Falling Man_ A Novel - Don Delillo [29]
Late one night he had to step over the prone form of a brother in prayer as he made his way to the toilet to jerk off.
The world changes first in the mind of the man who wants to change it. The time is coming, our truth, our shame, and each man becomes the other, and the other still another, and then there is no separation.
Amir spoke in his face. His full name was Mohamed Mohamed el-Amir el-Sayed Atta.
There was the feeling of lost history. They were too long in isolation. This is what they talked about, being crowded out by other cultures, other futures, the all-enfolding will of capital markets and foreign policies.
This was Amir, his mind was in the upper skies, making sense of things, drawing things together.
Hammad knew a woman who was German, Syrian, what else, a little Turkish. She had dark eyes and a floppy body that liked contact. They shuffled across the room toward her cot, clamped tight, with her roommate on the other side of the door studying English. Everything happened in crowded segments of place and time. His dreams seemed compressed, small rooms, nearly bare, quickly dreamt. Sometimes he and the two women played crude word games, inventing nonsense rhymes in four pidgin languages.
He didn’t know the name of the German security agency in any language. Some of the men who passed through the flat were dangerous to the state. Read the texts, fire the guns. They were probably being watched, phones tapped, signals intercepted. They preferred anyway to talk in person. They knew that all signals traveling in the air are vulnerable to interception. The state has microwave sites. The state has ground stations and floating satellites, Internet exchange points. There is photo reconnaissance that takes a picture of a dung beetle from one hundred kilometers up.
But we encounter face to face. A man turns up from Kandahar, another from Riyadh. We encounter directly, in the flat or in the mosque. The state has fiber optics but power is helpless against us. The more power, the more helpless. We encounter through eyes, through word and look.
Hammad and two others went looking for a man on the Reeperbahn. It was late and bitter cold and they saw him finally coming out of a house half a block away. One of the men called his name, then the other. He looked at them and waited and Hammad advanced and hit him three or four times and he went down. The other men advanced and kicked him. Hammad hadn’t known his name until they shouted it out and he wasn’t sure what this was all about, the guy paying an Albanian whore for sex or the guy not growing a beard. He had no beard, Hammad noticed, just before he hit him.
They ate skewered meat in a Turkish restaurant. He showed her the dimensional specifications he did in class, where he studied mechanical drawing, halfheartedly. He felt more intelligent when he was with her because she encouraged exactly this, asking questions or just being herself, being curious about things including his friends at the mosque. His friends gave him a reason to be mysterious, a circumstance she found interesting. Her roommate listened to cool voices speaking English in her headset. Hammad troubled her for lessons, for words and phrases and we can skip the grammar. There was a rush, a pull that made it hard to see beyond the minute. He flew through the minutes and felt the draw of some huge future landscape opening up, all mountain and sky.
He spent time at the mirror looking at his beard, knowing he was not supposed to trim it.
He did a little lusting after the roommate when he saw her ride her bike but tried not to bring this craving into the house. His girlfriend clung to him and they did damage to the cot. She wanted him to know her whole presence, inside and out. They ate falafel wrapped in pita and sometimes he wanted to marry her and have babies but this was only in the minutes after he left her flat, feeling like a footballer running across the field after scoring a goal, all-world, his arms flung wide.
The time is coming.
The men went to Internet caf