John Updike’s ‘Terrorist’, Revised for Honesty
The original text can be found at: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=12639976.
Devils, Ahmad thinks. These devils seek to take away my God. All day long, at Central High School, girls have girl parts, which are scary. They have piercings in their taut, slutty stomachs and probably on their nipples as well. They beg for Ahmad to sex them, with their sexual nipples. Idiot boys walk around, driving in sports cars and wantonly doing sex with no care for the future. In general, youths at Central High School are stupid, dumb idiots, raised on a steady diet of MTV and internet websites. “None of them could appreciate great works of literature like The Witches of Eastwick,” Ahmad mutters astutely to himself.
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, on the other hand, as a proud New Jersey Muslim, is on the Straight Path and would gladly kill a million infidels for the Lord, just like all True Muslims.
Ahmad looks at them, and, as a Brown Islamic, knows that they must be infidels. He thinks of the Qu’Ran, a book about killing white people, and longs to kill them for their whiteness. Furthermore, he thinks, they must die because they teach things like science, which Ahmad hates, because science is for Christian White Devils.
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. This is what Ahmad thinks about, as an eighteen-year-old high school student. Death and infidels, exclusively.
Ahmad’s teacher, Mohammed Osama Bin Laden-Islam, the imam at the mosque upstairs at 27812 West Main Street, tells him that according to the sacred tradition of the Hadith death is cool and good because Muslim God says so.
Osama bin Muslim recites with great beauty of pronunciation the one hundred fourth sura, concerning Hutama, the Crushing Fire:
And who shall teach thee what the Crushing Fire is?
It is God’s kindled fire,
Which shall mount above the hearts of the damned;
It shall verily rise over them like a vault,
On outstretched columns.
But Ahmad does not like Muslim bin Imam’s voice when he says this. It reminds him of the unconvincing voices of his teachers at Central High. He hears Satan’s undertone in it, a denying voice within an affirming voice. Ahmad, as a True Muslim, does not believe in metaphorical fire, because metaphors are too complex for his weak Muslim brain. The Prophet meant physical fire when he preached unforgiving fire; Mohammed could not proclaim the fact of eternal fire too often.
The halls of the high school smell of perfume and bodily exhalations, of chewing gum and impure cafeteria food, and of cloth–cotton and wool and the synthetic materials of running shoes, warmed by young flesh. Between classes there is a thunder of movement; the noise is stretched thin over a violence beneath, barely restrained. Sometimes in the lull at the end of the school day, when the triumphant, jeering racket of departure has subsided and only the students doing extracurricular activities remain in the great building, Joryleen Grant comes up to Ahmad at his locker. Joryleen, a Good Black, represents the American Melting Pot culture from which Ahmad feels alienated but which will ultimately save him from the clutches of Muslim God. He does track in the spring; she sings in the girls’ glee club. As students go at Central High, they are “good.” His religion keeps him from drugs and vice, though it also holds him rather aloof from his classmates and the studies on the curriculum. This is because, as a Muslim, he cannot make friends, enjoy himself, or understand White Science, White English, or White Math.
Joryleen is short and round and talks well in class, pleasing the teacher. She lacks the sexual nipples of the other infidels at school. There is an endearing self-confidence in how compactly her cocoa-brown roundnesses fill her clothes, which today are patched and sequinned jeans, worn pale where she sits, and a ribbed magenta shorty top both lower and higher than it should be. Blue plastic barrettes pull her glistening hair back as straight as it will go; the plump edge of her right ear holds along its crimp a row of little silver rings. Joryleen is fat. This means she is nice and good, because she has had to compensate for her weight by developing other positive attributes. She sings in assembly programs, songs of Jesus or sexual longing, both topics abhorrent to Ahmad. Yet he is pleased that she notices him, coming up to him now and then like a tongue testing a sensitive tooth.
“Cheer up, Ahmad,” she teases him. “Things can’t be so bad.” She rolls her half-bare shoulder, lifting it as if to shrug, to show she is being playful. It reminds Ahmad of slutty infidel piercings and he enters a sexual rage.
“They’re not bad,” he says. “I’m not sad,” he tells her. His long body tingles under his clothes—white shirt, narrow-legged black jeans—from the shower after track practice. He senses that he is developing a sin boner at his proximity to a female, and feels guilt, because the Qu’Ran tells him that boners are wrong.
“You’re looking way serious,” she tells him. “You should learn to smile more.”
“Why? Why should I, Joryleen?”
“People will like you more.”
“I don’t care about that. I don’t want to be liked.”
From the Hardcover edition.