Nine Eleven (#Wattys2015)

Chapter 6

"Had my face always been this thin?" Omari says aloud staring dryly in front of a mirror in the bathroom. He had his turban on. But no shirt. Pants, belt, turban, and a black revolver cold and snug in this right hand. He pointed it at the mirror as if he was pointed to another man. Another thin, scared, and anxious man wrapped in a turban, shirtless, and aiming a cold lifeless gun.

"I mean, hollow, or whatever I look like?,"he continued, "my eyebrows, my cheeks, my eyes, how they've sunk and sold the edges of my face like a silhouette to potential. Potential. Potential I've never met."

He speaks tersely, directly into the mirror itself. The barrel of the gun stares squarely at the forehead of his reflection. His face wet. Just shaven, fresh and irritated. He let water drops fall sporadically from his chin onto the ground before him. He frowns into his reflection. His eyebrows purse and hold their frame. His lips pressing shut as if every wire and fiber in his body is tightened and turned, coiled, and stiff to the formation of his displeasure. His finger lay silently on the trigger. Motionlessly. Thoughtlessly. Would he have shot himself had he been another man? And why?

His turban reminds him of his ancestry. He likes it. It was black and small. Normally he didn't wear his turban; he had put it on merely to see himself with it in the mirror. The bathroom is clean, as most hotels are. His eyes are red, it seemed as if he was crying, or had been-but he hadn't. Not crying-praying.

His face fully shaven, begins to dry in the hotel bathroom. The gun extended in his hand slow moves up and down. Shaking, getting tired, getting tired of aiming it as his face. Noticing this, he tightens his grip on the gun, reaches his arm further, and stands up straighter than before.

The Quran lies open before him, barren on the sink. Open like a procedure. Like an organ. Bloodless surgery. Omari stands before the Quran, bold and courageous, reckless and true. Operating on its colorless words. He stands heaving as words like blood drip down onto his memory. On top of the Quran is a picture. A young girl. She was wrapped in his arms. She smiles at the camera in beauty and innocence. It was Omari's daughter. It was dilapidated. A younger Omari was in the picture holding his daughter. The Omari before the Al-Qaeda. A different man.

"It was them," he whispers softly to himself. Whispering because Waleed was lying on the bed on the other side of the bathroom door. The sound of the television was murmuring like a river under Omari slowing whispers:

"My ancestors. The men, the women, the people. My prophet. My god. My love. My family, all of them. All of them. It was them. It's them that have done it. For Jihad. For Jihad. For Jihad!"

The word bring a flood of notions into his mind.

"Jihad. Yes. Like my father, and his father, and his father, and his! Jihad! The image of my father plagues the mirror in front of me making this bullet earnest, and this gun eager. A man who killed himself for me. For god. That's at least what he told me. That he killed himself for me. I'm about to the same for my child. For my family. Kill myself. This book tells me-my father tells me its right. He speaks to me still."

With all his unforgiving five senses he imagines his father locked in the mirror before him, wearing the same turban, standing in the same quiet bathroom. The Quran open in between them like many pages of a living sacrifice. His father stands inside his mirror older than Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and all twelve of his sons. They stand staring at each other.