THE TOWEL ATTENDANT
MONDAY, AUGUST 2, 2004
Flesh. Hassan tried so hard not to notice, but it was impossible. Flesh encircled him at the main pool of the Paradise Hotel and Residences at Boca. Fleshy breasts taunted him from low bikini tops, and fleshy thighs sloped from bikini bottoms. There were stomachs, taut and flat, but also undulating bellies, soft and bloated from the breakfast buffet. There was deep brown flesh, and bronze flesh, and pallid white flesh, and flesh turned red from the hot sun. Creases in the flesh ran in all directions, plunging into and swooping out of swimsuits, leading Hassan’s eyes to forbidden places. There were also the fleshy remains of the seniors who migrated to Florida from all points north. The nanas and poppies and grannies and grampses who flocked there to roast in the sun. They became so brown and shriveled that they looked like walking beef jerky with New York accents.
And how these people positioned themselves! Sprawled on chaise lounges with their knees high in the air and their legs spread wide. They splayed their arms across each other’s bodies, or sometimes wedged themselves into a single chaise lounge, interlocking their perspiring bodies in a helix position, flesh on flesh.
It wasn’t easy being a celibate terrorist and pool towel attendant at the Paradise.
This is the test of my worthiness, Hassan thought. They promised me seventy-two virgins in Paradise. Then they send me to the Paradise Hotel and Residences and tempt me with flesh, and try to break me with the constant calypso music over the loudspeaker, turning my mind into steel drums.
Hassan was feeling the strain. How could he concentrate on leading his sleeper cell with these pounding headaches? Not to mention that stabbing pain in his groin. Maybe a hernia, he had read on WebMD. But the Paradise Hotel didn’t offer health insurance to part-timers, and the budget guys at the Abu al-Zarqawi Army of Jihad Martyrs of Militancy Brigade declined his request for more money for medical expenses. They did, in their infinite mercy, make one suggestion: “How about a forged Medicaid card? That we can do.” So Hassan filled out the paperwork and emailed it to Tora Bora. Every week for the past six weeks a functionary had promised him, “Hand to God, it will only take one more week, Hassan.” Meanwhile, the groin pain was getting worse.
“This is my test. I will not fail,” Hassan coached himself every day. From early morning, when he dispensed fresh towels poolside, to the evening, when he limped from chair to chair, swiping off clumps of towels saturated with sweat and chlorine and sand and suntan oils and God knows what else. And in the hours in between, he stood guard in the towel hut, battling the infidels all day about . . . towels. What was it with these people and their insatiable demand for towels? He would dispense the maximum two towels per guest, and then fight with each guest about the two-towel maximum. He would point to the massive sign with the huge red words: TOWEL LIMIT: 2 TOWELS PER GUEST. THANK YOU, and still they would demand three towels or four or even more. No wonder they won’t give us back our land, he thought. Look how they fight for an extra towel!
Of course, it didn’t matter to Hassan that the Americans who visited the Paradise never took any land from his people. To him, they were all Zionists. The Italian Americans, the Irish Americans, the African-Americans, the Hispanic Americans. If they were American, he was sworn to destroy them. He had even said so, in the video that awaited his final act. He took an oath to destroy them, to annihilate them, to consume them in a wrathful, unmerciful, apocalyptic fireball.
But until then, he had to keep them dry.
His reward was nearing. Within months, God willing, his task would be complete. The sleeper cell would be activated. Azad, Achmed, Pervez, and he would be roused from their long hibernation. Azad would be freed from his job at Bozzotti Bros. Landscaping; Achmed liberated from the humiliation of cleaning planes of the mess left by first-class infidels; and Pervez would serve his last Happy Meal as a McDonald’s counterman. They would attack. Then Allah be praised, Paradise wouldn’t be the name of the hotel where he worked, but the afterlife he had been promised. Paradise, where he would meet the seventy-two virgins. In the flesh.
He closed his eyes, imagining the virgins, imagining away the pain in his head and groin.