Chapter 11: Sleeper Cell

They said that learning the language wouldn’t be the main difficulty, nor circulating among the American people, all of whom would be tolerable to live among, although barely so. They said the food wouldn’t be so much of a problem as the alcohol, which they served like our own zum-zum water. They served it at every restaurant and bar, at every cantina and grocery store, but this was only a minor difficulty considering that one usually socialized while drinking, which wouldn’t be a problem for me, because I was told not to socialize with anyone. The women, they said, wouldn’t be a problem either, even though they didn’t cover themselves and usually pranced around like whores. I wouldn’t be tempted by them, they said. In fact, I would come to pity them but in a way that wouldn’t permit me to interfere in their own demise. They were the wives and consorts of Iblis, they said, and they reiterated that point as though they had been through it already.

The police at the immigration checkpoints at the various terminals and small-town airstrips and at all disembarkation points would only be minor inconveniences, they said, just as long as I carried the documents they then presented me with. These documents would easily pass as authentic. The police may search me, but this wouldn’t be difficult, since I wouldn’t be carrying anything unlawful. I wouldn’t be looking like a typical Arab, so even though the complexion of my skin would pose some difficulty, it wouldn’t get in the way of my plans one way or the other. My clothing would be cheap but in a contemporary Western style that suggested some kind of colonial relationship that my country of origin had with the West, as my home country was one of the jewels in an imperial crown that protected me from those other types of Arabs who were much more devout-looking, and therefore, much more suspicious to the authorities.

Moving out to the country after I arrived in New York City wouldn’t be so difficult either. People minded their own business, they said, and so I should mind mine. And when the time came to get the equipment together and to meet my other Muslim brothers who would be a part of my holy mission, this wouldn’t be a problem at all. Neither would our ride into New York City be a problem. Americans will do anything for money, they said. The would sell me semtex off a street corner if they thought it would help send their kids to college, only that I should be discreet about it. Don’t buy everything in one place, in other words. And what made things even easier for me, they said, was the contact I’d meet in Manhattan, about once every month. He was an older man whom I would check in with and have lunch with every so often. This wouldn’t be so difficult, they said.

They said that the only difficulty in all of this – from the moment that they had conceived of their plan to the moment God would finally answer our most clandestine prayers - was managing the time it took for such an answer to arrive. They said that I may have to wait for years for God’s divine plan to manifest. They said all of this to me in the summer of 1996, the time when I left Beirut to settle just south of metropolitan New York, to live in a suburb in central New Jersey where I rented a ground-floor apartment in a typical mother-daughter home. I was ordered to stay put until my contact called.

It took him about a month, but when he did call, he ordered me to Manhattan, to a restaurant near the United Nations on First Avenue to have lunch with him. He wasn’t as I had imagined him. He was actually quite thin but taller and older than I was, his head balding, his moustache and beard cropped close to his face, his complexion a little lighter than mine. He dressed in a three-piece suit, and I’ll always remember the red silk tie he wore. It was the only thing animated about him, that and the international edition of a British newspaper he read from, the name of which I can’t recall. And I, of course, having purchased all of my clothing at a discount shop in New Jersey, looked like his servant or at least a distant relative whom he had sent to college here in the States. He ordered steak and a glass of red wine, and he permitted me only a small cup of tea, meaning that our discussions would be brief and that we were neither friends nor colleagues. I was simply his worker, and he was my superior.

“How do you find America?” he asked in a British accent.

“It’s interesting,” I said. “It has taken some adjustment.”

“Is there anything out of the ordinary you’d like to report?” he asked.

“No.”

“Your bank account shows that you are being properly compensated for your expenses? Your rent and food bills are being paid on time?”

“Yes.”

“The accommodations we’ve provided you with are satisfactory?”

“Yes.”

“Good, then. You will await further instructions, but if none come between now and next month, you are still to check in with me next month and every month thereafter at this same time and at this same location. Is that clear?”

“Yes.”

“Good day to you, then.”

And he went back to reading his newspaper. He hardly even looked up from it the entire time we talked.

I returned to New Jersey that afternoon, and it was only a week later that someone knocked on my door. It was a crisp autumn afternoon when, actually, two people knocked on my door – a mother and her young son, apparently. She was a young American woman with auburn hair and mysterious green eyes. I had never before seen such a bewildering combination in a woman before. And standing next to her on the porch was her young son who couldn’t have been older than three or four. A small tot he was, standing there looking at his shoes. And I remember being a little annoyed at the interruption – not that I was doing anything important really. I was watching CNN. She also held a package wrapped in tin foil in her hands.

“Hi,” she said. “I’m Angela, and this is my son, Alex.”

“Hello,” I said reluctantly, my English steadily improving but still a bit broken.

“We’re your upstairs neighbors,” she said. “We thought we’d bring you over some homemade apple pie.”

“But I don’t want any apple pie,” I said.

“Oh. Well, we’re not going to eat it, so if you’d like to try some...”

“I’m not hungry right now,” I said.

“Okay. Well, we just wanted to introduce ourselves.”

I knew I shouldn’t have, because they were infidels, and no woman ever visits another man alone at his residence – with or without a child at her side. But there was something very sad about her that her green eyes hid very deeply within the folds of that American soul of hers, and of course her son didn’t look all that jubilant either. They turned to walk away, but I just couldn’t see them leave so quickly. Yes, I was rudely disturbed, but there was something very melancholy about them that I had to engage. Perhaps there was some part of her melancholia that I had to fight.

“Wait a minute,” I called out to them. “Why don’t you come in. I’ll accept the introduction of you and your American child.”

I remember her telling me that I needed furniture for my apartment. We all had to sit on the floor back then, until one afternoon she finally convinced me to buy a sofa and even a coffee table. I never expected her to visit so often, but apparently she was a lonely woman. The father of the child had abandoned them for some pleasure-seeking dream that she said probably wouldn’t come true. She said he played guitar, and one morning he simply left her and the child at the breakfast table, never to return. He said he would be right back, she said. The woman had been moving from town-to-town ever since, finding work where she could. They seemed like such a lonely pair, but they were beautiful people, I came to believe. And even though I preferred to remain alone – because I wanted nothing to do with the enemy – I slowly began to look forward to her visits. Sometimes she would bring her son with her. At other times, especially when her son was off to school, she would visit me alone, and we would talk over tea.

She asked me about Lebanon, as that’s where I told her I was from, and she grew fascinated by the life I had once lived there. At times we indulged and had coffee, and she sometimes brought some American pastries with her. But I’ll always remember how sad she looked and how alone she was. She wanted more out of life, and I thought that this wanting of more is what made Americans the bane of humanity, their greed and corruption knowing no bounds. The rest of the world had to suffer because of it.

But after several straight months of waiting for my orders, I too wanted more for some reason, and I came to understand why the young woman suffered so much. Her eyes, it seemed, were always looking for an escape and perhaps a return to the places she once knew – places of comfort and security, the places where she was once happy, joyous, and free. But she had been cast out of these places, she said. And after several months of having coffee and pastries with her, usually in the afternoons before the yellow bus returned her son from the local elementary school, I came to see her wanting to move on to better and greater things as somewhat, well, as somewhat admirable. It was a worthy goal: to aspire to a better life, I supposed, and perhaps this was how Allah operated within her. She believed heaven actually existed on earth somewhere instead of it existing in heaven alone.