Redeployment(65)

She broke the silence first. “You told the Special Assistant things turned ugly,” she said, “for you and your family, around 9/11. Is that true?”

“Yes,” I said, relieved we were talking. “If you saw my mother, you’d think she was white, but my dad’s different. He’s darker than me and he’s got that Arab dictator mustache thing going on. He looks exactly like Saddam Hussein.”

“Exactly?” she said. “Like he could be a body double?” She leaned in toward me. That simple movement, the physical expression of interest, excited me. “What I mean is, would you think that if your family still lived in Egypt?”

I laughed. “They look alike, especially with the mustache. And he won’t shave it. It’s a manhood thing.”

“And that caused problems,” she said.

“Some,” I said. “He’s so stubborn. And he became Mister über-America. He had flags flying at our house, and ‘Support Our Troops’ magnets all over the bumper of his car. Not that that changed anything, the way he looked. Or the way we all looked, and with our Arab-sounding names, going through airport security.”

“I can imagine.”

“No, you can’t. Because when they’d pull him aside to pat him down by hand, he’d tell them, loud so everybody could hear, ‘I know you get a lot of flak, but I want you guys to know I support what you’re doing. You are protecting our American freedoms.’”

Zara shook her head sadly.

“And my mother, Jesus. She came from a totally different universe than my dad. Copt, yeah, but not the type to have family in Garbage City. Growing up, her friends were all Muslim, even one Jew, rich kids who read Fanon and talked radical politics before getting real and marrying each other. But my mom was more radical than all of them. More radical than my grandmom, even, who was a straight-up Communist before the June War. She married my dad. And then he pulled his American freedoms act? I thought she was gonna kill him the first time he did it. That shit nearly broke their marriage.”

“Why didn’t it?”

“She’s religious,” I said.

Zara smiled. “What did you think?”

“I was seventeen,” I said. “You’ve got to understand—my father was there when his cousin died. He was badly beaten himself. And then the people my father had told me were bad all my life had finally got my country really pissed. And those stories he’d told me weren’t bullshit anymore. My father, I mean, the man has never given two shits about me. He’s not a cuddly guy.”

“The Army was a way to make him proud?”

I winced. It didn’t sound so good coming from her mouth. “Make myself proud. But part of that would be in his eyes.”

“I imagine the Arab stuff got worse in the Army.”

“No,” I said. “Not at all. It was more direct, though.” I laughed. “One drill instructor, during inspection, he asked what I’d do if my brother joined al-Qaeda. Would I shoot him in the face? My own brother?”

“That’s awful.”

“I’m an only child,” I said. “I told him yes. Basic isn’t a place for subtleties.”

“What about the other recruits?”

“There was one guy, Travis. He had an uncle who worked construction, and after Travis joined the Army his uncle started refusing to work with this family of Muslim electricians. It was in Travis’ honor.”

“I’ve heard stories like that,” said Zara. “Actually, I’ve heard a lot worse.”

“Travis told it to me and then was like, ‘What you gonna do about it, faggot?’”

“What’d you do?”

“I told him I wasn’t Muslim. Or gay. It’s a nice card to have in your back pocket when you run into that stuff.”

“I don’t know if I could fight for an organization that treated me like that.”

“You’re thinking about it the wrong way,” I said. “That shit is just people. It wasn’t alienating. This”—I waved my hand toward the college—“this is alienating. All these special little children and their bright futures. Look, if Travis was the type to die for his buddies, and he might have been, I think he’d do it for me just as soon as for anyone else wearing Army cammies. That he hated me, and that I hated the ignorant f*ck right back, well, there are circumstances that trump personal feelings.”