They showed their badges, pulled me out of line to the turnstile, drew me off to the side on the platform, and pumped me full of lead. “A security measure,” they explained over the bang bang. “Random executions to keep the terrorists off balance. We know you’re probably just another commuter going to work, sir, but we have to show the Muslim extremists we mean business. Any sign of vacillation only makes them more vicious.”
“It’s random,” they went on as I was expiring in the pool of my blood, “because we don’t want to be accused of racial profiling. Just last week we terminated a sweet Irish grandmother who was coming back from Macy’s, from a sale on Italian leather handbags. She didn’t object. ‘I understand it’s for the Homeland, dears,’ she said before she gave up the ghost.”
“Racial profiling,” they went on, leaning over me as the death rattle filled my throat, “undermines the American way, everything that this great country stands for. We shouldn’t have used the word ‘Muslim’ a moment ago, we regret that, sir, because those fanatic fundamentalists are no more Muslim, truly, than you or I.”
“Islam,” they went on after my heart stopped and my eyes glazed and froze, “is a religion not that different, we understand, from Christianity or Judaism. Though you have to wonder about all the violence in its history. Did you know, sir, that the words assassin and thug are Arabic?”