American Taliban: A Novel Read online

  She’s scaring me today, Sylvie said.

  It’s like she’s operating in another dimension, Katie said.

  John agreed and wondered. What was it? Aloha, fortune, the gods?

  They lost sight of her until she reemerged on the sand, a faraway exhausted speck.

  Let’s drive down to get her, Katie suggested.

  They loaded their boards and drove and met Jilly trudging on rubber legs. She flopped into the Saab gratefully.

  If only we could have such swells at the ESA Competition, she murmured. And closed her eyes and slept.

  BARBARA HAD RESERVED TWO ROOMS at the Hatteras Motel: one for Sylvie and Jilly; another for Katie and John. They checked in and spent the afternoon taking showers and naps.

  Early evening, hungry, anticipating the promised crab-bake dinner special, complete with buttered corn and margaritas, Katie nudged John awake with her sun-dried lips on his eyes and lips, with her long hair tickling his chest, with her untanned parts telling him what she wanted. So he awoke, and with long arms lifted and tucked her into his hips. Fully awake, he swung his leg over her and pinned her beneath him, the way she liked it, she said, and gave himself to her hard and fast, the way she liked it, after which he slowed down and slow and holding out and slower, until she could no longer stand to wait.

  Katie dialed Jilly and Sylvie, to wake them. Meet us in the lobby in twenty.

  In the lobby they compared burns and bruises. Sylvie, who bruised easily, had a huge black and blue on her thigh.

  They drove to the nearby Harbor Resort, where Barbara and Bill were staying overnight and where they had reservations for dinner.

  I could eat three crab-bake specials, Katie said.

  Save room for the birthday cake, Barbara warned.

  The girls reassured Barbara that they could eat all night and still have room for dessert.

  So you think now, Barbara said, knowingly.

  How was it? Bill asked.

  John and the girls looked at one another. They hadn’t discussed it yet; they’d been too exhausted and too awed, even frightened.

  John spoke first. It was awesome, Dad. Scary.

  Bill looked at his son, then at each of the girls, who merely nodded. He noted their faraway focus, as if they weren’t quite here, at the table. Not a good sign, he thought, waiting to hear more.

  There were some awesome double overheaders, John said. Jilly, especially, had the rides of her life. Probably her next life, too.

  What do you mean, next life? doubting Barbara asked. And why was it only Jilly who experienced this?

  Katie and Sylvie looked at each other, and at her. Because she went for it, Katie said.

  But it was more than that, John thought. It was something else, he said, looking to Jilly for confirmation. I don’t know what it was, but she had some extrasensory thing going today.

  Jilly agreed. I don’t know how it happened, she said. It was like I couldn’t make a wrong move. My body sort of knew what to do on its own. I felt the wave like it was a live thing, and somehow my body knew what to do. I just shifted my weight to accommodate it. She shrugged. It was sooo eerie and totally cool.

  Heaping platters of crab and corn on the cob arrived, and they set to cracking, picking, dipping, eating, cracking, picking, dipping, eating, cracking, picking, and the talk ceased. And though John loved crab feasts as much as the next person, and picked and licked the salty Old Bay seasoning which he liked as much as or more than the crabmeat itself, Jilly’s words continued echoing in his head. I couldn’t make a wrong move, she said. My body knew what to do, she said. Was it instinct? Or something more extraordinary?

  He wouldn’t ask her now, not in front of Barbara, who wouldn’t appreciate the word extraordinary. But surely humans were endowed with imagination as well as intellect for a purpose, surely they were meant to rely on both. If there was anything wrong with modern man and woman, it was this: that in their attempt to grow beyond superstition, in their enlightened embrace of the rational, they’d abandoned knowledge of the extraordinary, the hidden, the transcendent, the whatever—call it by any name.

  If you can talk about it

  It isn’t Tao …

  Tao doesn’t have a name.

  Names are for ordinary things.

  The cake arrived, revealing that Barbara had outdone herself. Only as a last resort could the three-tiered concoction be called a chocolate cake, because it went beyond chocolate and transcended cake. It was an absurd extravagant chocolate park, featuring every kind of chocolate—including M&M’s, chocolate-covered graham crackers, Almond Joys, Goldenberg’s Peanut Chews, chocolate rolls, chocolate twists, dark chocolate truffles, chocolate-covered raisins, chocolate pops, Kellogg’s Cocoa Krispies, chocolate Ovaltine balls, chocolate-dipped strawberries, chocolate sprinkles, chocolate spread, Hershey’s chocolate, Mounds, chocolate mints, chocolate nougat, chocolate crisps, chocolate gum balls, chocolate licorice, scoops of Ben & Jerry’s chocolate brownie ice cream, and chocolate kisses—each one, Barbara explained, honors a phase in John’s eighteen years of life, when that particular form of chocolate was his favorite. Where the central birthday candle would normally stand was a tiny carton of Hershey’s chocolate milk, the one chocolate passion he’d never relinquished.

  How’d you get it down here in one piece? Katie asked.

  I packed the parts and put them together here, in the kitchen, Barbara said. I called in advance, and the staff agreed to give me a clean surface to work on.

  The girls applied themselves to tasting each form, holding it up first for cataloging. Barbara remembered aloud the year or years in which each particular chocolate treat was it. Which made the girls laugh.

  Wouldn’t you say, Sylvie said, between giggles and tastings, that your son qualifies as a dangerously overcaffeinated chocoholic.

  No wonder he’s so skinny, Katie said. All that caffeine must keep his metabolism churning.

  Bill agreed that John was surely a chocoholic and that Barbara was guilty of nurturing his chocoholism, but he corrected Katie on the source of John’s metabolism. That, he said, is genetic, since I’ve always been thin and I don’t favor chocolate. So don’t get any ideas. Anyone else eating that much chocolate would gain weight.

  Yes, Barbara confirmed. Chocolate hasn’t worked for me. Clearly.

  John, who was preoccupied with his gifts—a Lawrence of Arabia DVD from Sylvie and Jilly, a biography of Richard Burton from Katie, and, from Barbara and Bill, David Carson’s Trek, an expensive design book filled with surfing references—looked up.

  One small detail about my so-called chocoholism that hasn’t been credited is how much of it, or, I should say, how little of it, I eat in any one sitting. I taste rather than eat chocolate, though I do taste frequently.

  That’s true, Barbara agreed. He has some God-given self-discipline.

  Mom, John reminded, you don’t believe in God. But I think I didn’t develop neurotic tendencies because Barbara always let me have as much as I wanted. Most kids act as if they’ll never see another chocolate bar.

  Meaning, Katie said, turning toward Barbara, you’ve done something right.

  THE EVENING’S ENTERTAINMENT, the girls announced, was a choreographed skateboard show, to take place on the area’s best stretch of concrete, their own motel parking lot. Barbara and Bill followed the Saab back to the motel and settled on a stoop. John sprawled beside them, prepared to be entertained. In June, when he’d moved down to OBX, he’d taught first Katie, then Sylvie and Jilly, but he’d had to talk Katie into trying it, and now she was giving back, acknowledging the significance of his sport.

  One board sport informs the other, he’d pointed out. You never know in which you’ll make your mark. Christian Fletcher made the cover of Surfer with an aerial he had taken from skateboarding. Skater Todd Richards started snowboarding only to keep sane in northern winters, and he went on to the Winter Olympics.

  Katie agreed that the three board sports shared a particular persona
lity. Like you and me, she said. We’re good together because we both ride side stance.

  In Katie’s opinion riding sideways made for a disposition that was other, that looked at and saw the world from an oblique angle. And surfing, she said, was better preparation for life because water and waves were always in flux, unlike the static street curbs on which skaters practiced.

  But she agreed to try skateboarding and after stopping at Duck Village Outfitters for a six-point-seven-five-wide board, complete with trucks, wheels, and precision bearings, and also a helmet, knee and elbow pads, she started on pavement. John demonstrated correct foot placement, how to keep her front foot angled and on the front bolts, rear foot on the back bolts, perpendicular to the board. He demonstrated the push with the back foot, weight forward, feet pointed straight ahead, which she already knew from surfing. He reviewed the basics anyway, to make certain she knew right from wrong, and then, without a single fall or falter, she graduated to turns, quickly learning how to follow her shoulder into a semicircle. She especially liked tictacing, shifting her weight to her back foot and lifting the front wheels to the left and right, alternating between. Comfortable on a surfboard, she had no problem with balance on wheels. Within the first hour of her first skating lesson she was taking on skating’s most necessary trick, the ollie.

  Keep your back foot on the heel of the board, your front foot at center, he instructed. Lean forward, stomp on the heel, while at the same time or almost the same time pull up with your front foot, which will allow the board to ollie into an air.

  It’s cool how the skateboard appears glued to your shoes, she said, when he performed it for her in slo-mo.

  She tried and tried, almost had it, then didn’t, then almost again, and she was stoked.

  I might change my mind about skating, she said. It’s fun.

  Then she fell on her back, and said, I take that back. She rubbed her tailbone and winced. I’d rather get tumbled and thrashed in the most extreme white-water washout, and go pearling in the sand. Anything is better than slamming on pavement.

  But she got Sylvie and Jilly to try skating, and soon all three were practicing ollies, and now they wanted to celebrate it, or John, or the sport at large. In his honor. For his birthday. For stage lights, they used the headlights of both vehicles, engines running. For music, a boom box, of which John was in charge.

  They started in semidark, to a song from Dancer in the Dark, and though the lyrics insisted on sight—I’ve seen it all, there is no more to see—the theme of blindness was odd. But hey, it wasn’t Bob Marley.

  They each took a turn performing an old surf move: Katie ducked and crouched as if she were entering a curl, Jilly hung ten, as if she were cruising a mellow Hawaiian wave on a nine-foot board, and Sylvie did some fancy stepping, crossovers, both forward and back, a trick old Kahanamoku made famous.

  John laughed and clapped. They’d done their homework. Barbara and Bill cheered, too, though they didn’t know the references. John explained.

  I get it, Bill said. They’re inside jokes.

  Yes, John said. But also they’re moves possible only on long, wide boards known as doors, impossible on today’s lightweight small surfboards, and they’re not exactly easy on a skateboard, not even a pig.

  Introductions done, Katie came up for a series of tricks. She began by tictacing, ollied up on a block of concrete, slid along the edge on her front wheels, kicked her board into a kickflip on her way down, and landed—imperfectly, wobbly, but she stayed up.

  John applauded. She had made real progress. She was strong, a powerful, muscular athlete.

  Sylvie, who was as dark as Katie was blond, was up next. She was also longer and leaner, with limber rather than powerful muscles. And Jilly was always Jilly: freckled head to toe and funny.

  Sylvie’s specialty, John already knew, was speed, and she picked it up right from the start, ollied up, landed, delivered another air from a double kickflip, then ollied up again, slid on the rail the hardest way, between front and back trucks, landed, and kept going. Amazingly, she stayed fluid and following throughout, a Gumby. Speed and agility were Sylvie’s defining attributes.

  And then Jilly cruised up, performed a handstand on her board, and kickflipped her board with her hands, a parody of the real thing, and landed on her feet. She spun a three-sixty, popped an ollie, didn’t quite land it, and then, as if to make up for the nonlanding, added an extra air, which turned into a somersault of sorts. She was a clown on wheels; she played; she entertained. She was extraordinary. Each of the girls was extraordinary in her own way.

  They finished with a series of disco moves out of Saturday Night Fever, a skating train, then high kicks, New York Rockette style, references Barbara and Bill recognized and applauded. After which, they hugged the girls, hugged and triple kissed John, wished for many more birthdays to come, and said good night.

  IN THEIR ROOMS, paid for by Barbara, her birthday gift to John, the girls collapsed, and, amounts of chocolate consumed notwithstanding, slept.

  John turned the pages of Trek.

  Your parents, Katie said, turning over with a groan, are so cool. For making this trip possible. For this book. For letting you stay at OBX all summer. You’re lucky, Katie said, and pulled the sheet over her head.

  John agrees. He is fortunate. He has Barbara and Bill, he has friends who share his passions. His world is wide open, or so it seems, he can take from it what he wants and needs, or so it seems, which makes deciding difficult. He knows what he does not want, but not the inverse. He knows that he will not dedicate himself to a life of earning and acquisition. He knows that to live fully is to avoid mere being, complacency.

  Barbara, he knows, was eager to see him safely at Brown. She’d earmarked passages written by Brown alums, one by a female student. Radack, Jesselyn. Class of ’91: On her own for the first time, she wrote: The only person I have to worry about is me, how unbelievably, amazingly selfish. What a gift!

  She’d gone on to Yale and the Honor Program at the Justice Department. A total Goody-Two-Shoes.

  Re: Brown, he said, yes. Eventually. But first he would take a year off. To learn and know. To remain eternally in process, to forever become though he doesn’t yet know what. Therefore his policy is to pursue only what is of immediate personal interest, a commitment to the present. So he is fortunate. So he surfs the Atlantic. On December 8, 1981, a woman pulls up to the stoplight at California and Eighteenth Streets just as the radio announcer pauses to remember John Lennon. So she names her son John. On the radio, Hey Jude is playing, and she stays and listens all the way to the end, for seven long minutes. Despite its length, Hey Jude was number one for nine weeks straight, the longest spell at the top of the American charts for a Beatles single. So she names her son John Jude. So he skates the streets of Washington, D.C. So he graduates John Harlan High summa cum laude and defers Brown. He moves to the Outer Banks. Falls in love. Skates. Surfs. Turns the pages of Trek. He is fortunate. His world is wide open; he can take from it what he wants and needs, which makes deciding difficult. So he is committed to the daily minute, to living the present in the present tense, to finding the extraordinary in ordinary time, in the here and now. Thus he turns the pages of Trek, reads his daily Tao, reads his Whitman and Emerson and Dylan, and resolves to read more.

  AUGUST 15, the day of the ESA Competition, and the morning was moist with saline. He could taste the salt on the membranes of his nose, mouth, and throat. On the radio, the National Weather Service announced the tide and trade wind conditions, the buoy report, the day’s sunrise and sunset times, predicting possible head highs, which, if not mere wishful thinking, would give the girls an opportunity to show how good they were. Slowing for the stop sign at the end of East Dogwood, John licked his finger and felt the wind. On a scale of one to ten, the day was no more than a four. For surfers anyway. The winds were too calm for head highs, though that could change. For Katie’s sake and for the sake of all wahines competing today, he sent up a prayer t
o the sea gods, to Lono, god of winds. If he could lash the seas with vines and swell the water, it might offer up surf-worthy waves. But would he? Did the gods care for wahines? Or for anyone for that matter? Philosophers didn’t think so. Nor did Barbara and Bill, though that didn’t prevent them from having him baptized. We did it for you, Barbara said when he asked, so that you wouldn’t grow up feeling unprotected in some way. They’d also taken him to church when he was little. On Christmas Eve and Easter. And once to the blessing of the animals.

  His own opinion: he was still undecided. It depended on how you thought of God. If God is nature, then God doesn’t care, since nature doesn’t. But if, as the mystics understood, God is the best of man and within man, then God cares, since man does.

  John was eager to see Katie win. If she remained confident and centered, she could take home both a long and short board prize, she was that good. And she was favored for first place, but as anyone who follows these things knows, a favorite more often than not suffers an upset. He wondered whether she understood the challenge and, if she did, was it a case of knowing things or knowing herself.

  He, John, already knew a few things. Numero uno: that he had no desire to follow his lawyer father into law and certainly not his pseudo-doctor mother into psychotherapy. He wouldn’t be that kind of achiever, working eight to seven to pay the bills on the Adams Morgan town house and on their second home, the beach house in Southern Shores, which purchase he’d had a definite hand in, steering them away from Virginia Beach where they were looking, farther down the coast to the Outer Banks, where the best surf on the East Coast could be had.

  The outer in Outer Banks was immediately attractive to his mother, who had a yen for adventure of the extreme and exclusive kind and declared as soon as they crossed Wright Memorial Bridge into Kitty Hawk that she had fallen in love with the place. After this first visit, she determined that to get them there and back they would require a sport-utility vehicle, and a week later left her signature with the local Mercedes dealer for a spanking-new black SUV. She planned to leave the old Saab at the house. All of which, both house and vehicle arrangement, John very much appreciated, though the ability to beget such things, or finance them, would not be his life’s work. And it wasn’t what Barbara and Bill wanted of him anyway. What they looked for from their son was originality and intellectuality and a lifestyle shaped by the liberal humanist ideas in which, as Barbara liked to point out, he had been immersed from the instant of his inception. They had provided him with the makings for a complete and perfect man, the faculties, talents, and privileges, both nature and nurture, and they expected him to fulfill such promise. And although the ways and means of fulfillment and how it would be measured had never been discussed, John understood, if only in a vague way, that proof of achievement would have to come from the media, with features in newspapers, magazines, radio, and television; in other words, what Barbara wanted for her son was the kind of hallowed celebrity a sophisticated parent could take pride in, meaning her son would do something highly remarkable, perhaps even original, but definitely not embarrassing.