reading

Man of the Hour

Peter Blauner

To
my beautiful and talented wife,
Peggy

Contents

Prologue

A Biography of Peter Blauner

Acknowledgments

Woe to him who seeks to pour oil on the waters when God has brewed them into a gale! Woe to him who seeks to appease rather than appal! Woe to him whose good name is more to him than goodness!

—Herman Melville

Prologue

THE STUDENTS WITHDREW from the classroom like a tide pulling away from the shore, leaving just one boy stranded in a chair at the back.

He looked at the clock, glanced at the floor, stared out the window at the ruins of Dreamland Amusement Park over by the Coney Island boardwalk. Anything to avoid the watchful eye of his teacher, Mr. Fitzgerald, who sat at his desk, studying him.

“Do you know why I asked you to stay, Nasser?” he asked the boy.

The boy shrugged, refusing to look at him. He was eighteen and already expert in a certain kind of resistance.

“I read the journal you gave me,” the teacher said, holding up a sheet covered on both sides with an emphatic red scrawl.

“Then okay,” the boy mumbled. His accent turned the th sound into a buzzing z.

“Thirty-five times you wrote, ‘I hate America.’”

The boy started to smile and then stopped himself.

“You know, there’s only one m in America.” The teacher came over with the page and sat beside the boy, showing him where the misspelling was. Even in a chair, he towered over the student.

“Ya habela,” the boy said. “Coosa mach.”

“Okay,” said the teacher, not understanding the specific words, but getting the general sentiment. “If that’s the way you feel, that’s all right. I was kind of an angry kid myself.” He edged his chair a little closer. “But listen, as long as you’re here in school, you might as well get something out of the place.”

The boy ignored him and started humming to himself.

“Look, there’s more eloquent ways to make your point.” The teacher pulled out a slim booklet and began reading aloud from Allen Ginsberg’s Howl. “I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness …”

The poem was a kind of last-ditch effort to hook kids who couldn’t be reached any other way. It could either take the top of their heads off or make them recoil in horror and revulsion. But one way or the other, it never failed to engage them.

Fitzgerald was aware of Nasser rocking slightly in his chair as he kept reading. But when he got to the part about “angelheaded hipsters” seeing “Mohammedan angels staggering on tenement roofs,” the boy put his hands over his ears and shut his eyes.

“Stop it!” he said. “This is the blasphemy!”

“All right, all right.” The teacher closed the book, realizing he might have gone too far. He always avoided the more graphic parts of the poem, but he’d forgotten that line was in there too. “We don’t have to read the whole thing.”

Tell me I didn’t lose him already, he thought.

The boy slowly lowered his hands and looked at him. “I don’t know why they let anyone write this,” he said in a wounded voice.

“I’m just trying to show you that you’re not alone,” Fitzgerald told him. “You don’t have to go around like a scream looking for a mouth. You know? There’s a hundred thousand other ways to go.”

For the briefest of seconds, the words caught the boy’s interest. There was a spark behind the eyes. He started to turn in his chair. Is he going to open up? The teacher leaned forward. But then the movement stopped. The boy had reached the edge of something and couldn’t make himself go any farther.

“You can’t understand.” He shut his eyes. “In a million years, you could never understand.”

Fitzgerald decided to give it one last try. “Look,” he said. “I can tell you’re a bright, sensitive kid. But you’re obviously miserable here. Nothing’s getting through. Tell me how to get inside your head.”

“I don’t want you in my head!”

“All right. Then tell me how to help you. How’s that?”

But he could feel the boy disengaging, closing down on him. You never knew what baggage these kids were bringing into the classroom. Some of them walked straight in from war zones and prisons. Others were just naturally antisocial.

“Just leave me alone,” Nasser said, turning his chair away.

“Okay.” The teacher thought of putting a hand on the boy’s shoulder but then decided against it. “But you know, Nasser, I can’t pass you with the kind of work you’re doing. If you’re willing to put in a little extra time, though, I think I can help you. I can maybe even help you graduate. Then you can spend the rest of your life hating America and it won’t be my problem anymore.” But that didn’t even rate a small smile from the kid. “So come on. We’re not in a war yet, are we?”

The boy listened to the words, shivered a little, and then got up and walked out of the room without looking back.

BY MIDNIGHT, CHURCH AVENUE in Brooklyn was almost a dead artery. An old Chevy dragged its muffler down the middle of the street, and the sound echoed like tin cans falling in a canyon. Sodium streetlights shone down on corrugated iron gates in front of a liquor store, a nail salon, and a shop specializing in wigs made from “Real 100% Human Hair.” Only a check-cashing place was still open, with blue neon in the window and a giant dollar bill on the sign out front.

Across the street, two men sat in a bruised red ’88 Plymouth, watching the door and the movement behind the window.

“Ayna hoa,” said the one behind the wheel, a big bear of a man with an onion-dome bald head, a heavy graying beard, and tinted aviator glasses. “Where is this guy? My ass is getting asleep.”

“That’s not how you say this, is it?” said Nasser, sitting beside him.

“Sure it is,” said his friend Youssef, switching back to Arabic. “It means you’re tired of waiting.”

They looked like father and son, sitting there. Youssef was muscular but going to flab. A long crimson scar was visible through the buttons at the top of his shirt, and the tails were out over the gun in his waistband. Nasser, who was now twenty-two, had grown up thin and tense, with liquid brown eyes, soft prim-looking lips, and an accidental hint of Elvis Presley in his pompadour. Thus far in his life, he hadn’t been able to grow more than a weedy little beard to make himself look devout, so he’d just decided to stay clean-shaven. A rusty key dangled from a chain around his neck.

“Maybe we should go,” he said.

“We’re not going anywhere,” said Youssef, the Great Bear. “Remember what this is about. This is about jihad.”

“Yes, I know about jihad.” Nasser chewed his fingernails. “This is a Holy War. But I don’t see why this is a Holy War here. This just seems like stealing.”

“Everything is jihad.” Youssef nudged him with his elbow. “Everything you do from when you get up in the morning. If you have a cup of Turkish coffee, instead of the instant American kind, this is jihad. If you tell a brother about the Holy Book, this is jihad. If you turn off a television, this is jihad in the mind. But the greatest thing you can do for jihad is to fight. Remember, one hour on the battlefield is worth a hundred years of prayer.”

“I know.”

“What we’re doing here is like the caravan raids from the olden days, after the hijra. The Prophet himself allowed this.”

Nasser took his fingers from his mouth. He wondered if this was wise, what they were about to do. Yes, Youssef could cite verses, whole suras, to support it, but words could be twisted and turned to mean anything.

“I still don’t know. Can’t we raise the funds another way? Isn’t this haram?”

“Of course it’s not haram.” Youssef started to shrug but then suddenly grabbed Nasser’s arm. “Okay, it’s him,” he said in a low, heated voice. “This is the one we follow.”

He leaned across Nasser’s lap and pointed out a tall, thin Rastafarian in a camouflage jacket shambling up the street. Tentacles of hair reached down his back like he had a little octopus under his green knit cap and he walked with a loping rhythm, as if there were music only he could hear.

“He always comes late, this one,” said Youssef. “I’ve been watching. It’s because he smokes the marijuana. I am sure of this. That’s why he’s never on time to relieve the one behind the counter. He’s a pig, I tell you, this one. I’ve seen the way he eats. The jerk chicken and the jerk pork. Uch. I tell you it makes me sick just to think about it.”

Nasser sat there, watching the Rastaman a moment, trying to hear the music. Then trying to imagine the man eating pork and smoking marijuana. Trying to work up some hatred for him.

The Rastaman went into the check-cashing store.

“Come on, let’s go.” The Great Bear reached for the door handle. “Remember what you’re supposed to do and nobody gets hurt. When he opens the door to go behind the counter, we go in after him.”

A passing livery cab almost sideswiped Youssef as he got out and put on a baseball cap with an X on it. Nasser put on his own X cap and climbed out on the passenger side, squeezing between two car bumpers to get to the curb. The .22-caliber pistol felt like a brick in the pocket of his maroon vinyl windbreaker.

He watched the glass door open and saw Youssef follow the Rastaman into the check-cashing place, the bear pursuing a hound dog. Nasser hesitated for just a moment on the sidewalk, the humidity of the night enfolding him. He wondered how many blocks it was to the nearest subway station. His nerve. Where was his nerve? He saw the cracked glass door swing shut behind the Great Bear. Then he reached inside his shirt and fingered the key hanging from the chain around his neck, knowing he had no choice.

With blood pounding in his ears, he moved quickly across the pavement, pulled the door open, and stepped inside.

The check-cashing place was little more than a twelve-by-twenty room with scuffed black-and-white linoleum floors, scrappy wood-paneled walls, and a little stall in the corner for local jewelry makers and incense sellers to peddle their wares. A bald-headed black man in shirtsleeves counted money behind a smudged bulletproof glass partition. There was a tinge of ammonia and marijuana in the air and a radio was playing a raucous reggae song with a deep-voiced hectoring singer, a walrus at a dance party.

The Rastaman in the green knit cap was knocking on the chipped wooden door next to the glass partition, ready to go in and relieve the man behind the counter. Nasser prepared to reach for his gun. But then the door behind him opened and a stout young woman in a red beret entered the storefront, pushing a little boy in a stroller—no more than two years old, wearing tiny black Nikes and a sheriff’s badge made from tinfoil. Nasser froze, looking at the woman and the child. What were they doing here so late? The place was supposed to be empty at this hour. He looked over at Youssef, expecting a signal to change their plan, but Youssef was standing at a tall side table a few feet away, studiously ignoring him and pretending to sign a check.

“So I tried your remedy and I feel much better now.” The woman approached the Rastaman. “But that aloe vera, it’s disgusting.”

“What did you do, child? Swallow it?” The Rastaman parted his hands.

“You mean, I was supposed to rub it on?”

The Rastaman laughed and knocked again on the door next to the partition.

And then everything changed. Time seemed to expand and contract simultaneously. The chipped door opened. The woman with the stroller bent down to tie the baby’s Nikes. Nasser saw Youssef pull back his shirttails and reach for his gun. He had to remind himself to breathe. Youssef was charging at the Rastaman and pushing him through the partly opened door some ten feet away, shouting: “Open the cash drawer or someone will get hurt!”

Back in the main room, Nasser took out his gun and pointed it at the woman reluctantly, tentatively, as if they both knew he had no intention of using it. He thought of saying something to reassure her, but decided against it—Youssef would be too angry. Instead, he stared at the little boy’s tinfoil badge, with its five points, wondering how long it had taken the woman to make it.

Then he heard the shot in the room behind the glass. A ferocious little sound like a balloon bursting. Part of him shriveled inside, hearing it. The room suddenly became warmer. The air closed in around his ears. The woman with the baby started to scream, knowing someone was dead. Nasser tried to say something to comfort her, but then the gun in the other room went off again.

He moved quickly into the doorway and saw the Rastaman splayed across the floor like a rag doll, arms and legs tossed around him, head turned, blood staining the front of his camouflage jacket and puddling on the floor next to him. Youssef was pulling the bills out of the cash drawer and stuffing them into the little blue laundry bag he’d had folded up in his back pocket. He didn’t see the bald black man in shirtsleeves rising up behind him, his face covered in blood, pulling out a small silver handgun.

Nasser saw his own hand rise with the .22, as if floating up through water. The impulse to squeeze the trigger came from somewhere besides his brain. The gun jumped and bucked in his hand and the noise bit into the air. A small part of the bald black man’s head flew off as he wobbled, fell against a stool, and slid down to the floor, still holding his gun. An angry black-red splatter remained on the wall panel behind him, with long spindly lines dripping down.

The woman in the other room scrambled, trying to get out the front door with the baby in the stroller. Nothing in her life had prepared her for this moment. Whereas everything had prepared Nasser. It was his destiny to be here and to do the things that would come afterward. So why did he still find himself paralyzed?

Youssef finished with the money, passed Nasser in the doorway, and came back into the main room. The woman turned away, not daring to face him. She understood that looking at either of them meant death. But it was too late. Youssef stepped up calmly and shot her in the side of the head.

She fell away from life, without even a chance to look back at her baby. And for a moment, this struck Nasser as unutterably sad, not at all part of the natural order. He knew these people were infidels and deserved to die, but he couldn’t help himself. When Youssef turned the gun toward the boy, who was screaming in his stroller, Nasser gently nudged him from behind.

“Come on, sheik, we have to go,” he said.

Two minutes later, as the car sped down Flatbush Avenue, Nasser still kept feeling the kick and burn of the gun in his hand. Slowly he tried to get back into the proper flow of time again. He fingered the key on the chain around his neck as headlights washed over the windshield and police sirens sounded in the distance.

“Don’t worry, my friend, they are not following us,” said Youssef, one hand on the wheel, the other fumbling for the little amber bottle of nitroglycerin pills in his shirt pocket. “We are going home.”

“What happened?”

“What do you mean ‘happened’? We were successful. I am so excited, I think I’m going to throw up. I don’t have a chance to count yet, but I’m sure we have enough to finance the next stage.”

Nasser realized he was still trembling from the force of events. “Sheik,” he said, using the word the way Americans called each other “sir.” “There’s something I have to ask you.”

“What?”

“Were you really going to shoot him? The little boy.”

“This is jihad.” The Great Bear stared straight ahead into the oncoming traffic. “If it was God’s will, I would have.”

“But I was the one who pushed you out of there.” Nasser let go of the key and looked once over his shoulder, to make sure they weren’t being pursued.

Youssef shrugged. “Then that was God’s will too.”

A MORNING MIST WAS burning off over the Atlantic and seagulls settled on the railings of the famous boardwalk along the southwestern rim of Brooklyn.

Nasser walked stiffly up the front steps of Coney Island High School, a salt-corroded, graffiti-insulted redbrick building on Surf Avenue. For the occasion he’d put on a black polyknit tie bought from an African street peddler in East Flatbush and a secondhand wool sports jacket that was much too warm for early October. He hadn’t been back in the four years since he left school, and now, as he walked into the lobby with a battered briefcase in hand and was confronted with the metal detector, he was not sure how to proceed.

“Please,” he said to the school security guard, “I have to see Mr. Fitzgerald.”

Come on. Keep them focused. Ten minutes before the buzzer.

Up in a fourth-floor classroom, David Fitzgerald angled his glasses and smoothed his beard as he read aloud from The Red Badge of Courage.

“‘But here he was confronted with a thing of moment,’” he began, in a deep, chesty voice with a slight Long Island accent. “‘It had suddenly appeared to him that perhaps in a battle he might run. He was forced to admit that as far as war was concerned he knew nothing of himself.’”

He slammed the book shut with a dramatic pop, getting the attention of all thirty-six kids. They were jammed into the little dimly lit classroom with yellow walls, uneven wood-plank floors, and an old rotting hulk of a teacher’s desk at the front smelling vaguely of formaldehyde.

“All right, let’s throw this one out to our studio audience,” he said, keeping his voice up so he could be heard above the constant drilling upstairs. “We’re talking about this idea of being tested again. The whole notion of what a hero really is. So how many of you guys think you would run?”

The students turned on each other with incredulous snorts and fey high-pitched wisecracks. He was going at it too directly. These were Coney Island kids: you weren’t going to get them to own up to fear and vulnerability that easily.

“Come on, guys, don’t leave me hanging here.” He picked up the gnarled old Rawlings baseball glove he had lying on his desk from the discussion of The Catcher in the Rye earlier. “The point isn’t that I want you to memorize these books. The point is, I want you to find something of yourself in them. Or maybe to take something out of them that will become part of yourself.” He looked around, thinking he saw a few glimmers of light.

He slipped his left hand into the glove and pounded his right fist into it, savoring the loud wop bouncing off the classroom walls, feeling the performing juices start to flow.

“A-right, let me give you an example,” he said, wading in among them—all six feet two, two hundred and ten pounds of him—like a ship breaking through ice floes. “Back when I was a kid, I had a job being a lifeguard one summer at the Westbury Beach Club in Atlantic Beach. Can you imagine me in a bathing suit?”

He held up his arms and made a show of sucking in his ever-so-slack middle-aged gut, getting a round of giggles. “Yeah, right,” he said. “I looked like the ‘before’ picture in one of those muscle-builder ads on the subway. Anyway, my father was this big war hero with all these medals and I used to dream of doing something great to impress him. And everyone else. You know, common adolescent fantasy, right? You save the girl and she swoons in your arms.”

About three-quarters of the boys in the class smirked in recognition while the girls held back, waiting to be convinced.

“So one day, I’m up there on my lifeguard chair, waiting to be a hero, and I see this head bobbing up and down on the horizon. So I’m on it. Okay?” He moved toward the back of the class, hearing chair legs scraping on the linoleum floor as kids parted to get out of his way. “This is my dream girl, who I’m going to save. And I go running out there and I dive into the surf and I’m stroking against the current, man.” He mimed thrashing in the water, pulling back great handfuls of the Atlantic. “And then I get there, like two hundred yards out, and it’s this big fat old lady in a bathing cap.”

“Oh, snap!” yelled a boy called Ray-Za in the third row, who up until this minute had been staring mindlessly into his tiny Game Boy screen.

A few of the others cracked up too. It’s happening, David thought. After four weeks of school, they’re finally beginning to wake up after the long summer’s mental hibernation. Now was the time to grab them before they slipped back into indifference.

“So I’m trying to pull her out,” said David, doing the gasping-for-air bit. “And they tell you when you’re in lifeguard class, grab the hair—don’t grab an arm or a shoulder, because the person you’re trying to save may grab you and pull you down. So I grab for her bathing cap and it comes off and she’s like bald underneath.”

“Ho shit!” Merry Tyrone in the second row put a hand over her mouth.

“Oh yeah,” said David, heading back toward the blackboard. “She’s bald and she’s losing it big-time. She grabs me around the neck and starts trying to pull me down with her. This big bald lady is trying to drown me in the middle of the Atlantic. It was like some Freudian nightmare. Anyway, make a long story short, the skinny girl lifeguard I had a crush on from the club next door had to jump in and fish us both out.”

“Whhooo-aaa, Mr. Fitzgerald!”

The whole class went off, boys and girls equally. Well, that wasn’t exactly what happened, but who cared? They liked it when he told stories on himself. You were trying to spark them, engage them, break up the frozen sea in each of them.

“All right, so somebody else give me an example of character being tested,” he said, pounding his fist into the glove. “I’ll take anything from life or one of the books we’ve read.” He switched into his Coney Island sideshow barker’s voice. “Step right up. Make your case or get outta my face. Think fast!”

Without warning, he whipped off the glove and threw it to Elizabeth Hamdy in the first row. That bright and radiant girl who usually came to class wearing a white Arab head scarf and Rollerblades. He wanted her to set the tone for the others. She caught the glove and looked around, half embarrassed and half proud. No head scarf today.

“Um, what about Holden Caulfield?” she said quietly.

“Yeah, okay. What about him? Speak. You have The Glove.”

“Well, he has that dream near the end. About saving the kids falling off a cliff. That’s why it’s called The Catcher in the Rye.”

“All right, but he only thinks about that.” David bowed to her. “He’s never really tested that directly. Can you give me a more concrete example?”

“Well, my father, when he crossed the river,” she said quickly and then lowered her eyes, hiding behind a smile.

“Yeah?” he said, not sure whether to push her. “What river was that?”

“The Jordan.”

“That’s in the Middle East, you guys.” David cocked an eyebrow at the rest of the class. You couldn’t make any assumptions about people’s knowledge of geography these days.

“Yeah, he’s Palestinian.” Elizabeth blushed a little.

“So why was crossing the Jordan such a big deal?”

“Because the Israelis shelled his family’s village,” she said shyly, not liking the attention but determined to answer the question diligently. “And his parents asked him to take his brother and sister across the river to Jordan. They thought everyone was going to get raped and killed by soldiers.”

“And so did he do it?” asked David. He hadn’t meant to delve so deeply, but the door was open now.

“Yes.” She swallowed and lowered her eyes. “One time, he said that when he crossed the river, it was like his childhood disappeared over his shoulder. But, you know, not everyone in my family was happy about it.” Her fingers curled up along the edge of the desk.

“Why not?”

“Some of them thought he should have stayed and resisted or something like that. But I thought it was more courageous, what he did do.”

“Which was what?” asked David, who remembered Mr. Hamdy only as a squat and exceedingly polite sixtyish grocery store owner he’d met on Parents’ Night last year.

“He survived,” she said, tightening her mouth a little. “He moved around a lot and eventually he saved enough money to come to this country and try to start a new life for his family. So it was like crossing another river.”

David sensed there was more to the story, but he decided not to push her on it. She’d said enough. In fact, if anyone else in the class had spoken that long, she would have been shouted down and called a loudmouth chickenhead. But with Elizabeth, the others hung back a little. They sensed she had a kind of glow about her, a special presence in the room. Look at her, thought David: she’s a star and she doesn’t even know it.

“Okay, thank you, Elizabeth.” He gave her a thumbs-up and saw her slump down a little in her seat, relieved she didn’t have to say any more.

“All right, somebody else!” he said, raising his voice so he could be heard above the construction racket upstairs. “Step right up. Make your case. All tales of guts and cowardice welcome.”

There was a pause, but he didn’t rush to fill it up. After fifteen years of teaching, he’d learned never to force the answers down their throats. Let them come to it, on their terms. That’s the only way they’d ever learn anything.

Eventually, Kevin Hardison in the back row half-raised his hand. He was a runty wannabe-gangsta with monogrammed gold caps over his front teeth, a Dollar Bill cap, and two sets of baggy clothes which he alternated day after day because likely that was all he could afford. Having been in fairly serious trouble himself when he was young, David always had a soft spot for the roughnecks and knuckleheads. He signaled for Elizabeth to throw Kevin the glove.

“I was gonna say something about how I moved last year,” the kid began with a soft lisp.

David started to stop him, saying he wanted to keep the discussion focused on heroism in literature. But then he remembered this was only the second time Kevin had spoken up in the first month of school. Better to let him go, to encourage him.

“All right, what’s that got to do with this idea of being tested?”

He saw the boy hesitate and start to sink back down into his chair, sorry he’d raised his hand. It was going to be one of those make-or-break moments, David realized, where a kid either becomes part of the life of a class or starts the process of withdrawing and eventually dropping out.

“It’s all right,” he told Kevin. “Make your case. I got your back.”

The kid licked his lips. “’Kay.” He began slowly, as if he were bouncing a ball at the foul line. “Like last year? My family moved outta the Coney Island Houses and got a apartment in O’Dwyer Gardens.” He was talking about two massive housing projects a few blocks away from each other in Coney Island. “Anyways, these guys from my old crew at the Houses had a beef with my new boys in O’Dwyer. And then they both came to me and said what all am I gonna do when they have a fight on Friday night. Whose side am I gonna be on?”

“So what did you do?” David said gently, trying to protect the moment and keep the space open for the kid.

“I stayed home, by my moms,” said Kevin, trying to sound tough and unashamed of himself. “I was like just buggin’ out with the WB, and jacking the sound up so I wouldn’t hear them busting caps and the sirens outside and shit. And then in the morning, I found out my man Shawn De Shawn got shot in the head. They had him on life support for a month before they let him die. That was messed up, man. He was gonna play point guard for St. John’s.”

His voice trailed off and he looked down at his fingers, ill at ease over having exposed so much to the group. A couple of the other guys in the class started mumbling behind his back and pointing in contempt, but David cut them off with a cold stare.

“All right, enough,” he said, before turning his attention back to Kevin. “Thank you, Kevin. I give you props for opening up like that. Shawn was in my class, and for the record, I think you did the right thing. And if anyone disagrees, they can take it up with me personally after class.”

Okay, so it wasn’t “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard,” but to have a kid like Kevin let his guard down so much was a small miracle. The kind—along with having Elizabeth in his class—that kept David going year after year in spite of budget cuts, school board politics, and plaster dust drizzling down on his desk.

He cruised by Kevin’s desk, collecting the glove and quietly telling him, “Come talk to me later if you want.” The morning was developing a kind of unusual gravity, with kids dropping their hearts on their desks. He made a U-turn back toward the front of the class and used his booming voice again, trying to lighten the discussion a little.

“Okay, I don’t want to turn this into a therapy group or a talk show,” he said, picking up a piece of chalk. “I want to bring it back to the books. Because that’s what we’re here to talk about. Right? So can somebody else give me an example of a character in one of the books who’s either being tested or maybe even testing something?”

A Russian boy named Yuri Ehrlich slowly hoisted his arm in the fifth row, over by the radiators. He was a brilliant but unscrupulous kid, with long, straight brown hair and a disturbing habit of cheating when he didn’t have to, as if the old Soviet habits of beating the system were too deeply ingrained in him. David wondered if he’d change this year.

“Raskolnikov.” Yuri rolled out the name with a thick accent.

“Raskolnikov who chopped up the old widow and her sister?” David tossed him the mitt. “Should I have brought an ax instead of the glove to throw around today?”

Uneasy laughter. They were reading Crime and Punishment in Advanced Placement English, not in this class. But why make a deal out of it if the kid wanted to contribute?

“All right, I’ll bite. Why Raskolnikov?”

Yuri sat there, silent and brooding, letting the glove tumble to the floor.

“Maybe he means that Raskolnikov is testing the definition of what it means to be an extraordinary man,” Elizabeth Hamdy said earnestly, leaning forward on her elbows. She was taking A.P. for extra credit too.

“Okay, I can live with that,” said David, thinking this really was the day for heavy topics. “So does he succeed or fail?”

“I think he fails, because his definition of ‘extraordinary’ is flawed,” said Elizabeth in her perfect diction, obviously glad not to be talking about herself.

“Yuri, is that why you think he fails?”

A tensile moment of anticipation. Other kids looking at each other, checking their watches; David holding up his arms, wanting everyone to hush up and listen.

“No.” Yuri stared down at his red Converse high-tops. “He fails because he turned himself in.”

The period buzzer went off.

“Yuri, you’re scaring me.” David went to pick up the glove. “The rest of you give me three to five pages on this subject by next Friday.”

With the change-over between classes, the hallways exploded in sound and visual chaos. Students stood around in exclusive circles and insolent clusters, as if daring people to pass.

Nasser moved by them gingerly, feeling just as invisible as he had felt when he was a junior here, repeating the grade, four years ago. Everything looked the same, except for some red-white-and-blue bunting on the walls. The green-tiled walls, the dull streaky floors, the chipped mahogany banisters, the names of war veterans and valedictorians of years past painted in gold letters on brown plaques, the sports trophies in glass display cases, the posters celebrating Italian American week with pictures of famous actors, pop singers, Christopher Columbus, Leonardo Da Vinci, and pasta dishes. But the feeling was a little bit different. He no longer wanted to fit in here, he told himself. He no longer wanted to be one of them. Let them swagger by, talking in code, flirting, fighting, making incomprehensible private jokes. With their bared midriffs, their pierced noses, dyed hair, black nail polish, foul language, their tight and baggy clothes, their frank appraising stares. Seeing him but not seeing him. Someday a Great Chastisement would befall all of them.

On the other side of the building, David Fitzgerald hiked a black Jansport book bag over his shoulder and walked past the gauntlet of kids on his way to the office. The inside of the school was like something dreamed up by a fun-house designer. Long, dark hallways that didn’t go anywhere, stairwells that didn’t connect from floor to floor, offices with tiny windows. Traffic patterns loosely based on Boston and Tijuana. Acoustics appropriate for a heavy-metal concert or a Manhattan restaurant. Buzzers going off for absolutely no reason.

A group of loiterers in front of the boys’ room called out to him.

“Yo, what’s up, Mr. Fitz?”

“Yeah, look out, don’t step on me, Mr. Fitzgerald!”

“Yo, you’re scaring me, Mr. Fitzgerald!”

Though he had a few inches on most of the kids, occasionally a hand would reach out to touch him on the head or the shoulder, either mockingly or affectionately. It was hard to tell at times. But there was something comforting about it anyway. A kind of assurance that he had a secure place in this intricate little municipal beehive.

“Yo, Mr. Fitz, you gonna call my parole officer for me?”

“Mr. Fitz, you gonna talk to my moms? Right?”

“Yo, Mr. Fitzgerald, how’s the bike?”

Oh yes, the bike. An old-fashioned Schwinn with a banana seat he’d picked up for five dollars at a sidewalk sale. He’d first developed an image as an eccentric because of that bike. Some years back, he and his soon-to-be-ex-wife Renee had been living in Park Slope and he’d ridden it to school a couple of days a week, instead of taking the subway. So he became the bicycle man. Even after they moved back to Manhattan and he started taking the train again, he was still “the bicycle man” to the kids. He had a reputation to uphold. Funny Mr. Fitzgerald. Weird Mr. Fitzgerald. Not a bad thing. It was an identity. A way for people to think about him. One time he brought a baseball glove into class when they were talking about The Catcher in the Rye. So that became another part of his mythology. Mr. Fitzgerald brought in props. Now every year he had to bring in the glove for the imperfect hero discussions. The kids expected it.

“Yo!” he shouted out to a Dominican kid called Obstreperous Q from his seventh-period class, who was sweet-talking a girl by the fire stairs. “Come by my office later. I got that book of García Lorca poems I was telling you about.”

When David arrived at the door of the English Department office Donna Vitale was standing in the doorway, waiting for him. Donna with her frizzy straw-colored hair, her wonderful warm shining smile, and her one wayward eye staring slightly out into space.

“You have a visitor,” she said.

“Tell me it’s not Larry coming to complain about my programs again.”

Larry Simonetti, the school’s principal, had been in a state of high fret for the past week, ever since Albany issued a report calling the school “one of the ten worst-managed” in the city. Test scores were fine, but the school had ricocheted from scandal to scandal in the last twelve months. There was the security guard running away with the ninth grader, the falling bricks that seriously injured an eleventh grader last spring, and of course the $75,000 from the annual budget that was mysteriously missing. The governor himself was scheduled to come next week and give a speech about “taking back our schools,” possibly as a prelude to announcing his own candidacy for President.

“No, it’s not Larry,” said Donna. “It’s a blast from the past. I told him he could wait at your desk.”

“Thanks, Ms. Vitale.”

He started to move past her, but she caught his elbow “I also wondered if I could talk to you about coming over for dinner next week,” she said softly.

He stopped short, flattered but awkward, suddenly feeling like a bashful ape. How did women handle this kind of attention? “Um, can I get back to you on that, Donna?”

“You got the number.”

He wondered if he was missing a great opportunity here, waiting to see if he could still work things out with Renee. Ms. Vitale was smart, she had ballast, and something about her suggested a kind of rowdy availability. You could imagine sitting up in bed, drinking beer with her.

“But don’t wait too long, David.” She brushed by him on her way to the Xerox room. “I might not be around forever.”

He continued on into the office. A narrow little blue room, off a main corridor, with a dozen desks for the twenty teachers in the English department. The junior staffers were expected to roam like nomads and put their papers and books down on any surface that happened to be clear, while the senior teachers hunkered down and defended their areas like mangy old primates. Three students loitered inexplicably by the water fountain and a work-crew guy stood on a ladder pulling down parts of the ceiling, looking for God knows what hazardous materials. A tattered print of Edvard Munch’s The Scream adorned a wall above an overstuffed file cabinet, and a group of painters stood around with dripping rollers, trying to freshen the room up for the governor’s visit.

The visitor was sitting in David’s chair, studying the papers on top of his desk and the placard above it with the Melville quote God keep me from ever completing anything.

What did that mean? Nasser wondered. He’d never trusted this one, this Mr. Fitzgerald, with his patient smile and unruly brown hair. He’d sat in the back of his class for a whole term, too bored yet too intimidated to speak up. Feeling the work was both above him and beneath him. Not understanding most of what was said; not getting the jokes; not liking the fact that he’d been left back once already and was older than most of the other students. And especially not liking it when Mr. Fitzgerald would call on him in class, asking him to explain what he thought of The Great Gatsby or The Deerslayer or some other immoral American book. It was humiliating, like being stripped naked in front of the other students. He stammered and stuttered, wanting to crawl under his chair, while this man read him immoral poems and tried to force him to think and speak in an uncomfortable way.

He’d dropped out soon after that. But there was another part of Nasser that was confused, being back here. The weaker part that needed to talk to someone about the things he’d seen. He remembered how he’d watched other students talk to Mr. Fitzgerald, sharing jokes and intimate secrets after class, and how he’d wished he could unburden himself to someone that way.

“It’s Nasser, right?” David set down his bag and offered his hand, grateful for the excuse to ignore the pink phone message from Visa lying amid the piles of uncorrected papers from his five classes on his desk.

The thought of the $2,500 he owed on his credit card made the back of his neck ache.

The visitor looked up, startled, with luminous brown eyes, just like his sister’s. “I am surprised for you to remember me.” His handshake was limp and cautious.

“Sure, I remember almost all my students.”

Not that he’d done much worth remembering, this Nasser. Just sat in the back, looking pissed off all term. There was a certain number of kids like him every year, maybe twenty, thirty percent. The unreachables. Who either didn’t speak the language or just didn’t give a damn. After all these years, David accepted that triage went on in the classroom. You helped the ones who were going to make it and made the best deal you could with the ones who wouldn’t. And once in a while, you found a gem in the gravel. There’d be a kid like Kevin Hardison, of no special promise, yet somehow you could find a way to buff him up and make him shine. You could signal him that there were life and ideas and mystery on the other side of the great divide of adulthood; it wasn’t all just driving on the expressway, flipping burgers at Mickey D.’s, and selling drugs on the corner. High school was the last chance at true democracy, where everyone stood more or less equal. So you went to the wall for these kids. You bought extra books for them, went to their Friday-night basketball games, talked to the social workers when they had problems with their parents, took their phone calls from Rikers when they got in trouble with the law.

He’d offered to give this Nasser mat kind of attention, thinking he’d seen something unusual in him. But the boy had stalked out before they could even make an appointment.

The real enigma here was how this Nasser’s little sister, Elizabeth, could then turn out to be one of the best students he’d ever had.

David pulled over an empty chair and sat down. “So how have you been, anyway? What have you been up to?”

“I am good. I am very good. I am excellent, in fact” Nasser pulled on his tie nervously. “I am driving for the car service. I am doing very well. I’m making the money.”

“I’m glad to hear it. Sounds like your English is better now too.”

“Is still very difficult for me.” He rolled the tie around his finger and stared out at the patriotic bunting draped in the halls, pride and embarrassment wrestling on his face.

“So the governor is coming next week—to share his sincere concern with the children and teachers of this state, no doubt.” David brought his chair close so they were almost knee-to-knee, like passengers on a train. “What brings you back? You thinking about getting your GED?”

The boy looked over to meet David’s eyes. “No,” he said. “But I have something very serious to discuss.” The tie unrolled, the Adam’s apple bobbed behind the buttoned collar. “I must talk to you about my sister.”

“Elizabeth?”

Nasser put his briefcase flat across his lap, almost defensively.

“What about her?” asked David. “She’s terrific. She’s a world-beater. She got fifteen hundred on her SATs. She can write her own ticket to any college she wants.”

“This is not appropriate. For a girl like this to write her ticket.”

“Why not?”

Nasser frowned, straightened his tie, and picked at his raggedy briefcase. So much tension. David thought about offering him a cup of coffee, but then decided he’d better not. The kid was wired enough already.

“A girl like this should stay home and make a good marriage,” Nasser said firmly. “A girl like this should help raise a Muslim family.”

A part of David rebelled, hearing that. Why did everyone want to control these kids and put them in a box? Sometimes it felt like half his job was breaking these boxes open.

But he tried to finesse the point here. “Well, what makes you think she can’t get married if she goes to college?” he said, opening up his big palms.

“No.” Nasser shook his head vigorously. “This will not work. There are things in the world.”

“Things?”

“Bad things. Things she shouldn’t be exposed to. The immorality and lasciviousness. I drive around this neighborhood, I see the drugs and prostitutes on the boardwalk. Every day, girls like this are raped in the newspaper. People are shot for being in the wrong place. For no reason at all. This is a terrible thing.”

As Donna Vitale squeezed between them with a wink, a pile of secondhand Jane Eyres in her arms, David found himself uncomfortable with all this brotherly interest. It wasn’t unusual, traditional families not wanting their kids to go out into the world. Some of it was just cultural differences. But occasionally he wondered if the relatives secretly wanted to hold the kids back so they could feel better about their own lives.

“Can I ask why you’re the one who’s talking to me about this and not your parents?” David furrowed his brow and leaned in so close his shoulder almost touched Nasser’s ear.

Nasser reared back from the contact. “Our mother is dead,” he said, greatly agitated. “Someone has to look out for my little sister.”

“So what about your father? I talked to him last year.” David found himself wanting to defend the old man after hearing Elizabeth’s story.

“My father.” Nasser pursed his lips and pulled hard on his tie. “My father is not the one to protect my sister. He is married to an American woman with no morals and he has daughters with her who are allowed to eat pork and watch filth on television! I’m sorry to say this to you, but it is the truth. My father is not a devout man. He tries, but it is not enough. Someone else has to be responsible.”

Then all at once, Nasser fell quiet, turning and looking out into the hall.

His sister had just walked by with her best friend, Merry Tyrone, a stylish black girl who wore short skirts and chunky shoes and didn’t like people knowing how smart she was.

“You see this?” Nasser clapped his hands in frustration. “She’s not wearing her hijab today.”

“Her what?” asked David.

“Her head scarf. This is what a proper Muslim girl should be wearing.”

“Oh.” David looked down at the top of Nasser’s head, as if trying to see inside it. “Come on, Nasser. Your sister’s a good kid. She’s not going to get in any trouble.”

“Oh no? Look at this.” Nasser started to dig through his briefcase. “Look what I find in her room.”

He began pulling things out. A copy of Cosmopolitan, a J. Crew catalogue, The Catcher in the Rye, and The Color Purple with various sections dog-eared and underlined in red ink. Her permission slip for Tuesday’s field trip to the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

“You see?” he said. “Haram. Haram. Haram!” He pointed to each item. “None of this is permitted.”

Haram. The word sounded like an engine revving. David sat back as if he’d just gotten a faceful of fumes.

“Nasser, I don’t know what to tell you.” He sighed, arching his chin at the ceiling and rubbing his throat with a knuckle. “This is the modern world. I don’t like everything about it either, but you can’t put on blinders and pretend it doesn’t exist.”

“But don’t you see how this is harmful to a young girl?”

“Well, I don’t know.” David didn’t want to say he’d assigned some of the reading himself. “Do you think it’s possible you’re overreacting a little?”

“No, this is not possible.”

David watched Nasser’s fingers slip between his shirt buttons, as if he were trying to control some terrible pressure building up inside of him. So tight, so held in. Did he want to say something else?

“Really, Nasser. I think it’ll be okay.” He tried to sound reassuring.

“So you don’t help me keep her home from college?” Nasser asked with glistening, almost brimming eyes. “Is that it?”

David saw he was wrong about this guy. Before, he’d suspected Nasser was merely jealous of his sister’s grades, her ease in assimilating. But something larger was at stake: here was a young man genuinely frightened by the late twentieth century. In fact, David remembered, that had been Nasser’s problem as a student. He was too scared to step outside his familiar frame of mind and try out new ideas.

“I’m afraid I can’t make anybody do anything they don’t want to do,” David told him. “Are you sure there’s nothing else you wanted to discuss?”

He studied Nasser’s face again. Amazing. Brother and sister hardly looked anything alike, except for the eyes. Most days, Elizabeth looked like a regular could-be-anything New York City girl, if you ignored the head scarf. But Nasser had an unmistakable Old World heaviness, as if he’d just come off the streets of Bethlehem. Even their first names sounded as though they came from opposing cultures.

“No, nothing else is important.” Nasser loaded his sister’s things back into his briefcase. “I am disappointed. I hoped you would help.”

Every year, they come and go with the tides, David thought once more. The kids. Young, then not young. Some you save, some you don’t. Like a lifeguard.

“I’m sorry, Nasser. It’s a free country. I mean, I respect your beliefs and I’ll look out for your sister the way I’d look out for any of my students. But people are entitled to make their own mistakes.”

“No, I don’t think this is so.” He snapped his briefcase shut and stood.

David started to offer him his hand, but Nasser was distracted again, looking at the Melville quote over the desk.

“And this is not right either,” he said, jabbing the placard with his finger. “A man should finish anything he starts.”

“WHAT’S THE MATTER?” Youssef was asking.

“Nothing.” Nasser shrugged, not meeting his eye. “Why do you ask?”

“I see you looking very … dog-face.”

jihad.