open-backed hospital gown.

  “What happened?” said David.

  “It was nothing.” Renee wiped her eyes and studied her sandaled feet. “He had a little fight at school.”

  Through the doorway, Arthur smiled and waved to his father. David tried to smile back but his face felt heavy and numb.

  “A fight put him in the hospital?”

  “Well, he had a little asthma attack in the middle of it.” She stood on her toes and tensed up, as if he were about to start screaming at her.

  “Oh God.” David put a hand to his forehead, struggling for civility and sobriety. “What did he have a fight about?”

  “You.”

  “Me?”

  “Another boy was picking on him in the yard.” She bum-rushed the words, trying to get through them. “Something to do with the story in today’s paper. The other kid said you were a bad guy and Arthur hit him. Okay?”

  “Okay. Okay.” David closed his eyes. “I got it.”

  All at once, the falling that had been going on all day stopped. He felt something turning over inside him. His son was having to fight to defend him in the schoolyard. Finally, he knew he’d hit bottom and it was time to start climbing up.

  “So what does the doctor say?” he asked, slowly beginning to rearrange himself, hitching up his pants and tucking in his shirt. “Does Arthur have to stay overnight?”

  “They gave him a s
hot of Ventolin and they think I can take him home.” She started to reach for David’s hand, but then caught herself and left her fingers hanging in the air.

  “Well, nobody asked me, but …” Anton interrupted with a lazy drawl. “Maybe it’d be better if everybody just cooled it and tried to change the atmosphere a little.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” David turned on him, seeing at last a place to put all his anger.

  “I mean, you should go home.” Anton fussed with a black beret in his hands. “Renee is stressed out, Arthur’s stressed out, and I’m stressed out. It creates an atmosphere. So maybe you should make yourself scarce awhile. Chill. Give us some space. Let the pot simmer. Take two aspirin, and call back in the morning.”

  “What are you, the king of clichés?”

  Anton puckered his purplish, slightly oversized lips. “You know, I can see where he gets it from now,” he said.

  “You can see where who gets what from?”

  “Arthur. That little way he has.”

  David turned on him. “You got a problem with my son?”

  “No, man.” Anton stepped back. “I’m just saying he needs a lot of attention. That’s all.”

  “He’s seven years old.”

  “Okay,” Anton said in a mopey voice. “I understand. I’m just saying sometimes you can spoil a kid by giving him too much attention.”

  “You think he fakes having asthma?”

  “No, man … I don’t know.” Anton toyed with his Navajo bracelet again. “I just … never mind …”

  The man was a child himself, David realized. He wasn’t going to help Renee out with Arthur.

  “Anton, I’d like to have a few words with my wife,” he said, resisting the urge to slap the taller man.

  Anton looked back and forth between Renee and the man with the IV pole, not so much protective as worried about a scene. “Is that cool?”

  “Yeah, let us be. I’ll give a shout.”

  Anton walked down the hall, miming a saxophone and singing cocktail scat to himself: “Bwada-dee-dum-dum-bwada-dum-dum-dum …”

  David glared after him, shaking his head. “What do you see in him, anyway?” he murmured.

  “I don’t know.” Renee dabbed her eyes with a tissue. “Maybe I thought he could help me get over myself.”

  “And has he?” David asked.

  “Not exactly.” She touched the dent she’d made in the middle of her lip. “I don’t seem any better to you, do I?”

  “Is that why you said all those things about me to the newspaper girl?”

  She shut her eyes tight. “David, I don’t know why I did that. I’m so sorry. She just came up to me and started talking and I needed someone to talk to, because of all the pressure I’ve been under with the judge, and Arthur, and the FBI, and Anton and—” She stopped mid-rant and cringed. “I don’t know. The words just came out angrier than I meant them to. I mean, I knew what I was doing, but I didn’t know. Do you understand? The words kept coming and she kept listening. She seemed so nice and I …” She touched the side of her face. “I guess I got out of hand again, didn’t I?”

  “I guess you did.” David stared down at the frayed cuffs of her jeans, trying to sort through fury, sympathy, and anxiety.

  A gurney came rattling down the hall carrying a hairless old man on a ventilator, with a Jamaican nurse and a Filipino doctor arguing on either side of him.

  “Look, Renee, we can’t—I mean, I can’t allow this to happen,” David said, fighting down the vodka sickness and the waves of exhaustion. He could still feel the dampness in his bones from last night’s rain.

  “What?” She looked over her shoulder, as if someone had just tapped her on it.

  “I’m going to have to … going to have to.” He stopped, forcing the words to take on shape and muscle in his mind. “Just get through this. Okay? I have to do it for Arthur’s sake and for my sake. Understand? If you’re there when I come out the other side: great. If you’re not, then I guess that will have to be okay too.”

  “What do you mean, if I’m not there?” She looked scared.

  But he was already moving past her, into Room A-121. He was reaching back down into himself, trying to find that core of solidness again. The one he’d first felt when he was a boy, trying to grow into his oversized body. He’d always been too big to hit anybody back at school, so he’d just learned to take it. To remain in that secure place within himself. Now it was time to go back there.

  Arthur was still sitting on the examining table, but the nebulizer mask was off. On seeing him, David felt himself becoming more vivid. The little pulse next to his heart. He knew there was a reason he hadn’t gotten around to killing himself today.

  “Daddy, the cloud almost got me.”

  “The cloud?” David sat down beside him on the table, still a little green and churned up inside.

  “The bad cloud. The one from my dreams.”

  Oh yes, the nightmare cloud that always appeared after he’d seen his parents fighting.

  “I was fighting with Maxwell and then the bad cloud came in my chest and I couldn’t breathe.”

  “Okay. Okay.” David put his arm around the boy and pulled him close, like he was pulling him to shore. “The cloud almost got me too.”

  “What?”

  “It’s all right. I’ve got you now. I’ve got you.”

  43

  AFTER LAST NIGHT’S cold snap and rain, the weather had warmed up again, a final gasp of Indian summer. And from the way the sun was roaming on top of the water and the wind was carrying the carousel music up the Coney Island boardwalk, Elizabeth could tell this was going to be an American day.

  There were days she felt more Arab. But this Saturday—as she put on a pair of denim cut-offs, a black tank top, and her Rollerblades and went skating down the boardwalk with her friend Merry Tyrone—she felt more American.

  “Come on, girlfriend, shake that thang,” said Merry, keeping pace with her in a blue Spandex tank top and tight navy shorts with the Adidas stripes down the sides. “Put some rhythm into it.”

  Elizabeth wobbled a little, hoping none of her family would see her like this. She’d had it with Nasser and the insanity of him going through her room. It made her just want to shuck off all the tradition, all the relatives, all the history, all the pressure of being part of an oppressed people without a real homeland. Enough already. She just wanted to skate.

  She pushed off with her right leg and then her left, feeling the tendons and muscles stretch as she sailed past the hot dog stands and the old burned-down Dreamland amusement park, its disused Thunderbolt roller coaster shrouded in moss and ivy. The sun played lightly on her skin, making her shoulders shine and her arms look golden. She was wearing the new pads that Nasser had bought her but not the helmet. It was too small and it made her feel like she was suffocating. Besides, she liked having her hair in the salty breeze. She wanted the sensation of things rolling off her today.

  “Yo, what about Mr. Fitz?” Merry said.

  “I know. Did they arrest him yet?”

  “No, but everybody’s buggin’ out about it. None of us knew he was, like, the mad bomber an’ shit. So now, I’m like, thinking like a detective, you know. Going back over things he said in class. Reexamining. I always thought there was something a little out about him. What was that shit he wrote on the blackboard the other day? To know yourself is the final horror. Now we know why.”

  “It was, ‘To be afraid of oneself is the last horror,’” Elizabeth corrected her. “That’s not at all the same thing. He was being a teacher.”

  “If you say so.”

  Elizabeth pushed off hard on her right leg, hearing the roar of the herringbone boards under her skates as seagulls scattered from her path. “I don’t believe what they said about him in the paper anyway.”

  “You liked him. Right?” Merry was grinning at her.

  “What you talkin’ about, girl?” Elizabeth was trying out that homegirl speak; it neve
r sounded right coming out of her mouth.

  “You were sweet on him, Mr. Fitz. I seen the way you looked at him sometimes.”

  “He’s my teacher. What’s up with that? Why’s everybody think I’ve got something going on with him? It’s just because he takes me seriously.”

  She passed through scents of perfume and cigarette smoke, thinking about him. Mr. Fitzgerald. It still made no sense to her, the accusation. He never seemed that strange in class, not like they said in the papers and on television. He just liked to push things a little. In fact, she’d enjoyed that about him. The way he could pull ideas out of you that you didn’t know you had. Not like her other teachers, declaiming the same boring lessons from the same books in the same can’t-be-bothered voices. When Mr. Fitzgerald talked, the words moved around in your head. Of course, he’d touched her, lightly, that day in the parking lot. But somehow she hadn’t minded.

  “Yeah, I know what that’s about,” Merry was saying. “You got that older man thang going on with him.”

  “I do not.”

  “Yeah, that’s what you say. But you thinking about that mad bomber love.”

  The carousel music grew louder. Elizabeth pushed off on her left leg as they approached the entrance to the Aquarium. Four boys from school were standing there, some thirty yards away, smoking blunts and hoisting forties. One of them was that cute Dominican guy, Obstreperous Q, with the shaved head and the earring, and another was Ray-Za with the funky hair and the gangsta-style, whom Merry dated sometimes.

  “Speaking of bad boys,” said Merry, skating on ahead. “Excuse me a minute. I have to communicate with this fine young Nubian.”

  Elizabeth hung back a little, watching Merry’s hips do the side-to-side swivel and wondering what it would be like to be so free and easy with your body. To be so relaxed. To be a hot American babe, instead of a demure Arab girl. To have men stare at you, enthralled. She thought she’d seen Mr. Fitzgerald look at her that way once or twice. And why not? Why should she be different from anyone else? She had more in common with kids here than she did with her crazy brother from Bethlehem. She was raised in America, she had an American stepmother, she read American books, had American thoughts. But something wouldn’t let her go all the way over to that side. The one night she’d tried hanging out on a street corner, drinking beer with Merry and a couple of other girls from school, she’d found herself getting restless and uncomfortable, liking the idea of what she was doing, but hating the actual taste of it. With boys, it was the same. She’d look at a guy for weeks, fantasizing about the absolute coolness of being on a date with him. But if he dared to approach her, she’d shrink away in terror.