The Terrorist's Son by Zak Ebrahim

Author:Zak Ebrahim
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster/ TED

7

February 26, 1993

Jersey City, New Jersey

I’m about to turn ten, and I’ve been bullied at school for years. I can’t pretend it’s just because of who my father is. For reasons I will probably spend my whole life trying to unravel, I seem to be a magnet for abuse. The bullies’ latest trick is to wait until I’ve turned to open my locker and then slam my head against it and run. Whenever this happens, the principal says he wants to be “fair to all parties,” so I usually get sent to detention along with the bullies. The anger and dread have made a permanent nest in my stomach. Today’s a Friday, and my mother has let me stay home from school to recover from what we agree to call “a stomach bug.”

I’m camped out on the couch, watching Harry and the Hendersons, a movie about a family who’s hiding a Bigfoot-type creature from the police because the police won’t understand how kind and gentle he is. In the middle of the movie, there’s breaking news. My mother’s in her bedroom, trying to write a historical novel, so she’s not there to turn off the TV this time.

There’s been an explosion in the parking lot beneath the North Tower of the World Trade Center. The NYPD, the FBI, and the ATF are on the scene, the early theory being that a transformer has exploded.

I knock on my mother’s bedroom door. When she doesn’t answer, I crack open the door a bit. My mother is sitting at her desk. She’s engrossed in writing her novel—it’s about an American woman who goes to the Middle East and has some kind of adventure, that’s all I know—and she’s typing in a sort of trance.

“You should come out,” I say. “There’s something going on.”

“Can’t,” she says, without looking up.

“But—”

“Stop it, Z. My heroine’s caught in a sandstorm, and her camel won’t budge.”

So I flop back on the couch and watch the story unfold for hours. The wreckage is horrific. People are stumbling out covered in ash. The reporter is saying, “We’ve never seen anything like this before.” At three PM, my mother comes out of her bedroom, blinking in the sunlight like she’s emerging from a cave. She looks at the TV and stops short.

“Why didn’t you tell me?” she says.

• • •

Hundreds of FBI agents comb through the rubble at the blast site. They abandon the theory about the transformer when they discover remnants of the Ryder van that carried the explosives. The FBI traces the van back to Mohammed Salameh—the deliveryman who’d promised to marry my sister when she came of age—and arrests him on March fourth when he returns to the rental company to report the van stolen and demand that he get his four-hundred-dollar deposit back. In the months that follow, America shivers at the previously incomprehensible thought of terrorism at home, as well as at the fact that its governmental agencies had been caught unawares. It will be years

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