Homeland Elegies(29)

“So why couldn’t your parents say it right?”

“They don’t speak Arabic.”

“They’re not Arabs?”

“Well, no, they’re from Pakistan, so—actually, they were born in India. But that’s a long story.”

“And you all moved here from Pakistan when you were in kindergarten?”

“I was born here.”

He paused for a moment, picking lint off the stiff felt dome of his wide-brimmed trooper hat. From somewhere upwind of us, the sweet smell of burning apple wood was pouring into the air. “So where were you born?” he asked, suddenly tentative.

It was clear I’d made a mistake.

“Wisconsin,” I said. It was another lie. Though I spent almost the entirety of my childhood and adolescence in Wisconsin, I was born on Staten Island. “Wisconsin,” though, felt like a stronger move in this negotiation around the impression forming inside him.

“Never been,” he said. “I just read this book, The Looming Tower. You heard of it?”

“It won the Pulitzer last year, didn’t it?”

“It’s pretty incredible.”

“I know the writer. Lawrence Wright. Great guy.”

I’d recently met Lawrence—or Larry, as he’d introduced himself—at a reading of a play he’d written about the Italian journalist Oriana Fallaci. We’d spoken afterward, an encounter I doubt he would recall and during which I would wonder if, in fact, his sympathies with Fallaci’s troubling views on Islam were deeper than he was letting on in the play he’d written. In short, I was misrepresenting both my affection for—and proximity to—this famous writer in an obvious attempt to signal status and amiability, to get Trooper Matthew off whatever suspicions I worried he was now harboring.

He continued: “You know, I never knew that the guy who ran the whole crew of hijackers was from Egypt. For some reason, I thought they were all from Iraq. I thought that’s why we went to Iraq. See, but the truth is, none of them was Iraqi. Not a one. They were mostly from Saudi. And Atta, Mohammed Atta, the guy in charge, he was from Egypt. Cairo, actually.” So quickly had we arrived, via my father’s best friend, on the subject of Atta. “My grandfather was stationed in Cairo during the world war. We had a picture of him in front of the pyramids. I used to dream about visiting when I grew up, standing there where Grandpa did. I had no idea the kind of hate they’ve got for us.” I bit my lip—literally—and nodded, hoping my silence would appear respectful. “I gotta say, for guys who’re pure evil,” Trooper Matthew added, “the book almost made me understand them. Don’t get me wrong. It’s not like I felt for them or anything like that. I mean, they’re monsters. But…you know, when you see what happens in their countries, and how messed up everything is for them, how hard it is for folks who live there, well, you start to get how they’re seeing the world. You can understand how they start thinking Disneyland’s really the problem with everything.”

“Disneyland?”

“Yeah. Atta. He hated Disneyland. Thought America was turning the world into a theme park.” Moments earlier, I hadn’t known better than to speak; now I was certain silence was necessary. He was fishing, his tone no longer declarative but slipping—at the ends of phrases—into the ostensible friendliness of the interrogative. “I mean, you can almost understand a guy like that. You know what I mean?”

“You think? I don’t know.”

“I do. I really do.” He paused again and glanced at me—I thought—with a look that drew out more distinctly the tapering almond shape of his eyes. “D’you know that when he returned his rental car on September ninth, he called the rental agency to tell them the oil light was on? Can you believe that? He didn’t care about the three thousand people they killed, but he cared about the next person driving the car. You believe that? I wouldn’t if I saw it in a movie.”

“The book sounds amazing,” I said after a short pause.

“Right,” he said distantly. “I should probably get on the horn. Make sure those guys are on their way.” The hat found his head again as he walked back to the driver’s side to make his call.

He was still on the phone—running a check on me, I assumed—when the flatbed truck from Marek Auto Repair pulled up. The tow driver was a short, stocky man in denim overalls whose face was covered with blistering acne. He huddled over the engine to inspect. “Yep,” he said. “Busted head gasket.”

“You guys can fix that, right?”

“Shouldn’t be a problem.”

I looked over at the cruiser, where Trooper Matthew’s face was lowered, phone still to his ear.

The tow driver backed up the truck and lowered the flatbed. Once the cables were attached, the truck’s squealing winch pulled my car up into place. It wasn’t until the car was mounted and level—and until we’d gotten into the cab and were readying to go—that Trooper Matthew finally emerged and made his way to the tow truck’s driver’s-side window. He and the driver spoke about someone they both knew; I could tell he was ignoring me. I looked forward and did the same. As their conversation came to an end, the trooper put his hand on the door frame and leaned in:

“Staten Island, right?”