by Steve Israel
Hassan returned to the towel hut, took the pill, and washed it down with an entire bottle of water. He studied Rona from his perch, watching and waiting for two things to happen.
First, he waited for the pill to poison him, to bring him to his knees. He would grope at his throat, and then die amidst the towel pile. In which case he could just forget the virgins in Paradise. Dying before suicide rendered the whole event null and void, according to the contract he had signed with the Abu al-Zarqawi Martyrs of Militancy.
Second, he waited for Rona to do something that ended his fantasy of her. Maybe peel off the burka to reveal an immodest bikini. Or walk right up to the towel hut and say, “What was I thinking? Gimme three towels!”
Neither occurred.
In fact, within an hour, the crushing pain had abated, as if someone had connected the pool pump to his temples and sucked out all the tension. For the first time in weeks, he could think clearly.
He could see clearly, too.
There was Rona, across the pool, almost shimmering like a mirage. Rona Feldstein: performer of medical miracles, abider of the two-towel-per-guest rule, guardian of her own purity. Even when the sun rose high overhead and forced everyone into the lukewarm pool, Rona remained on the chaise lounge, one leg fused to the other, covered by that black robe, fanning herself with her magazines. All the other women at the pool, with their flesh exposed and their breast implants, read magazines plastered with exposed flesh and implanted breasts. But not one of Rona’s magazines even hinted at such immodesty. Not the Psychology Today or Ventilate: The Public Opinion Journal For Social Workers or the Hadassah Magazine with its banner headline:
JAKE GYLLENHAAL IS JEWISH?
HADASSAH’S TOP TEN CELEBRITY MINYAN!
Hassan often heard Jews talk proudly about famous Jews. It confused him. In training camp, he had learned how the Zionists owned all the world’s banks and controlled, among other enterprises, the United Nations, the United States, the military-industrial complex, Exxon-Mobile, Saudi Arabia, all the 7-Elevens, and everything between Wall Street and Hollywood. So why the ecstasy when they learned that some famous or quasi-famous personality was Jewish or half-Jewish, or married someone who was Jewish or half-Jewish? Or, in the case of Madonna, studied Kabbalah? And if the Jew just happened to be a professional athlete! Forget Moses with his Ten Commandments. We have Art Shamsky, who played outfield in the 1969 World Series!
When the heat overcame Rona, she unwrapped the robe, self-consciously darting her eyes, until she revealed a one-piece bathing suit that stretched from just below her neck to just above her knees. No flaunting or flashing, thought Hassan.
Just like what his grandmother, Fatimah, wore on the rare visit to the ocean in Gaza.
When the heat became too strong for her, Rona stood. She kept her hat on her head and her sunglasses perched on her nose, wrapped the towel around her narrow waist, and stepped toward the pool, like she was approaching the edge of a high cliff.
How she immersed herself! thought Hassan. The others hurled their bodies into the pool or rolled in like great whales, spraying waves of pool water mixed with tanning lotion, tiny wisps of grass, brown specks of beach sand, and flakes of peeling skin everywhere. As if they owned the pool; as if they were the only ones in the pool. How typically American.
Rona’s entry was like a delicate minuet. She dipped the toes of one foot, lifted them from the water and shook them gently, then repeated the action with her other foot. Once acclimated to the temperature, she clutched the rail and eased herself down each step. Slowly. Hesitantly. And when the water lapped at her knees, she bent forward as if to dive, cupped her hands, and sprinkled a few drops on each shoulder. Next, she rubbed her wet hands down her neck, and across the top of her chest. And climbed out of the pool, panting.
She had “spritzed” herself, which was the Rona Feldstein equivalent of the fifty-meter freestyle in the Summer Olympics.
Throughout the day, Hassan ventured from the towel hut. Gathering used towels and replacing them with fresh ones, adjusting towels on chairs and lounges, folding and refolding towels, fluffing towels, turning towels, patrolling for any loose or errant towels. Sometimes, when he would pass Rona, she would peer over her sunglasses, raise her palm, and wiggle her fingers so that her bracelets jingled and flashed in the sun. No one waved at him, unless they were beckoning him to do something for them. Bring me a drink, Hassan. Adjust my umbrella, Hassan. Another towel, Hassan. Embarrassed, he spun his head in a different direction and walked past Rona. As if he didn’t notice her waving. Checking on him.
When the sun turned burnt orange and cast long umbrella-shaped shadows across the pool, Rona lifted herself from her lounge, gathered her belongings, and then began folding her towel, from end to end, smoothing the layers as she folded. Then she brought the finished product to the towel hut. “It was nice meeting you, Hassan. I’m going up to get ready for dinner with Morris. Get a good night’s sleep and tell me how you feel tomorrow.”
“Yes, Mrs. Feldstein. Tomorrow.”
“And Hassan. Next time when you don’t feel well you let me know. Remember, I’m trained, Hassan. As a therapist, and as a mother!”
The camera clicked one last time.
THE VOYEUR
FRIDAY EVENING, SEPTEMBER 3, 2004
Alonso Diaz didn’t mind Friday night shifts, when his colleagues emptied out for the weekend. He preferred to be alone with his photo collection, hundreds of images glowing on his computer. Peering into the lives frozen in the click of a shutter, examining their forbidden secrets, peeking beneath whatever layers they had wrapped around them.
Diaz was a voyeur. Employed by the Federal Bureau of Investigation Boca Raton Field Office. Tonight, he was annoyed. The hurricane was threatening to rip across his region within days. Hurricanes weren’t good for the terrorist surveillance business. Terrorists tended to stay indoors in bad weather. Out of the reach of Diaz’s cameras.
He sat in the cluttered cubicle they called his “work station,” enveloped by a soiled beige fabric partition plastered with Miami Dolphins stickers, curling and faded photos of family fishing trips with his family, and an array of bureaucratic memos.
He leaned into his computer monitor, rubbed his eyes, and studied the latest photos. In the War on Terror, Alonso Diaz’s weapon of choice was a fast shutter—capturing images of men and women suspected of suspicious behavior, questionable associations, and un-American activities. Agent Diaz connected the dots by building a massive database of pixilated images. Surveillance photos of taxi drivers and fast-food workers, college students and maintenance crews. In black and white. But mostly olive.
Some were suspected terrorists, some were suspected of knowing someone who knew someone who just might be a terrorist, and most just happened to have stumbled within Diaz’s depth of field. It didn’t matter. He often thought, Show me a picture of anyone and I will show you a story to be told, a secret to be outed, a lie to be exposed. It was all so . . . scintillating! The blemishes of human nature just waiting to be developed. Like in the old days in the darkroom. You exposed the image to some light, immersed it in a chemical bath, and before long, patches and blotches appeared. Subtly at first, until a vivid picture emerged.
Today’s collection, for example. Hassan Muzan appeared to be just an overworked towel boy at the Paradise Hotel and Residences. And his conversation with that redheaded woman wasn’t exactly destined for Top Ten Crime-Scene Photos on the Discovery Channel.
But these days, appearances were deceiving and deception appeared everywhere. Diaz had a collection of informants bothered by aspects of Hassan Muzan’s behavior. His strange habit of purchasing and discarding cell phones. His periodic meetings in Little Havana with three suspicious men. His belligerent behavior when asked for too many towels.
So he—literally—became the focus of Diaz’s attention. Framed, shot, pixilated, and uploaded over th
e past few weeks, a face among the other faces in Alonso Diaz’s Rogues Gallery.
With a cameo appearance by Rona Feldstein.
Soon something would develop from these photos. Maybe not a plot against the United States, but something. Diaz had a hunch.
As Diaz was fond of saying: “Cameras don’t lie. People do.”
MONSOON OVER MIAMI
SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 4, 2004
The next morning, Rona suggested to Morris that they go to the pool. Morris looked out the window at dark clouds roiling over the ocean, and watched as gusts of wind rattled the palm trees and blew errant papers across the patio. Yesterday the ocean was turquoise and placid. Now, it was gray and frothing.
There was tsuris ahead, Morris knew.
“The storm is coming,” he said.
“No biggie. Why should we lose a whole day of our weekend, Morris. Let’s sit by the pool while we can.”
No biggie? They are evacuating half the state of Florida and she wants to sit outside? This from a woman who didn’t like sitting too close to the field at Shea Stadium because “God forbid a foul ball can take somebody’s eye out”?
What’s happening? thought Morris.
Once, I sat safely in my RoyaLounger 8000 and watched my Turner Classic Movies. Now I’m about to reenact the tornado scene in The Wizard of Oz.
Even with the wind blowing and waves swelling, Paradise guests converged on the main pool, hoping to cram in a few hours before the hurricane drove them inside.
Rona led Morris to the towel hut, clamping her hat to her head, against the wind.
“Hello, Hassan! This is my husband, Morris. Oh my God, this storm looks like it will be something!”
Hassan smiled, half glad to see Rona and half giddy at the approaching Armageddon where God would wipe out the infidels. “Hello!”
“Thank you again for the towel yesterday! The pool was very refreshing.”
For thirty-four years Rona had guarded her body from the transmission of germs from “other people’s schmutz.” Morris found it implausible that Rona would insert a single body part into a public pool, no less dry the polluted water from her skin with a towel used by strangers and washed with other towels in a communal laundry.
A few drops of rain began to fall, and Morris said, “I’m going back inside, Rona. Are you coming?”
“I’ll be up soon, Morris. There’s something I want to discuss with my new friend, Hassan.”
As he walked back, Morris had no doubts that Rona had befriended Hassan. Rona befriended everyone within her peripheral vision. If you were standing beside her at the supermarket checkout, or eating at an adjacent table at the diner, or sitting near her on an airplane, it wouldn’t be long before you were hearing about her childhood, or flipping through pictures of her children. There was no escape.
Rona leaned against the counter:
“Nu?” Rona said.
Hassan turned away, toward the towels.
“Hassan?”
“You asked for a new towel. I’ll get one.”
“No. Not new! Nu! As in ‘Hey, what’s happening?’ ” Rona began a cackle deep in her throat.
“So, are you feeling better?”
“Yes, Mrs. Feldstein. I slept all night! And awoke with no pain! Thank you!”
“Don’t thank me. Thank Migramize. By Celfex. When you go to your doctor, you’ll tell him: Mi . . . graaa . . . mize. By Celfex. He’ll write you a little prescription.”
Hassan’s smile faded.
“What’s the matter, Hassan?”
“A doctor is expensive in your country.”
“Gottenyu! What these Republicans have done to health care in America. You could bust a gut. And if you did, who could afford the surgery? It’s a national shonda!”
“Yes, Mrs. Feldstein. A shonda.” Hassan entered the word into his ever-expanding mental dictionary of Yiddish phrases that should be memorized by every sleeper cell terrorist.
“Look. You’ll give me your address. When I get back to Great Neck, I’ll mail you some samples from Morris’s trunk. No biggie.”
“Thank you, Mrs. Feldstein.”
“You have to take care of yourself, the way you schlep towels all day! Running around like that. You could get heat stroke, God forbid. I hate to sound like your mother. But you do need to be careful. Where is your mother by the way? Where does she live?”
Hassan Muzan was well trained to resist most interrogation techniques, including beatings, threats, seduction, frothing dogs, solitary confinement, electric prods, simulated drowning, and Twisted Sister’s “We’re Not Gonna Take It” played at ear-bleeding volume. Defending against a Jewish psychotherapist asking about his mother had not been part of his training.
“She lives in Kuwait,” he stammered. It was a lie. And now he felt something strange and new: a pang of guilt.
“Aaaaach. So far away. It must be lonely. You should call your mother, Hassan. She must worry about you. Being so far away. And with this hurricane coming. It would eat out my kishkas to have a son so far away and not hear from him.”
He thought of the last time he had seen his mother.
He had arrived home and sat at a wobbly table in the kitchen, to report his decision. Over the din of the congested and dusty street outside, the babies wailing and the children screeching and the muezzin’s calling, he told his parents he would drop out of college and join the jihad—specifically, the Abu al-Zarqawi Martyrs of Militancy Brigade, which offered, among other perks, a signing bonus, training, a chance to see the world, a gun, and the seventy-two virgins in Paradise.
His mother wailed at the news. “Why are you doing this? Why?”
“To end the Zionist occupation. To protect my homeland.”
Hassan left out the part about the virgins.
“Stop this foolishness!” she said, as if Hassan had revealed that he wanted to become an astronaut or a cowboy. “Let the troublemakers blow themselves up. You will go into the orange-exporting business. With your father and uncles. And Cousin Qassim. It’s settled.”
“It is not settled! It is my life and I will decide how to live it!”
His mother narrowed her eyes. “That troublemaker Abdul put you up to this, didn’t he? I told you to stay away from Abdul. Why can’t you be more like Cousin Qassim! Qassim is going places. In the orange-export business!”
Hassan would not listen. And his mother would not shut up about Cousin Qassim this and Cousin Qassim that, and how Cousin Qassim would save the world one crate of oranges at a time. Soon she was shrieking and clenching her fat fists in the air.
Meanwhile, his father sat impassively under the crooked framed photograph hanging on the wall, the photograph of Cousin Qassim with his moronic grin and ill-fitting American suit. He watched his wife and son battle in the detached way he watched everything. As if watching one of those silly soap operas on Israeli television.
Then his mother did the unthinkable. She turned to his father, pointed a puffy finger at him, and screeched: “You are to blame. You. You I curse!”
She had humiliated him. Right there. In front of Hassan. So loudly that the neighbors had to hear it.
His father fidgeted through his rough beard nervously, and his heavy, sad eyes connected with Hassan’s. Weak, pleading, helpless eyes.
Eyes that said, “Go. Escape this woman. Now.”
That night, Hassan took one last look at his young sisters, Adiva and Ameerah, and stroked their black hair against the pillows in the bed they shared.
The next morning Hassan set out on his new life. A life which, if he studied hard and did everything right and mastered his trade, would end with his blowing himself up.
Final destination, martyrdom.
With a layover at the Paradise Hotel and Residences.
“Look,” Rona said. “I think a mother should hear f
rom her son. My Jeffrey moved to Chicago. Maybe not as far as Kuwait, but it may as well be. Still, every Sunday he calls. At six on the dot. Before our Chinese food. You and your mother are none of my business, I know. Morris says I can’t help myself. So what’s such a sin? So shoot me, why don’t you.”
Not you, thought Hassan.
A gust of wind blew in from the ocean, etching determined currents in the pool and bending palm trees. Guests shivered and wrapped towels around their bodies.
“Oh my God,” Rona exclaimed. “I better get inside. Do you think the hurricane will be bad?”
Hassan thought, If there is a merciful God, yes. It will destroy everyone and everything. It will be the mother—the mother—of all hurricanes.
ELDERCARE
SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 5, 2004
Even at the age of ninety-six, Minny Schwartzman had a crush on that nice man who visited her room twice a week. He would sit next to her bed as she watched The Price Is Right on the wall-mounted television. He studied the family photographs that littered her room. He nodded with interest at the stories she shared about her life. He helped her eat her favorite Melba Toast snacks and made sure she took her medications. And how handsome he was! With that Clark Gable mustache and the Charles Boyer voice.
Having escaped the surveillance of federal authorities on Long Island, Ricardo Montoyez found a new home—specifically, the Bella Abzug Home for the Aged in Riverdale, New York. He volunteered there to provide people like Minny companionship in their incredibly old age, posing as a retired hedge fund executive who wanted to give something back. And take a few things in the process.
The Abzug Home was like a pharmaceutical gold mine, a treasure trove of medications that kept hearts ticking, blood creeping, bowels moving. From Avodart for prostates to Xarelto for blood. Drugs for brittle bones and drugs for foggy brains. Drugs to keep every overworked organ functioning for at least another day. Twenty, thirty, forty pills a day. Scooped and shoveled out of plastic cases that looked like fishing tackle boxes. Inserted through ancient lips, washed across toothless mouths, and choked down grizzled gullets.
