Note from Author

THIS novel is now complete. The entries have been reordered to read consecutively from first to last. Thank you for reading.

MAY 25, 2012 - Amsterdam

Peter and I arrived in Amsterdam this morning after an exhausting flight from New York City. Security was tight at all of the airports. Before we left JFK, everyone was ordered off the plane, which was searched. We had to go through security screening a second time before reboarding. By the time we got to Schiphol Airport, we were beat. We splurged on a taxi, which dropped us off on Prinsengracht Street, right in front the Anne Frank Museum.

I came to Amsterdam with a burning passion to see the house of Anne Frank, the young Jewish girl who hid with her family from the Nazi occupation from 1942 to 1944 in a secret annex. I don’t know why my feelings were so strong. I have read that Anne Frank’s diary—her fury at her confinement and the brutality of the Gestapo, her hope for release and dreams of making her own future, her yearning for love, her escape into fantasy—affects many young women this way. As if through Anne Frank’s words—the reality of her looming extermination—young women realize that the only answer to oppression is defiance and independent thinking.

I was nervous and excited. Peter offered to watch our packs while I went into the museum. I sensed that his disinterest was nearly as strong as my obsession. I was too eager to coax him out of his pensive mood and left him on his own.

I spent nearly an hour inside, then staggered out, so emotional I couldn't even talk to Peter about it. We walked south along Prinsengracht Canal, and soon I was practically skipping with joy. We were in Amsterdam! How I loved the mix of people, the counterpoint of foreign languages, the chaos of bicycles and pedestrians. How I loved the soothing canal waters, the elegant trees and quaint doorways, the tipsy rooflines and gables. How I loved peeking into the old brick houses to see rooms lined with bookcases, tidy collections of glassware, ancient clocks, cozy couches and chairs—scenes that stood outside of time, as precious and charming as snow globes.

We stopped at one of the many canal side cafes, drank a couple of beers, then continued on until our adrenaline ebbed and weariness seeped from our bones. We staggered over a few more bridges and discovered Vondelpark, a large English style green with ponds and winding paths, lawns and thickets. We found a grassy spot and laid our heads down on our backpacks for a snooze. We slept for several hours and woke up starving.

The air was filled with the smell of butterscotch. We followed our noses to a cart on the edge of the park that sold Liége waffles, fluffy squares of butter-fried batter with caramelized sugar on the outside. Ever sensible, Peter suggested that we get something more substantial in our stomachs. I allowed him to pull me down the street—how my mouth watered for those waffles—until we came to a cart that sold raw salted herring sandwiches. I begged for something else, but Peter said he was too hungry to take one more step. Several other young couples stood at the cart. One tall blond woman turned and smiled at me. I must’ve worn a crinkle on my nose, because she laughed and said in excellent English, “The herring is very tasty here. We come almost every day.”

“Oh, good,” I said. “I’m so hungry I could eat a horse.”

The woman shifted her chin—almost imperceptibly—to the left, her lips flinching, eyebrows raised. It was a look I would later come to recognize, a uniquely European scowl bestowed on Americans to express disdain and forbearance. “No, no,”—I rushed to clarify—“I don’t eat horsemeat. God no. It’s an American expression, like ‘raining cats and dogs’ for when it showers.” I lifted my hands over my head and fluttered my fingers as I lowered them, as if performing the gestures for The Teensy Weensy Spider. I felt like an idiot. “Americans don’t eat horses,” I said.

She laughed, amused by my embarrassment. She wore a black raincoat over a gray ribbed turtleneck and black slacks, simple and chic. She made me think of Emma Peel in her black leather jumpsuit—unflappable, gorgeous, ready for anything. “My name is Marjon,” she said. “This is my husband Nicholas. You are students?”

Peter and I introduced ourselves. The four of us chatted while we ate our herring sandwiches, which, with the onions and mustard, were not as awful as they sounded, although kind of squeaky on the teeth. We told them of our horrible flight, and when I complained that we thought the airport security measures were excessive and probably did little to stop terrorism, they nodded their heads silently. Marjon changed the subject and said that she and her husband were on their way to a friend’s opening at a nearby art gallery. She invited us to join them.

It was the kind of spontaneous encounter young people expect when traveling abroad. I was eager for adventure and—after a quick glance to Peter, who appeared noncommittal—didn’t think twice about accepting the invitation. We hoisted our backpacks and tagged along.

The four of us talked and joked as we ambled back across Singelgracht Canal and down Lijnbaangracht into the Southern Canal Belt. I was a little awed by Marjon. Like us, she was in her early twenties, yet she seemed so much more mature and sophisticated. She moved like a giraffe, her forward momentum initiated by a barely perceptible jutting of her chin, which slowly rippled down her spine to her hips until her long legs swung into motion. She was friendly and gracious, as if assigned by her embassy to entertain us, and exuded an almost imperial elegance. Even the fact that she was married—unthinkable to me at our age—seemed somehow glamorous.

Marjon’s husband, Nicholas, was tall with very short hair and an already receding hairline. He deferred to her, standing attentively by her side, occasionally adding to her descriptions or offering a word in English she searched for. She was like a magician and he her assistant holding a top hat while she pulled out a rabbit.

We came to a warehouse type building that teetered on the edge of a canal. Twenty or so people were milling around on the sidewalk holding drinks. Marjon led us inside.

The room was crammed with art revelers: street-waif artists, flirty vixens, stately white-haired men in elegant suits, vivacious matrons with fingers full of rings, diffident intellectuals with bad posture and bad skin. While the socialites and art dealers worked the room, shaking hands and reciprocating hugs, the artists sipped their free drinks, peeking shyly from beneath unruly hair.

Marjon took us around—she seemed to know everyone. We felt awkward and shabby in our backpacks and jeans, but everyone was gracious to us. Amid the jangle of Dutch, Italian, and German, I picked out words in English bandied about like volley balls above the crowd—“fantastic,” “stupendous,” “genius,” “crap,” “fucked,”—used, I assumed, as Americans use French, to impress.

The artwork was difficult to see through the crowd, so we went upstairs and looked down from the balcony. The enormous fifteen-foot square canvasses, painted in black and red with a shiny almost vinyl-looking finish, depicted smokestacks and angular industrial complexes graffitied with slogans about global warming and terrorism. They were gaudy, monstrous, and surreal, quite disturbing really—like having the worst of Western civilization shoved in one’s face.

Marjon pointed out the gallery owner, a gangly, rosy-cheeked man with a scruffy beard and buzz cut. He waved back. “His name is Leo Kern,” she said. “Leo came to Holland from Israel to avoid military service. He shared a flat with two artists and began selling their work in order to pay his part of the rent. He now represents a dozen young artists from all over Europe—mostly German neo-expressionists. The man over there—” she pointed to a panicky looking man in a black suit, black shirt, and white tie “—is Aidas Aligimanus, the artist. He’s Lithuanian. He was sent to a mental hospital while serving in the Soviet Army, then sent to Afghanistan to fight the mujahideen. After the war he went to Berlin to study art.”

“Is he a friend of yours?”

“Yes. He does the sets for our little theater group. Will you excuse me for a moment?” She waved to someone and bee-lined through the crowd.

Peter was staring off across the room. I tugged his sleeve, but he didn’t turn to me, his eyes glued to a cluster of artist types. “Do you know those guys?” I asked. Slowly he dropped his gaze and kissed me on the head. As long I was being adored, I didn’t fret about his social skills.

“What do you think of the art?” he asked.

The elephant in the room—one had to say something at some point. One hoped to sound intelligent or thoughtful or sophisticated, and not offend. Honesty was not the point. As someone with a long list of character flaws—lying among them—I have no idea why I chose that moment to be candid. “Why is it,” I asked, “that no one paints art that is pretty anymore?”

Marjon, suddenly appearing at my side, caught my comment, and burst out laughing. Nicholas joined her. I blushed, knowing how doltish I sounded. “I mean,” I blundered on, “isn’t that the purpose of art? To create beauty?”

“Americans can be so right sometimes,” said Marjon kindly. “I’m sorry we laughed. You are delightful. Please don’t be offended.” She kissed me on the cheek, then whispered into my ear, “They are going to start making speeches soon. We should get out of here.”

The four of us fought our way out of the gallery. We wobbled a half block, recovering gradually from the intensity of so many excited people crowded together. The sun hung low on the horizon, casting a pinkish purple light against the stone walls of the canal. The black water lapped quietly. A bicycle bell rang out. We dashed across the street into the rising mist, then paused to absorb the stillness.

“Would you like to come to our house for dinner?” Marjon asked. “We are having a few friends over. We live just outside of Amsterdam, not far from Durgerdam. Some of the tulip fields are still blossoming. Please come. You will make it a party.”

I glanced at Peter, whose expression gave me no clue. I suddenly felt haggard, and the prospect of hunting down a hotel and a place to eat seemed overwhelming. Besides, they had been kind and fun, and we were here in Europe for adventure. “What time?” I asked.

“Why don’t you come with us now? If you don’t mind squeezing into a Smarty. Otherwise you’ll have to take a bus.”

We walked to her car, a Smart Forfour, built in Holland, about the size of a Mini-Cooper, and stuffed ourselves in. It felt like being inside of a giant sneaker. I was the only one comfortable, I’m sure. The men were both over six feet, and Marjon was probably five ten.

While Marjon and Nicholas whispered fast exchanges in Dutch up front, I nudged Peter, stretching my eyes wide. He shook his head and shrugged. “What?” I demanded. He turned sullenly to look out the window, then, as if to apologize, reached over and squeezed my hand. I spun my head and glared out my side of the car, my face prickling with anger—if he didn’t want to go, he should have spoken up. Why did he always make me guess what he wanted?

The city quickly turned into open flat land. The fields stretched to the horizon, with only a church steeple or windmill marking the next town. Something about the flatness of the land, and the sky rumbling with clouds, backlit and turbulent, felt gothic—like the black and white footage of Kansas in The Wizard of Oz. There was something spooky about it.

We arrived at an isolated country cottage, nearly a quarter mile from the nearest neighbor in a wide field of wheat. Built in the eighteenth century, it had low ceilings, white walls, brown woodwork, and exposed beams. The floor sloped slightly, which gave me the boozy feeling of being on a boat. It was furnished with a hodgepodge of antiques and brocade sofas, striped durian rugs, gold and red paisley curtains, rose-print table cloths, and lampshades made out of varnished maps. Eclectic, bohemian, and utterly charming. It was the type of place I imagined for myself one day.

I was grateful when Marjon said she needed help in the kitchen. Again I got an embarrassed pang, sensing that I was merely a child, immature and ignorant, a long way from being a grownup, and here was this woman, my age, in control, put together in a way that American woman seldom achieve until their forties. It seemed to me that she knew how to get what she wanted out of life, whereas I was a girl looking into a store window, a girl who felt too young for anything in the display, doubtful that she would ever have money to possess anything there, unsure if she even had a right to desire such things.

Everything Marjon did—chopping tomatoes, garnishing the plates with parsley, flipping the pork chops—contained authority, as if she had been preparing dinners for her husband and guests for a dozen years. Was it simply being married that gave her such poise? Yet she wasn’t wearing a wedding band. Was a ring too bourgeois? Perhaps she was wasn’t married. And if she had lied about that, what else was she lying about?

For a moment I distrusted her. Obviously I was envious. I felt a sharp stab of suspicion that felt almost like hatred. Then she smiled and I was back to worshipping her.

While we set the table and waited for the béchamel sauce to thicken, another couple arrived. They looked very Dutch, wide round faces with blond hair, tall and well-fed. They were chatty and noisy. Nicholas looked grateful for the interruption, as if entertaining Peter was a chore. Peter could be charming in small social situations, but I had also seen him turn into the silent martyr—usually when I flirted or acted badly. But I was being good. What was his problem?

I decided not to worry about it. The rest of us had a fun dinner, joking and laughing, finishing off several bottles of wine. After we cleared the table and retired to the living room for dessert, the doorbell rang and two young men entered.

I was too tipsy by then to catch their names. They both had straight dark hair, grayish tan skin, with stubble on their faces. The shorter one had badly scarred cheeks, from acne perhaps, though more severe, as if scars from some third-world disease. I guessed they were Turkish or Moroccan. It didn’t seem polite to ask. They appeared to know both couples well and were very relaxed, greeting Peter and me warmly, though their English was limited.

After the newcomers sat down, Peter grinned at me as if he had just been let in on a joke—a mixture of “I told you so,” and “what the hell,” as if we had walked into a bar where a fight was about to begin. His smile was such a departure from his grouchy mood that I caught my breath. I was dying to know what he was thinking.

Nicholas offered everyone glasses of port and cigars. To my astonishment, Peter took a cigar. I enjoyed the unfamiliar plumes of smoke, which seemed sophisticated and daring, not the toxic clouds I knew them to be. This was the Europe I had come to see—decadent, sensual, bohemian. Live it! Experience it!

We talked late into the evening. I felt glowy, tingling with excitement, as if during the evening I had transmogrified into the person I had dreamed of becoming—a person accustomed to four-hour dinners with friends from many cultures, a person who discussed with ease politics, art, and literature. I don’t remember exactly what we talked about—I suppose the usual, our academic studies, movies, music, books—but I do remember the lilt and tinkle of dialog, the rise of the women’s voices, the bursts of laughter from the men, the lovely music of Europeans speaking English. I also remember our hosts seemed unduly careful not to bring up the topic of American politics. The tension it created—or perhaps I was imagining it—made everyone all the more effervescent.

Around midnight Marjon asked where Peter and I were staying, and when we said we didn’t have reservations but had considered the youth hostel in town, she suggested that we spend the night. “We have a guestroom in the windmill. Let me show you.”

The other dinner guests didn’t appear to be preparing to leave, but we were obviously being dismissed. Perhaps we looked tired, I thought, or their friends had something private to discuss. I sensed a hint of false joviality from our hosts at our goodnights—the way parents will tease their children before putting them to bed so they won’t dwell on their worried asides about money and family trouble. I hated to miss out.

Marjon led us through the French doors in the kitchen onto a brick path that led through a perennial garden. The air smelled of lavender and white roses made luminous in the moonlight. Beds of red and yellow tulips nodded in the gentle breeze.

The windmill was the size of a small lighthouse, squat and shapeless like a rook from a chess set. It was covered in weathered cedar shingles, but the turbine was modern. “It used to be a polder mill,” Marjon explained, “used for draining water from the farm land. We refurbished it last year with the latest wind power technology. The old windmill made much noise, but this is more quiet. Some people find it helps them sleep.”

We entered and climbed up a windy staircase to a loft. It smelled like the inside of an old wine cask, sweet and oaky. The furniture was simple, a wide platform bed with a white down comforter, white nightstands, a white trunk at the foot of the bed, a white wardrobe and bureau, a little white table with a bowl and water pitcher, and two white chairs. The white contrasted charmingly with the rough wood interior and the antique iron farm tools displayed on the walls.

“I’m sorry there is no bathroom. We plan to put in plumbing next year. I’ll leave the back door unlocked so you can use the one in the house.”

“Thank you,” I said. “This is perfect.”

“I’m so glad you are here,” Marjon said, taking my hand. “If there is anything you need, let me know. We stay up late.”

Her gaze unnerved me. I looked away quickly, eyes burning. Was it the wine or fatigue? No, it was Marjon’s probing sincerity. As if she thought I was in some kind of trouble and needed her help. I felt unworthy. I thanked her feebly, and reached for Peter’s hand.

As Marjon clomped down the stairs, a heavy dizziness washed over me. I dropped my backpack on the floor and collapsed on the bed.

Peter placed his pack on the table, took off his socks and shoes, and lay beside me. He turned me over onto my back and kissed my brow. The room spun for several moments, then stopped and became almost too clear, the edges of objects falsely sharp as if a montage, cut out and pasted. He held me silently. When he let go I realized that he had been squeezing me so tightly it almost hurt. He rested his head on my chest and sighed.

“What?” I whispered.

He propped himself up on his elbow, lips pressed together, eyes half closed, the way he looked at me when he was trying to come up with a way to explain something that I wasn’t getting. “Hansel and Gretel,” he said, falling back on his pillow.

“You think we’re being fattened up by an evil witch?”

“Something like that. Don’t you find it strange that they’re so friendly?”

“That’s the way Europeans are.” I combed his thick dark hair with my fingers, loving the soft weight of it. “When I went to Italy with my family as a kid, total strangers bought us gelato and showed us around. They adored my little sister. People came out of stores and cafes to play with her.”

“That was Italy. This is Holland.”

“Doesn’t matter. It’s the same.”

“No it isn’t! Europeans hate Americans now.”

“No they don’t, Peter. They know Americans don’t all agree with our government’s policies. I’m tired. Let’s go to sleep.”

“What about those guys? Didn’t you find them strange?”

“The Moroccans? No, I thought they were nice. Can we go to bed, please?” I roused myself, peeled off my clothes, and dove under the covers. The bed was incredibly soft, the down comforter like whipped cream, the thump, thump of the windmill like a relaxing heartbeat. I felt as if I were in the stomach of an ancient benevolent beast, safe, hidden, protected. My muscles became jelly, sinking, drifting.

Peter sat for a moment, completely still. He then undressed, folding his clothes neatly on a chair. Before he crawled into bed, he removed something from the wall and placed it on the nightstand.

MAY 26, 2012 - Amsterdam

The sun poured through a small paned window high above our bed and woke me. I imagined for a moment that I was Anne Frank, taking refuge from the Nazis, hidden by the Dutch resistance in a windmill. I realized that I must have dreamed of her.

As I blinked awake and stretched my neck, I noticed an iron hand tool—a hoe or something—on the nightstand beside Peter. I smiled—my hero.

Peter and I met as freshmen at Canterbury College near Philadelphia. It was one of those highly academic liberal arts schools that delay adulthood for the well-to-do and prepare them for virtually no job whatsoever. I was an art history major. Peter, smarter and more practical than I, had a dual major, political science and engineering. He was tall and lean, with a mop of straight dark hair. I was crazy about him from the moment I saw him, his aloof manner, his equestrian bearing, his warm white smile that contradicted every other impression he made. I had this notion at the time that if you listened hard enough you could hear the soundtrack that went with a person. I thought of myself as ragtime or a Nino Rota theme from a Fellini movie. Peter was the score of an epic saga, like Doctor Zhivago or Lawrence of Arabia. He had all the nervous energy of youth, bound with a deliberateness and dignity that tantalized me. I was a popular sort of girl—I had never bothered going after a guy before—but something made me beat my wings around his flame, my heart fluttering, appearing where I knew he would be, making sure he saw me, but careful not to make eye contact. One day he spoke to me while picking up his mail. We have been together every day since. I find it hard to imagine ever being without him.

The block of sun crept up on the pillow and across Peter’s face. I adored watching him sleep, when he couldn’t resist, or analyze, or make me feel foolish. But even in his sleep, he didn’t appear vulnerable—like a classical marble bust of a Roman orator that seems to own a power that protects it from vandals. I studied him—the lightness of his skin where he shaved, the tiny gap in his eyebrow where he had a scar, the faint creases by his eyes that one day would be character lines, a rash of red by his nostrils, his long curly eyelashes—details I knew by heart. Yet in a way he seemed a total stranger.

He woke—a twitch of his shoulders, a rounding of his cheeks, a flare of his nostrils. He saw me through his eyelashes and pulled me to him. As we made love—a silent lazy early morning kind of lovemaking, a function of his waking erection more than any emotion or passion—I felt a sense of doom that I had never known before, an intimation that however much I loved him, I would do something stupid to lose him.

“I’m starving,” he announced moments after he came. He kicked the tangled sheets off of his body as if an alarm had gone off. “What about you?”

“Famished,” I whispered. I was desperately hungry. I wanted to eat until I my skin was tight. Until it hurt.

We pulled on our jeans, poured water from the white pitcher into a bowl, and splashed our faces. We tiptoed down the stairs and burst through the door. Dew sparkled on the grass. The tulips were translucent—almost glowing—in the early morning light.

We crossed the yard, creaked open the door to the kitchen, and walked in. I could’ve sworn I smelled coffee brewing as we walked through the garden, yet the kitchen was still. Wine glasses, stained pink and waiting to be added to the dishwasher, sat on the counter.

“Do you think we should start breakfast?” Peter asked.

“I don’t think Marjon would mind. I have to pee first.”

“Me, too,” he said grinning. The race was on.

The bathroom was across the living room at the base of the stairs leading up to the second story bedrooms. We raced each other across the kitchen and down the hall—I was in the lead—giggling as I fended off Peter’s groping hands.

I turned into the living room and froze. I gasped, grabbing behind for Peter, then slid to the floor. He stared silently for a moment, then pried away my fingers and stepped past into the room.

#

Six bodies lay dead. Ribbons of dried blood ran from one maroon puddle to another. Marjon, on her stomach, lay by the front door. Nicholas was in the hallway, as if coming to help. The Moroccan-looking guys were on the couch where they had been sitting when we went to bed. The blond couple lay on their backs in the middle of the floor. Each of the six bodies had been shot in either the head or chest. Each throat was slit from one ear to the other, almost decapitating them.

Peter was so calm that my hysteria disappeared at once. He stepped around the blood and squatted by one of the Moroccans. After a few moments he stood and moved his eyes around the room from one body to the next.

“Peter,” I whispered, pointing at Nicholas.

He walked over and pushed Nicholas onto his back with his foot. A dagger pinned a note to the middle of his chest. Peter looked at the note for a long moment without reaching for it. I began to get up, but Peter shook his head, warning me. He walked to the front door and removed a brown scarf from a peg on a coat rack. Stepping carefully around the bodies, he wiped off the table and chairs where each of us had sat during dinner, and the armrests of the chair in the living room where I had eaten dessert. Then he pulled me up by the elbows and led me back through the kitchen. “Go pack our things,” he said. “Wipe down all the surfaces. Bring me our bedding. Now.” As I stumbled out the back door, he added the last of the dishes to the dishwasher and turned it on.

Within twenty minutes, we were walking briskly down the road. After a half mile, we climbed onto a crowded bus headed toward the city center, where we transferred to a train to Schiphol Airport.

We were both in shock. The gears in my brain jammed, my mind shut down. The only thing I remember feeling was a panicky sense of relief, as if we had just missed slamming into a bus on a hairpin turn.

We barely said a word to each other until we got to London and were riding the train from Gatwick Airport into the city. “Their throats were slit after they were killed,” said Peter, gazing out the window. “Bodies don’t bleed after the heart stops.” He squeezed my hand and turned to look at me. “They slit their throats in homage to Allah.”

“What are you talking about?”

“There is a Quranic verse that commands Muslims to cut off the head of anyone who insults Allah and his prophet. It’s their signature. The ritual killing.”

“How did they insult Allah?”

The subway rattled into Piccadilly Circus. “Let’s get off here,” Peter said.

MAY 27, 2012 - London

At an Internet Café in Piccadilly Circus, we found a room listed on Craigslist.com, a small flat south of the Thames near Kennington Park. A college student was renting out his ex-roommate's bedroom by the week. Unlike a hotel or bed and breakfast, he didn’t ask for our passport or for identification. We gave him false names and told him we were Canadian. We paid two hundred pounds for a week in a tiny room that was cold and decorated with travel posters taped over stained floral wall paper. I was fine with it—at least we had our own bathroom.

After dinner at a Chinese restaurant, Peter and I headed to a pub to watch the evening news. There was nothing on British television about the murders. I began to relax a little.

The next morning, Peter returned from an early morning walk with the International Herald Tribune and the London Times. The story made the front page: “Terrorists Strike in Amsterdam, Six Dead.” The Dutch medical examiner estimated that by the time the bodies were discovered by Marjon’s mother, who had stopped by to pick up Marjon to go shopping in the early afternoon, the bodies had been dead for twelve hours, placing the murders at 3 A.M. The papers revealed that the six victims were members of the avant-garde Jenever Theater troupe in Amsterdam that performed improvisational political satires on current events. On more than one occasion, they had presented sketches highly critical of the way Muslims treated women and homosexuals. “Police suspect the murders are political in nature,” reported the Times lamely.

There was no mention of us or the possibility of other visitors to the house. No immediate suspects were named.

“Didn’t they find our hair?” I fretted. “What about the wet bedding in the washing machine? Didn’t they count the dinner plates in the dishwasher? The wine glasses? We couldn’t have wiped clean all of our fingerprints. It isn’t possible.”

“Forensics takes time,” said Peter, “and police don’t release everything they discover. Besides, the number of plates and glasses doesn’t necessarily mean anything—the extras could be left over from lunch. I’ve never been arrested. My prints aren’t on any database. Are yours?”

“I don’t think so.”

By the time we caught the evening news at our pub, twenty-six Muslim mosques and a dozen Muslim schools or madrassahs had been torched in the Netherlands. The Muslim districts in Amsterdam, Rotterdam, and Utrecht had erupted in heavy violence. Cars were torched, store windows broken and vandalized, public buildings set aflame. Police flooded the streets trying to contain the looting and were attacked by excited rioters. They defended themselves with tear gas and rubber bullets. Hundreds were arrested.

At a press conference in which he assured the city that the murders were not endorsed by the Muslim community, the mayor of Amsterdam revealed the contents of the note pinned to Nicholas’s dead body. It was addressed to the people of Amsterdam. The writer stated that the Jenever Theater group was a sacrilege to Allah, that the actors were killed in self-defense because they “terrorized and mocked Islam.” The note protested a Jewish conspiracy to control the Netherlands and subjugate Muslims, and blamed Jews for a global battle against Islam as evidenced by the new immigration laws in Europe and the Palestinian struggle. The writer claimed that the murders were motivated purely by faith. There was no signature other than Allah Akbar written in blood—Allah is greater.

The following day, separate jihadist cells blew up three dikes and two train stations. Dozens of blocks were flooded. Public transportation was completely shut down. Ten thousand people marched in a demonstration in the Dam, the huge square in front of the royal palace. The Dutch prime minister declared a state of emergency. Troops from the Royal Netherlands Army were deployed to control the streets of Amsterdam and The Hague.

Dutch intelligence revealed to the newspapers that they had arrested eight young men, members of Hizb ut-Tahrir, a terrorist organization dedicated to restoring a global caliphate under Islamic law, and every bit as radical as Al Qaeda. Their phones had been tapped and had been heard discussing the Jenever Theater Group, as well as a string of attacks against the Dutch Parliament, Schiphol Airport, and a nuclear reactor. Their apartments were raided, and police found bomb making materials, several “martyr’s wills,” and videotapes of beheadings. There was no proof, however, that these men were responsible for the Jenever Theater murderers.

Peter and I tried to do some of the things we had planned to do in London—the Tate Museum, the Tower of London, the British Museum, but we couldn’t concentrate. We were still badly shaken. We headed to an Internet Café. I had a somewhat hysterical email from my mother. She asked me to telephone as soon as I could. I used a calling card from a pay phone.

“I thought you were flying into Amsterdam,” my mother said, trying to keep the scold out of her voice.

“We were, but we ran into some people on the plane. They invited us to stay in London, so we changed our plans and got off at Heathrow.”

“Do you have a number where I can reach you?”

“We’re not staying with them anymore. We’re subletting a room in a flat, but it doesn’t have a telephone. Everyone uses cell phones here.” I could’ve given her our roommate’s phone number, the one we called to rent the place, but some lingering adolescent rebellion wanted to make it a little hard for her to reach us. Childish I know, but then I was young and on my own for the first time.

“Are you all right, dear?” my mother asked. “You sound stressed.”

“We’re fine. Just tired. Probably jetlag.”

“I would feel more comfortable if you came home, Anne. This business in Amsterdam. I know you planned to go there. I’m concerned about you.”

“Don’t worry, Mother. London is perfectly quiet.” I didn’t tell her about the sudden appearance of police on every corner.

“How is Peter taking it?”

“He’s fine, Mom. He’s more interested in the museums than whatever else is going on.”

“Have you had any problems?”

“No, Mom. We’re great.”

“Well, I guess it’s okay, honey. I trust you. Use your good judgment.”

MAY 28, 2012 - London

The next day sympathy riots broke out in France in many of the same areas wracked by riots in October, 2005. Again the unrest started in Clichy-sous-Bois, a working-class commune in an eastern suburb of Paris. Muslim youth burned cars and attacked police stations, which quickly spread to poor housing projects. Violence spread to Toulouse, Lille, Strasbourg, Marseille, and Lyon.

British papers reported a handful of demonstrations in Muslim communities in East London, but otherwise the city was quiet. As a matter of safety, several tourist sites were closed. Peter and I spent our time wandering the streets, popping into pubs when it rained. Londoners were fomenting in the bars, suggesting to one another to “just line ‘em up and shoot ‘em” and to “drop a bomb on the bloody lot of ‘em.” Peter and I got out of there quickly.

We walked until we got to Soho. We browsed the aisles at Blackwells for a while—I bought a couple of British murder mysteries—then stopped at another Internet Café for a cappuccino and to check our emails.

Peter looked angry when I glanced up from my screen to tell him what my mother wrote, angry not at me but at what he was reading. “Mom bought us return tickets,” I said. “Unrestricted. We can pick them up any time we want at the ticket counter at Heathrow. I wrote her that we’d play it by ear. Anything from your parents?”

He asked me to hold on a second while he fired off an email. “You ready to go?” he asked when he was done. He almost never told me about his emails—a guy thing, I assumed—and I didn’t ask.

We left the café and stepped into the thick of it.

#

Earthquake was my first thought. I was from California. It wasn’t the kind of earthquake that rumbles through the earth like an approaching train, starting out as a little nudge, then a shake, then a paroxysm of rocking and reeling like someone trying to wake you out of a sound sleep, but a sudden hard jolt, walls crumbling down into the streets, billowing gray clouds of dust and smoke. Two distinct blasts followed. Then screams—which struck me as out of place because in Los Angeles people don’t scream during earthquakes but duck for cover—and then alarms and sirens, brakes and crashing automobiles, glass smashing on cement, the air thick, impossible to breathe. Flames shooting out of windows like long tongues. Reams of 8-1/2 x 11 paper flying like confetti from above.

Someone, something shoved my shoulder and I fell down. Peter yanked me up. People pushing and running. I felt their bodies, but saw only their terrified faces. A car caught fire and people began running in the other direction. We were blinded by the black air, roiling and hot, our eyes stinging, leaking tears. We ran with the pack, stumbling on bricks and pieces of insulation. There was no choice. The herd was panicking, pouring into the streets like water released from a dam. We were carried away in the rapids.

Within minutes there were policemen every fifty feet, telling us to walk calmly and directing us away from the fires. How did they get there so fast? We felt another blast a few blocks away, and a cloud of black smoke rolled toward us. We ducked into doorway, tripping on debris, pulling our T-shirts over our mouths to block the choking dust.

In a moment it was as dark as night. We were covered in ash, soot, and debris. Glass showered from the sky. Pieces of buildings, aluminum, bricks, roof tiles crashed around us like hail. As the worst of the blast passed, we fell back into step with the crowd.

The air cleared a bit, and I could see we were entering a park that appeared to be a staging area for emergency vehicles—ambulances, police cars, and triage units. A first aid station was already set up, slipping oxygen masks over peoples’ faces, cleaning and bandaging wounds. In the west, the sun glowed, a phosphorescent pink globe. Someone handed us water bottles and dust masks. The water must’ve been clean, but it tasted like ash.

Completely disoriented, we walked until we could move without touching other people. Police had already blockaded the streets. Cars were at a standstill. Fighter jets circled the skies, helicopters buzzed overhead. We passed a bearded man who was singing and clapping—“My Arab brothers! My Arab brothers! Victory! Victory!” Four guys grabbed him and I thought, My God they’re going to kill him—but cops descended on the group in a flash, grabbing wrists and yanking them behind their backs.

We were several miles from our flat. The tube was shut down. Buses were routed away from the city center. We already saw people on bikes, riding in the middle of the road. I tried several payphones, but nothing was working. We had no choice but to walk back to the South Bank.

When we got to the flat, we turned on the news in the living room. At about 4:50 P.M. coordinated bombs had gone off in and around the Soho district. The first went off at Tottenham Court Road Tube in London. Two more exploded within a minute of each other on two other London Underground trains. A fourth bomb exploded on a bus, ripping off the roof on the top deck, and destroying the backend, which vaulted into the air. Nobody on the bus survived. The surrounding buildings were damaged by fragments, and the vibrations broke windows over a four block area.

The newscaster reported eighty-six deaths so far, hundreds wounded. The city was under a Code Amber Alert.

Within hours of the bombings, riots broke out in Walthamstow in East London and in the Bethnal Green area, just north of the Tower of London. Street fighting began between Jewish and Muslim youth. Pakistani Muslims were taking to the streets in Leeds, Burnley, Bradford, Birmingham, Leicester, and Oldham.

Amazingly, no leaders from the Muslim community stepped forward to condemn the violence. One imam interviewed on television shook his head and said that it was “sad and inevitable.” Another demanded that the British government “control paranoia over terrorism.” Muslims on the street were all on the side of the Islamists, and said that the British deserved it. “So what if a few Londoners die?” asked one man. “Go to Iraq. Go to Palestine. Thousands of innocent woman and children have been killed.” “Jews control British companies,” explained another, “they’re fair targets.” “Britain should be punished,” said yet another. “Miniskirts, body-piercing, drinking, shagging. Disgusting!” And a woman in a headscarf said, “I think it is good there are groups like Al Qaeda. It keeps them awake at night.”

Around 8 P.M. our roommate, a skinny, ruddy-faced redhead, stumbled in, his head bleeding. As we jumped up, he collapsed on the couch where we had been sitting. I ran to the bathroom for antiseptic and bandages. “It’s a friggin’ war zone out there,” he said as I cleaned his wound. He smelled rank as if someone had doused him with vinegar and vomit, and it was hard to work on him. “Tanks all over the place. They’re burning synagogues, burning schools, hoards of them like rats, beating up any white Londoner they see, screaming stuff like, ‘Fuck Christian Pigs. We’re taking over Britain.’ Can you believe the ungrateful bastards? Half of ‘em are supported by our government. Deport them or kill ‘em—that’s what I say. Pour me a drink, will you?” I wasn’t about to tell him that wasn’t such a good idea with a head injury. Peter poured a whiskey and handed it to him. The young Brit wasn’t embarrassed at all to spout off in front of us. “It’s fucking Londonistan—that’s what we are. The fucking media is so busy ranting against American foreign policy, they don’t see we’re being taken over by Muslim fascists. Our chicken-livered government invited these rats in, and now won’t do anything about it—too fucking worried about offending their fucking precious Muslim electorate. They’re killing us with political correctness. They’re scared of a Nazi backlash, but let me tell you, the Nazis look pretty good to me right now.”

The next day was full of demonstrations. Hundreds of thousands filled the streets, and the city was virtually closed down. Dozens of mosques were torched. Our sense of adventure began to flag, and I had to admit I was getting scared. That and my mother’s increasingly apoplectic emails convinced Peter and me to return home.

By evening the airports were reopened. We decided to try to get a flight out the next morning.

MAY 29, 2012 - London, New York

We arrived at Heathrow by 7 A.M. It was mobbed. We spent two hours in line to get our tickets. The soonest flight we could get out on was 1:35 P.M. We used up two of those hours getting through security. All luggages had to be checked in. Guards walked down the line with black garbage bags. We could carry on our purses, but everything inside had to be dumped except wallets and personal documents, which could be carried in clear plastic bags. No cosmetics, pencils, or pens. No one objected.

It was eerily quiet standing in line, as if we were filing into a funeral. Everyone was jittery. A few Pakistani families stood off to one side, looking terrified. No one went near them.

It made me think of Anne Frank at Auschwitz, standing barefoot behind a barbed-wire fence, emaciated and in rags, her huge eyes watching the smoking crematories, the SS guards in watchtowers, the groups of gypsy girls and Hungarian children herded into the gas chambers. Did she wonder, as I did, how people could wait in line so patiently for something guaranteed to be miserable?

#

On the plane Peter fell asleep almost immediately. I suppose dealing with my anxiety had worn him out. Or maybe jet lag was finally catching up to him. He started turned to the window, but shifted in his sleep, leaning his head on my shoulder. Rays of sunlight glistened on his long lashes. I recalled something Susan Sontag once wrote: “What is most beautiful in virile men is something feminine; what is most beautiful in feminine women is something masculine.” I wondered what I might have that was masculine. I hoped it was courage.

I thought of Marjon and how her confidence and almost masculine grace had attracted me. Suddenly I began to sweat, breathing rapidly. Then shivers and shakes. I hadn’t let myself think about her or the murders except in an abstract way, but now, in the forced confinement of the airplane seat, the horror of it pressed down on me. I thought I was having a heart attack. I saw the discarded corpses, the streaks of drying blood, the hands and elbows askew in hideously unnatural angles, eyes and mouths contorted in surprise and pain.

I imagined Marjon answering the door, delighted to greet more guests. Three gunmen burst in. She sees the eyes of the lead gunman, sure and steady as if responding to a question she hasn’t asked. He nudges her chest with the point of his machine gun, the other two men darting around on either side of him, advancing a few steps, the three taking no more than a few seconds to assess the number of people, then shooting, not wasting any bullets, using hand guns, one bullet per person. Then calmly slicing off their heads. Whispering Islamic prayers.

A ritual killing, they said. Religious ritual is a sacrament, a means of knowing and experiencing God. I wondered how cutting off someone’s head could bring them closer to God, and if it did, what kind of god would that be.

Again I thought of Anne Frank, the day the Nazis came for her family, charging up the rickety narrow stairs behind the bookcase—she must’ve heard their heavy boots, must’ve known that it couldn’t mean anything other than the end—springing into their tiny rooms, jabbing with their guns, dragging them out, not even giving them time to grab their coats.

In the end, all that hiding did no good.

#

I don't know why I hadn’t been able to talk to Peter about my visit to Anne Frank’s house. Something in me wanted to protect the experience, keep it for myself. Maybe I was afraid he wouldn’t understand.

We arrived at the museum well before 9 A.M. I knew from guide books that the lines to get in were usually long. When I saw a Dutch woman walking officiously toward the museum, I stopped her before she got her key out of her handbag and begged to be allowed into the museum before it opened. “I need to hear the silence,” I pleaded. “I need to feel the rooms as Anne did. I need to feel her aloneness. Please.” The woman looked at her watch, then at me again, a weary blank stare that said I was not the first young woman to make this request. She nodded and told me to follow her.

The building was incredibly narrow. It felt like stepping into a gigantic cider press. I imagined the walls pushing in on me. I hurried past the display cases of her letters and photos to the bookcase and the stairs hidden behind. I pulled myself up the steep stairs, closing my eyes, smelling dust and something sweet like the lingering scent of onions. I wondered how the Franks could have prepared meals without the aroma of food giving them away.

The rooms had no furniture—so small, so narrow. It felt as if the Franks had just left, the beds and chairs recently removed to make room for a new tenant. Anne had described everything so precisely—descriptions I memorized as a girl—that I could nearly see the bed she lay in, the table where she studied shorthand and Algebra. I could see the kitchen table and the pots and pans. I could smell the soup cooking on the stove.

I looked out the window in the bathroom where Anne and her sister took their Sunday baths. I imagined her pressing her face to the pane, peering into the canal, trying to see as far as she could, feeling with her eyes every stair, every tree, every detail, jumping with delight to see a neighbor or a squirrel. I imagined her yearning, and the flush of hope that would shoot up her neck and make her blush as she fantasized about walking along the canal, perhaps on the way to meet a boyfriend, to be kissed and made love to.

It is hard to describe the effect the Frank House had on me—as if, perhaps, I had witnessed the suffering and torment of a sister, and this house was all that remained of her. I left feeling raw and vulnerable and forewarned.

As if Anne were trying to tell me something.

#

Halfway over the Atlantic Peter roused, groaning as he untangled himself from an uncomfortable sleeping position. He sat up and turned to me. He could always read me so well. He put his arms around me and held me tightly. “I’ll never let anything happen to you,” he said.

I felt as I had before in the windmill, my heart longing for him, missing him even as he held me.

As he fell back to sleep, his arms didn’t let go.

#

We arrived in New York at 4:40 P.M., 9:40 P.M. London time. We were exhausted. The lines at customs were long. Security guards were everywhere with dogs. A handful of Marines held weapons across their chests.

Peter and I stood in separate lines, a little game to see who got through faster. After about twenty minutes, I stepped up to the counter. The immigration officer stood on a platform, towering over me. He scrutinized my passport as I fidgeted with my purse strap.

“You are Ann Aulis?” he asked.

“Yes, sir.”

“Your visit to Europe was rather short,” he said.

“My mother wanted us to come home. She bought me the one-way ticket. I have my original roundtrip ticket in my purse. Do you want to see it?” The agent gave me a hard look, then back at my passport. Damnit! I was acting like an idiot, talking too much, acting suspicious.

“You stayed in Amsterdam for one day? You left May twenty-seventh?” he asked.

“We were on our way to a friend’s engagement party in London.” My lie surprised me—must be my nervousness, stupid and unnecessary—he didn’t care.

“Is this all of your luggage?”

“Yes. I travel light.”

“Anything to declare?”

“No.” A second agent opened my bag and looked briefly through it.

“Everything looks okay, ma’am. Welcome home.”

“Thank you. I’m glad to be here.”

I hurried away and looked around for Peter. He was still talking with his immigration agent, getting asked a lot of questions. His agent signaled someone on the far side of the room. Two security guards came up on either side of Peter and began to escort him away.

“Peter!” I cried, bolting after him. Another guard stepped up quickly and grabbed me around the waist. “Let me go!” I demanded, swinging my fists. “That’s my boyfriend!”

“Calm down, ma’am. It’s just routine. A random selection of people is taken aside for secondary questioning. It’s a precaution we must take. Please understand. You may wait for your friend over there.”

I was terrified. I knew this search had nothing to do with random or routine.

Peter was half Arab.

#

Peter’s last name was Abulhassan. His father, Ali Abulhassan, was born in Saudi Arabia. When Ali turned ten he immigrated with his parents to Connecticut, where he grew up, went to Boston University and raised a family. A jovial man, warm and funny, Ali supported his family as a dentist, but his job was to enjoy life. Peter’s mother, Gloria, a feisty butterball artist of Dutch and English descent, kept up with his jokes. They were a couple that loved to entertain each other, loved to party, and when Peter and I took the train from Philadelphia to Connecticut for the holidays, we spent the entire vacation playing with his parents.

Because Peter’s grandfather had been educated at Oxford, and Ali was raised in the United States, the family was thoroughly American, with a large dose of European bon vivant. I had never met parents who were fun before. They were easier to love than my parents who had the American disease of wanting to be good, caring people, which had the somewhat unpleasant side effect of making them dull, overly sincere, and somewhat humorless. The idea of my parents getting drunk, or jumping naked into a lake, or even dancing in front of us children was unimaginable.

I waited for half an hour before I again asked the guard what was going on. He said he would check on it and came back a few minutes later. “Federal Marshals are holding your friend. Somebody’s coming to talk to him.”

“Somebody? Who? We have a plane to catch.”

“Someone from the FBI wants to interview him.”

“Doesn’t he get a phone call? Or a lawyer?” By now I was nearly frantic. I ran to a phone and called my dad in Los Angeles, who by some miracle actually answered his phone. I explained everything, and he told me to ring him again in fifteen minutes.

When I called back, my father said he had talked to Peter’s parents, who were vacationing in Maine. He then called a lawyer friend in New York, who was on his way to the airport and who would stay with Peter until he figured out if Peter needed a criminal defense attorney or some other law specialist. I was to wait for him.

#

I’ve never been much good at waiting. As a child waiting could send me into a temper tantrum. I hated that feeling of anger and anticipation churning inside me until I sprang to my feet, pacing and fretting, whining between my teeth. I never imagined it would become such a huge part of my life.

Waiting.

Like Anne Frank.

Imagining the worst.

I watched the endless shuffle of weary passengers through customs, Americans in jeans and sweatpants and sneakers, so badly dressed it was embarrassing, lugging large vinyl suitcases and black gym bags. My eyes stung from fatigue and the dry recycled air conditioning. My lids closed. I concentrated on slowing my fluttering heart and my rapid breathing. The noise was like chalk on a blackboard—the endless rolling of plastic wheels from people dragging their luggage, the snap of extension handles, voices, muffled footsteps and occasionally the click of heels, the whoosh of steamed milk from a nearby Starbucks, a two-toned dingdong from the loud speaker before announcements, a baby screeching, the sound of heavy American bottoms thudding down on the seats beside me.

I resisted opening my eyes to look at the clock, knowing that only minutes had passed. Every second was like a boulder I had to push aside in order to proceed. The more I wished for time to pass quickly, the faster horrifying images flashed behind my lids—Marjon lying in blood, her graceful hands flitting around the kitchen preparing dinner, necks gaping wide like hungry mouths, hair matted with drying blood, brown blotches of blood absorbed into the rugs, speckles of blood on the couches, dull streaks of blood on the hardwood floors.

Anne Frank lived with windows blocked with blackout curtains, her clues to the passage of time the noises of the workers in the shop below, coming and going, the rattle of gunfire and bombs outside, friends stopping in for lunch to deliver the latest news. Two years of it. I wondered how she managed not to go mad.

#

I waited for an hour and ten minutes. Then I saw him.

Baron Fairchild didn’t look like a lawyer. He was well over six feet, barrel-chested with a gray fringe for a beard like a Mystic sea captain. His perfectly tailored steel-gray Italian suit and briefcase gave him away.

I stopped him before he got to customs and pointed to the guard outside the interrogation room. He introduced himself to me, then walked over to speak to the guard, who let him inside. I waited another hour before Fairchild came out again. He wiped his upper lip with a handkerchief, then ambled over to me slowly, as if organizing his thoughts. He squeezed my shoulder, sat, and took my hand. “Your father and I have known each other for thirty years. I will not leave until this is sorted out. Do you understand?”

“Yes.”

“Good. Your friend Peter’s name popped up on an FBI watch list. It probably is a case of mistaken identity. Apparently this other Peter was on a list of terrorism suspects.”

“They must know he’s not the same person, don’t they?”

“The photos don’t match, but they find it suspicious that Peter flew into Amsterdam one day before the Jenever Theater murders and flew to London hours later.”

“There must’ve been hundreds of people who spent just one day in Amsterdam.”

“But not with the name Abulhassen.”

“How long are they going to keep him?”

“The FBI wants to take him into custody for further questioning.”

“Custody? Where? Here in New York? Can they do that?”

“They can. Will you stay here a minute? I have to make some calls.” He walked over to a bank of windows and flipped out his cell phone. He paced back and forth, talking, then sat with his elbows on his knees, his head propped up by his hand. He came back fifteen minutes later. “I have a civil rights lawyer coming. Peter’s parents are flying in from Portland tonight. Your father wants you to take the next plane home to Los Angeles. There’s nothing you can do here.”

“I’m a witness. I can tell them he had nothing to do with anything.”

“That’s not a good idea. At this point, your name hasn’t been mentioned and we want to keep you out of it. I know how you feel, but your father is right. You need to go home. This could drag on for days. They will not let you see him.”

“But why? I can’t leave. I don’t give a shit if—”

Fairchild caught my hands, gently cupping them between his palms as if snagging a butterfly. “You did the right thing calling your dad. Peter will be all right. I’ll make sure of that.”

I began to cry, not out of relief or humiliation or fear or fatigue or hunger or any combination of these feelings that raged inside of me. I cried because I knew this kind gentle man was wrong.

Peter would not be all right. None of us would be all right.

MAY 30, 2012 - Los Angeles

Usually I take the Super Shuttle from LAX to my home in Santa Monica, but my mother insisted on picking me up. My father and little sister, Cynthia, were with her.

I felt both relieved and annoyed at this bevy of brethren. I hadn’t seen my family since Thanksgiving, six months prior, and it was good to see them. But I felt irritated that they were making such a fuss—the hugs, the squeals, the compassionate long looks. My adventure to Europe had been a disaster. I was scared for Peter. I had been up for twenty-six hours without anything but airline food to eat. I wanted to be alone. I barely tolerated a hug from my father. My mother, sensing my mood, didn’t even attempt an embrace, brushing my forearm with her fingers. “I’m glad you’re home, honey.” Cynthia stared at me with big round eyes as if I had just been released from prison. They all looked a little afraid of me, which struck me as funny, and I started to laugh, a raucous witchy cackle. My rude, barely contained hysteria felt delicious to me—powerful and nasty. My parents shot each other alarmed glances, which made me laugh only harder.

My father’s name was Arthur G. Aulis. He was an accountant with his own practice that specialized in small businesses and international money management. He was born and raised a liberal democrat, but he was conservative when it came to businesses and individuals conserving their assets. He was brilliant at it. He never made any of his clients into millionaires overnight, but they all saw steady growth in their personal wealth. He made sure they understood what he was doing with their money and all of the ramifications. In short, my Dad was someone people trusted. He enjoyed a joke, but never made one himself. He hardly ever cracked a smile. I wondered if it wasn’t because he had bad teeth as a young man and didn’t get them fixed until he was a successful businessman. To relax he painted meticulous watercolors, which Mother spirited away to the framing shop and hung on our walls. He wrote poetry, too.

My mother was a high-energy leftover hippy type that is common in California. Beside her job as a psychiatric counselor for troubled teens, she was active in environmental causes, animal rights, Save the Bay, homeless rights, organic vegetable rights. If anyone needed help, they called her. She wasn’t ditzy but pragmatic, though she had blond kinky hair and wore dirndl skirts and sandals. Think Mama Mia. Even as a child I knew she was eccentric, so by the time I was a teenager, I wasn’t as thoroughly embarrassed by her as one might expect—she was a relief from the super successful Armani-armored moms of LA. I never once heard her talk about real estate.

My sister, Cynthia, was thirteen, a sensitive girl, not brilliant, but sweet and very pretty. Everyone in the family adored her and tried to protect her. I suppose we all sensed that the world could easily crush her.

The ride from the airport was excruciating. My father insisted on taking Lincoln Boulevard, the most direct route, but it was stop go, stop go, backed up for several light changes through Marina del Rey. I began to feel more and more angry, impatience coiling tightly in my chest. I stared out the window, glancing only once at Cynthia who smiled beside me, obviously eager to hear my stories, which made me feel even more annoyed. I felt trapped, a captive, a runaway princess dragged home to be locked up and punished. It all seemed so unfair. What made it worse was that I felt guilty for acting so childishly—for hurting my parents and Cynthia—which made me angry for not controlling my temper.

That night after dinner, we all sat in the living room and watched CNN news, something we almost never did together. I was surprised to see Cynthia sitting next to my mother. She had never been interested in world events before, preoccupied with her school friends, ballet, and her dreams of saving tigers in India, yet her eyes were riveted to the television. Even my brother, Alex, who had just turned eighteen, joined us. A taciturn fellow, Alex kept to himself and spent as little time at home as possible. It seemed to me that he disapproved of us, although he never said anything. He was ridiculously good-looking, but, amazingly in this city where everyone assumes the right to take a stab at stardom, did not want to be an actor. We had been close at one time—a fond combative rivalry—but since I left for college three years ago, we had rarely talked.

The news reported that Amsterdam was under martial law. The prime minister had asked for NATO troops to be deployed to assist the Royal Netherlands Army. Eighteen hundred troops had been dispatched from Belgium.

The number of dead in the Netherlands had reached 420, mostly Muslims. Hundreds were injured. Over 260 mosques had been burned out of the 400 or so in the country, as well as 30 Islamic schools. Hundreds of Muslim businesses, cemeteries, and schools were vandalized. The international Muslim community was up in arms at the arrests—nearly 10,000—bandying about words such as Kristallnacht and fascism and pogrom. Muslims who weren’t full citizens were being rounded up for questioning. The large Muslim neighborhoods in Amsterdam, Rotterdam, and Utrecht were patrolled by soldiers. The country was not yet in control, with eruptions of violence throughout the land.

The Jenever Theater murders, as they were now called, were mentioned in passing, completely overshadowed by the riots.

London was calm, but sporadic fighting continued to break out across France. In Germany, a performance by members of the banned ultra-nationalist rock group Landser touched off riots in Berlin, which spread to Hamburg and Cologne. The broadcasters used graphics that showed the riots as small red fires spreading across a map of Europe, the same graphics used when the Santa Anas blew hot in September, burning up hundreds of miles of California forests. Europe was like that now, a raging inferno.

The broadcast cut to President Elliot Gladwell at a news conference. Gladwell was a tall athletic man with a robust energy and a booming deliberate voice. In the last three and a half years since he was elected, his handsome movie-star face had become a little jowly, his chest thickening, his hair showing white streaks. He was obviously wearing makeup—his face peachy with powder, his lips pink—which made him look oddly unhealthy. “I was elected by the people of the United States to bring our soldiers back from the Middle East. We have done this. Our troops remaining in Iraq and Afghanistan are part of the United Nations Peacekeepers. We have a limited presence on the Arabian Peninsula, but our commitments to Israel and to the new democracies of Iraq and Afghanistan remain strong. We will not remain isolationists.” He went on to say that the United States was prepared to send financial assistance to Europe, but would deploy no troops at this time. He said he wanted to reassure the American public that he did not anticipate sympathy riots in America. When a reporter asked why, President Gladwell said, “Unlike in Europe, the American Muslim population has integrated well into our culture. The average Muslim American male earns well above the median, and their unemployment numbers are lower than the national average. As a percentage of the population, their numbers are also far fewer than in Europe. We are a country founded on religious tolerance and we will remain so.”

“Will the United States accept Muslim refugees?” asked a second reporter.

“The United States has always opened our doors to those persecuted because of their faith.”

“Jesus,” scoffed Alex, who was leaning against the doorjamb, arms crossed. “We’re going to let more of them in? Is he nuts?”

“Shhh,” hissed mother, jabbing her finger at the television.

“Mr. President,” another reporter queried, “if Europe’s response to this crisis violates the human rights of European Muslims, will the United States take any action against our European allies?”

“I cannot comment on speculation. That’s all the questions I can take at this time. Thank you.”

“It sounds like he’s threatening to send troops to the Middle East,” Alex commented. “Why would he do that? The trouble is in Europe.”

My mother turned off the television and looked at Dad. “It can’t be that bad. Can it, Arthur?” He didn’t respond, staring solemnly at the black screen.

#

Later Alex stopped by my room as I was unpacking, sorting my dirty clothes into a pile to take to the laundry room. Peter and I had packed in a hurry and I had several of his T-shirts. They smelled of him. I put one over my pillow like a pillowcase, the others to the dirty clothes.

Alex gave me a crooked and not entirely pleasant smile. “I’m sorry about Peter,” he said, sliding his finger down the molding of the door. “I always liked him. It’s too bad he got mixed up in all this shit.”

“Thanks, Alex, but he’s not mixed up in anything. It’s all a mistake. We were just in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

“Yeah. Well Europe kind of deserved what they got—letting in all those Muslims.”

“How can you say that?”

“They were greedy, too lazy to raise enough children, too lazy to take factory jobs. Nice and liberal and stupid. They let in cheap labor and now they’re fucked.”

“So you think America should’ve kept Peter’s father out of the United States?”

“I’m not saying that. His father speaks English. He was educated.”

“So we should let upper class Muslims into the country. Just not the poor.” I was really getting pissed off.

“That’s pretty much how it worked out. Germany, England, Holland, and France imported guest workers. We got upper-class escapees from the Ayatollah and Saddam Hussein.”

“You make me sick.”

“Are you sure that Peter isn’t involved somehow?”

“You shithead!” I vaulted off the bed and dove for Alex. “How can you say such thing?”

“Hey, don’t get mad at me.” Alex dodged, scooting around the bed. “All I’m saying is maybe you don’t know Peter as well as you thought you did. Maybe the FBI isn’t stupid. Maybe the FBI doesn’t waste taxpayer’s money for no reason. I like Peter—you know I do—but I never really understood how you could be attracted to him. I mean, Jesus! Islam sucks the big one. Especially if you’re a woman.”

“Alex, leave my room. I don’t want to talk to you right now.”

“Sure, I’ll leave. But you ought to know it’s pretty dumb to be seen around with an Arab. I can’t believe you went to Europe with him. I’m glad he’s not here. I’m glad I don’t have to defend my sister for dating a raghead.”

I charged, slapping the side of Alex’s head, kicking his calves, punching his chest. He grabbed my wrists with one hand. As I bit his arm, he shoved me hard with the other. I tripped backward onto the bed. Alex scooted out of the room and slammed the door. I ran to pull it open, but he held fast. Laughing. I tugged and tugged at the knob, banging on the door, yelling at Alex to let me out until Father came to investigate. He told Alex to let go, and the door with my weight on it flew open and I collapsed on the floor.

“Won’t you two ever grow up? What’s this all about?” Father asked, glancing at the crescent of teeth marks on Alex’s bicep.

“Nothing,” I said.

“Nothing,” Alex said.

Father glared at us. “Fine. Nothing is going on. I’m glad to have a household so full of peace and harmony. If you don’t mind, I’ll go back to meditating."

Alex smirked at me as Father stalked away. "You gonna stay home all summer long? I can hardly wait." My teeth itched to sink into his meaty butt.

MAY 31, 2012 - Santa Monica

Today after he got home from work, Dad took my hand and led me outside to the garden. He sat me down and told me that Peter had been taken to a military prison in South Carolina. “He is being held as an illegal enemy combatant.”

“What? They can’t do that! Peter isn’t an enemy combatant! How can they—” Dad tried to take me into his arms, but I twisted away. “Let me go! They can’t do this! I hate this country!”

“I’m sorry, Ann. Everyone’s doing whatever they can. Peter will be visited every week by Amnesty International. They will make sure that he’s not being abused.”

“You mean tortured?” I thought of the Muslim German citizen Khaled el-Masri I had read about who was whisked off to Afghanistan by the CIA while he was on vacation, beaten, stripped, drugged, and interrogated for four months until the CIA realized their mistake. How many more like him we never heard about? “Why are they holding Peter? He was never a member of any terrorist cell.”

“Honey, honey, honey. Calm down. For one, he’s refusing to talk about what he did in Amsterdam.”

I groaned, sick with guilt. Peter was protecting me. If he didn’t talk, they would never let him go. Then I remembered that I had lied to Mom about even being in Amsterdam, and now Dad knew. My face felt so hot I thought it was going to pop. “Have they charged him with anything? Can’t he get out on bail?”

“Military courts don’t work that way. Is there something you need to tell me, Ann?”

“I need to talk to him.”

“I’m sorry, you can’t. Apparently the FBI went through Peter’s things at Canterbury College and confiscated his computer. They’re saying that Peter accessed jihadist websites. He had a lot of materials that he probably shouldn’t have had—tapes of Al Qaeda executions and suicide confessions.”

“He was writing a paper, okay? Half the political science majors at Canterbury write papers on terrorism. They even teach a course on it! Everyone reads the websites. Everyone reads the English version of Al Jazeera. They are trying to understand terrorists, not become one.”

“Calm down, sweetie.”

“What about his rights? He’s a U.S. citizen. His parents are U.S. citizens.”

“It’s okay, pumpkin, it’s okay. Come here.” His hug felt like a straightjacket, my rage growing hot, whirling up inside of me like an evil extraterrestrial escaping from a human host, all jaws and claws and flailing tails. I ran to my room and slammed the door.

Unlike Anne Frank, at least I had my own room.

#

I was exhausted but couldn’t sleep, tossing and turning, tormenting myself, completely racked with guilt. It was me who had insisted on going to dinner with Marjon and Nicholas. Hungry for adventure, flattered that the Dutch couple took an interest in us—in me—I had ignored Peter. If we hadn’t gone to Marjon’s, we wouldn’t have seen the murders, and we’d still be in Amsterdam or some other place in Europe. He was right to blame me, I thought, to hate me. He didn’t even turn around to look at me when security dragged him away.

Now Peter was in some military jail cell—I couldn’t imagine how horrible—and it was my fault, my selfishness that put him there. Imprisoned, without free will for the first time in his life. Strange sounds—clanging doors, moans from other prisoners, telephones, voices, footsteps—keeping him awake. How frightened he must be.

I wanted him beside me, his hands on me, his breath on my neck, his mouth on my mouth. I wanted to press all of my skin against all of his skin. If I imagined him vividly enough, maybe I could save him.

Frustrated, I threw off the covers, got out of bed, and went to open the window. A crescent moon hung in the black sky.

A crescent moon, the symbol of Islam.

The symbol of submission.

JUNE 16, 2012

Over the past two weeks I’ve split my time between reading newspapers and watching television in a nearly catatonic state of horror.

Just as soon as Amsterdam seemed to be settling down and the curfews and military presence seemed to be quieting the population, renewed violence broke out across the city. The city was paralyzed by Islamic riots and demonstrations. A local Salafi Imam, Fawaz Jneid, declared that the Muslim Slotervaart district, home of Mohammed Bouyer, the murderer of Theo Van Gogh, was now under Islamic law. Utrecht was taken over by Islamists, who stormed local government buildings and burned them to the ground. In The Hague, a group of officers of Islamic descent led the army in a coup. The ranks of the military, which were forty percent Muslim, overran the House of Parliament and local administrative offices, replacing local police with members of the Muslim Brotherhood and Al Queda. They liberated all Muslims held in prisons or jails, which was seventy percent of the prison population. A Muslim militia crossed the land putting local imams in charge. Salafists declared Holland an Islamist regime, and Imam Fawaz Jneid was declared “emir of the faithful.”

Panicked non-Muslim populations across Europe reacted swiftly, joining the rightwing Germany National Democratic Party, the French National Front, the Austrian Freedom Party, and the Flemish Interest Party. Emergency legislation in Belgium called for containment of Muslim neighborhoods and the closing of all mosques. Muslim schools were shuttered. Muslims on the streets in groups of more than three were arrested. Muslims were banned from driving in certain parts of the city. Muslims had to be indoors by eight o’clock. Muslims were forbidden to attend cinemas, theaters, and other places of entertainment. If these laws seemed reminiscent of Hitler’s anti-Jewish laws no one mentioned it.

Civil unrest spread to Northern European Countries that had large non-integrated populations of Muslims: Iraqis and Iranians in Sweden, Pakistanis in Norway, Turks in Denmark. Only Finland and Iceland, with almost no Muslims, remained unscathed.

The first city outside of Holland to fall was Malmö. Sweden’s third largest city, which was forty percent Muslim, declared itself an Islamic State. Within days imams in Muslim communities throughout Europe also declared their neighborhoods “Islamic Jurisdictions”: in Roubaix, France; in Bradford, England; in Copenhagen, Denmark; and in the Sint-Jans-Molenbeek neighborhood of Brussels.

The French military continued to battle guerilla wars in urban areas. Muslim refugees, fleeing Belgium and Germany into France and Switzerland, were turned away at the borders. They had nowhere to go, open targets for vigilante groups. Hundreds were killed.

The whole world was weighing in on the European crisis. While Al Jazeera was reporting that Salafi extremists were celebrating the unrest in Europe as the beginning of global jihad, leaders of many Middle Eastern countries were expressing indignation at the wide deployment of military forces to civilian neighborhoods. “Any treatment of Muslims above and beyond that sanctioned by Amnesty International will require action,” said the president of Lebanon. “Internment, expulsions, or massive arrests of Muslims will not be tolerated.”

I recalled a line on a T-shirt worn by geology majors at Canterbury College because they thought it sounded sexy—“subduction leads to orogeny.” It meant that the collision of tectonic plates creates mountains. That’s what seemed to be happening to the world—civilizations were colliding into each other, massive, immutable forces beyond anyone’s control, creating insuperable divides.

And no one could stop it.

#

“Why don’t we just drop the bomb on the towelheads. Just nuke whole damn place. It’s all just one godawful desert anyhow.”

Alex scooped an enormous glop of mashed potatoes and slapped it onto his plate. He had been in an oddly bullying mood since I got back, his body jumpy and tense like a jock sitting out a penalty on the sidelines at a championship hockey game. He shoved food into his mouth as if he couldn’t wait to get away from us, his every word confrontational.

Dinner time is delightful.

“Alex, I won’t stand for that kind of talk,” snapped my father. “There is enough intolerance going around without you adding to it, even flippantly.”

“What’s the purpose of having a gazillion nuclear warheads if we never use them?”

“The whole point is deterrence,” my father said patiently, “the threat of massive retaliation. It’s about power, maintaining our global strategic position. The point of having them is to keep anyone else from using them.”

“That assumes our enemies are rational. Muslim extremists are suicidal maniacs. Sitting on our bombs isn’t going to deter them. They don’t care if they sacrifice millions of people. They figure that even if Muslims die involuntary, they are martyrs, their deaths glorious. Everyone goes to heaven.”

“I don’t think there are many Muslims who believe that,” piped in Mother, “only the extremists.”

“Islam is hardly a religion of peace,” Alex said hotly. “Muhammad participated in twenty-seven battles. He ordered assassinations. He told his followers to make war against unbelievers until they were converted or subjugated. The Quran demands that Muslims obey and imitate Muhammad. Jihad is essential their faith!”

“You are wrong, son.” When Father started speaking like a Baptist minister, I knew he was angry. “Suicide bombing is completely against the teachings of Muhammad. ‘Do not kill yourselves; for surely God has been merciful to you.’ Being a martyr means that another person kills you, not that you kill yourself. Furthermore, the killing of woman and children is forbidden in the Quran.”

“Furthermore...,” mocked Alex, smirking around the table. “Have you noticed how everyone has begun quoting the Quran? Everyone is a fucking expert.”

“What your language, Alex.”

I gave Alex a swift kick under the table, which he ignored. He was on a roll. “Bin Laden claims that Muhammad’s death bed injunction to ‘banish the pagans from the Arabian Peninsula’ requires that Muslims get rid of any western presence in any land that was once ruled by Muslims. He argues that women are fair game because they’re now in the military, and civilians are fair game because they elect their governments and are culpable for their actions. All I’m saying is that Jihadists aren’t going to hesitate to use nuclear weapons. They just don’t have them yet. We should use ours first.”

“You want us to drop a nuclear warhead on Mecca?” asked my father. “Great. Then Hamas takes out Israel.”

“Why do we care so much about Israel?” Alex retorted “What has Israel ever done for us? We give them a gazillion dollars in aid, and they continue to kill Palestinians. Why do we want to support that? If they want a homeland, why don’t we give them part of Arizona? They could have five times the land of Israel. Do you realize how much money we waste trying to keep them safe in the Middle East? What’s the point?”

My father’s face turned red with fury. He had raised us to argue, to question, to read between the lines of newspapers, to flummox teachers with impertinence, and now his son was using these weapons against him. He looked like he was about to explode.

“The point,” my father said evenly, “is religious freedom. If America won’t defend religious freedom, then we are morally bankrupt as a country. And as individuals. Everyone of us.”

My mother looked to be engrossed in her eggplant, smooshing it onto her fork with her knife, English style, chewing thoughtfully. She had a remarkable capacity to appear oblivious. Cynthia had stopped eating all together, her hands under her thighs, her eyes round with apprehension, on the verge of tears.

“I just think we should use the bomb and be done with it,” said Alex, lamely attempting to strengthen his argument with repetition.

“Well,” said our father grimly, “if the republicans win the election, you may get your wish.”

“Allahu Akbar,” said Alex, raising his water glass in a toast.

Cynthia began to whimper and dashed away from the table.

JUNE 17, 2012

I realized that I had paid hardly any attention to Cynthia since my return. Her distress over last night's dinner conversation filled me with guilt. She had always had a tendency to take family “discussions” to heart. Now Dad was losing his temper. It was more than she could bear.

I knocked on the door to her room. She didn’t answer, but the door was ajar. I pushed it open.

Sometimes Cynthia took my breath away. It was hard to believe we were sisters. She had long blond hair, huge violet eyes, a heart-shaped face with flawless skin, a tentative smile, and a slim coltish body. Her sweetness and vulnerability made her beauty almost painful. I knew her looks would always set her apart, and that made me afraid for her.

She sat on a large cushion on the floor reading, dressed in billowy pants with a gauzy veil over her head. A cascade of pink-dyed cheesecloth hung over her bed like a mosquito net. On one wall hung a poster of a flying white horse. Brocade and satin pillows covered the bed, larger ones on the floor. On top of the carpeting was a Persian rug, the kind of knockoff that you find for sale draped over hurricane fences on Jefferson Boulevard. A potted palm tree sat beside a futon on the floor. It was—in the mind of a thirteen-year old girl—a perfect Bedouin tent.

“Hi,” I said. “What are you doing?”

“Homework.”

I was surprised at first, but then remembered that her middle school went year round, which I wasn’t sure was necessarily a good thing for Cynthia. She tended to be too serious, and it seemed to me that she was missing out on an essential part of childhood. Summers had never felt like wasted time to me. “What are you working on?” I asked.

She gave me a sly glance, cleared her throat, lifted her book as if to read, then shut her eyes. “‘God brings forth the living from the dead, and brings forth the dead from the living; and God enlivens the earth after its death: and so will you all be brought forth.’ Isn’t that beautiful?” Her eyes were aglow, her lips parted, her cheeks flushed.

A numbness shot though my body, my knees wobbled. I pushed aside the mosquito net and sank onto her bed. I got a gnawing nauseated feeling that was becoming upsettingly frequent—that the world was changing too fast, spinning out of orbit.

As soon as President Elliot Gladwell stepped into office, he proposed a number of policies that seemed at the time to be harmless liberal bullshit, a nod to the far left and to what had become a vocal Muslim minority in Gladwell’s home state of Michigan. In an effort to promote “religious tolerance and cross-cultural understanding” and to “assimilate Muslims into American culture,” he recommended that every American child receive a semester of instruction on world religions, emphasizing in particular Islam. In order to get that accepted, he vigorously campaigned to allow school prayer. Even staunchly conservative school districts adopted the new curriculum. Evangelicals got their five minutes of prayer—children who objected were allowed to step out of the classroom—and all eighth graders learned about Muhammad.

Gladwell’s Cultural Accommodation Policy included a number of other initiatives as well: liberalized immigration quotas for Muslim countries, federal funding for Muslim schools, requiring employers to allow Muslim employees time for the five daily prayers, protecting the right to wear headscarves in school and the workplace, replacing A.D. (Anno Domini) with C.E. (Common Era) in government publications, and banning the use of terms which Muslims might find offensive, such as Islamo-fascism, Islamic terrorism, Islamists radicalism, and jihadism.” Using President George W. Bush’s 2001 Faith Based Initiative, he encouraged federal funding for Islamic religious groups to run prisons, drug rehabilitation facilities, and schools. He also proposed that Eid Al-Fitr, the end of Ramadan, become a national holiday.

While some of these recommendations met with resistance, President Gladwell’s genius at appealing to both liberals and conservatives led to, if not the adoption of policy, the tolerance of practice. He stressed that his ideas were essential to prevent “the plague of terrorism from rooting itself in America.”

Apart from the instruction on Islam for eighth graders, extracurricular Islamic clubs became the rage. Perhaps it was the rebellious nature of young teens, or the exotic allure of Arabic culture, but Islamic clubs soon surpassed Bible clubs across the nation.

I hadn’t paid much attention to President Gladwell’s Cultural Accommodation Policy—I had my head in my books, my activities, my boyfriend. I didn’t bother to vote when I turned eighteen. I didn’t care. Now I saw that my little sister was obsessed. If Islam allowed images of the prophet, no doubt she would have had a dark-skinned black-bearded rock-star-gorgeous idol hanging on her wall.

I was speechless. Cynthia batted her raccoon eyes made up with heavy eyeliner and mascara, the fashion among many Muslim women who cover their faces except for the eyes. Cynthia was so sweet by nature—I didn’t want my first real conversation with her since I got home to be criticism. I looked around for something innocuous. “I like your flying horse,” I said.

“That’s Buraq,” she said reverently, “the horse that took Muhammad to heaven where God instructed him in the prayer rituals required of a true believer. That happened about 622. Muhammad later dictated the verses to a scribe. The verses became the basis of Islam.”

“Why do you have a poster of Buraq on your wall?”

“He is a symbol of al-Isra, the divine journey through the darkness to great enlightenment. I love looking at him while I fall asleep.”

Something about this was making me hugely uncomfortable—her rote recitation of the Quran. Her crush on a white horse. I remembered the Born Again Christians I used to flee from. I picked up a book of Islamic folktales that lay on her bedspread.

“You can read that if you want,” Cynthia said, returning to her Quran, her head tilted to one side, a gentle smile playing on her lips. She looked pious as a novitiate—despite the harem pants.

I took the book and left. This is great, I thought, my boyfriend is being held as a terrorism suspect, my brother is a Nazi, and my sister is a Muhammad groupie.

#

“How can you let her read that stuff?” The next morning I confronted my mother in the kitchen.

“It’s just a phase, dear. Don’t you remember when you wanted to become a Catholic nun? You thought you were Saint Theresa. You refused to eat and claimed to have mystical visions. But you grew out of it as soon as James Ramamurthy asked you out. Then you wanted to be a Buddhist.” My mother tittered, which I didn’t appreciate. “A lot of the girls are attracted to the romance of the flying carpets and magic lamps. They’re all into the harem pants. I swear it’s a relief from those hip hugger jeans and belly rings that you and your friends were crazy for.”

“You might want to tell her the romantic part where Arabs cut off a girl’s clitoris,” I retorted sharply. “Or that women are often gang-raped for something the men in their family did, and then are murdered to clear the family honor. Or that a Muslim can divorce his wife merely by saying, ‘I divorce thee’ three times and take her children. Or that women are not even allowed to leave the house without permission. Or that—”

“Ann, stop. You know as well as I do that none of that has anything to do with the teachings of Islam.”

“Mom! Europe is being swallowed up by Islamic extremists, and your own daughter is prancing around in harem pants. Don’t you think it’s about time to start worrying?”

“What would you have me do, sweetheart? Forbid her? She has to study it for class. Don’t worry, Ann. Cynthia isn’t going to become a Muslim anymore than you became a Catholic nun.”

More don’t worries. It was beginning to make me feel a little hysterical. “Don’t parents have the option of keeping their kids out of that religion class? You could do that. Cynthia recited Quranic verses to me by heart!”

My mother shrugged and turned on the faucet to wash spinach. I left the kitchen. My parents were diehard liberals. In their eyes, President Elliot Gladwell could do no wrong. I could think of no way to change their minds.

JUNE 18, 2012

“Mrs. Aulis, could we speak with your daughter please?”

Two men in suits came to our door. They didn’t look that much older than I. I wondered when they learned to make questions sound like commands. I wondered what had taken them so long.

My mother looked over her shoulder at me, fingers rigid with alarm. “What’s this about?” she demanded, turning back to the intruders.

Neither man acted as if they heard her question, but showed her their badges. “We would like to take your daughter Ann to our headquarters in Westwood,” said the taller one. “We think she would be more comfortable answering questions there.”

“You are welcome to take Ann to Westwood. I will have my lawyer meet her there,” my mother said firmly.

“Well,” said the shorter man, “I suppose we could interview her here, if you prefer.”

We sat in the living room. The agents asked for water, probably trying to get my mother to leave the room. She stayed, handing them bottled water from Dad’s wet bar.

“You may have guessed that this has to do with your friend Peter Abulhassen,” said one agent to me.

“Yeah,” I said, “I figured that much.”

“If you don’t mind, we’d like to ask a few questions about him and about your trip to Europe.”

“Okay, I guess.”

“How long have you known Peter?”

“Almost three years. I met him my freshman year at Canterbury College.”

“Do you know any of his friends?”

“If you’ve raided his room at Canterbury and looked at his computer, I’m sure you know who his friends are.”

“We don’t know which friends you knew,” the taller agent said calmly.

It felt like a betrayal, but I couldn’t say I didn’t know his friends. I gave them the names of Peter’s three closest friends. Neither agent wrote the names down, so they already knew them. I suspected they were also being interrogated by the FBI.

“How long has Peter been a radical Muslim?” asked the short agent.

I smiled and shook my head—the question was like out of some television cop show. “Peter was not raised Muslim. His parents are not religious. I never saw Peter go to a mosque or pray. We dated on Fridays, the Muslim holy day. He drank. He ate pork. He made jokes about Muhammad. Peter is not a Muslim.”

“He studied Islam.”

“Sure. He wanted to figure out why Islam was taking hold of the world. He was fascinated as to how ideas—religious ideas—affect politics.”

“Was he Christian?”

“As I said, he was interested in intellectual history. He considers all religions to be political mythology.”

“Political mythology?”

“Yeah. Ideas used by men who want power to dominate everybody else.”

“I see. He believed that?”

“Don’t you?”

“What religion are you, Miss Aulis?”

“I’m a pagan. The Greco-Roman gods are so much sexier, don’t you think? Venus, Mars, Apollo.”

“Is that the religion you were raised with?” The agent smirked.

“My parents aren’t religious, although I thought I was saint material when I was twelve.”

“So you were raised a Catholic?”

“No. I just told you I wasn’t raised in any faith.”

The telephone rang and my mother got up and went into the next room. The two agents glanced at each other. I knew I was in trouble.

“Did Peter ever talk about what he planned to do after college?”

“I think he said he wanted to work for the FBI.”

“This is not a joke, Miss Aulis. We found a footprint that matches Peter’s shoe in Amsterdam at the scene of the Jenever Theater murders. Did you know these people?”

My bravura left me. If they had a shoe print, they probably had fibers and DNA. I wondered if they had tortured the information out of Peter. “We had just met them.”

“Did Peter plan to meet them in Amsterdam?”

“No. Like I said, we just stumbled into them. Near Vondelpark. It was completely spontaneous.”

“Why did the two of you go to Amsterdam?”

“It was my idea. I wanted to see the tulips at the Keukenhof Gardens.”

“It was past the season,” the thin one said, smiling. “Did you know your new friends were members of a political group called the White Rose?”

“You mean like the Nazi protest group in the Second World War?” I recalled from history class that the White Rose was a handful of students at the University of Munich who published a leaflet in 1942 decrying the evils of the Nazi regime and calling for a revolt. They were nearly the only internal opposition to Hitler. In February 1943, they were all tried for treason, convicted, and executed by guillotine.

“Yes. This current White Rose group is against what they call Islamic fascism.”

“All they told us was that they were in an acting group. They didn’t go into it.”

“What did you talk about?”

“The usual. Pop music. Things we had to see in Amsterdam.”

“What things?”

“Tourist things. The Rijksmuseum, the Nieuwe Kerk, the Hermitage, the Red Light District. Nothing political. We had dinner, then we went to bed.”

“What happened the next morning?”

“We went inside the house for breakfast and found the bodies.”

“Why didn’t you call the police?”

“We didn’t want to be hauled off by the CIA and interrogated in Afghanistan.” They didn’t return my smile, blinking blandly, waiting for me to get scared enough to tell the truth. I was getting there. “Look, we were in a foreign country with bad Muslim-Dutch relations. Peter is half Arab. The murders didn’t have anything to do with us. We were in the wrong place at the wrong time. We didn’t see anything. We didn’t hear anything. There was nothing we could have told the police that would have helped them find the killers. And—” I added, although it was just now occurring to me “—if we reported it to the police, we thought the killers might come after us.”

“Do you remember if Peter make any calls when you when you arrived in Europe?”

“No.”

“Emails?”

“Not when we arrived.”

“And later?”

I sat on my hands, furious, trying hard not to scream. “We went to an Internet café in London to check our emails. I don’t know who he emailed.”

“What Internet café?

“I don’t know,” I said testily. “It was in Piccadilly Circus.”

“Was Peter in bed with you all night on the night of the murders?”

“Yes, of course. Look, he was as surprised as I was. He didn’t have anything to do with the murders. Didn’t they already arrest the cell that did it? From Berlin or something? Why are you trying to involve Peter?”

The agents finally got up and went to the door. “We may have more questions for you, Miss Aulis, at a later time.”

“When are you going to let Peter go?”

“That’s not up to us. That’s up to the U.S. military. Take care, Miss Aulis. You might want to choose your friends more carefully.”

#

My father scolded me that evening when he heard about the FBI visit. “Jesus, Ann, what were you thinking? Agents from the Joint Terrorism Task Force? You should have called me immediately. Don’t ever talk to anyone like that without calling me first.”

I hadn’t called him because I still hadn’t told him about what went down in Amsterdam. I don’t know why I didn’t tell him. I used to tell him everything. I guess I didn’t to be treated like a child, scolded for how badly I had handled things. I guess I didn’t want to disappoint him. But not telling him made me feel guilty and dishonest—it was only a matter of time before he found out about it.

I was just about to confess, when he changed the subject and told me what Baron Fairchild had reported that afternoon.

The military claimed that Peter was involved in the preparation for acts of international terrorism, that he had links to Al Qaeda, that he had intelligence in regard to future terrorist attacks, and that he was a continuing threat to American security. Yet they refused to press charges. Peter’s lawyers filed protest in the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals with no success. Even after years of various court challenges, the Military Commissions Act of 2006, which allowed the government to designate terror suspects as “enemy combatants” without charges and with disregard to habeas corpus, was still in full effect. Not good news for Peter. He could remain in custody indefinitely, without any further legal recourse.

“In order to detain him, don’t they have to have some proof?” I asked my father.

“Apparently not if he is being held as an enemy combatant. But don’t worry, honey. We have a good team working on it. Peter is in good hands.”

The next day, less than three weeks after his arrest, the military, without informing his lawyers, transferred Peter to a naval base in Cuba.

Guantánamo Bay prison.

Yes, it still existed.

JUNE 19, 2012

I lay sleepless in bed trying to imagine what it must be like. Guantánamo Bay Prison. Was Peter handcuffed, blindfolded, masked? Clamped into leg irons on a trolley to be wheeled into an interrogation hut? I imagined his cell, a cubical five feet wide and ten feet long. I wondered what he did with the Quran and the prayer mat each prisoner was supposedly given. Two buckets—one for defecation, one for washing. I imagined him lying on a cot, a thin blanket over him, staring up at the corrugated steel ceiling. I imagined his despair and his fury. Did he think that he would be released soon, or that he was there for the rest of his life?

Did he think of me?

I remembered looking up at the ceiling above where Anne Frank’s makeshift bed had been, and imagined her spending hours there forced to be quiet, gazing at the rough boards, her body itching to run and play, letting her mind run and play instead. She must’ve known every crack, every cobweb, every knot. She probably imagined faces and pictures in the wood grain as if clouds in the sky. She probably made up stories about the pictures. She probably talked to the faces, confiding her dreams. Her imagination kept her sane.

I imagined that the cold anxiety I now felt in my stomach must be like what she felt—the threat of violence, hunger sharpening her senses, claustrophobia and inactivity deepening her fear. The longing I felt must be like hers—the desire to embrace my lover, to walk hand-in-hand under the warm sun. The bitter taste of guilt in my mouth must be like hers—alive and safe while her friends were rounded up and sent to Auschwitz.

Like Anne, I was powerless to help.

I thought maybe if I lay still and looked up at the ceiling as I imagined Peter must be doing in his cell that I could communicate with him in some way, that he would know that I lay as he lay, feeling as trapped and frightened as he. Perhaps he would sense how much I loved him and be comforted.

I tried to recall how he looked, the exact color of his skin, the width of his hips, his lips, his eyes, the hair that curled on the back of his neck. I saw him with different expressions, flickering in the dark like faces around a campfire. I tried to recall the sound of his voice, his laughter. But each day it became harder, and I wondered if it was becoming harder for him to remember the world outside of prison.

#

Flashes come back to me—Peter and I snuggling together in my twin bed at Canterbury College, juggling our books, trying to get comfortable, trying to read. My feet were always cold. Peter let me warm them between his calves. Often the tedious transfer of written word to thought gave in to sex, but many of the ideas for our papers came from our long post-coital discussions.

His favorite subject was political science, his favorite topic radical jihadism.

“After the defeat of the Ottoman Empire in World War I, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, a military officer, led the Turkish War of Independence. He took power in 1923, abolished the caliphate, and established the Republic of Turkey, a secular, democratic government. The jihadists want to reestablish the caliphate, a religious superstate, and to resume fatah, the conversion of all countries to Islam. It’s like if the Vatican decided to reestablish the Holy Roman Empire.”

“If the caliphate was abolished in 1923, and jihad can only be declared by a caliph, how can any Muslim rationalize jihad?”

“That’s the thing. You have all of these fundamentalists groups independently taking over the ‘mission of jihad.’ You’ve got the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt—they’re like an underground movement—spreading jihad by exploiting racial and class conflicts in other countries. They opened chapters within the émigré communities in the West, and proselytize in prisons. They work on people with nothing to lose. They are the masterminds of terrorism. Then you’ve got Sunni radical groups like Fatah al-Intifada in northern Lebanon around the Palestinian refugee camps. And you’ve got the Shiite jihadists in Iran, who started terrorist networks in the Middle East like Hezbolla in Lebanon, and Hamas in Palestine. There are dozens of other groups, all of them making up their own rules about jihad. But they all want the same thing—to rebuild the caliphate, rebuild its armies, establish a Muslim superpower in the Middle East, and resume the fatah.”

“Why don’t they get together if they all have the same goal.”

“They have!” Peter jerked up on his elbow sending books and papers skidding onto the floor. “That’s what nobody realizes. Back in 1992 there was this super-conference in Khartoum, Sudan. All of the radical Islamic groups were there: the NIF of Sudan, the FIS of Algeria, Gamaat Islamiya of Egypt, the Jordanian Islamists, Hamas and Islamic Jihad of Palestine, Lebanon’s Salafists, the South Asian jihadists, and the Taliban. A lot of these guys hate each other, but they got together to lay out an international strategy to defeat America and the West.”

“A worldwide conspiracy,” I blurted unwisely. In truth I found political discussions boring, and preferred to gossip about teachers and students, or talk about my film class—anything but terrorism.

“Fuck your sarcasm. It’s true! The whole world has blinders on! It’s fucking too scary for them!”

Peter’s eyes burned, his chest and arms rigid with fury. Sometimes he got aroused during our arguments, but I saw this was different. “Why are you mad at me?” I asked feebly.

Clambering over my books, he got out of bed, dressed, and left. Out the window I watched him stomp back to his dorm through the snow.

A half year later, as I imagine him on his cot in Guantánamo, I understand why he was so angry. He wanted me to get it without having to explain, to feel his fear and powerlessness and frustration without trivializing it with simple answers. It infuriated him that I didn’t already know. It infuriated him that I didn’t really care.

The FBI was crazy. There is no way that Peter is a jihadist.

JUNE 20, 2012 - Brentwood

Yesterday the International Olympic Committee convened in Rome. After much heated speculation in the press, the committee decided that the Summer 2012 Olympics scheduled for July 27-August 12 in London should be cancelled. England could not guarantee the safety of the athletes or the crowds. Belgium is on the brink of civil war, and France, Germany, and the Northern European countries are still battling Muslim insurgencies. Several Islamic countries had already withdrawn their athletes. Random acts of terror strike every country in Europe every day.

Since its modern incarnation in 1896, the Summer Olympics had been cancelled only three times—in 1916 because of World War I, and in 1940 and 1944 because of World War II.

That alone should have told us something.

#

Regardless of the civil wars breaking out across Europe, it was still an election year in America.

President Elliot Gladwell was scheduled to deliver a campaign speech at University Synagogue on Sunset Boulevard in Brentwood. Mother wanted to go, and I agreed to go with her. Apparently Gladwell was going to confront his staunchest critics. Before a Jewish audience, he couldn’t refuse to send troops to protect Israel. But if he did that, he would be reversing his previous campaign pledge to withdraw “every single U.S. soldier from the Middle East,” a dangerous move in an election year.

In the previous campaign, Elliot Gladwell had vigorously courted the Muslim vote. Apart from his Cultural Accommodation policy, Gladwell campaigned for Muslim members of Congress, for Illinois Democratic Governor Joe Farhan, and for our own mayor in Los Angeles, Malcolm Jefferson, an African-American Muslim. Gladwell supported the Congressional Muslim Staffers Association and the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee which lobbied congress for pro-Muslim legislation. According to the latest polls, Gladwell had ninety-five percent of the Muslim vote.

If he sent troops to Europe or the Middle East, he would lose their support; if he didn’t he would lose the Jewish vote. Both were Democratic constituencies.

I don’t think I had ever seen so many people packed in a room and be so quiet. It took fifteen minutes to get through security. The room was hot, the mood was pensive. Instead of milling around, everyone took their seats and immediately began to fan their faces with political fliers.

After an enthusiastic introduction by LA Mayor Malcolm Jefferson, President Gladwell lumbered onto stage, the vigorous bounce of his previous campaign replaced with a stiff preoccupied gait. The audience clapped politely—no catcalls, no whistles. We waited anxiously.

Following his introductory remarks, thanking the synagogue, and assuring the audience that the United States would never abandon its commitment to Israel, Gladwell began to intone a speech that thrilled us, his voice raspy with fatigue, his body tense, gripping the edges of the podium as if in pain. “No one wants to go to war, particularly without a clear enemy or decisive army to fight. Our war is not against Islam, but a war against a handful of fundamental extremists who would turn civilization back to the Middle Ages.

“I was elected president because the American people clearly saw that the war in Iraq was a failure. We spent more than a trillion dollars which should have been spent fighting terrorism and boosting the American economy. I promised to withdraw from Iraq. And we did.

“By withdrawing troops from Iraq, we deflated jihadist rhetoric, and used our resources to help our allies in Europe combat terrorism as well as here at home. We mended fences with Iran, and, through diplomacy between the Shia, Sunni, and Kurds, quelled a civil war in Iraq and oversaw the partition of the country into a tri-part federation. We worked with Saudi Arabia to quell Sunni and Shiite rivalries in Lebanon, Syria, and other Middle Eastern countries. We have had four years of peace. At the same time, with my comprehensive Energy Bill, we have made enormous strides in decreasing our dependence on Middle Eastern oil.

“But the beast of jihad is a multi-headed beast which has awakened again and threatens Europe. We now must embark on a new crusade, not a Christian crusade, not an American crusade, but a crusade for humanity. We cannot sit back and watch Europe be incinerated by Islamic extremism. We must not wait, as we did in World War II, for war to reach our shores. How many died unnecessarily because of our inaction? In truth, we have already had our Pearl Harbor, when two jets struck our World Trade Towers on September 11, 2001. Now is the time for action.

“Tomorrow I will ask Congress to formulate a plan. I will not lead this country into war lightly, but the time has come to take a stand for civilization.

“I quote from the great English statesman Sir Winston Churchill speaking before the House of Commons on May 13, 1940. ‘We have before us an ordeal of the most grievous kind. We have before us many, many long months of struggle and of suffering. You ask, what is our aim? I can answer in one word: Victory. Victory at all costs—victory in spite of all terror—victory, however long and hard the road may be, for without victory there is no survival.’”

The audience was moved by the words of the great cigar-chomping statesman. We saw him before our eyes and heard the intonation of his voice. Yet as I wiped tears from my eyes, I wondered about what Elliot Gladwell had not said. He did not say he was going to ask the joint houses to declare war, but “to formulate a plan.” He did not say he was going to send aid to Europe. He had, in fact, not said much at all.

JUNE 21, 2012 - Santa Monica

Every day when my father comes home from work, he looks at me and shakes his head. No news from Baron Fairchild. Peter’s lawyers are filing motions in the courts; hearings are set and then postponed. Fairchild has been to visit Peter and reports that he is healthy, but solemn.

I can hardly bear the guilt. Why can’t I think of some way to help? The stifling passivity is making me nuts. I am on pins and needles all the time. But what can I do? I can’t even write to him. Apparently my letters sent to Guantánamo are withheld from him, undelivered.

If I don’t do something soon, I am going to pop.

I’ve made a habit of walking down to Montana Avenue every day to pick up the New York Times and International Herald Tribune. Every day more bombings, another city overtaken by Islamists—things are happening so quickly that the print media is only good for analysis and perspective. I spend hours at the computer, and watch BBC for the latest news. I am becoming obsessed. Somehow I feel that by keeping up with what is happening in Europe I am helping Peter. It is the only thing I can think to do. It is my vigil.

In the Netherlands, now called the Islamic Republic of Holland, a purging has begun that rivals the Spanish Inquisition. All “coffee houses” and houses of prostitution have been closed. Their employees must accept conversion or jail. Alcohol and drugs are banned. Libraries have been emptied of many of their books, which are burned in great bonfires on barges in the canals. Television stations have been shut down and then reprogrammed with feed from Al Jazeera television. Radio stations no longer broadcasted music, but readings from the Quran. Homosexuality is outlawed. Women are required to wear headscarves and modest clothing in public—no pants. The Emir of the Islamic Republic of Holland, Fawaz Jneid, is allowing Ahl al kitab or “people of the Book,” meaning Christians and Jews, to stay in Holland, but forbids them from government office and from serving in the armed forces. Non Muslims must abide by Islamic law, and must pay a penalty tax, the jizya.

The most liberal city in Europe is now the most conservative.

Thousands have fled into Germany and Belgium, but millions haven’t. Most prefer to live under Islamic law rather than abandon their homes and their lives. Holland, after all, has survived foreign occupation many times before.

In Malmö, Sweden radical Islamists occupy government buildings. The Swedish military, with orders to kill resistance fighters, comb the city, block by block, killing Muslim youth, burning mosques. Imams have been shot. Muslim women and children have been loaded onto trucks and sent to makeshift camps. The country that had shut its eyes tightest to its Muslim integration problems is now addressing it in the most ruthless way possible. They are eliminating it.

In Denmark and Norway, where large populations of Muslims continue to riot in the cities, the police and military are jailing hundreds, who are then deported without legal recourse. City governments enforce an around-the-clock curfew in Muslim neighborhoods, except for two hours in the morning for food shopping.

The worst fighting is in France, which is twelve percent Muslim. Although civil unrest in Paris has been contained, France has extended its state of emergency for ninety days. The cities of Lyon and Lille are not under control.

The European Parliament has moved temporarily from Strasbourg and Brussels to Zurich. Germany threatens to invade the Islamic Republic of Holland if they send their newly formed Islamic army into Belgium. It appears, however, that Belgium is likely to fall to the Islamists without any Dutch assistance.

Oil prices have risen to $110 per barrel, the highest since the summer of 2008.

#

To get me to “stop moping around the house,” my mother sent me to the Santa Monica Farmer’s Market, which was held on Wednesday and Saturday mornings at Arizona Boulevard and Third Street. It was a festive affair where organic farmers drove in from Bakersfield and Oxnard with dozens of different kinds of tomatoes, cantaloupe, and eggplant, strawberries that melted in your mouth, Valencia oranges that tasted of heaven, crisp lettuces with strange names, fresh herbs, and every kind of exotic vegetable you could imagine. It was my mother’s favorite place in the world. If I agreed to go with her on a Saturday morning—something I avoided except in cases of extreme guilt, or to wheedle a favor out of her—I knew that I was signing on for two or three hours while she discussed soil conditions, growing seasons, and recipes with the farmers, ran into friends, and cooed over baby carriages. I knew it was a sacrifice for her to give me the errand. I grabbed her large hemp bag and headed out the door.

As I was picking over the peppers—Mother had requested a variety of sereno, jalapeño, and sweet peppers—I spotted Cynthia’s World Religions teacher sniffing a bunch of cilantro. I had seen her once before when Cynthia hosted her Islamic club in our backyard. Fifteen girls had sat in a circle, wearing head scarves, each with a copy of the Quran, all eyes on a woman in her mid twenties. Even with her head covered, I had seen how beautiful she was, her large brown eyes rimmed with kohl, her hazelnut skin, tendrils of black hair escaping from her scarf and hanging long down her back. Her loose clothing fell against her figure as she moved, revealing for a moment her body obscured beneath, and as she listened and answered questions, she smiled with a queenly sweetness. I could see why the girls were in love with her, why they would do anything to become like her.

After her friends left, I grilled Cynthia about her.

“Her name is Sara Jiluwis,” Cynthia explained. “She is from Sudan, but also lived in Kenya and Egypt.”

“She preaches Islam to your club?”

“Not exactly. We read passages from the Quran and she explains, and we discuss stuff. She tells us about life in Africa. A guy from her mosque leads the boys.”

“Like Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts.”

“We meet together sometimes. When we have a guest speaker or go to a museum or something.”

With her headscarf and mesh cart, Sara Jiluwis looked very much at home at the Farmer’s Market. I went up and introduced myself.

“How wonderful to meet you,” she said, smiling broadly. “Cynthia has told me so much about you. She is such a delightful young woman.”

I was alarmed that Cynthia had talked to her teacher about her family, about me, implying an intimacy between them that I immediately distrusted. There was a light in Sara’s eyes, a maieutic energy—disarmingly sincere—like the forgiving gaze of the Dali Lama. She obviously cared about Cynthia. Without knowing why, I asked her if she had time for coffee.

“I would love to,” she said. “I need to pick up some dates, then I am done.”

We agreed to meet in five minutes at the Farmers Market entrance on Arizona. We walked to a Starbucks. I bought the coffees while Sara got a table for us outside. I was nervous, with no idea what I was doing. I felt like a spy.

“Cynthia speaks so highly of you,” I said as I pried off the top to my cup, clumsily spilling coffee all over the place. I wiped it up, creating an unappetizing pile of soggy napkins. “I don’t think there’s anything she wouldn’t do for you.”

“Cynthia is very enthusiastic.” Sara took a slow sip of coffee. She set her cup down, looked at it for a few moments, then raised her eyes to me—those penetrating, dark brown, kohl-rimmed eyes. “You asked me to coffee because you are concerned about Cynthia’s interest in Islam. Am I right?”

Her eyes stung like a truth serum. “I’m a little curious,” I replied, trying for nonchalance.

“It is partly her age. Cynthia is very open and impressionable. I tell my students that every religion slowly reveals itself as you study its truth, its beauty, and that studying the religion of their parents honors them. I tell them that the reason for studying other religions is that we learn that all religions seek the same truth, the same beauty.”

“And Islam?”

“Yes, of course Islam, one of the world’s four great religions. Islam is a religion of peace and charity and justice.”

“And tolerance?” I asked.

Jiluwis smiled but didn’t respond.

“In your club meetings, do you discuss what’s happening in Europe? Do you talk about jihad?”

She paused, then said, “Are you asking me if I am recruiting terrorists?”

“No, of course not,” I said. “I meant no offense. It’s just...my sister is completely—” I bit my lip, but continued “—obsessed with Islam. It’s a little weird.”

“The class is a requirement to pass the eighth grade. I could ask Cynthia to leave the Islamic club.” She smiled, waiting for me to backpedal.

“I just wondered—” I broke off, flummoxed and embarrassed. “How can so much hatred—so much murder—come out of a religion you say preaches charity and justice?”

“I could ask the same question about the Christian Crusades, or the Inquisition, or bombing abortion clinics.”

“Neither the Crusades nor the Inquisition had anything to do with Christ’s teachings. No major Christian denomination advocates violence. Can you say the same about Islam? Don’t Muslims consider jihad to be the sixth pillar of Islam?”

“There are many parts of the Bible that most Christians do not take literally or are clearly part of an ancient culture. The same is true for Islam. The fundamentalist Salafi sect that was developed in Saudi Arabia in the eighteenth century interprets the Quran and the traditions or hadith of Islam in a very literal way, without regard to historical context.”

“What is hadith?” I ask.

“Hadiths are a collection of the Prophet’s deeds and sayings. They are second only to the Quran as an authority of Islamic knowledge. Salafis seek to revive the early practice of Islam, which they believe is simpler and purer, and that any innovation since then is evil. It is very strict, very puritanical. Unfortunately, Salafism is used by terrorists to validate their actions, and it’s growing very rapidly. But my guess is that you do not want to discuss theology with me. Your sister said that your boyfriend is held at Guantánamo Bay. You suspect he is a jihadist?”

“No, of course not. He’ll be cleared soon.”

“I’m sure he will. It is curious why a middle class secular youth might join a terrorist cell.”

“Peter didn’t join a terrorist cell,” I nearly shout.

“Of course not. But you want to know why young people are attracted to Islam. You want to know why your sister is attracted to Islam.”

I felt so ashamed, yet desperate. “Yes,” I said.

“I’ll give you my theory. It’s not just that young Muslims feel alienated and lack opportunities. I think young people have an instinct to seek truth. They always have. Truth is not easily found in Western consumer culture. Young people crave focus and a path. They see themselves and the world and want to do something important. In jihad they feel a sense of adventure, of belonging to part of a big movement, part of history. Their desires are answered and reinforced through the internet, global media, and social bonds. Fundamentalism is a form of intoxication, full of clichés, a world that is black and white. They feel empowered. You know that old recruiting slogan for the U.S. Army?”

“‘There’s strong, and then there’s army strong?’”

“That’s the one. You can imagine how many millions the military paid some Madison Avenue advertising company to think that one up. Why? Because it works.”

“You make it sound like jihad is fueled by propaganda.”

“The power of the jihadist movement lies in the truth that the world has become too materialistic. Like the Protestant Reformation, the culture is responding to a truth.”

I suddenly felt enervated, as if this woman had sucked out my energy with her calmness and pat explanations. “Do you believe in jihad?” I asked.

“I believe in jihad as the personal struggle to become a better Muslim. I believe the word of God will spread throughout the world as God sees fit.”

“Don’t you feel responsible in some way? Don’t you feel Muslims should do something about extremists who murder in the name of Islam?”

“It pains me deeply to see my faith used as a vehicle for terrorism.”

“Then why don’t you do something about it?”

She smiled. “Don’t you feel like you should do something about global warming?”

“Of course I do.”

“Have you done anything?”

As she got up from the table and collected her groceries, Sara Jiluwis pressed my fingers with her soft scented palm, her smile warm and genuine. “Come talk to me again,” she said. “I enjoyed our conversation.”

Her answers were perfect. She was perfect. There was no particular reason to distrust her. But I did. I felt enraged as if she were trying to steal my sister’s soul. I was afraid of her.

JULY 6, 2012

In late June Al Jazeera broadcasted a speech by Osama bin Laden. “A new battle has begun, a great battle, like those of the great battles of Islam. Fear God, O Muslims and rise to support your religion. Islam is calling on you. It is the duty for the umma, for all men, women, and youths to give themselves, their money, and all types of material support to promote jihad. Fear not the number of the enemy and their arsenal of arms, because victory is a gift of God. The winds of faith have come. Allah blesses us. Now is the time for all Muslims to rise up and fight for Allah.”

It was as if someone shot off a starter pistol. The Middle East erupted.

In Afghanistan, after years of bruising battles between NATO troops and Taliban fighters, the Taliban along with jihadists recruits from Pakistan overtook Kabul. The Afghan government, already thoroughly infiltrated by Islamic extremists, and terrified of massacres, turned over power to a local imam, who immediately declared Afghanistan an emirate under Islamic law. Al Jazeera applauded the “stabilization” of the country.

Al Qaeda has stepped up terrorist attacks in Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, and Iraq, targeting the economic and tourist centers of these countries, destroying oil refineries, causing the governments to lose control. Al Qaeda soldiers moved in creating chaos. Desperate for order, local populations allied themselves to local Salafi imams, who established security, food, water, medicine, Islamic courts of justice, and jobs for the numerous unemployed. As soon as the imams exerted control, Al Qaeda soldiers moved on while simultaneously targeting more oil installations in the Persian Gulf.

On the world market, oil has jumped to $150 a barrel.

In Sudan, government troops of the National Islamic Front and the Janjawid militia resumed fighting against Darfur rebels in the western part of the country. Massacres are occurring in the tens of thousands, but Europe, preoccupied with its own problems, and the United States, still hesitating to become involved, do nothing. The Islamic Courts Union in Somalia, backed by Eritrea, stepped up their drive to oust Somalia’s United Nations-backed government. Hizb ut Tahrir, a radical pan-Islamic group, has overthrown the government of Zanzibar, setting up a radical Islamic state, a safe haven and training ground for jihadists.

Then Taliban armies joined by Al Qaeda troops from Afghanistan invaded Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan to the north without opposition. The three countries declared themselves to be a single Islamic emirate, joined quickly by the Islamic Courts of Sudan, Zanzibar, Somalia, and Eritrea.

The United Nations of Islam.

#

I went to The Map Store on Pico and Bundy and bought the biggest map of the world that I could find. At Staples I bought a box of pins with colored balls on the ends, blue, red, and yellow, and some magic markers. I taped the map to my bedroom wall.

With a pink magic marker, I colored in all of the countries that were once part of the Islamic Caliphate that ended in the thirteenth century, or part of the Ottoman Empire in the sixteenth century. I started with Spain, up to just below Paris, over to Austria to Vienna, Sicily, Hungry, Armenia, Greece, Serbia, Bulgaria, Romanic Moldavia, Hungary, Turkey, up into the Balkans, the Ukraine, and the Caucasus, all of the Middle East, then east through Turkmenistan, Afghanistan, and Pakistan, then west through Egypt to Morocco.

I stood back shocked. It stretched over three continents. These were the lands that the jihadists claimed were rightfully theirs. Once all of these countries were again under a caliphate, they would press on until the entire world was under Islamic rule.

I thought of something Alex said in our last argument. “You know why Osama bin Laden wants Sudan and Somalia as part of his United Nations of Islam? Africa isn’t good for much—no arms, no money, no organization. But they have lots people. More than forty percent of these countries are under the age of twenty, desperately poor with nothing better to do than to die for jihad. Like Hitler said, “Give me the youth, and Germany will rule the World.” A little brainwashing and they’re set. They’ll have soldiers to fight to the end of time.”

As I began sticking in pins—red for the countries that now formed the United Nations of Islam, yellow for Islamic governments not yet part of UNI, blue for secular governments—I realized how small Europe was, and how vast the lands of the Middle East and Africa. Europe looked so vulnerable.

Every day after I studied the daily news, I moved the pins.

“Hey,” said Alex. “What are you doing?” He sauntered into my room and sat on my bed. “You look like some World War II general plotting the Invasion of Normandy.”

“Lieutenant General Aulis, if you please.” I pushed in more pins. UNI troops were making rapid progress in Uzbekistan, and fighting had broken out in Bosnia. “Everything seemed so abstract. I needed to see it to understand it.”

“What’s to understand? It’s just like when Hitler marched into the Rhineland, then Austria, then the Sudetenland and the rest of Czechoslovakia, practically without firing a shot. Then Poland and Norway. He overran Denmark in one day. Four days for the Netherlands. Then Belgium and Luxembourg. Everyone just lay down for him. People forget. From the time Hitler took control of Czechoslovakia in March, 1939 to when the Germans marched into Paris in June, 1940 was only fourteen months. You get the magnitude of that? Hitler took over most of Europe in less than a year! Fucking dominoes, man.”

“The circumstances were different.”

“It’ll happen again. You just watch. Then Europe, then the United States.”

“You can’t be serious. They won’t invade the United States.”

“Don’t forget Venezuela.”

“What about Venezuela?”

“Iran has been exporting long-range missiles to Venezuela. President Hugo Chavez and Ayatollah Khamenei have been paying each other visits for years. Venezuela is the launching pad into Cuba and Mexico. Then the United States.”

“Are you serious?”

“I’m joining ACC.”

“What’s that?”

“The American Christian Crusaders. You think the National Guard will be able to protect us? Fuck no. It’s the enemy within we’ve got to be worried about. Have you ever noticed that every computer store and every Radio Shack employee is Middle Eastern?”

“Alex, you’re paranoid and racist.”

“They’re going to bring down the Internet. They’re going to bring down the power grid. Just you wait. They have infiltrated the country.”

“You’re insane!”

“I’m not insane. Saudi Arabia uses their oil money to spread Wahabism, which is a brand of reactionary Islam. They believe in jihad just as much at Al Queda, they just prefer to do it through nonviolent subversion, through education. Did you ever wonder why a small liberal arts college like Canterbury has such a fabulous Middle Eastern studies program? Oil money. Ninety percent of America’s Middle Eastern studies programs are funded by Wahabists. They hire teachers with a fundamentalist world view. They teach that the reason for terrorism is bad U.S. foreign policy. Then those graduates get jobs in the State Department and other colleges and the media. That’s how nine-eleven happened, don’t you see? The media, Arab specialists in government, and academic experts all underplayed the force of jihad because that’s what they were taught!”

“I don’t believe it.”

“Why do you think the U.S. government did nothing every time jihadists struck in the nineties? In 1993 jihadists tried to blow up the Twin Towers. In 1994 jihadists blew up a U.S. facility of Khubar in Saudi Arabia. Both times the U.S. failed to crack down on radical Islamists. Osama bin Laden appeared on television in February, 1998 declaring war against America, which was dismissed by Washington and barely mentioned by the media. A group of people declare war on us and we do nothing? Was there retaliation for the two U.S. embassy bombings in 1998? Or when the USS Cole was bombed in 2000? No, because Middle East experts advised against creating tensions in the Muslim world! Why? Because everything our fucking experts knew about Islam and the Middle East, they learned from teachers intent on spreading Wahabism.”

I thought of Sara Jiluwis’s smooth and ready answers. I wondered if she was a Wahabi. “You know your facts a lot better than I do, but I’m sure you’re exaggerating.”

“Oh yeah? Did you ever wonder why Elliot Gladwell proposed his Cultural Accommodation Policy? Do you know how much money it takes to get something like that through Congress? Who was a major backer? Wahabi lobby groups, who also contributed to his election campaign. Liberals have been completely bamboozled.”

“Gladwell wanted to integrate Muslims so there won’t be jihad in the U.S.”

“But that is jihad! Information jihad! Look at our fucking sister. She wants to be an Arab princess!”

“You’re crazy, Alex. I can’t believe you’re my brother.”

“Is that right? Well you’re a fucking idiot.”

#

I was furious with Alex. What a Nazi! But then I began to think about the gorgeous brand new Islamic center at Canterbury College—travertine and stainless steel on the outside, glowing oak floors and exposed beams on the inside—and the many scholarships to Middle Eastern students and paid summer internships in Washington and at television stations across the country. An unusually large department for a college with three thousand students.

Paid for by oil money from Saudi Arabia?

I looked for clues on the Canterbury College website. The chair for Middle Eastern studies was called the Adul Aziz Al Sa’ud Chair for Middle Eastern Studies after a member of the Saudi royal family. The full name of the Islamic Center was the King Fhad Center for Islamic Studies. I paged through the list of major “angel” donors, which included several dozen Arab names. And then I recalled a name I had never thought twice about, the publishing arm of Canterbury College, Buraq Press, which produced a substantial number of titles about Islam and Arab culture.

Wasn’t the basic premise of most of the political science classes at Canterbury that the West misunderstood the Middle East, that imperialism and oil lust had completely screwed up our foreign policy? Didn’t a lot of students say the 9/11 was our own fault?

Could Alex be right?

And if it was true, where did Peter fit into all of this?

JULY 7, 2012

“So Anne,” my mother began, “what are you thinking of doing for the rest of the summer?” Just the way she asked I could tell she had been talking with Dad about it.

“Do we have to discuss that now?” I asked. I stood by my map looking for the small African country of Djibouti where the U.S. military based AFRICOM, its central command for Africa. Last night Islamic insurgents from Somalia tired to blow up a military compound there.

“No. No, I guess we don’t. I just don’t like to see you wasting your time, doing no—”

“Mom,” I warned, drawing out the open vowel, biting down hard on the second M.

“You’re right, dear. It’s your summer vacation. But still I hate to see you waste—”

“Mom!”

She sighed loudly, exasperated at her daughter who never listened—spoiled rotten, if we must be honest. But there was something else in her sigh, something that had nothing to do with me.

“What is it, Mom? Something about Peter?” I asked, whipping around. “You know something?”

“Calm down, Anne. I don’t know anything.”

She said this wearily, as if I pestered her with the question ten times a day, which I never had, not even once. Oh my temper, flapping like a loose sail. “Mom! Tell me what’s going on!”

Her scolding eyes soften almost at once. “I don’t know, honey. The future seems—I don’t know. It’s just a feeling.” She laughed apologetically, sipping from her water bottle. “I get the sense that I should be preparing for something—hording water and food and tools, packing first aid boxes. Doing something.”

I flashed on an image of Otto Frank making preparations months before his family went into hiding, wearing several extra shirts and sweaters under his coat to work, little by little storing up food, a bag of potatoes one day, onions another, beans yet another, giving away furniture and valuables to friends, neighbors helping by bringing by a few jars of vegetables, pans, linens, a little something every time they visited the warehouse where the Frank family would hide. He even remembered Anne’s film star posters and picture postcards, sensing the hours of daydreaming that lay ahead for his daughter, anticipating what might give her the most comfort. Otto Frank prepared to escape and hide, while other Jews were doing what—hoping it wouldn’t get that bad?

My mother was filled with the same survivor instinct. That she even imagined that it might be necessary shocked me.

JULY 15, 2012

This week my father got word from Baron Fairchild that Peter was going to be released soon. I was so excited. I couldn’t wait to see him. I was thrilled that he would be freed by the time fall semester started. I immediately made plans to fly to his parents’ house in Connecticut to welcome him home. I figured I’d spend the rest of the summer with him and his family, then we’d take the train together to Canterbury College.

I was beside myself. I couldn’t eat, couldn’t sleep. I was in a perpetual state of sexual arousal. I was making myself crazy. I couldn’t think of anything else—his hands, his kisses, his thighs. I was afraid that I might explode before I got to see him.

Today was the day. Today Peter—my Peter!—was going to be set free!

Just before dinner Dad shuffled out of his office looking haggard. He said he'd just gotten off the phone with Baron Fairchild. He told me this.

A little after noon, Peter was flown from Cuba to Ronald Reagan National Airport in Washington, D.C., escorted by two military guards. He was met by Baron Fairchild, his Washington human rights lawyer, Stanley Kirk, and an FBI agent. As they were exiting the airport, Peter asked to use the restroom. The three men waited outside for ten minutes. When Peter didn’t come out, they became concerned and went in to find him. A dozen men were using the facilities. The lawyers shouted Peter’s name. When he didn’t answer, they checked every stall.

Peter had disappeared.

#

“How could they lose him?” I demanded of my father. “Where did he go? I don’t understand. Why didn’t they go into the bathroom with him?”

“As soon as Peter stepped into Ronald Reagan Airport, he was no longer in custody,” my father said. “It probably never occurred to them that he’d take off.”

“Why did he disappear?”

“Maybe he didn’t believe that he was being released. Maybe he thought they were lying to him and were moving him to another prison. The FBI hasn’t ruled out kidnapping.”

“Kidnapping! Who would kidnap him?”

“I don’t know. Some terrorist group or maybe anti-Muslim fanatics.”

“Can we file a missing person’s report?”

“Yes. But Peter is over eighteen, and with his history, nobody is going to look too hard.”

“His history! What about innocent until proven guilty?”

“Calm down, honey.”

“So they’re not going to try to find him?”

My father straightened the seam of his khakis, eyes hazily focused on his knee. “I’ll tell you what Baron Fairchild told me. If the FBI finds him, they will put him under surveillance. Informing us where Peter is would not be in their best interest.”

“Do they think he’ll lead them to a terrorist cell or something? Is that why they let him go?”

“The FBI takes his running as a sign of guilt.”

“Has he called his parents?”

“No, he hasn’t.”

“Where would he go?”

“I don’t know. Where do you think he would go?”

#

I was furious. I could hardly breathe. I stomped into my room and slammed the door. I collapsed on my bed and pounded the mattress with my fists, then flung myself on the floor, legs kicking, arms flailing. A full throttled tantrum like I hadn’t had since I was eleven. I was furious with my father, with the lawyers, with the FBI, but most of all I was furious with Peter.

I kicked and convulsed until I was depleted. Despair pressed down on me, squeezing me, immobilizing me. How could he disappear without letting me know?

In the depths of my self pity, a tiny sane part of me understood that this was how Peter must have felt in Guantánamo, powerless and abandoned. It would’ve been worse for him. Much worse. I suddenly ached for him.

I closed my eyes and imagined I was Peter. It took me a few moments to feel myself slip into his body.

There I was in Guantánamo on his cot, looking up at the corrugated roof, rain clattering down on the tin. He feels betrayed and angry. At first he is not allowed to talk to anyone except a Muslim cleric who visits him once a week. Peter doesn’t bother to tell the cleric that he is not Muslim, but listens to him talk about Islam for something to do. In the afternoons when his anger has exhausted him, he picks up the Quran and reads. At first it seems flowery and pompous and repetitious, and he can’t believe anyone could be inspired to jihad based on this prose. Bored he puts it aside.

Waiting, waiting, waiting.

In the beginning he thinks he will be released soon, but then he recalls that some of the prisoners at Guantánamo have been there for nine or ten years. A small percentage have been granted trials. The others received only abbreviated hearings before the Combatant Status Review Tribunal, where they were not allowed to have an attorney present or to call witnesses. They were presumed guilty of being enemy combatants based on evidence that they were not allowed to see. Most faced life in prison.

Despair sets in. I feel his weariness. He cannot move. He spends hours watching a roach crawl across the floor. He observes the other prisoners, who maintain a certain amount of discipline—praying, doing calisthenics, reading the Quran. After awhile, he picks up the only book he is allowed to read.

When the interrogations begin, he waits for someone he feels he can trust to talk about Amsterdam. They badger him, calling him “terrorist trash,” making him kneel for hours until he collapses, their angry faces grimacing in front of him, shackling him hand and foot in a fetal position for twenty-four hours, forcing him to soil himself, bombarding him with loud music, yanking him from his bed in the middle of the night for questioning. It makes him stubborn. It makes him think being terrorist trash might be a good thing.

I feel his rage and his fear, betrayal suffocating him like a blanket soaked in something hot and toxic.

This goes on, month after month.

Then a guard tells him to be ready to move and to take all of his belongings. An hour later, two soldiers whom he has never seen before march him to a military plane. They do not tell him where he is going. He sees that he is the only nonmilitary person on the plane. When they touch down, an FBI agent boards and tells him that he is being released into his lawyer’s custody. Peter has never seen this agent before. He doesn’t believe him. Even when he sees Baron Fairchild, a man he trusts, standing in the terminal, he still doesn’t believe they will let him go.

When he enters Ronald Reagan Airport, he knows that, even if they do let him go, he will always be on a list, will always have his computers and telephones and bank accounts monitored. His friends will be investigated. He will be under surveillance. He will never be cleared. A black cloud of suspicion will follow him for the rest of his life.

He knows this so he runs.

I knew then that Peter didn’t lie awake at night thinking about making love to me. He didn’t think about me at all. I was insignificant. If once he indulged my spoiled silliness, he now despised me. I represented all that he hated about America.

I rolled to my side, barely able to move, my body covered in sweat. I had fallen into the deep dank well of the falsely accused along with Peter. I felt the walls closing in on me, the hopelessness of climbing out. I understood how betrayal weakens you. Rage was the only thing keeping him alive.

I felt him on the run. Did they give him back his luggage? His passport and money? Or did he only have his jeans and a denim jacket, a thin, frightened Arab-looking boy. How would he ever make it on his own?

I then realized that Peter was not on his own. The only kindness he had received in prison was from Muslims. Wrongfully accused, he would become one of them.

I pressed my fingers over my eyelids, trying to block out the images, to turn off the truth. Stop! I don’t want to know.

Peter studied terrorism in college—was it possible that he had more than an academic interest? Was the FBI right in questioning him? Did he know where to get help?

Thoughts of Amsterdam flooded my brain, questions and doubts. Why had Peter been so ambivalent about having dinner with Marjon? Had he known something about the White Rose group beforehand? Did he know she was a member? Who were those men he was looking at in the art gallery? Why was he so composed when we discovered the murders? As if he half expected it. Who had he emailed so angrily when he was in London? Were his Muslim friends at Canterbury College somehow involved?

In truth it was strange that Marjon and Nicholas had been so friendly. Yet it was Peter who had insisted on stopping at the herring cart when there were a million other places to get food. It was Peter who chose to walk south toward Vondelpark and who glanced repeatedly at his wristwatch, which was not typical of him. Had he planned to meet Marjon?

I had known Peter for three years, yet I realized I didn’t really know him. He had always seemed so much older than the rest of us students. I often felt as if he were marking time with us, with me, like a young Henry IV wiling away his days with strumpets and beer, waiting to be called to serve. I never asked him a lot of questions about his past or his ambitions. I wanted him to be mysterious and unknowable.

Oddly the thought that Peter might possibly have been part of a terrorist cell, or had now fled to one as his only recourse, made me want him more. An adolescent love for the renegade outlaw. I admired his idealism, his willingness to fight for a cause, his warrior spirit. I knew I could never be like that. I was lazy and self-indulgent, a compromiser, a conciliator. It was foreign to me, erotic.

I suddenly understood why jihad was burning up the map, why youth from Morocco to Iraq to Bangladesh to the Bronx joined terrorist cells.

Jihad was sexy.

JULY 16, 2012

I don’t think Peter will run home, but he’ll at least call his mother. Won’t he? I had to know.

I liked Gloria. Free-spirited and warm, she enjoyed chaos and spontaneity, something that often irked Peter’s sense of propriety. I loved her round figure and hand-dyed tent dresses and bangles—her laughter. She was easy to talk to.

I hadn’t called her since I had gotten back from Amsterdam. Second to being spoiled, I suppose my next worst character trait is cowardice. I was afraid that she would turn into a quivering simpering puddle—that I would lose the carefree image of her that I found preferable to my own parents. I didn’t want to share my grief. I didn’t want to expose how much I loved Peter. All of these reasons were completely selfish. I should have called her immediately.

Better late than never. I knew that she spent her mornings in her studio painting and didn’t like to be interrupted. Late afternoon, I picked up the phone.

“Hello, sweetheart. I haven’t heard from you since Christmas,” she said cheerfully. “I was just thinking about you. I was reading about this wonderful young set designer in The New Yorker—she did the sets for the new Peter Gynt production—just marvelous with papier-mâché puppets and masks. It made me think of something you might do. So colorful and original. So how are you, dear?”

I had no idea how I could remind her of anyone creative or original—I didn’t have an artistic bone in my body—but I took her compliment, as with all of her compliments, as an expression of her irrepressible exuberance. I wasn’t nearly so gracious. “Have you heard from Peter?”

“No,” she said, her voice dropping, turning gravely. “The FBI called me and asked the same thing. I don’t know why they bother. They would know as soon as I did.”

“You mean they tap your phone?”

“Good afternoon, boys,” she sang into the phone. “Still haven’t heard from Peter.” She changed pitch again. “A couple months ago, one of the nice ones asked if I had any new variations on cherry pie for July Fourth—I had given a friend a new recipe over the phone a few hours before. Nice of him to let me know they listen in, don’t you think? I get a weird echo sometimes.”

“Aren’t you worried about Peter?”

“Now that he’s out of Guantánamo, I don’t worry. He’ll be fine. We raised him to be independent.”

“You have no idea where he is?”

“No. I’m sure he won’t tell us either.”

I didn’t know if Gloria was saying this for me or for the FBI. “Would he go to a relative? A cousin or someone?”

“No. He won’t involve the family. He wouldn’t want to endanger us in any way. He’s like that. He won’t ask for help until he no longer needs it.”

I wondered how much was an act or if she really did feel comfortable giving her son that much freedom. My mother became mildly hysterical if I was out of reach for a half a day. Gloria’s words had a flat brittleness—I could tell how much she hurt. I felt like a jerk for not calling her earlier. She was so brave. “Is there anything I can do for you?” I asked.

“I don’t want you to worry, honey. Peter is resourceful and smart. You’ll have to trust that he’ll be fine.”

I started to choke up. I told her to take care and that I’d call again soon.

JULY 17, 2012 - San Francisco

I got an email response to a message I sent to Peter’s roommate at Canterbury College, Greg Sewell. He gave me a telephone number and told me to call from a pay phone. He would call me back ten minutes later from another pay phone.

It all seemed like a lot of hocus-pocus, but I went along with it. I used a phone at the Santa Monica Library. When he called back, he said that he would rather talk in person. Could I come up to San Francisco?

I said sure.

I wasn’t crazy about spending a few hundred dollars on gas, but the fact that Greg was unwilling to talk over the phone made me think the trip might be worthwhile. Greg was spending the summer working in San Francisco as a law clerk even though he wasn’t in law school yet. The men in his family had been lawyers for four generations and he had connections. At twenty-one, he could easily have passed the California Bar.

We agreed to meet at a coffee shop in North Beach. I told my mother I was going to visit a friend in Santa Barbara and would spend the night. I’m not sure why I lied—it felt safer somehow.

I started out early thinking that I needed to beat the rush hour, but there was no traffic, even as I neared San Jose. The gas stations I passed advertised regular for $6.67 per gallon. I had never known what a pleasure it could be to drive in California. The sun was warm, the air clear, the hills violet and crisp in the distance. No pollution.

I arrived in North Beach before noon. I even found parking.

“Sorry to make you do the drive,” Greg said, as I took a seat in the cafe.

“That’s okay. I understand.”

“I don’t think you do, Ann,” he said, jabbing a straw into his Frappuccino. Greg was a serious guy who tended to acummulate spittle at the corners of his mouth. He looked especially grim. “You wouldn’t believe what’s gone down at Canterbury. The FBI took Peter’s computer, my computer, and the computers of a half dozen of our friends. They took all of his papers and research. There was this huge fight with the library—the FBI wanted to know what books he’d taken out. The college president got involved and the library finally gave in. They talked to all of his teachers. They turned the Islamic Studies Program inside out.”

“His mother says her phone is tapped.”

“I’m not surprised. They’ve gone after some of his Muslim friends. They revoked their student visas and got them deported.”

“He’s out of Guantánamo. He disappeared when he got to Washington.”

“Yeah, I heard.”

“Has he contacted you?”

“No. He won’t either.”

“That’s what his mom said. Any idea where he is?”

“Why do you want to find him?”

“I just want to know if he’s all right.”

“He’s all right.”

“How do you know? You said he hadn’t contacted you.”

Greg rattled the ice in the bottom of his drink, then slurped hard to get the last of his caffeine fix. “I don’t know if you knew how deep he was into his research. It wasn’t Islamic radicalism that fascinated him so much, it was the anthropological aspect—how terrorist cells worked, how they spread, how ideas spread, what motivated them. He talked to them.”

“Online?”

“Yeah, and in person. Two that I know of in Philadelphia. He cruised the websites. There’s like five thousand jihadist websites. Some of them are blogs and you can comment on them. Some of them are humorous. He showed me one out of Berlin that was hysterical—full of scathing political satire.” Greg wrote down the domain name on a napkin and pushed it over to me. “He’d write comments and show me. He signed his name as The Stinking Rose, because of the White Rose anti-Islamic group.”

I gasped.

“Yeah,” he said. “The kids who were murdered in Amsterdam.”

“Peter knew about the White Rose?”

“Sure. They’re huge in Europe. They’re not anti-Islamic really—just against fascism—both Islamic and the neo-Nazi reaction to it. Anyhow, Peter wrote a comment on that website a few days ago and signed it The Stinking Rose.”

“It could be someone else using his nom de plume.”

“Nah, it was him. His sense of humor.”

“Did he say anything about where he was or anything?”

“Of course not. He commented on a political cartoon, that’s all. But it means he’s all right.”

“Could I log on and respond to a comment made by The Stinking Rose?”

“I’d be careful. You know the FBI is all over these sites. Do it from a library or cafe.”

“Do you think he could’ve become one of them?”

“Peter is an atheist. For a Muslim, an atheist is the worst of all kifur, the worst infidel of all. That’s why they hate communists. Could he be with them now? I don’t know. He wanted to get deep inside. He wanted to feel the heartbeat of jihad. Who knows what Guantánamo could’ve done to him. If I were you, I’d keep my distance.”

“You have no idea where he might be?”

“He wouldn’t go to contacts he made while at Canterbury. He’d know the FBI was on to them. Maybe to some contact he made at Guantánamo.”

“Do you know of any groups in Canada?”

“For chrissake, Ann, don’t go hunting him down. That would be the worst thing. For you. For him. Forget it. Promise me you won’t.”

He had my hand and was crunching my fingers together until they hurt. “Okay, okay. I promise.”

#

I’m not much good at keeping promises either. You can add that to my list of faults.

I had to let Peter know that I still cared about him. I wracked my brains. If I used the computers at Santa Monica Library, the FBI could trace it there, then match the signup list to the computer. If I swapped computers, they still could find my name on the signup list. Maybe I could sneak on when the computers weren’t busy. Or maybe I could try an internet café. No. The FBI could show my picture to a clerk, who might remember me. Even if I found a way to post a message to him, I’d have to access an anonymous computer a second time to see if he answered, which would take checking the website over a period of days, increasing my chances of leaving a trail each time. Was I being paranoid? I didn’t know enough to be sure. But if the FBI did discover that Peter was the Stinking Rose, they might be able to find him.

If Peter had done nothing wrong, why was I worried that the FBI might find him? I then realized that I no longer believed that he was entirely innocent.

I also realized that it was vanity that made me want to contact him. I didn’t want to be forgotten. Did I imagine that he’d respond and tell me where he was so that I could join him in the woods with his merry band of jihadists? Was I an idiot? I endangered him by trying to contact him. I had to leave it.

Still I could not give up the hope that somehow he’d find a way to get a message to me, when I least expected it, a note passed anonymously to me as I walked down the Santa Monica Promenade, or a secret message on a call-in radio show. Any day now he would let me know he was all right. That he loved me, too. That soon we would be together again.

JULY 26, 2012

The presidential campaign continues. All anyone talks about is whether or not the U.S. is going to war.

Last Monday the Republican National Convention began in Chicago. The 2,509 delegates were nearly evenly divided between the warmonger Texas Senator Bob McMillan, and the ultraconservative isolationist Congressman Thomas Tannin from Colorado, with several hundred delegates committed to minor candidates.

Massive marches preceded the convention. Over fifteen hundred people were arrested, mostly Muslim.

The theme of the convention was “Securing a Peaceful World for Our Children,” yet it looked like the members of the platform committee would kill each other before crafting an official party platform. For the first time in years, it included nothing about abortion or gay marriage.

I’ve never watched a convention on television before, Republican or Democratic—a form of torture I consider worse than watching football—but this was different. For the first time in decades there was actually a question as to who would win the nomination. And whoever won could very possibly decide the fate of the world.

A great fissure erupted between Republicans who criticized President Gladwell as weak on defense, and those who recalled that the Republicans lost the 2008 election primarily because of Bush’s meddling in Iraq. Senator Bob McMillan called for the immediate deployment of troops to Europe and the Middle East. “Winning the war against Islamic aggression must be our government’s first priority. For years Republicans were mocked for claiming that an ‘Axis of Evil’ threatened the world. Well, it turns out we were right.

“How do we fight evil? How did we win World War II? We used everything we had. We asked our young men to become soldiers. We used our factories to make ships and airplanes. Our women worked in munitions factories. We developed the most powerful weapon the world had ever seen...and we used it.

“Our military prowess is matched only by the righteousness of our ideals. Our enemies express hatred for all that is good in the world, for all that is good in humanity. Freedom and justice are invincible. We are Americans. We will never be defeated.”

The delegates applauded tentatively.

McMillan’s rival, Congressman Thomas Tannin, led the isolationists. “A small but vocal minority in this country would like us to sacrifice our economic and national security to participate in the many civil wars that Europe has brought on itself. They would have us return to the Middle East. Why should we be in a part of the world where we clearly are not wanted?”

After various notable Republicans spoke—including former President George W. Bush, Rudolf Giuliani, former Mayor of New York City, and Arnold Schwartznegger, former Governor of California—Florida Congressman Warren Mullet took the floor.

Mullet was a large man, six-foot five, thick through the shoulders and chest, with a haystack of white hair, a round boyish face, and a Southern drawl straight out of the cypress swamps of Wakulla County. For twenty years he had hosted the most popular radio talk show in the nation out of Tallahassee—a conservative and reliably offensive program—then ran for Representative in 2006 and won. He had something the Republicans hadn’t seen in a candidate since Ronald Reagan—charisma.

“I didn’t go into politics because I like to make speeches,” he began in his soothing Southern lilt as the clapping eased. “I went into politics because I saw that our way of life on the Gulf Coast of Florida was threatened by reckless urban sprawl that was turning our fertile ocean waters into a wasteland. Now I see that our way of life in America is likewise in jeopardy. The Republican Party must take a stand.

“The United States was clearly founded on Christian principals and values. I’m tired of this government worrying about whether we are offending some individual or their culture. Yes, we are a multi-cultural nation, but together we have ONE culture, ONE language, ONE society that has been developed over four centuries. We speak ENGLISH, not Spanish, Lebanese, Arabic, Chinese, Russian, or any other language. If you wish to be part of our nation, learn the language! Most Americans believe in God. If our God offends you, then I suggest you consider moving to another part of the planet. This is OUR country, OUR land, OUR culture. Immigrants, not U.S. citizens, must adapt. We didn’t force you to come here. You asked to be here. If you aren’t happy with our Christian values, if you want a country which has Sharia law, then the United States in not for you. Clear off!”

Mullet’s message was extreme, whippinh up the delegates into a patriotic roar—they clapped and stomped their feet and screamed at the top of their voices, “U.S.A., U.S.A.” It was a little scary.

I didn’t watch all four days of the convention, of course, but I caught sound bites as I made my way through the city, in line at the bank, at the DMV, at the convenience store, at the Rose Café while I drank my daily cappuccino and ogled the bodybuilders from Gold’s Gym. Today was the last day of the convention. After three ballots it didn’t look like any of the current candidates would break the deadlock.

Copying Senator Edward Kennedy’s ploy from the 1980 Democratic National Convention, Senator Bob McMillan proposed that delegates be released from their voting commitments, based on “the clear and present danger” confronting the United States from the ongoing conflicts in Europe and the Middle East. In a surprise move, party leaders presented his proposal to the delegates, who voted to open the nomination process to an open ballot vote on the floor.

What suspense! What drama! The assembly hall looked like a beehive, candidates and their staffs crawling all over each other, buzzing from delegate to delegate, weariness, caffeine, and desperation sending them into a frenzy. The network newscasters were beside themselves—this was history in the making.

Warren Mullet could be seen working the floor hard; his physical presence—his engulfing hugs, his warm handshakes—began to make an impression. Here was a man of moral integrity who would do what had to be done to make America strong again. The mood of the delegates was becoming more and more anti-Muslim.

Then Sarah Palin stepped to the podium and nominated Warren P. Mullet as Republican candidate for the United States. As the nomination was seconded, a ground swell of chanting spread across the convention floor—“Mullet for President! Mullet for President!”—croaking in a chorus like a swamp of frogs. Could this really be happening? Would the Republican Party actually elect a man who had not even run in the national primaries? An isolationist who seemed to be advocating expelling American Muslims? The delegates were delirious with excitement.

Yet before a tally of votes could be counted, the cheering suddenly stopped.

Richard Perle, the conservative pundit who was a chief architect of George W. Bush’s war to oust Saddam Hussein, took the podium and announced to the delegates that Lebanon’s terrorist organization Fatah al Islam had just bombed Jerusalem, killing thousand of women and children. The delegates were horrified, and suddenly the thought of electing a rightwing isolationist seemed downright unpatriotic.

“There is only one candidate who can lead this country to victory against its enemies—” roared Arnold Schwartznegger, his wife smiling by his side “—and that one man is Senator Bob McMillan.”

McMillan, a man known for his aggressive pro-military foreign policy, a man who promised to lead the United States into war, won a nearly unanimous victory.

The Republican Party was signing on for war.

AUGUST 3, 2012

Each day that I don’t hear from Peter makes me feel more stressed, more depressed, more useless. My anger and frustration winds tighter and tighter in me. At night, my legs kick and itch. I can’t relax. Sometimes my heart starts racing and I can hear it squeezing blood through the valves. Some nights I lie awake all night.

I bought dark curtains to block out even the slightest shaft of light from streetlamps, a passing car, or the moon. Even in total darkness, I can’t fall asleep. As soon as I drift into unconsciousness, the slightest noise makes my eyes pop open. I think of Anne Frank lying awake, listening to planes overhead from England, air raid sirens, machine guns in the street, bombs that shook their narrow wooden house, long blitzes followed by silence, which only made her anxious about the next wave of bombings. I too hear sounds I don’t want to hear—neighbors’ television sets, helicopters, screeching tires, car stereos thumping as they passed, electrical hums, cats meowing, and in the predawn hours, Cynthia mumbling Islamic prayers in her room.

I dread the nighttime. I dread the responsibility of being awake while everyone else sleeps. Sleep is a luxury I don’t feel that I deserve.

My bedroom is on the ground floor. One night I heard someone stumbling around at about two o’clock in the morning. It didn’t sound like anyone going to the bathroom or raiding the refrigerator. It sounded like someone was drunk. A loud grunt was followed by things clattering out of the medicine cabinet into the bathroom sink. I slipped on a pair of shorts and opened my door.

A light down the hallway to the left. More grunting and swearing, the kind of swearing that explodes through clenched teeth.

I found Alex sitting on the toilet in the bathroom, bent over and clutching himself. Drugs was my first thought, withdrawal, getting a fix, then I saw drops of blood on the white tiles. “What in hell happened to you?”

Alex jerked up to look at me, moaning as he wrapped his arms around his chest. He shook his head and caved again, rocking back and forth.

“Are you shot?”

He shook his head no.

The door to the medicine cabinet was open. Bandages, scissors, iodine, and cotton balls covered the sink and floor. In the shape he was in, he’d never be able to bandage himself. I read the labels of the medicine bottles on the top shelf. Dad had some leftover Vicodin from his knee replacement surgery. I shook out two tablets, then a third, and ran Alex a glass of water. “Here. Take these.”

His eyes—I’d never seen Alex with such eyes—filled with fear, agony, and desperation. And trust—that really surprised me. He took the pills, grunting in pain after he drank the water.

“Sit up if you can. Let me see.”

Slowly he straightened his spine. I brushed his hair off of his face. His nose was bleeding, but not broken, his lips cut, his left eye red and swollen. I cut off his T-shirt with scissors. There was a large bruised splotch on his left side with an odd angular bump halfway down his torso. I probed his abdomen with my fingers—no internal bleeding.

I knew about taping broken ribs, but had never done it before. “Sit up straight,” I commanded, then worked the bones until they fell into place. I cut five pieces of adhesive and laid one piece over the break, wrapping it around his chest to his spine, then two pieces on either side. I then wrapped his chest with Dad’s blue rubber sweat wrap, which he wore to the gym to try to melt his belly fat. “Cough for me,” I said. Alex coughed, groaning in pain. “You have to breathe deep and cough even if it hurts. You don’t want liquid to collect in your lungs.” I wiped the blood from his face. It didn’t look too bad—teeth a little loose. I stopped the bleeding in his mouth and nose with pressure, and cleaned the cuts with hydrogen peroxide.

I helped him to his room and out of his clothes. I put him to bed and laid a steak on his eye. After lowering his blinds, I kissed his forehead and told him to sleep.

I cleaned up the bathroom and went back to my room. I felt oddly calm—as if I had been mending wounded soldiers my entire life.

I went to bed and slept soundly until eight o’clock. Father and Mother were off to work, Cynthia to school. I watched the local news, then waited a few hours before making a banana protein shake and soft boiled eggs. I put everything on a tray with two more Vicodin and orange juice, and went to Alex’s bedroom.

He stirred when I walked in. I opened the blinds and set down his tray. I checked his forehead for fever—none—and his eyes for dilation, then wedged pillows behind him until he was sitting up. I handed him the pills and orange juice.

“So, what’s the story?” I asked.

“Fucking ragheads.” He gulped down the pills and handed back the glass.

What I guessed had happened turned out to be true. The morning news had reported that the King Fhad Mosque, one of the largest mosques in Los Angeles, had been bombed, as well as the offices of the Muslim Public Affairs Council on Wilshire Boulevard. Of the forty-eight mosques in Los Angeles County, twelve had been torched. All eight Muslim charter schools had been attacked with handmade bombs. The American Christian Crusade claimed credit.

“The news reported injuries,” I said. “They didn’t say how many.”

“We planned it for night so we wouldn’t hurt anyone. But at one of the schools, there were these seven guys working on computers. They came running out when we threw the Molotov cocktail in the window. We took them on.”

“Anyone hurt? Besides you?”

“Two were killed. Muslim. The others were beaten up and scared.”

“The news didn’t mention—”

“They were terrorists. I’m not sorry they got killed.”

“What makes you think they were terrorists?”

“Come on, Anne. A bunch of ragheads working on computers late at night? They had guns.”

Young men with guns hardly seemed proof of being a terrorist in this town, nor working on computers late at night, for that matter. “Did they see your faces?”

“No, we wore ski masks.”

“Anyone else see you? All of these places must have security cameras. They will show that you killed—”

“I didn’t say I killed anyone. I said two were killed. Not by gun. Not traceable.”

“Alex, you can’t do this. You can’t—”

“I have to. We have no choice, don’t you see? I’m not a racist. You’re wrong about that. I have nothing against moderate Muslims. But that’s not who runs the mosques and schools anymore. They’re all jihadists. They spread it in the prisons. They’ve infiltrated the gangs. It’s not the Crips and the Bloods anymore. It’s the Muhammad Militia. We got to get rid of them.” Alex was in tears now, in pain from raising his voice, clutching his ribs, furious at me for what he saw as the suicidal ignorance of his community.

“Mom and Dad would kill you if they knew what you’re up to. They might turn you over to the police.”

“No they won’t. Not if they understood what we’re up against. Believe me.”

I jammed a straw into his protein shake and handed it to him. “Tell Mom you fell from a motorcycle,” I advised. “That will make her mad enough to keep her from suspecting the truth.”

I left his room, weak, ashamed, and frightened. I wouldn’t tell our parents, not even for murder. I was complicit, just as I was for the massacre of Marjon and her husband and friends. I felt as if I were sinking in quicksand, and the only person I trusted, who could help me make sense of it is on the run from the FBI.

I ached to see Peter.

AUGUST 4, 2012

This week the government seat of Iraq’s three-state federation was taken over by Sunni Salafi radicals in a military coup. The international community immediately withdrew its peacekeepers. Iraq then joined the other nations of the UNI, which now consists of Afghanistan, Turkistan, Uzbekistan, and Tajikistan, Sudan, Somalia, Eritrea, Yemen, Oman, and Zanzibar.

In Lebanon the confrontation between the Lebanese Army and Islamic militants at Palestinian refugee camps, which house over 400,000 Palestinians, worsened, erupting into the greatest violence since the end of Lebanon’s bloody civil war. The militants, belonging to Fatah al-Islam, have already taken over Tripoli, and the government is in danger of falling.

Afghanistan jihadists moved across the Pakistan border and rallied the tribes. Dozens of suicide bombers attacked Lahore and Karachi, massacring thousands. Jihadists continued on, pouring into the front lines with Kashmir, launching attacks inside India. Indians retaliated, demonstrating and indiscriminately murdering thousands of Indian Muslims, many who fled into Pakistan and joined the jihadists.

Al Jazerra broadcasted the second statement from Osama bin Laden since the Jenever Theater murders. “The world is now tasting what we have tasted for more than eighty years. For years Europe and America have abused the blood, honor, and sanctuaries of Muslims. Just as you laid waste to our nation, so shall we lay waste to yours. May God show you His wrath and give you what you deserve. His sword comes down on Europe and America.

“I bear witness that there is no God but Allah and that Muhammad is his messenger. All praise is due to Allah.”

#

A new mosque opened on Sixth and Arizona in Santa Monica. Sara Jiluwis had invited all of the girls in Cynthia’s Islamic Club to an open mosque day. Cynthia was very excited to see the new building and begged me to go with her. I surprised her by saying yes. I had my reasons.

The mosque was a classical abstraction in white travertine that fit in nicely with the Santa Monica Library down the block. The dome looked like the sun setting behind collapsed slabs of white rock, and the minaret, a triangular tube, jutted into the sky like a steel I-beam.

Cynthia and I covered our heads and walked inside. The air was light and cool, the lofty dome shedding a warm golden glow on the travertine floor. A woman in a sari met us at the door and directed us to the women’s section. We took our shoes off at the door, and placed them on shelves. We entered a room with thick carpets with pillows scattered in rows on the floor and against the wall. There were women of all ages, many with small children lying with their heads on their laps. Elderly women sat in chairs around the sides, or leaned against the wall chatting quietly. Several women in skirts looked like they had just come from work. Teenagers in jeans and headscarves clustered in corners. Every race of woman was there—Middle Eastern, Indian, Asian, Somali, African American, white, all with headscarves. One or two in full burkas.

Sara Jiluwis greeted Cynthia and her friends, and gave them presents of beautiful hand-woven head scarves from Egypt. She led them away to meet another group of teenaged girls.

I stood awkwardly by myself and looked around. In the absence of men there seemed to be a freedom and comfort among the women, an unguarded sensuality. They moved among one another fluidly, as if currents pushing in different directions, but flowing as one body of water.

I began to feel seduced by the shimmering calm.

I watched a young woman who sat with an open Quran on her lap, reciting verses. She looked completely serene, connected to her purpose and surroundings as if a lone fisherman on a still lake at dawn. I couldn’t take my eyes off of her. Something made me want to be like her—purposeful and pious. I felt a sudden bleakness in me, hallowed out and paper thin. A feeling like failure.

A woman stood in front of the room, opened her Quran and began reading aloud in Arabic, a lovely mezzo chanting. Several women sat around her, others continued gossiping and soothing their children. The feeling was silky, cool and warm at the same time, the lulling susurrus of prayers and light conversation. I felt as if I were being folded into the petals of flower.

After the prayer, Sara Jiluwis came back to speak with me. “I’m so glad you’re here, Ann. We are making an effort to reach out to the non-Muslim community. There is so much people don’t understand about Islam. We would like them to experience the beauty of Islamic spirituality.”

“How can a spirituality be beautiful?” I asked skeptically.

“The beauty of Islam is in its poetry, words that move the soul, that speak of the harmony between God and man. Islam is a religion of daily lived piety. It allows Muslims to live in the secular world, but asks us to remember our divine source five times a day. Prayers and receiving revelation are woven into our daily life. There is a wonderful phrase in the Quran, ‘God is closer to you than the beating of your own heart.’ Our daily life is a process of transformation of mind, heart, and soul, of coming to peace with ourselves and God.”

“Doesn’t it bother you as a woman to be treated as a second class citizen?”

She smiled. “The beginning of every chapter or sura in the Quran starts with ‘In the name of Allah, the compassionate and caring.’ The root of both words in Arabic is rahim or womb. The Quran is very pro female.”

“I guess it depends on what part of the Quran you are reading.”

“Do any of the women here appear oppressed? Humiliated? Frightened?”

“You don’t ever feel inhibited by the head scarf?”

“No. I love the head scarf. To me it is my portable sanctuary. When I place it over my head, I am reminded of the presence of God. That he is never separate from me.”

I was beginning to feel a rash of irritation. I had seen people’s heads cut off in the name of Islam, and here was this woman talking about Islam’s beauty without the slightest hint of irony. I reminded myself that I had come there for a reason. “The women here seem very close, very intimate.”

“Yes. We are sisters.”

“You are a well connected community, aren’t you?”

“Well, yes. What are you getting at?”

“Do you know how I might go about finding out if someone is in an Islamic safe house?”

She looked at me, lips pressed firmly together. “There is a tiny sect of Christian fundamentalists called The Covenant, The Sword, and The Arm of the Lord which the U.S. government considers to be a terrorist organization. If I asked you to get a message to one of them, could you?”

“No. Of course not. I wouldn’t know where to start.”

Without my realizing it, Sara Jiluwis had taken my arm and had escorted me out of the mosque. A fire truck rolled slowly past. “I can’t help you, Ann. I wish I could.”

“Don’t you know of someone at your mosque, maybe a young man with fundamentalist leanings? Couldn’t you ask him to contact his network? You can talk to men, can’t you?”

“Ann, I know you want to do everything you can to find your friend. I would, too. But your friend does not want to be found. It would be best to forget about contacting him.”

“You mean best for me, or for him?”

She gently pressed the top of my shoulder with her fingers and whispered in my ear. I took a step back, then turned to look at her as if I were saying goodbye while glancing over her shoulder. A man across the street was putting quarters into a meter. “Are you sure he is following me?” I asked.

“He was at the farmers market, too. When you wear a headscarf, you are aware of long looks, no matter how discrete. Please be careful, Ann.”

#

I hurried home leaving Cynthia at the mosque. Sara Jiluwis’s warning unnerved me.

Who would be following me? I wondered. The FBI? Did they think Peter might contact me? Or did they think that I also might be involved in a terrorist cell? No, it made more sense to me that they were following Sara Jiluwis. They knew I had made two contacts with her and might suspect that I know something or am in someway involved. Maybe she was mistaken.

As I did my errands around the city I tried to catch sight of anyone following me—a dark figure ducking into a doorway as I turned. I never did. Not even once. But the feeling it left me was raw and vulnerable. I began to think that wearing a burka wasn’t such a bad idea.

I tried it one day, not a full burka but a dopatta, a single long piece of cloth wrapped around my head, shoulders, and chest. As I walked through the streets I felt anonymous. I passed construction sites without a chorus of catcalls. I felt at once part of the world, carried softly by my purpose, yet contained and protected. As strong as my desire was to shake my head free and let the wind blow in my hair, was the desire to hide, to be anonymous, to disappear in the shadows. To be invisible.

The thought that I should find comfort in such a guise made me very uneasy and oddly distrustful of myself.

AUGUST 19, 2012

Last Thursday, several days before the end of Ramadan, the Democratic National Convention in Los Angeles nominated Elliot Gladwell as candidate for a second term in the White House. While the nomination was not unexpected—he had won virtually all of the primaries except for a few Southern states—there appeared to be, as in the Republican convention, little consensus about how to handle Europe.

Nationwide Gallup Polls showed that only 23% of Democrats thought that the United States should get involved in the Middle East. Only 40% thought we should help Europe. People were more worried about rising gas prices. The U.S. economy, while strong, was still struggling with the enormous debt left by the Bush administration, and raising taxes to cover the increased military expenditures was obviously not an issue to campaign on. On the other hand the Democratic Party did not want to appear to be soft on national security, a description that the Republicans had used to defeat any number of Democratic candidates in the last twenty years.

Gladwell’s acceptance speech was listened to carefully by both Republicans and Democrats. “The world is in deep, deep trouble,” he began. “The greatest nation in the world, the one remaining superpower, cannot stand back while Europe is threatened and Asia Minor is overrun by the greatest illegal land accumulation since Adolf Hitler. The world faces a monumental struggle between moderates and extremists. The United States must take a stand.

“The United States has 294 military installations in Europe with 26,000 combat personnel and 34,000 military support and administrative personnel. Tomorrow I will ask Congress to make all of these personnel available to our European allies, and to approve an additional 20,000 combat personnel for Europe. In addition I will ask Congress to approve the mobilization of 40,000 troops to Pakistan and 80,000 to the Middle East. These are dramatic measures for a country on the cusp of an election, a country that four years ago decided it wanted no part of war, a country that worries that high gasoline prices will push it into another recession. But if nuclear warheads in Pakistan fall into the hands of Al Qaeda and Pakistani insurgents, there will be no security in these United States, or any place in the world. I ask you, is any price too high to pay to know that your children are safe, and that they will enjoy the same freedoms that Americans have enjoyed and fought for since the founding of our nation? We must fight for world security, and we must fight now.”

The speech was loudly cheered by the delegates. Many of the party bigwigs, however, appeared anxious, clapping politely. They imagined the polls dropping before their eyes.

As expected, the Republican response was to accuse the Democratic party of having created this dangerous situation in the first place by withdrawing from Iraq, of endangering national security by unilaterally decreasing the size of the U.S. forces to pre-9/11 numbers, and of proposing too little too late. That dreaded word flip-flop blazoned headlines of the conservative press.

“It looks like we’re going to war,” my father said. We owned four televisions, but the whole family watched the nightly news together in our parents’ bedroom. I suppose it made it all a little less scary.

“That’s a piss in the ocean,” Alex protested. “What does he think he can accomplish with eighty thousand troops in the Middle East?”

“He can’t send many more. No president can declare war before an election,” said Dad. “Not even Roosevelt had balls for that, and he was as popular as they come.”

“Gladwell won’t get enough people to enlist,” said Alex. “He’s going to have to impose a draft.”

“He for sure can’t do that before the election,” I added. “He’d get demonstrations on every college campus in the country.”

Mother hugged a pillow to her chest while watching the news. “I’m surprised Gladwell is being this aggressive,” she said. “He must know America isn’t ready for another war. It took America forever to get involved in World War Two. If it wasn’t for Pearl Harbor, we probably never would’ve gone.”

“The Republicans aren’t suggesting anything else,” said Father. “McMillan is calling for full engagement. But people trust Gladwell going to war more than the Republicans. He doesn’t sleep with the oil conglomerates. They know he will only send America to war if he really has to. Gladwell will get reelected.”

“I wouldn’t be so sure,” said Alex. “Warren Mullet has as much support as the Republicans. It could go any way.”

Despite his loss to McMillan for the Republican nomination, Florida Congressman and talk show host Warren Mullet had walked away from the Republican Convention with enormous political momentum. He was quickly tapped as the candidate for the Americans for America Party, which had worked diligently to get on the presidential ballot in all fifty states. The party, largely made up of isolationists and “traditional values” populists, supported stricter illegal immigration laws and sought to end U.S. involvement with the North American Free Trade Agreement, the World Trade Organization, and other foreign trade agreements. The party advocated the closing of all United States military bases outside of the U.S., transferring resources to the National Guard. It vigorously opposed sending U.S. troops or financial aid to Europe or to U.S. allies in the Middle East.

Contributions, mostly from working class conservative voters, flooded Mullet’s election campaign offices. His straight-talking manner and relentless call to put “America First” appealed to a population confused and terrified by what was happening in the world.

Mullet used his radio call-in show to promote his ideas, and appeared as a guest on all of the top television talk shows. Security at home was his mantra. “We must prevent what is happening in Europe from happening in the United States. We must close mosques, madrassahs, and Muslim community centers that spawn terrorists. We must close university Middle East studies programs that skew the thinking of our young people. We must expel non-citizen Muslims, and close our borders, particularly to anyone of Middle Eastern, Pakistani, or African descent. No immigration. No visas. The American Civil Liberties Union can go to hell for all I care.”

“At least we know what he stands for,” said Alex.

My parents looked worriedly at one another, my mother picking at the edge of her pillow. “Mullet doesn’t have a chance, does he, Arthur?”

“He’s going to pull Christian Fundamentalists from the Republican Party,” said my father, “and he’ll have the Independent and Libertarian vote. He might pull away anti-war Democrats. It’s hard to know. I think it matters how much Americans don’t want to go to war.”

The next day Al Jezeera broadcasted Osama bin Laden’s latest speech. “The United Nations of Islam does not fear the United States. Every day our territory increases, every day thousands join our jihad. Every week a new country joins our Islamic Union. When Allah blesses jihad, as he did twelve centuries ago, there is no stopping Him. If the United States sends troops to the Middle East, the people of America will see their own shores become the battle ground for jihad, their country torn apart as in their great Civil War.”

Oil futures closed at $190 per barrel.

AUGUST 27, 2012

This morning I found Mother in the backyard, jumping on the back of a spade, breaking up large clods of freshly turned sod. She was wearing overhauls and red rubber boots.

“What happened to the lawn?” I asked.

“I figured it was time to start a garden. You kids don’t use the yard anymore.” She ripped open a forty pound bag of soil amendment. “Help me with this, will you, Ann?” I took the other side of the bag, and we dragged it across the dirt, shaking it as we walked until it was empty.

“Why aren’t you at work?” I asked.

Mom leaned her head back and rolled it side to side, stretching out the kinks in her neck. “I could use some water. How about you?” She walked to the patio and took a swig from a water bottle that sat on the picnic table. She offered it to me.

“Mom! Tell me what’s going on.”

“Don’t get angry, pumpkin.” She took another swig and set the bottle down. “I was laid off.”

“Laid off? How come?”

“The agency lost a good chunk of their funding. High gas prices make the cost of running the city higher, and I suppose counseling for troubled teenagers is a low priority when it comes to running buses and trash collection. We’ll be okay. We’ll save on gas, and I’ll have time to do all the chores I used to pay to have done.”

“I’m sorry, Mom.”

“It’s all right. Lots of people are losing their jobs. We’ll be fine. Your dad has his own business. As long as we have a government, people will need accountants. We’ll just tighten our belts a bit. I do have something I need to talk to you about, Ann.” She looked sheepish and apologetic.

“Now you’re scaring me.”

She laughed uncomfortably. “I know it’s just before the fall semester, and I’m sorry this is so last minute, but I don’t think we can cover your tuition. If you worked a semester, your dad and I could save a bit. Maybe you could go back in January. Or transfer to a school in state.”

“I’ll lose my scholarship if I don’t go back.”

“I know, honey, but we simply can’t cover the difference.”

“What about Alex?”

“He’s been accepted at Berkeley, a full scholarship for tennis. We’ll cover his living expenses. You’ve had three years of college. He deserves to experience it. I’m sorry, pumpkin. Are you terribly disappointed?”

If anything I felt relieved. I didn’t want to go back to Canterbury without Peter. I didn’t want to have to answer questions. Without him I would feel different from everyone else, like a widow or something. But I had assumed I would go back and finish up what seemed like a dreaded obligation. Without school, what would I do with myself? “People are getting laid off all over the place, Mom. What makes you think I can get a job?”

“You could see if they’d take you back at your old summer job.”

“At St. John’s?”

“They liked you. They offered you a nursing scholarship.”

I had almost laughed when my supervisor made the offer. I had my eye on much grander things—a curator at a museum or maybe a filmmaker. “You want me to become a nurse? With my temper?”

Mom smiled. “Nurses can always get jobs. We’re going to need nurses.”

Her statement, delivered so matter-of-factly, as if she had said that we needed milk, surprised me. “You really think we’re going to have a world war? Is that why we have all that water stored in the basement?”

She shrugged. “Would you help me rake the dirt smooth? I want to get the vegetables in while it’s still cool. I found these heirloom tomato seeds from a company in Seattle. They’re supposed to bear fruit all winter long.”

Ours wasn’t the first victory garden on the block. One of the first signs that things were getting tough was that the gardeners stopped coming. One could live without a neat lawn. The price of groceries had gone up, even in California where most of the fruits and vegetables were grown. People began turning under their sod to plant gardens. That saved on gas going to the supermarket as well. And newly unemployed women who had worked all their lives suddenly needed something to do. All of the gardens gave a rural feeling to Santa Monica. Block after block you could see women dressed in jeans, clogs, and straw hats hoeing dirt and tying up peas and beans. Children sold extra produce from card tables in their driveways on Saturday mornings. As if this was the way it always had been.

Dad hired a plumber to divert our shower and sink water into a cistern to use in the garden. Mother had shelves built in the coolest part of our basement and bought boxes of Ball canning jars. It seemed a little crazy to me, but her mother had lived in London as a teenager during the Blitzkreig. The new V-2 rockets that Hitler launched on Britain late in the war in September 1944 had wiped out Grandmother’s neighborhood and killed her in-laws. My mother had grown up with these tales.

Mom wasn’t being paranoid. She felt a reality to the threat of war that I couldn’t possibly imagine.

#

I packed my college textbooks in boxes to take to the attic. I won’t need them for a while. I loved the weight of the books, especially the art history books filled with gorgeous reproductions of Italian Renaissance paintings. As I flipped through books on color theory and aesthetics, striped cover to cover with yellow highlighter, I wondered what I had read that had seemed so important. I thought of how Anne Frank treasured her books, how determined she was to continue her education even in hiding, how she and her sister competed for who would read a book first. Books fed her hopes and dreams. I thought of the hours I had spent looking through my Janson’s History of Art, transported by beauty. Now all of that seemed over.

I felt as if I were putting away something precious, something I might never see again, as if I were renouncing the world and entering a cloister. It made me incredibly sad.

Several of Peter’s books were mixed in with mine. Last year at Canterbury we had practically lived together, so I wasn’t surprised. A piece of paper slipped out from between the pages of his book The Media of Diaspora. It was a magazine article from the German magazine Der Spiegel printed from the Internet. I had taken two years of college German, enough to get the gist of the article. It talked about the illicit sale of Middle Eastern antiquities, objects plundered from the Iraqi museum after the fall of Saddam Hussein, as well as Persian and Egyptian artifacts. Egypt was apparently suing various museums around the world to get its treasures back from the fifty-five pieces stolen from a Luxor temple storeroom in 1987. They recovered a statue of Amenhotep III from a collector in The Hague. I was wondering why Peter would have been interested in the article, when I noticed the name of the European art dealer named in the suit. It took me a moment to recall Leo Kern, the dealer pointed out by Marjon in the art gallery in Amsterdam.

So Peter had known who Leo Kern was. Why had he been interested in him?

I went to my computer and looked up Leo Kern on the internet. I found dozens of articles about his involvement in the revitalization of the European art market, particularly of post modern surrealism. I found no other articles linking him to trafficking Middle Eastern antiquities. I was clueless.

Later I called Greg Sewell from a pay phone. “Sure I know the name,” he said. “Peter was studying how money flowed to the terrorists—you know, ‘follow the money’—and how African diamonds and stolen antiquities were funding terrorism. Leo Kern was one of those suspected of trafficking in antiquities of dubious provenance and giving the money to various terrorist cells.”

“You’re kidding. How did Peter find that out?”

“The Internet. Maybe from his friends. I don’t know.”

“We saw Leo Kern in Amsterdam.”

“Really? Where?”

“By accident at a gallery opening. Peter was clearly upset about seeing him.”

“He was probably worried about you. If he’d been alone, I bet he would’ve gone up and talked to him.”

“You don’t think he might go back, do you? To find out more?”

“I don’t know. He’d have to get a fake passport. But he already knew how to do that.”

“What do you mean?”

“He looked into it and told me about it. Maybe it was for one of his Muslim friends.”

I was beginning to get a very queer feeling—Peter as Jason Bourne with fake passports stashed in airport lockers around the world. “Thanks, Greg.”

“No problem,” he said.

“Greg?”

“Yeah.”

“You thought Peter was a good, don’t you? I mean, he wouldn’t….”

I could hear Greg breathing, thinking. “Peter was the most decent guy I ever met,” he said.

“Thanks, Greg.”

When I hung up the phone I felt weak and dizzy. All that I thought I knew about Peter, and my memories, all that we shared together seemed—like water—to be draining away between the fingers of my cupped hands.

I leaned against the wall of the convenience store beside the pay phone. It smelled of urine.

NOVEMBER 6, 2012

I got a job, the nightshift at St. John’s Hospital. Working nights leaves me free to attend nursing classes in the afternoon. I can’t sleep at night anyhow.

It might seem strange that someone as self-absorbed as I would ever consider nursing. During my senior year of high school, a friend of mine applied to be a nurse’s aide. I tagged along. My friend quit after a month, but I stayed on and went back every summer during college. I started taking classes. The messy logic of the body appealed to me, how it evolved, adapting from what already existed, experimenting, failing, then coming up with something that worked. I liked the idea that the human genome shared genes from simpler species, a library of life. I liked the Latin names, the procedures, the amazing way bodies defended themselves. Yet I had no interest in pursuing medicine as a career.

Now nursing is the only thing that makes sense.

My shift starts at 6 P.M. Most patients watch television while they eat dinner, so when I pick up their trays and check their medicine cups, I can catch most of the nightly news.

Each day the reports are worse. UNI fighters have begun to mine the Strait of Hormuz, the eight mile wide passage where every seven minutes a double-hulled supper tanker full of Middle Eastern oil travels to the Arabian Sea. The U.S. Navy has put mine sweepers to work, but tankers are bottlenecked and distribution as slowed.

On top of that the UNI initiated a wave of terrorist activities on oil and gas fields in Qatar, Kuwait, and the United Arab Emirates. Oil futures have jumped to $210 per barrel.

President Gladwell has assured the public that the government has enough in its strategic reserves to keep America running for sixty days, but analysts predict that the cost for oil will soar even higher.

Things are also not getting any better in Europe. Ultraconservatives of France’s National Front and Germany’s National Democratic Party won elections, which led to renewed rioting from their Muslim populations. The new German premier has promised to close mosques, deport non-citizen Muslims, and limit Muslim rights in ways that seems uncomfortably close to Hitler’s restrictions imposed on Jews: Muslims are banned from owning firearms, are banned from trains or airplanes, are not allowed to serve in the military or public office, are barred from public assistance of any kind, including higher education. The majority opinion is that the measures are just and necessary. Finland, the largest oil producing country in Europe, has handled its unrest simply and swiftly: all Muslims have been expelled from the country. Fortunately, their Muslim population was only a few thousand. Sweden refused the refugees, but Denmark has finally taken them in.

The presidential elections were last night. I monitored the exit polls as I went from room to room at St. Johns: Mullet led with 38%, Gladwell 35%, McMillan 22%, with 5% to other candidates. By the time I got to Romney Teagarden’s room, the polls were closed except for the West Coast.

Teagarden was an elderly black man who had been in the hospital for over a month. He had trouble sleeping, so whenever I had extra time, I popped into his room to chat. His scarred and dented face belied his dainty name and diction. He was a wise and funny man.

With half of the precincts having reported, there was no clear winner. The liberal Democratic states supported Gladwell, while the South and the Midwest were evenly divided between Mullet and McMillan. By midnight, when the hospital corridors got quiet and I sat down with Teagarden, the fate of the country rested on three states: Ohio, Wisconsin, and Florida.

As always, Teagarden pushed away the sleeping pills I set beside him. “We could save the country a lot of time and money and just hold elections in Florida,” he said. “They appear to decide our presidents anyhow. Why not make it easy on ourselves?”

“Mullet is from Florida,” I said.

“Doesn’t mean anything. Gladwell has always been popular there, especially among blacks. I think he’s got a good chance.”

“That is if they actually count the black vote.”

“Hmmm.”

“Did you vote, Mr. Teagarden?” I asked.

“You bet I did. Gladwell is a good man. I believe he is the man to lead our country.”

“Do good men win?”

“We’ll see, won’t we?”

The elections still hadn’t been decided when I got home from work at around 3 A.M. I ate a snack and went to bed. When I woke around noon, I still didn’t find out.

For the third time in history, and not since 1824, none of the presidential candidates won enough electoral votes to win. Of the 538 electoral votes, a presidential candidate needed an electoral majority of 270 to win. Between the three candidates, the electoral votes fell as follows: Gladwell, 235; Mullet, 214; McMillan, 89. As dictated by Article II of The United States Constitution, the decision rested with the House of Representatives.

The House of Representatives immediately went into session, voting en-block by state, one vote per state determined by the majority of delegates from that state. The vote continued until one candidate received more than half of the state delegations, 26 state votes. After three ballots, no candidate had 26 states. Finally, on the forth ballot, Republican delegates in three states swung their votes to Mullet. Democratic candidate Joseph Finkelstein, chosen by the Senate, won the vice presidency.

Nobody can believe it. Even though Gladwell had won the majority of both electoral and popular votes, Warren P. Mullet is our new president.

The television commentators and news columnists, trying to explain the election results, conclude that despite the map-changing horrors that were taking place in Europe and the Middle East, Americans did not feel compelled to spend any more money or send any more soldiers to a never ending crisis. Americans were weary of the Middle East. They resented that Europe had created its problems by allowing huge numbers of Muslim immigrants and now wanted America’s help to control them. To many Americans, Warren Mullet represented a solid, old-fashioned American male, who would protect American values and keep it safe from the excessive liberalism that had brought down Europe and had, through Gladwell’s Cultural Accommodation Policy, threatened America’s vision of itself as a Christian nation. Americans wanted life to go back to normal, completely unwilling to entertain the possibility that normal might not be in the cards.

The American Civil Liberties Union as well as moderate Muslim groups—including the Council on American-Islamic Relations and the Islamic Society of North America—were outraged, concerned that Mullet planned to violate the First Amendment Right to freedom of religion. By the time I got to work that evening, bands of Muslim demonstrators were marching outside government buildings in New York, Detroit, Los Angeles, and Chicago.

By evening a riot broke out on the west side of Detroit.

It began in a bar on the border between a mixed neighborhood and a white working-class part of town where Warren Mullet supporters were celebrating his victory. A handful of Arab youth threw a rock into the bar window. Before the police arrived, a fight spilled into the street. As the police began arresting everyone involved and waited for the backup vans to transport the arrestees, an angry crowd of spectators gathered, which then headed into the Muslim part of the city, growing in mass like lava pouring down a volcano. Looting and fires spread through the northwest part of Detroit, then crossed over to the east side.

Every mosque they came to was burned to the ground.

#

I checked on Cynthia before I went to work. I knew she was upset about the elections and the riot.

As I pushed open her door, I thought of all the times I had babysat her, fed her dinner, and read her to sleep. I was eight years older and had in a way always felt that she was my—not my parents’—responsibility. When I was younger, it made me furious whenever they left for an evening out or on a vacation, not because I felt unfairly burdened, but because I was appalled that they could be so unfeeling. Maybe they never knew how hard it was on her—I never told them, and when they returned Cynthia cavorted like a puppy, which probably dismissed any worries they had. They didn’t know her fear, her loneliness. Not like I did.

Cynthia asked me to read her a story from her children’s book of Islamic tales. “Kan ya ma kan,” it began, the Arabic equivalent to Once upon a time. “There was and there was not a time.” The story was about a man who walks to market with his son and their donkey. A neighbor stops them and tells the father that he ought to let his son ride, so he sets his son on the donkey. As they amble on, they pass a traveler who scolds the son for riding while his father walks, so the man helps his son down and climbs on the donkey. A third person then reprimands the father for his selfishness in making his son walk, so the father pulls up his son beside him. “The poor donkey,” cries out another, berating them for making the donkey carry such a heavy load. Fed up, the father hoists the donkey on his shoulders and staggers down the road, until someone laughs at him for being a fool. He sets the donkey down, takes his son’s hand, and they set off to market as before, the donkey by their side.

“I guess the story means we shouldn’t listen to advice from other people,” Cynthia said.

“You should listen to the voice inside.”

“To God,” she said, then added thoughtfully, “If God is the voice inside then he can’t be Muslim or Christian can he, because that’s on the outside. That’s people telling you what to believe, right?”

“How did you get to be so smart?”

Cynthia smiled, then her face turned pensive again. “So why is everybody fighting?”

“Come on, don’t start crying again.”

“I won’t,” she said, her eyes welling up. “Miss Jiluwis says that happiness is only realized in the face of unhappiness. Do you think that’s true?”

Fingers of ice squeezed my heart. Cynthia had been confiding her unhappiness to her teacher rather than her family. How could I be so blind? It seemed like every problem, every insensitivity, every fuckup in our family scored a raw grove into Cynthia, hurting her in a way we would never understand. I was guilty as anyone. I was her sister. “You feel that you aren’t happy anymore, but you used to be happy?” I asked.

“I used to be stupid,” she said.

NOVEMBER 21, 2012

For a week following the election, as I went from room to room during my hospital shift, changing bedpans and taking temperatures, I caught glimpses of the Detroit riots on television.

I couldn’t believe this was happening in America.

The day after the first riot erupted, buses of teenagers from Dearborn, Michigan arrived in Detroit, armed and ready to join the fight. The National Guard was mobilized, and on the third day of riots, 4,000 Marines were deployed. Police and military troops tried block by block to suppress the crowds and restore order. Many of the rioters were armed and shot at the troops. After seven days of rioting, 843 were dead, 2,356 injured, 10,000 were arrested, and more than 2,000 buildings had burned down.

“I haven’t seen anything like it since the Rodney King riots in ninety-two,” said Teagarden. “A billion dollars worth of damage and nothing changed. They are only going to make things worse for themselves.”

Copycat riots broke out in several cities. In Chicago mobs rampaged through business districts, breaking windows and looting. Mosques were set aflame in New Jersey and Toledo. Hundreds of protestors confronted police in Los Angeles, which broke out into a skirmish. St. John’s got overflow from Cedar Sinai in Culver City, mostly burns and blunt trauma to the head. I was told to help out in the emergency room. I performed first aid on people lined up in the hallway waiting to see a doctor. Screaming and crying. I couldn’t believe it.

President Gladwell spoke to the nation, denouncing “random terror and lawlessness.” He outlined federal assistance he was making available to the mayors of Detroit, Chicago, and Los Angeles, where the worst of the rioting occurred. He asserted that “brutality, racism, and religious intolerance will not be tolerated,” and that he and Congress guaranteed the protection of every American’s Constitutional rights.

After nine days of riots, Detroit settled down. The mayor lifted the curfew, and schools, banks, and businesses reopened. Federal troops will remain in the city for another two weeks.

The Muslim community in the Detroit/Dearborn area, estimated at 200,000 Muslims, protested that the police and military used excessive force. At many Dearborn schools, many of which were 90 percent Muslim, held peaceful rallies. Outside the Bint Jebail Cultural Center in Dearborn, long suspected of Hezbollah connections, twenty thousand demonstrated in protest.

The mayor of Dearborn, Samir Marzouk, who had previously been considered a moderate Muslim, called for a self-defense militia to protect the two largest mosques in North America—the Islamic Center of America and the Islamic House of Wisdom. “Islam,” he proclaimed to a crowd of several thousand, “makes it incumbent on all adult males, provided they are not disabled or incapacitated, to defend the writ of Islam in every country in the world.” He led a group composed of local Muslim leaders to draw up an edict declaring Dearborn an “Islamic Community” that would operate under Sharia law.

Many Sharia laws are illegal under U.S. law—allowing men four wives, requiring women to cover themselves outside of the home and to be accompanied by a husband or male relative, requiring that women marry only Muslims, or violated international human rights, such as whipping for public drunkenness, and stoning for adultery and apostasy—but in Dearborn, they became the law of the land. Bars and movie theaters were closed. Secular schools were made into Islamic schools. Suspected homosexuals were arrested and whipped.

Anyone who does not obey Sharia law is subject to punishment by the mutawas, the morality police, a group of men elected among the local Islamic clerics. They patrol the streets in black Mercedes with dark windows, dragging violators to jail—the girl with a short skirt, the woman without a headscarf, the couple holding hands. I think of them as Hitler’s Black Shirts. Women are not allowed in an automobile with a male unless he is a close relative, and if the mutawas become suspicious, they have the authority to stop a vehicle and check identification.

There is little crime now in Dearborn, Michigan.

Non-Muslims are allowed to stay in Dearborn, but they have to pay an extra tax, a dhimmis tax. According to Islamic law, second-class dhimmis are not allowed to marry Muslim women, to have Muslim employees, or to defend themselves if attacked by a Muslim. In Dearborn, they also are not allowed to serve as teachers or in local government, and their children are required to attend Islamic schools, which includes Islamic religious instruction,and history taught from a Muslim point of view. Girls are allowed in school, but no objection is made by the Islamic school superintendent if girls are kept home.

The most surprising thing is that most non-Muslims have not left Dearborn. Just like in Holland. They accept the new government and its rules, citing the lack of crime, rising real estate values, and excellent schools as reasons for staying.

Neither state nor federal authorities have intervened. No elected official wants to appear to violate any citizen’s freedom to practice his religion.

NOVEMBER 22, 2012

I woke this morning to a sound that is prohibited in our house—a television blaring before noon. I wandered into the kitchen. My mother was eating breakfast watching the news. Cynthia was making a sandwich to take to school.

Cynthia looked comical with her bike shorts under her grey-plaid uniform. Because of gasoline prices, the school bus no longer picked her up. Cynthia biked. She was making was a peanut butter sandwich. No baloney for her. She insisted on hahal meat—like kosher, killed and prepared according to Sharia law—which meant a drive for Mom to an Islamic butcher shop in Culver City, an extravagance she only occasionally indulged.

As I said good morning, Mother turned up the volume on the television. The news reported that the royal family of Saudi Arabia, our strongest ally in the Middle East, had been toppled in a bloodless coup by the radical wing of Wahabis. An emir was selected from the clerics, and Saudi Arabia had joined the United Nations of Islam.

Even before the Jenever Theater murders, the riots in Europe, and the renewed fatah declared by Osama bin Laden, Wahabi clerics had begun to impose Salafi radicals in Saudi Government and in the military. Afraid of losing power, many royal family members joined the Salafis. Others gave them money. Political analysts had been predicting the fall of the house of Al Sa’ud for years. Now it had happened.

Without the support of Saudi Arabia, American interests in the Persian Gulf would be impossible to defend. If President Gladwell didn’t do something soon, Israel would, which might mean nuclear war in the Middle East.

“The President won’t drop the bomb on them, will he, Mother?” Cynthia eyes welled up with tears as she dutifully continued making her sandwich.

Mother gave me a hard look—I suppose she wanted me to change the channel or distract Cynthia with a joke, but I stood like a zombie, surprised at my sister’s now convulsive sobs.

“I don’t know, honey,” Mother said, “We’ll have to wait and see.” She got up from the table and put her arms around Cynthia, who held in suspension a dinner knife with a glob of peanut butter, unable to either set it down or spread it on her bread.

NOVEMBER 30, 2012

There was no lame duck session for President Elliot Gladwell. Too much was happening. Congress, which had recessed during the election, agreed to extend its session through Christmas.

This past week Gladwell persuaded Congress to institute a peacetime draft. He arranged to send surplus weapons to Great Britain, just as Roosevelt had in 1940. Greece, which the EU had chosen as the staging area for troops to fight UNI aggression in Turkey, received warplanes and other U.S. military supplies. In addition Gladwell initiated a massive rearming campaign in all of the services, winning congressional approval for a multi-billion dollar naval construction program. He proposed doubling the size of the navy and increasing troop strength to 2 million. In an executive order, Gladwell transferred forty aging destroyers to the Aegean Sea in exchange for basing rights in six strategic locations in Greece. “‘We must be the great arsenal of democracy,’” he said, quoting Roosevelt.

The president elect was unhappy with Gladwell’s actions, but there was nothing Warren Mullet could do until after his inauguration.

The map on my wall was now covered with red pins. All of northern Africa, Nigeria, Sudan, Chad, Somalia, Eritrea, the Arabian Peninsula, Iraq, Jordan, Afghanistan, all the ‘stan’ countries, and now UNI troops had crossed from Morocco into Spain. The Islamic Republic of Holland controlled Belgium, Denmark, and many towns of northern France.

When it all seemed too unbelievable, I reminded myself that Hitler took France in forty-two days.

Surely there were people in Egypt and Saudi Arabia and Qatar who resented the loss of personal liberty, who did not want a culture that incited the abuse and suppression of women, who did not want a religion that mandated medieval punishments, who believed in peace and tolerance, and could see the benefits of living among people of different faiths. And yet they allowed the UNI to take over their governments and impose Sharia law.

There was no end in sight.

#

Alex peeked into my bedroom a little after noon as I was cramming for an exam on the endocrine systems. He and I had hardly spoken since he got back from Berkeley. In fact by working nights and studying for my nursing classes during the days, I managed to avoid almost everyone in the family, except my mother, whom I bumped into while she prepared dinner and I was running out the door to work.

Alex was not home on Thanksgiving vacation. When Alex arrived from Berkeley, he announced that he had lost his scholarship for refusing to play tennis.

My father was livid. “How can you accept a scholarship, then refuse to play tennis? We can’t afford to send you to college without a scholarship. How can you throw it all away?”

“I can’t play tennis when the world is exploding. I look at the ball and some guy hopping back-and-forth in front of me—it’s stupid. Besides, I don’t need college.”

“Then exactly what do you plan to do with yourself?” father demanded.

“I’m joining the Marines.”

“Absolutely not!” said my father. “Do you know how many innocent Iraqis were killed in Bush’s stupid war? Over one hundred thousand. Did it solve anything? No.”

“What about the millions that Muslims have killed in Sudan? In Somalia? In India? What about the people murdered in Holland and Germany and France?”

“We will find another way to stop them.”

“There is no other way. They weren’t stopped until the First World War, and now that they have oil money, they’ll never stop.”

“War is immoral.”

“Your morality is for shit, Dad. You’d allow fascist Islamists to take over the world. But then your job is to help people get out of paying taxes. Some morality.”

“Sure, I’m immoral. But my clients pay plenty of taxes. If they paid more, it would just pay for war.”

“I’m joining the Marines, and there’s nothing you can say to stop me.”

Alex asked me to give him a ride to the Marine recruiting office in East Los Angeles. He signed up with one of his friends. That was a few weeks ago. They had gone to briefing sessions. And now he was reporting for duty. It was my day off, so I agreed to take him.

“You won’t make it through boot camp,” I teased as we breezed through downtown. The speed limit had been changed from 65 mph to 50 mph, but the light traffic made speeding irresistible. “Since when have you gotten up before nine? The only time you clean your room is when you can’t find your sneakers beneath the pizza boxes.”

“I’m gonna change. You’re gonna change. We’re all gonna change or die.”

I scoffed at Alex as I would if he were ranting about some football team I couldn’t care less about. But something was different, and my laughter sounded hollow to me.

Before he said goodbye, Alex told me that I could have his tennis racket. His generosity—completely out of character—left me feeling uneasy.

#

That evening, Cynthia pushed open my door with her gentle knocks. She was wearing shorts and a T-shirt, and looked anxious. I patted my bed. She sat beside me, looking around the room as if it were unfamiliar to her. She asked me if I had taken Alex to the Marines that day, and I said yes.

“Is Alex going to kill Muslims?” she asked.

“I wouldn’t worry about it. Even if he makes it through basic training, which I doubt, there are lots of military jobs that don’t require shooting a gun.”

“How can he hate Muslims if he doesn’t know any? If he knew Miss Jiluwis, he wouldn’t hate her.”

“He’d probably fall in love with her.”

“What if I become a Muslim? Will he hate me? Will he be ordered to kill me? What’s going to happen to us?” Her questions spewed out, rushed and plaintive. “Christmas is going to be awful without Alex here. I don’t know if I even should celebrate Christmas. Why didn’t our parents ever take us to church? How could they do that to us? There’s a dance and Seth has asked me to go, and I don’t know if I should. I missed my period. I hate getting my period so I’m kind of glad, but I don’t want to get sick. I know it’s the fasting during Ramadan that did it. I don’t like to eat anymore. Dinners are awful with everyone so mad at each other, and you’re not even there most of the time so it’s just Mom and Dad. I don’t know what to do. Why can’t things go back to the way they were before?”

She threw herself into my arms sobbing, hiccupping through her tears. As I stroked her hair, I tried to recall the giggly knock-kneed girl in a miniskirt who loved more than anything to go to the mall with her girlfriends and try on makeup, who sat by the indoor fountain, crossing and uncrossing her gangly legs, hoping the boys would notice her, smirking at the disapproving glances from middle-aged women and the blank stares of embarrassed men, which sent her and her friends squealing in paroxysms of derisive laughter. I tried to recall the girl who could eat an entire pint of Ben & Jerry’s Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough ice cream in front of the television set, self-consciously observing in the mirror how her tongue curled and uncurled around the spoon, who was both proud of and uncomfortable with her new breasts, and who would ask me if I thought she was pretty and what was her prettiest feature. That silly girl was now this wretched confused creature, sobbing in my arms, saying she wanted to die.

DECEMBER 1, 2012

Time has begun to feel so strange. I am so busy that I hardly get time to write in my journal.

The world outside of America feels like it’s spinning out of control. But here in Santa Monica the world seems to have slowed down. Nobody is in a rush to get anywhere. No one is zipping off on vacation. No one is dashing off to the store. People stay at home. They work in their gardens. They go for walks. At the local bars business is great.

After eleven PM, when things get quiet on the ward, I sometimes flip through the magazines lying around in the lounge. In the December issue of Vanity Fair I read that in the Long Count of the Mayan calendar, December 21, 2012 is the completion of the thirteenth B’ak’tun cycle, which many believe portends the end of the world. At dawn on the day of the winter solstice, the sun will conjunct the intersection of the Milky Way and the plain of the ecliptic, which hasn’t happened for 26,000 years. A change in world order is imminent.

“Someone is always predicting the end of the world,” Mr. Teagarden said after I read him the article to amuse him.

“Why do you think that is?” I asked.

“They get tired of watching the same old news.” He clicked his wand at the television screen, which showed the Islamic army moving from Holland through Belgium into northern France, where they were greeted as liberators by the Muslim populations of Lille, Calais, and Roubaix. French and NATO troops were battling hard to contain the advance, but were losing ground in the industrial cities of the North. Paris was less than two hundred miles away. “Did you bring me some chocolate today?” Teagarden asked.

Before I handed him a Godiva bar, I stripped off the outside wrapper and hid it in my pocket, careful not to leave evidence for the nurse Nazis. “We haven’t had any terrorist attacks in the United States since nine-eleven. You think our homeland security is working?”

Teagarden laughed. “I figure the terrorists have their hands full with Europe. They probably realize that an attack on America would bring the might of the entire United States military down on them. Like in World War II. That’d be the end of jihad.”

“But they will attack the U.S. at some point.”

“They’ll come, sure enough. But we should give them some credit for strategy. It took them years to plan nine-eleven.”

“What kind of strategy?”

“These are patient guys. They’ll try to weaken us from the inside. Like they did in Europe, but different. Then they’ll come at us from a position of power.”

“Like when they have the nuclear bomb.”

“Touché, my dear. Any time now.”

#

Often I wake thinking of Anne Frank. As I turn on NPR, I imagine her sitting with her family around the radio, taking in the B.B.C. reports of British planes dropping a half million kilos of bombs on Ijmuiden, or the gassing of Jews in Westerbork, or the fall of Algiers.

I think of her torment as she heard of her Jewish friends dragged off, of children coming home from school to find their parents gone, abandoned to the street to beg from strangers a crust a bread. I think of Cynthia, a girl her age, appalled as she watches countries in Europe exile Muslims and ban their religion, frightened that the U.S. government will soon strike out against the religion that inspires her. The compassion and anguish of the two young girls moves me. I feel ashamed that the only suffering I have to compare is my longing for Peter, a fugitive, possible terrorist, who probably has forgotten me long ago. My suffering is self-imposed, more for my entertainment than real.

I think of how Anne’s love for her Peter was more in her head than a reality, a way of dealing with loneliness and the endless hours of waiting. Confined together, they had no one else and turned to each other. In her imagination, Anne built it into a great romance, combining his qualities with another Peter she once loved, turning them into the image of an ideal lover, an image that would be all she would ever know of love. I realized that my Peter, too, is a figure of my imagination, a romantic hero, borne of my loneliness. What excuse do I have? I am not fourteen, I am not stuck in hiding. Yet I cling to my imaginary Peter as did Anne.