Gentilly, New Orleans: 4 June 6:35 P.M. Central time
Tourak Rahmadad snagged a bag of potato chips, popped open a beer, and wandered into the front room of the half-renovated cottage he and three fellow students rented in an area of New Orleans known as Gentilly. Unlike most of the other Middle Eastern students who formed Jamaat Noor Allah, the Light of God, Tourak actually liked America—which surprised him, because he had expected to hate it.
He’d been in the States for three years now, studying journalism and filmmaking at the University of New Orleans. After 9/11, when white Americans started treating people with dark skin and foreign-sounding names the way they used to treat American blacks, Tourak had begged his parents to let him study in Paris, or maybe London. But his mother insisted that he go to the States. She had a cousin, Kamal, who lived in New Orleans and promised to watch out for him. Actually, the desire to escape the watchful eye of cousin Kamal was one of the reasons Tourak wanted to go to Paris. But his mother was the one paying the tens of thousands of dollars it cost to send him overseas to study. And so he had come to America.
Life here had been difficult at first. So much was strange, different. But most of the people Tourak met in New Orleans were surprisingly friendly, and he had fallen in love with the city’s moss-draped oaks and wide, slow moving river, with its platters of spicy crawfish and cold pitchers of beer. He liked Mardi Gras and shopping malls, cable TV and Baskin Robbins ice cream. But he still really, really hated the American government.
Flopping into a scruffy beanbag chair, Tourak pointed the remote control at the TV and flipped through the channels. He was restless tonight, unable to settle. In just forty-eight hours he would face the most important test of his life. Once, he had prayed to God to be given such an opportunity. Now he was nervous, afraid. His fear shamed him. What if he froze at the last moment? What if he couldn’t do it? He would let everyone down.
He flipped through two more channels, then paused at what passed for an American “news” network. The network alternately amused and infuriated him. So much of what they broadcast was a tissue of lies and exaggerations, all carefully crafted to deceive and manipulate. In other countries, people were more cynical, more suspicious of those with the power and means to deceive. But Americans weren’t like that. They were so credulous, so gullible. Even after Watergate and the Gulf of Tonkin, the Bay of Pigs and Iran-Contra, the American people still believed everything their government and news outlets told them. Tourak found that both incomprehensible and frightening.
He was about to switch the channel when a woman on the screen caught his eye. She appeared to be in her early thirties, dark and attractive in a way that reminded him of his sister Naji, who was a surgeon in Tehran.
The young woman was leaning forward in her seat, her face drawn and serious as she said, “We have to stop them, even if we have to kill them all to do it. If we don’t, they’ll destroy civilization and take over this country. I don’t want my children to grow up in a world run by illiterate mullahs who rant about evil and preach holy war against infidels.”
Practically choking on his beer, Tourak leaped from his chair and pointed the remote at the woman’s face, zapping her out of existence. “You stupid, bigoted donkey!” he screamed at her. “We started civilization, remember? You’re the ones who’ve been bombing the cradle of civilization back into the Stone Age. It’s your politicians who rant about axis of evil and evildoers and preach crusades against anyone who isn’t a Judeo-Christian. We don’t want to take over your stupid country. We just want you to get out of our part of the world and stay out!”
One of Tourak’s roommates, a physics student from Syria, called from upstairs in Arabic, “Ya, habibi. Aish bi’dak?”
“Nothing,” Tourak shouted, then slammed out the door to go stand on the front stoop and look out over the ghostly dark neighborhoods of the ruined city.
He had come from Tehran to the States to study journalism because he’d believed in the power of the truth to overcome ignorance and prejudice. But over the course of the last three years it slowly dawned on him that he had been as naive as he accused the Americans of being. Because most people weren’t swayed by words, particularly if those words were an uncomfortable truth.
Lately, Tourak had begun to believe the only truth Americans understood was the kind delivered by the barrel of a gun, or the explosive exit of a man driven to suicide by the grim realization that while he might be powerless in life, his death could change the world.