Falling Man_ A Novel - Don Delillo [64]
Hammad was impressed by this. It sounded like philosophy.
Two women rustling through a park in the evening, in long skirts, one of them barefoot. Hammad sat on a bench, alone, watching, then got up and followed. This was something that just happened, the way a man is pulled out of his skin and then the body catches up. He followed only to the street where the park ended, watching as they disappeared, brief as turning pages.
The windshield is birdproof. The aileron is a movable flap.
He prays and sleeps, prays and eats. These are dumb junk meals often taken in silence. The plot shapes every breath he takes. This is the truth he has always looked for without knowing how to name it or where to search. They are together. There is no word they can speak, he and the others, that does not come back to this.
One of them peels an orange and begins to pick it apart.
You think too much, Hammad.
Men spent years organizing secretly this work.
Yes, okay.
I saw, myself, these men walking through the camp when we are there.
Okay. But the thinking is done.
And the talking.
Okay. Now we do it.
He hands a slice of orange over to Hammad, who is driving.
My father, the other man says, he would die three hundred times to know what we are doing.
We die once.
We die once, big-time.
Hammad thinks of the rapture of live explosives pressed to his chest and waist.
But don’t forget, we are being stopped any minute by the CIA, the other man says.
He says this and then he laughs. Maybe it’s not true anymore. Maybe it’s a story they’ve told themselves so many times that they’ve stopped believing it. Or maybe they didn’t believe it then and only begin to believe it now, nearing the time. Hammad sees nothing funny in this, either way.
The people he looked at, they need to be ashamed of their attachment to life, walking their dogs. Think of it, dogs scraping at dirt, lawn sprinklers hissing. When he saw a storm bearing in from the gulf he wanted to spread his arms and walk right into it. These people, what they hold so precious we see as empty space. He didn’t think about the purpose of their mission. All he saw was shock and death. There is no purpose, this is the purpose.
When he walks down the bright aisle he thinks a thousand times in one second about what is coming. Clean-shaven, on videotape, passing through the metal detector. The girl at the checkout rolls the soup can over the scanner and he thinks of something funny he can say, saying it internally first to get the word order right.
He looked past the mud-brick huts toward the mountains. Bomb vest and black hood. We are willing to die, they are not. This is our strength, to love death, to feel the claim of armed martyrdom. He stood with the others in the old Russian copper mine, an Afghan camp now, theirs, and they listened to the amplified voice calling across the plain.
The vest was blue nylon with crisscross straps. There were canisters of high explosive wired into the belt. There were slabs of plastique high on his chest. This was not the method he and his brothers would one day employ but it was the same vision of heaven and hell, revenge and devastation.
They stood and listened to the recorded announcement, calling them to prayer.
Now he sits in the barber chair, wearing the striped cape. The barber is a slight man with little to say. The radio plays news, weather, sports and traffic. Hammad does not listen. He is thinking again, looking past the face in the mirror, which is not his, and waiting for the day to come, clear skies, light winds, when there is nothing left to think about.
PART THREE
DAVID JANIAK
10
They walked the entire route, north for twenty blocks and then across town and finally down toward Union Square, a couple of miles in steam heat, with police in riot helmets and flak jackets, small children riding their parents’ shoulders. They