Falling Man_ A Novel - Don Delillo [63]
One man on a visit did not know the name of the town they were in, outside another town called Venice. He’d forgotten the name or had never learned it. Hammad thought it didn’t matter. Nokomis. What does it matter? Let these things fade into dust. Leave these things behind even as we sleep and eat here. All dust. Cars, houses, people. This is all a particle of dust in the fire and light of the days to come.
They passed through, one or two, now and then, and sometimes they told him about women they’d paid for sex, okay, but he didn’t want to listen. He wanted to do this one thing right, of all the things he’d ever done. Here they were in the midst of unbelief, in the bloodstream of the kufr. They felt things together, he and his brothers. They felt the claim of danger and isolation. They felt the magnetic effect of plot. Plot drew them together more tightly than ever. Plot closed the world to the slenderest line of sight, where everything converges to a point. There was the claim of fate, that they were born to this. There was the claim of being chosen, out there, in the wind and sky of Islam. There was the statement that death made, the strongest claim of all, the highest jihad.
But does a man have to kill himself in order to accomplish something in the world?
They had simulator software. They played flight-simulator games on their computer. The autopilot detects deviations from the route. The windshield is birdproof. He had a large cardboard illustration of the flight deck in a Boeing 767. He studied this in his room, memorizing the placement of levers and displays. The others called this poster his wife. He converted liters to gallons, grams to ounces. He sat in a barber chair and looked in the mirror. He was not here, it was not him.
He basically stopped changing his clothes. He wore the same shirt and trousers every day into the following week and underwear as well. He shaved but basically did not dress or undress, often sleeping in his clothes. The others made forceful comments. There was one time he took his clothes to the laundromat wearing someone else’s clothes. He wore these clothes for a week and wanted the other man to wear his clothes now that they were clean, although clean or dirty didn’t matter.
Wrong-eyed men and women laughing on TV, their military forces defiling the Land of the Two Holy Places.
Amir had made the pilgrimage to Mecca. He was a hajji, fulfilling the duty, saying the funeral prayer, salat al-janaza, claiming fellowship with those who’d died on the journey. Hammad did not feel deprived. They were soon to perform another kind of duty, unwritten, all of them, martyrs, together.
But does a man have to kill himself in order to count for something, be someone, find the way?
Hammad thought about this. He recalled what Amir had said. Amir thought clearly, in straight lines, direct and systematic.
Amir spoke in his face.
The end of our life is predetermined. We are carried toward that day from the minute we are born. There is no sacred law against what we are going to do. This is not suicide in any meaning or interpretation of the word. It is only something long written. We are finding the way already chosen for us.
You look at Amir and see a life too intense to last another minute, maybe because he never fucked a woman.
But what about this, Hammad thought. Never mind the man who takes his own life in this situation. What about the lives of the others he takes with him?
He was not eager to bring this up with Amir but did finally, the two of them alone in the house.
What about the others, those who will die?
Amir was impatient. He said they’d talked about such matters in principle when they were in Hamburg, in the mosque and in the flat.
What about the others?
Amir said simply there are no others. The others exist