Authors: Ruth Francisco
“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 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.
#
Time began to feel so strange.
The world outside of America felt like it was spinning out of control.
But here in Santa Monica the world seemed to have slowed down.
Nobody was in a rush to get anywhere.
No one was zipping off on vacation.
No one was dashing off to the store.
People stayed home.
They worked in their gardens.
They went for walks.
The local bars were busy.
After eleven PM, when things got quiet on the ward, I sometimes flipped through 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 was the completion of the thirteenth
B’ak’tun
cycle, which many believed portended the end of the world.
At dawn on the day of the winter solstice, the sun would conjunct the intersection of the Milky Way and the plane of the ecliptic, which hadn’t happened for 26,000 years.
A change in world order was 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 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 woke up thinking of Anne Frank.
As I turned on NPR, I imagined 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 thought 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 thought of Cynthia, a girl her age, appalled as she watched countries in Europe exile Muslims and ban their religion, frightened the U.S. government would soon strike out against the religion that inspired her.
The compassion and anguish of the two young girls moved me.
I felt ashamed—the only suffering I had to compare was my longing for Peter, a fugitive, possible terrorist, who had probably forgotten about me long ago.
My suffering was self-imposed, more for my entertainment than real.
I thought 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 my Peter, too, was a figure of my imagination, a romantic hero, borne of my loneliness.
What excuse did I have?
I was not
fourteen,
I was not stuck in hiding.
Yet I clung to my imaginary Peter as much as Anne did.
I swore to myself I would become less selfish and more compassionate.
It seemed nearly everyone had it much worse than I.
I would stop thinking of myself so much and of all I wanted and couldn’t have.
I thought of how Anne never lost hope; gazing out the window at the first signs of spring, the blooming chestnut tree, listening to the birds, the sun warm on her cheek, she thought of her future.
#
It was bitter cold the following Sunday.
January 20, Inauguration Day.
Snow blanketed Washington, the day was clear.
A group of around five hundred Muslim women demonstrated in Lafayette Park across the street from the White House, covered head to foot in black.
They looked like grackles scavenging for bird feed in the snow.
Warren P. Mullet’s inaugural speech was wildly patriotic, talking about the “grand and enduring ideals” that united the country, “faith in freedom and democracy” in a “raging sea of Islamic fascism.”
He mentioned several times that “God’s country,” despite the different backgrounds and interests, was united by principals “guided by His direction.”
Inaugural speeches almost always invoked God, but President Mullet’s speech sounded like the establishment of a theocracy.
He mentioned God twenty-six times.
I counted.
“We must have a single nation of freedom, justice, and opportunity under God,” he said.
“One nation under God,” he intoned again and again.
When he stated “every child must learn these ideals,” and “we must reclaim our schools,” many read it as a reversal of
Gladwell’s
Cultural Accommodation Policies, and when he said “if we let our economy decline, we make ourselves vulnerable to the evil of the world,” and “we will protect this nation from attack and emerging threats from without and from within,” people understood he meant to keep troops at home, and to crack down on Muslim dissidents.
Within a week, Mullet proposed a bill in Congress to rescind federal funding for eighth grade instruction in world religions such as Cynthia attended, and to withdraw federal funding for Muslim schools, colleges, and community centers.
“The inclusion of Islamic ideas and New Age Spiritualism is a move by liberals to draw support of their cause against the Christian roots of America,” he said.
Demonstrations continued in Muslim communities across the nation, but were for the most part nonviolent.
Muslims were preparing for the worst, retracting into segregated communities.
Apart from Dearborn, several neighborhoods in Detroit declared themselves “Islamic Communities,” followed by large Muslim populations in Toledo, Minneapolis, New York, New Jersey, and Tampa.
Like Dearborn, they set up Islamic courts, schools, and installed their own morality police to uphold
Sharia
law.
There were three so-called Islamic communities in Los Angeles County: one in Encino, one in South Central Los Angeles, and one in Culver City.
In those communities, crime and gang violence disappeared.
As the drug trade vanished, people began to walk the streets again.
Even the non-Muslims in these neighborhoods—most of whom were either Baptist or Catholic—were grateful.
Los Angeles Mayor Malcolm Jefferson, who was a member of the Nation of Islam, applauded the Los Angeles Police Department and the Islamic Communities for working together, and invited Islamic leaders to participate in community outreach programs to reduce crime in the rest of the city.
He praised the closing of the ubiquitous corner liquor stores that had been such
a blight
, and supported the Islamic community centers with their computer labs and educational programs open to the non-Muslim community.
A strange paradox began to emerge.
The more it looked like the United States would join Europe against Islamic jihad, and the more President Mullet and his supporters vilified Muslims in America, the stronger the cry for religious freedom.
In many urban areas, where wealthy Muslim donors had poured money into charity, people of all faiths strongly supported their Islamic communities and resisted Mullet’s “fascism.”