The True American: Murder and Mercy in Texas (42 page)

When Rais arrived at the Napoletanos’ home that week, he found among its floral, woody, homey Americana decor a prayer rug, arranged to guide him toward Mecca, in the guest room. He had come to speak at a Christian church, and there was a prayer rug in his bedroom! He couldn’t believe it.

“They are Christian, I’m Muslim, and I’m staying in their house and praying in their room; they made a special rug for me,” Rais said. Their example made him wonder why the larger society was perpetually up in arms. “Why can’t it be this entire country like this house?” he asked. This idea appealed to him, and he returned to it later: “We can take this as an example and just multiply, increase the size of this house—make it this country.”

A
T DUSK, RAIS
and the Napoletanos drove to Christ Episcopal Church for the first installment of the two-night presentation. On the way, they passed a white house with a small shop on the premises. Staked in the yard was a three-line sign. The first and third lines were in small, regular type; the middle line was in a larger font and all capitals:

We sell

AMERICAN GIRLS

dolls and accessories

Out of nowhere, this angered Rais. He sniffed that the sign was clearly trying to make people think that the store sold American girls rather than American Girl dolls and accessories. He seemed to believe that the shop owner was playing on some sinister fantasy. Moments like this were a reminder that Rais’s faith, which seldom came across as rigid or doctrinaire in his everyday dealings, was the lens through which he regarded everything. It accounted for his tendency to perceive in the most ordinary events the tragedy of degeneracy. It had helped him to see America’s situation with some insight, but it could also make for stranger reactions.

The church was small and old, wooden and white, set in the dense forest of Middle Haddam. Upon arriving, Linda was nervous. Would people come? It wasn’t like she hadn’t pamphleted and e-mailed enough—but would the parishioners show to see her Muslim Texan friend? She warned Rais, who was relaxed and milling about in his blazer and khakis, that attendance might not be what she’d hoped. “Perfect,” he told her. “Even if just two people show up …”

Rais had gotten the routine down pat. He set up his Toshiba laptop on the table, hooked it up to the projector, and fired up PowerPoint. On the screen appeared the logo of World Without Hate. Behind the screen happened to stand a statue of Jesus, which Rais later marveled at as yet another example of the mashed-up tolerance the world needed. He fiddled with the assortment of computer files he had gathered for his presentation—videos of Stroman, TV clips, news articles, pictures of himself before and after the day of the attack. Linda and Dick, meanwhile, were fussing over the audio, trying to get just right the connections among the amplifier, microphones, computer, and projector. There was a brief panic over whether they needed the headphone-jack-to-headphone-jack cable, or the one with red and white on one end, or the yellow one. Yellow, it turned out.

Then they began to trickle in, the parishioners of Middle Haddam, most of them older, almost all of them white, none of them anything
like Rais. But here they were. They filled the pews, whispered and waited.

Rais began his show: first a video presentation about the shootings in 2001 and his campaign many years later, followed by an onstage interview of him by a visiting pastor from New York. Rais opened with a blessing, explaining that it was a tradition of Muslims when they addressed others: “I begin in the name of almighty God, the most gracious and most merciful.”

He told his strange, sweeping story: his origins in Bangladesh; his journey into and out of the Air Force; his American fantasy-turned-reality; the fiancée he once had; his victory in the Diversity Visa lottery; his move to Dallas; that rainy day in September 2001, when he was not supposed to be working; his rebuilding and recovery, piece by overwhelming piece. He spoke also of his campaign to save Stroman, and now his effort to save Stroman’s children from becoming their father. His organization, he said, was dedicated to interrupting the cycle of hate, violence, and lack of education.

When the time came for audience questions, hands shot up across the church. Rais deftly took them one by one, charming the audience, honoring their faith as much as his own, deflecting when he didn’t want to go there.

A woman named Rose stood up and apologized, first of all, for stepping out during the interview. She was cooking for the reception afterward and had to check the oven. “My question goes back to something a little more personal,” she continued. “You had said in your early discussion that your father had a stroke, that you had a fiancée, and I don’t know if you married. How did your life go from those very sad events, which compounded your sorrow and misery, to where you are today? It would be a comfort to know that you are with someone who loves you and nurtures you, and that your father’s well—where do things stand in your life and relationships?”

“It’s a very good question,” Rais began, though his considerable
practice with Q&As had taught him how to avoid answering it. “Well, I was taught by my parents that whatever happens, happens for good reasons. There are good reasons behind, and God loves us so much, He doesn’t want us to go through any kind of pain and sufferings. But sometimes we go through—it’s a test for us.”

Rais then reprised a favorite theme of his, the idea that God had saved him for reasons that he was only beginning to understand: “God could have taken me on September 21. He took two others; He could have taken me. But He did not. Definitely there are important reasons behind. That’s why He kept me alive. Maybe there is something that could be done through me in the future in course of time. That’s why He put me through that.”

Rais often spoke of himself as God’s instrument, and as he built on the idea in the church, he had to catch himself. “If you look at the life of Abraham,” he began, “if you look at the life of all the—I’m not a prophet, so don’t get me wrong. Just saying that I was taught all these stories at my childhood. Look at their lives—they went through one after one test—pain and suffering in their lives. God could have stopped that right away. But there was a reason behind. So because of those teachings, when I was going through all this disaster, I never asked God, ‘Why I was shot?’ ”

Rais added, “Definitely God wants me to go through these hardships. It’s a learning curve for me. Maybe something good is waiting for me.”

W
HAT AWAITED HIM
the next morning was a great deal of work. The Air Force man who became a Buckner Food Mart man who became an Olive Garden man who became an entry-level IT engineer was now a big-shot manager in the universe of databases and servers. At 11:30 a.m., he was sitting at the kitchen table, after a night
of uncharacteristically long sleep, remotely conducting his global orchestra of engineers.

A short while earlier, he had received an e-mail about a sales promotion in the works. The Customer Delivery Team sent word to the Advance Support Team, which in turn informed the Operation Team, on which Rais served. In roughly a week, one of the travel company’s websites would unveil a new sale: €99 flights from Brussels to various European destinations. They were expecting maybe three times the normal volume of visitors to the site, which would crash if nothing was done. Enter Rais’s squad.

He knew his role by heart now. He would look at the spreadsheet that informed him how much of the computing power, memory, and bandwidth were consumed by normal usage. Multiply that usage by three, and you could calculate how much additional memory had to be freed, or what applications had to be shut down, or whether the system had to be restarted, or whether more servers were needed. In the latter case, Rais could deploy his team to prepare servers in London remotely from Bangalore. They would be online by the time the sale went live, and then thousands of users would somehow find their way—via ads, via word of mouth, via news coverage—to the website, and their arrival would, fingers crossed, be entirely uneventful, so that they had no idea of all the work being done just to let them look up the price of a ticket.

Rais sat in the kitchen quietly doing this work, talking to faraway places on his phone, running his miniature global fiefdom. He was part of the weightless new world that had brought much promise to many people and places but that could also, as he well understood, be profoundly threatening. Here he sat in a spacious, well-appointed home on a well-proportioned lot, paid for by two teachers in public schools. Jobs like theirs—once the vertebrae of so many communities—used to buy houses and lives like this without much trouble. In a changing country, though, no one Rais’s age, embarking on a career like Linda’s and Dick’s, could reasonably expect this kind of life—the family home
they shared in Rhode Island, the retirement condo they had bought in the Century Village development in southern Florida, the photographs of countries they had visited on the walls.

In his wits and his grit, Rais was not ordinary, and he was part of the sweeping changes that were making this a harder country for the ordinary: the “hourglass economy,” some called it. Rais understood how the squeezing out of ordinariness would complicate his battle against resentment. The new virtual world had done so much for him, but it wouldn’t for everyone. And it placed distance between people. It made it possible to sit at this kitchen table and work with four different countries, it was true, but it made it rarer to have the kind of face-to-face contact that melted brittle incomprehension—the kind of melting that Rais had begun to achieve with Amber over Starbucks coffee and Chipotle burritos.

He was equally torn over the merciless American economy that had served him so well. It could be a cruel country, with a fetish for the idea of lone wolves. Rais had seen that when the hospital kicked him out after the shooting. He had seen it at work, where full-timers were often hired as contractors, so the company could kick them out at will. He had experienced the lone-wolf fantasy most acutely, of course, by getting shot in the face by a self-proclaimed one-man allied brigade. Yet Rais grasped that this fantasy and the harshness of American isolation were not unrelated to the country’s possibilities. When Rais went to Europe on business, the coddled employees of the same company came across so differently: conscious, above all, of their rights and hours and vacation days, more worried about what the company owed them than the other way around. It was difficult, Rais observed, to get them to work. The Americans on his team worked as hard as the Bangaloreans, because in America, as in a poor country, the consequences of failure were too dire. Harshness raised the cost of falling behind. It propelled you onward, though perhaps only if you were blessed enough to be the onward kind.

O
F ALL OF
Rais’s new aspirations, perhaps the most momentous had gone unmentioned until lunchtime on the second day. In recent months, Rais had decided that he was ready, once again, to turn his attention to women and the possibility of marrying.

His family had consistently applied pressure to this end but had by now more or less given up. It had been nearly a decade since Abida left him, and he hadn’t been with a woman since then.