Terrorist by John Updike Page A

unclean men."
    Joryleen's eyes widen and she blinks her lids, taking this unsmiling solemnity as part of him, which she might have to deal with. "Well, I don't know where that leaves me," she says cheerfully. "Their notion of unclean was pretty broad in those there days," she adds, and brushes back some moisture from her temple, where the hair is fine like a boy's mustache before he thinks to shave. "How'd you like my singing?"
    He takes thought, while the chattering congregants stroll past, their duty done for the week, and the in-and-out sun makes feathery weak shadows beneath the emergent locust leaves. "You have a beautiful voice," Ahmad tells her. "It is very pure. The uses to which it is being put, however, are not pure. The singing, especially of the very fat woman—"
    "Eva-Marie," Joryleen supplies. "She's the most. She never gives it less than her everything."
    "Her singing seemed to me very sensual. And I did not understand many of the words. In what way is Jesus such a friend to all of you?"
    "What a friend, what a friend," Joryleen pants lightly, in imitation of the way the choir broke up the hymn's phrases suggesting the repetitive (as he understood them) motions of sexual intercourse. "He just is, that's all," she insists. "People feel better, thinking he's right there. If he isn't there caring, who is, right? The same thing, I 'spect, with your Mohammed."
    "The Prophet is many things to his followers, but we do not call him our friend. We are not so cozy, as your clergyman said."
    "Hey," she says, "let's not talk this stuff. Thanks for coming, Ahmad. I never thought you would."
    "You have been gracious to me, and I was curious. It is helpful, up to a point, to know the enemy."
    "Enemy? Whoa. You didn't have no enemies there."
    "My teacher at the mosque says that all unbelievers are our enemies. The Prophet said that eventually all unbelievers must be destroyed."
    "Oh, man. How'd you get this way? Your mother's just a freckle-faced mick, right? That's what Tylenol says."
    "Tylenol, Tylenol. How close are you, may I ask, to this fount of wisdom? Does he consider you his woman?"
    "Oh, that boy's just trying things out. He's too young to get fixed up with any one lady friend. Let's walk along. We're getting too many looks."
    They walk along the northern edge of the empty acres waiting to be developed. A painted big sign shows a four-story parking garage that will bring shoppers back to the inner city, but for two years nothing has been built, there is only the picture, more and more scribbled over. When the sun, slanting from the south above the new glass buildings downtown, comes through the clouds, a fine dust can be seen lifting from the rubble, and when the clouds return the sun becomes a white circle like a perfect hole burned through, exactly the size of the moon. Feeling the sun on one side of him makes him conscious of the warmth on the other, the warmth of Joryleen's body moving along, a system of overlapping circles and soft parts. The bead above her nostril-wing gleams a hot pinpoint; sunlight sticks a glistening tongue into the cavity at the center of her scoop-necked blouse. He tells her, "I am a good Muslim, in a world that mocks faith."
    "Instead of being good, don't you ever want to feel good?" Joryleen asks. He believes she is sincerely curious; in his severe faith he is a puzzle to her, a curiosity.
    "Perhaps the two go together," he offers. "The feeling and the being."
    "You came to my church," she says. "I could go to your mosque with you."
    "That would not do. We could not sit together, and you could not attend without a course of instruction, and a demonstration of sincerity."
    "Wow. That may be more than I have time for. Tell me, Ahmad, what do you do for fun}"
    "Some of the same things you do, though 'fun,' as you put
    it, is not the point of a good Muslim's life. I take lessons twice a week in the language and lessons of the Qur'an. I attend Central High. I am on the soccer team in the