American Lies

by Joshua Corin

This time the governor didn’t pick up.

  On the way to the capitol, Poncho tried him twice more, but it really was more to keep his hands busy and his thoughts from screaming.

  Someone had blown up a mosque.

  Casualties unknown but expected in the dozens.

  There already was an increased presence of state police outside the capitol, but Poncho’s car was finally waved through, and soon he was standing in the anteroom outside the governor’s office on the second floor.

  The door was shut, so Poncho had to hypothesize about which alphabet-soup agencies were in there with the governor. GBI, definitely. FBI, definitely. DHS? ATFE? ICE? Poncho listed agencies and subagencies and their corresponding federal and state liaisons, and in the back of his mind he realized that this attack was going to, in all likelihood, delay the vote on HB 44, and he tried to dismiss this fact as mundane, especially when compared to dozens of casualties, but passing HB 44 had been the spine of his life for the past two months and any delay allowed time for the yeas to become nays and yes, dozens of casualties was bad, very bad, but a failure to pass HB 44 would affect millions of Georgia citizens, and Poncho could feel his mouth go dry and he immediately crossed the anteroom to grab a can of Coke from the executive assistant’s mini-fridge.

  The executive assistant was busy fielding phone calls.

  Poncho wandered out of the anteroom. His knees hurt. He needed to sit, but more than that he needed to be doing something. If he couldn’t take the elevator upstairs and knock on every lawmaker’s door to remind them of their support for HB 44 or feel them out over the religious freedom bill which had just crawled zombielike out of committee, if he couldn’t cross the street and gently harass the boys and girls in the Legislative Office Building…

  He made a decision. He didn’t like it. But it was sure better than standing in the middle of the hall like an overfed statue. He treaded across the floor—pinkish marble mined and shipped direct from Georgia congressional districts 9 and 14 just to the north of Atlanta metro—and found his way, reluctantly but assuredly, to the outer offices of the governor’s deputy chief of staff for communications.

  The door was open. The door was always open.

  The outer offices were manned by three eager-beaver twentysomethings, even now hard at work on their computers despite the horror show occurring in Buckhead. One of them did have a news feed running audio so they could keep up with the latest—most of the injured had been transported to Piedmont Hospital, still no confirmation of a death count—but their faces remained stoic and their fingers remained fixed to the keys. Their boss had scared the humanity out of these peons, just as she almost had done to Poncho, once upon a time…

  And her radar sense must have detected his blip because she sauntered out of her office, arms crossed, and gave him a glance with her brown eyes that in two seconds summarized him, found him lacking, and dismissed him.

  Poncho sipped his Coke to hide his grin.

  “Hey, Judy,” he said. “What’s new?”

  Chapter 9

  “I don’t have time for you,” his ex-wife replied.

  “There was a time when you had all the time in the world for me, Judy.”

  “To spend with you, Poncho. Not for you. But our marriage vows always were a little abstract from your point of view, so why should I be surprised?”

  Poncho shrugged. The three peons at their desks continued their percussive typing undistracted. Judy’s titanium-tough attitude steamrolled many, many people, but the problem with Poncho was that even now, with all the foul history between them, he still found it to be not as intimidating as it was, well, charming.

  Again, he hid his grin with his can of Coke. No reason to infuriate her just yet. Plus, he reminded himself, he came here to help.

  “I came here to help,” he said.

  “Are you a speechwriter now?”

  “I can be whatever you need me to be.”

  “You can be whatever the governor needs you to be,” Judy lobbed back. “But come on, then. I need someone to listen to what I’ve got so far to make sure it’s idiot-proof. You can be the idiot.”

  They settled into her office. The arms of Poncho’s chair bit into the sides of his gut. They always did. He suspected she made sure the visitors’ chairs in her office were the smallest in the entire building for the very purpose of dissuading her ex-husband from making an appearance. Some might call that petty or even fantastical, but Poncho was certain that five minutes in conversation with Judy would have rid them of their doubts.

  “The governor is scheduled to make a statement on the capitol steps at ten-thirty,” said Judy. “I’ve been going over similar such statements from other governors and mayors responding to similar such situations. School shootings, mostly.”

  “You should probably look at what Giuliani said after 9/11.”

  Judy answered him: “ ‘We’re going to rebuild and we’re going to be stronger than we were before. I want the people of New York to be an example to the rest of the country, and the rest of the world, that terrorism can’t stop us.’ Yeah. I got it.”

  “Just replace ‘New York’ with ‘Georgia’ and press print.”

  “A wonderful idea. I’m so glad you came here, Poncho. If you want, you can stay and I’ll go home. The governor is going to do some press at eleven, nothing big, just the national networks, but I’m sure you can prep him for that.”

  Poncho waited until her rant had ended, gave her a chance to shoot him a glare of death, and then replied, “Why don’t you read me what you’ve got so far?”

  “Okay. Keep in mind this is a first draft.”

  “I will prep my red pen.”

  “Asshole.”

  “Is that how the statement starts? I like it. It’s bold.”

  “There are people who may be dead, Poncho. Walking distance from here. Do you always have to be so glib?”

  “I’m a glib asshole and you’re an emotionless bitch. Have we not met before?”

  Judy ground her teeth but then turned her attention to her computer screen and began to read aloud the governor’s statement.

  “ ‘This morning, an act of terror was leveled against the good people of Atlanta. The victims of this act are our neighbors, our friends, and our loved ones. To target them is to target all of us, and we will fight back. We are not scared. Those responsible for perpetrating this crime will be brought to justice. As such, I have authorized—’ ”

  “What if they’re not?”

  Judy raised an eyebrow. “Is it time for notes?”

  “Isn’t that why you asked me in here?”

  “All right.” Judy lowered her eyebrow, leaned back in her roomy chair. “You think I should cut the line that ‘those responsible…will be brought to justice.’ ”

  “I didn’t say that. What I’m saying, Judy, is what if all the king’s horses and all the king’s men fail to find whoever did this. It took over ten years to get bin Laden, and if you think that didn’t take its toll on the Bush administration during its second term, you’re a fool. And you’re not a fool.”

  “The people are scared. They need the promise of hope.”

  “Except you just said—”

  “That ‘we are not scared’? It’s called a rally cry, Poncho. Even a fool would know that, and you are a fool.”

  “I’m just concerned about three years from now and whoever runs against the governor rolls out an ad with him making promises that he might not be able to keep. Because that’s the only way you unseat an incumbent. You find a way to turn his own words against him. So for the love of Jesus, let’s avoid arming the enemy, please and thank you.”

  Finished with his Coke can, he crumpled it up, reached across the desk, and handed it over.

  She deposited it in the bin by her feet.

  “Anything else?” sh
e asked.

  “Just this: imagine you live in Dawsonville. Weekdays, you work at the quarry. Weekends, you head up to the mountains with some friends and you get drunk and you hunt deer, hopefully not in that order. You try to go to church at least once a month. You make sure your family looks nice on those Sundays. After church, you come home and you watch the Falcons game on your TV. You don’t ever actually see them play live at the Mercedes-Benz Stadium because that’s in the city and who needs the hassle of dealing with that. You vote Republican not just because your dad voted Republican but because you honestly believe that Republicans represent your values. You don’t trust Big Government. You don’t trust Big Media. You trust your family, your friends, and you trust Jesus Christ, who is just as white as you are. Then one morning you turn on your TV and your governor, who you voted for, is telling you that all those brown people who just got hurt are no different than you are. Oh, really? No different, huh? You don’t remember seeing them at the quarry, breathing rock dust day in and day out. You don’t remember seeing them at church or at the speedway or standing in line with a six-pack at ten o’clock on a Saturday night. Your favorite singers are named Hank and George, and Hank and George sang about real Americans and none of the people in their songs was named Ahmed.”

  “Are you finished?”

  “I’m not talking about a lack of empathy here, Judy. These are good people. They love their home. They love their country. They love their God. See, most college kids learn about Plato’s allegory of the cave, and they walk away with the wrong message because their professors are liberal and can’t help but filter Socrates through their left-wing bias. The folks in the cave who think the shadows are real life—when we try to turn them around to see out the front of the cave, they’re going to fight back. They’re going to prefer the shadows. And that’s neither good nor bad. It just is. And what’s so bad about believing in shadows? It’s a whole lot better than believing in nothing.”

  “I think you’ve predictably gone off-track, and, frankly, we’re running out of time, so thank you for your notes and your trite thumbnail of the hardworking Southern man in the early twenty-first century, but—”

  “You have the governor draw this comparison and you are going to get the exact opposite reaction that you’re hoping to get. You’re going to alienate the very people you’re trying to mollify. Let them come by their compassion naturally. They will. They don’t need to be told to do it, and they’ll resent you for even trying.”

  With some difficulty, Poncho extricated himself from the chair.

  Judy stood as well.

  “If I wanted homespun condescension,” she said, “we’d still be married.”

  “I’m just trying to help.”

  “Someday, Poncho, you’re going to have to allow that the rest of us mere mortals might know a thing or two about what we’re doing. Your gross generalizations may have been applicable ten years ago. Maybe even five years ago. But our values are evolving. Even Southern values. Your straw man may not go to church with a ‘brown person’ but he sees them on Sunday afternoons scoring touchdowns on that TV of his for his beloved Falcons. And then, after the game is over, he sees them in his sitcoms alongside some ‘gay persons’ and even some ‘yellow persons.’ They might not be exactly like him, but they’re close enough. You see, your man from Dawsonville may be uneducated, but, contrary to your low opinion of him, he’s not a moron.”

  She maneuvered around the desk, approached him, stopped a hairbreadth from rubbing noses.

  She was taller. But she was wearing heels.

  They both knew what her actual height was in bare feet.

  “One of us is right,” said Poncho.

  “Yes,” she replied. “I am.”

  At which point one of her three peons cleared his throat and, almost apologetically, informed them that there had been a second attack.

  Chapter 10

  The largest concentration of Muslims in the United States was not in Atlanta, of course, but in New York City.

  And Dearborn, Michigan.

  When asked why a suburb of Detroit was home to so many Muslim Americans, the layman on the street gave an answer that tended toward the superficial: it must be the oil, the Middle East being a massive producer of oil and Michigan being a massive producer of oil-dependent automobiles.

  Yes, but no.

  The immigration actually began in the 1800s, well before Henry Ford and his cohorts established Detroit as Motor City. Families from Lebanon and Syria migrated in droves. Middle America had ample factories, and here came an influx of hard workers from the Middle East. When Henry Ford finally established his mechanical kingdom, he employed hundreds of these transplants in his workforce. He may have hated the Jews, but he tolerated Muslims. And so Iraqis and Yemenites followed soon after. Detroit fattened into suburbs and the suburb of Dearborn became the community center for these Middle Eastern greenhorns.

  When the Ottoman Empire collapsed, people fled to Dearborn.

  When Israel became a state, people fled to Dearborn.

  When war broke out between Iraq and Iran, people fled to Dearborn.

  By 2000, nearly half of the city’s ninety-thousand-plus population was Arab-American.

  The largest mosque in the United States was in Dearborn, Michigan.

  Masjir Ahmed-Salaam, in the Dearborn neighborhood of Bingham, was not the city’s largest mosque or even its sixth largest mosque. It was, however, a quaint limestone structure with a glittering gold dome, two minarets, and a series of yawning arches that, in the wintertime, grew teeth of ice. Now, though, in the peak of spring, the only ice to be found came from freezers in the mosque’s attached kitchen and dining hall. All of the members of the congregation today—women, men, and children alike—would be adjourning there for a hearty meal after services.

  The sweet scents distracted them from the moment they stepped into the building. Normally the allure would have been unbearable and would have stretched minutes into hours, but today was not a normal day. All 342 worshippers knew what had happened in Atlanta. They knew and they wept and the sweet scents only served as a reminder of what their brethren wouldn’t be enjoying on this day meant for delight.

  Their heavy mood continued after Eid prayers had ended and was carried with them into the dining hall. The men sat with the men, the women sat with the women, the children sat with the children, and even at the children’s tables, the playfulness was subdued. The youngest among them, barely old enough to feed themselves, had no idea what had happened, of course, but knew something was wrong, and so they ate their dates and honey and didn’t even bother pegging a companion across the table with a spoon or piling up their baklava into grainy forts.

  At the head table, the imam was pouring himself a fresh cup of coffee. He bought the coffee himself just the other day. Kurukahveci Mehmet Efendi. Thirteen dollars for a pint at the Kroger on Michigan Avenue. Smell those Turkish beans. It reminded him of his childhood, though not in Istanbul, no, but Philadelphia. He dreamed of playing center field for the Phillies, and sipped coffee on Thursday nights with his grandfather. Was he much too young for coffee? Absolutely. But his grandfather, who was from Istanbul, lived to spoil him, and the imam, at least in his younger days, lived to be spoiled. In the late spring and well into the summer, they would sit on the front porch of their row house and sip Turkish coffee out of Styrofoam cups and listen to the ball game on his grandfather’s radio. It was together, the two of them on that porch and with that coffee, that they heard Pete Rose, Charlie Hustle himself, lead the Phillies to their championship in 1980. It was no surprise that, among his secular friends, the imam insisted on being called Charlie instead of his given name, Chadli. Boys named Chadli weren’t recruited for the Phillies.

  “Imam,” said the man to his right, the head of the mosque’s youth outreach program. “I am surprised you haven’t officially condemned
the atrocities in Atlanta.”

  The imam sipped his coffee. His lips tingled. Even after all these years.

  The other men at the table looked to him and waited for a response.

  This was the response he finally gave:

  “What would make my condemnation official? Is there a prayer you know that would help Allah in His mercy differentiate between when I am speaking with authority and when I’m not? Oh, I see. I misunderstand. He is not the audience you had in mind. You want me to stand on this table and shake my fists and shout about the atrocities. That would make it official? Or I misunderstand again. You want me to email Fox News. Tell them that in no uncertain terms I condemn what has happened. Maybe I should type in all caps. Because if I do none of those things, it is implied that I don’t condemn what happened. If I don’t send out emails or stand on the table or offer a special prayer, then I am in my inaction supporting the atrocities. Over an hour has passed since our brothers and sisters were attacked. I must either be lazy or indifferent. Or, and again I could be mistaken, for I am only a man, I am reminded that today we are instructed to be charitable. If I condemn you for being a fool, is this charity? Maybe it is. I don’t know. But please pass the apricot jam, if you would be so kind.”

  When he spoke like that, he hoped he was channeling his grandfather. What was wisdom but the conscious echoing of the past? He spread the apricot jam on his brown bread and ate in further silence while the head of the mosque’s youth outreach program excused himself to check on the children.

  The imam mused, not for the first time, on the path that had taken him from a row house in Philadelphia and an Anglicized name to serving as the head of a mosque in Dearborn. He still preferred to listen to baseball rather than see it in person. The speakers in his Chrysler were excellent.

  Every few months he called in to a national sports talk show to debate the merits of including Pete Rose in the hall of fame. He always identified himself as Charlie from Philadelphia. Not as a betrayal of his religion or culture. More as a personal joke. He argued that all men were worthy of forgiveness and love. All sinners had the potential for salvation, even a two-bit gambler. The religion of America was baseball and like all religions it had to offer hope, didn’t it?