Excerpt of Terrorist by John Updike
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I
Devils, Ahmad thinks. These devils seek to take away my God. All
day long, at Central High School, girls sway and sneer and expose their soft
bodies and alluring hair. Their bare bellies, adorned with shining navel studs
and low-down purple tattoos, ask, What else is there to see? Boys strut
and saunter along and look dead-eyed, indicating with their edgy killer gestures
and careless scornful laughs that this world is all there is—a noisy varnished
hall lined with metal lockers and having at its end a blank wall desecrated by
graffiti and roller-painted over so often it feels to be coming closer by
millimeters.
The teachers, weak Christians and nonobservant Jews, make a show of teaching
virtue and righteous self-restraint, but their shifty eyes and hollow voices
betray their lack of belief. They are paid to say these things, by the city of
New Prospect and the state of New Jersey. They lack true faith; they are not on
the Straight Path; they are unclean. Ahmad and the two thousand other students
can see them scuttling after school into their cars on the crackling,
trash-speckled parking lot like pale crabs or dark ones restored to their
shells, and they are men and women like any others, full of lust and fear and
infatuation with things that can be bought. Infidels, they think safety lies in
accumulation of the things of this world, and in the corrupting diversions of
the television set. They are slaves to images, false ones of happiness and
affluence. But even true images are sinful imitations of God, who can alone
create. Relief at escaping their students unscathed for another day makes the
teachers’ chatter of farewell in the halls and on the parking lot too loud, like
the rising excitement of drunks. The teachers revel when they are away from the
school. Some have the pink lids and bad breaths and puffy bodies of those who
habitually drink too much. Some get divorces; some live with others unmarried.
Their lives away from the school are disorderly and wanton and self-indulgent.
They are paid to instill virtue and democratic values by the state government
down in Trenton, and that Satanic government farther down, in Washington, but
the values they believe in are
Godless: biology and chemistry and physics. On the facts and formulas of these
their false voices firmly rest, ringing out into the classroom. They say that
all comes out of merciless blind atoms, which cause the cold weight of iron, the
transparency of glass, the stillness of clay, the agitation of flesh. Electrons
pour through copper threads and computer gates and the air itself when stirred
to lightning by the interaction of water droplets. Only what we can measure and
deduce from measurement is true. The rest is the passing dream that we call our
selves.
Ahmad is eighteen. This is early April; again green sneaks, seed by seed, into
the drab city’s earthy crevices. He looks down from his new height and thinks
that to the insects unseen in the grass he would be, if they had a consciousness
like his, God. In the year past he has grown three inches, to six feet—more
unseen materialist forces, working their will upon him. He will not grow any
taller, he thinks, in this life or the next. If there is a next, an inner
devil murmurs. What evidence beyond the Prophet’s blazing and divinely inspired
words proves that there is a next? Where would it be hidden? Who would forever
stoke Hell’s boilers? What infinite source of energy would maintain opulent
Eden, feeding its dark-eyed houris, swelling its heavy-hanging fruits, renewing
the streams and splashing fountains in which God, as described in the ninth sura
of the Qur’an, takes eternal good pleasure? What of the second law of
thermodynamics?
The deaths of insects and worms, their bodies so quickly absorbed by earth and
weeds and road tar, devilishly strive to tell Ahmad that his own death will be
just as small and final. Walking to school, he has noticed a sign, a spiral
traced on the pavement in luminous ichor, angelic slime from the body of some
low creature, a worm or snail of which only this trace remains. Where was the
creature going, its path spiralling inward to no purpose? If it was seeking to
remove itself from the hot sidewalk that was roasting it to death as the burning
sun beat down, it failed and moved in fatal circles. But no little worm-body was
left at the spiral’s center.
Excerpted from Terrorist by John Updike Copyright © 2006 by John Updike. Excerpted by permission of Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
