We were the same with our own parents-get away from 'em, they don't get it, they're embarrassing. That philosopher of yours, what was his name?"

"Sayyid Qutub. Properly, Qutb. He was a great favorite of my former teacher, Shaikh Rashid."

"He sounds good on America. Race, sex-they spook us. Once you run out of steam, America doesn't give you much. It doesn't even let you die, what with the hospitals sucking all the money they can out of Medicare. The drug companies have turned doctors into crooks. Why should I hang around until some disease turns me into a cash cow for a bunch of crooks? Let Beth enjoy the little I can leave her; that's the way I feel. I've become a drag on the world, taking up space. Go ahead, push your fucking button. Like the guy on an airplane on Nine-Eleven said to somebody on the cell phone, it'll be quick." Jack reaches across his body toward the detonator and Ahmad for the second time seizes his hand in his own.

"Please, Mr. Levy," he says. "It is mine to do. The meaning changes from a victory to a defeat, if you do it."

"My God, you should be a lawyer. O.K., stop squeezing my hand. I was just kidding."

The girl in the back of the station wagon has seen the brief struggle, and her interest has woken up her brother. Their four bright black eyes stare. In the side of Ahmad's vision, Mr. Levy is rubbing his fist with the other hand. He tells Ahmad, perhaps to soften him with flattery, "You've gotten strong this summer. After our interview you gave me a handshake so limp it was insulting."

"Yes, I am no longer afraid of Tylenol."

"Tylenol?"

"Another graduate of Central High. A dull-witted bully who has taken possession of a girl I liked. And who liked me, odd as I must have seemed to her. So not only you have romantic difficulties. It is one of the pagan West's grave errors, according to Islamic theorists, to make an idol of an animal function."

"Tell me about the virgins. The seventy-two virgins who will minister to you on the otlier side."

"The Holy Qur'an does not specify that number of buriyyat. It says only that they are numerous, and dark-eyed, and have modest glances, and have never been touched by men or djinn."

"Djinn, yet! Oh, my."

"You mock, without knowing the language." Ahmad feels a hated blush steal over his face as he tells his mocker, "Shaikh Rashid explained the djinn and houris as symbols of God's love for us, which is everywhere and ever renewed and cannot be directly comprehended by ordinary mortals."

"O.K., if that's how you see it. I'm not arguing. You can't argue with an explosion."

"What you call an explosion is to me a pinprick, a little opening that admits God's power into the world."

Though it has seemed the moment might never arrive in the balky flow of the traffic, a subtle flattening and slight upward tilt of the tunnel floor tells Ahmad that the low point has been reached, and tlie curve of the tiled wall ahead, fitfully visible through the tall procession of truck bodies, marks the weak spot where the fanatically tidy and snugly cinched square of plastic barrels should be detonated. His right hand detaches from the steering wheel and hovers over the military-drab metal box, with its little well where his thumb will fit. When he pushes it, he will join God. God will be less terribly alone. He will greet you as His son.

"Do it," Jack Levy urges. "I'm going to just relax. Jesus, I've been tired lately."

"For you there will be no pain."

"No, but there will be for plenty of others," the older man responds, slumping way down. But he cannot stop talking. "This isn't the way I pictured it."

"Pictured what?" The echo comes on its own in Ahmad's cleansed and hollowed state.

"Dying. I always thought I'd die in bed. Maybe that's why I don't like being in it. Bed."

He wants to die, Ahmad thinks. He taunts me to do the deed for him. In the fifty-sixth sura, the Prophet speaks of the moment when the soul of a dying man shall come up into his throat. That moment is here. The journey, the miraj. Buraq is ready, his shining white wings rustling, unfolding. Yet in the same sura, "The Event," God asks, We created you: will you not credit us? Behold the semen you discharge: did you create it, or We? God does not want to destroy: it was He who made the world.

The pattern of the wall tiles and of the exhaust-darkened tiles of die ceiling-countless receding repetitions of squares like giant graph paper rolled into a third dimension-explodes outward in Ahmad's mind's eye in the gigantic fiat of Creation, one concentric wave after another, each pushing the odier farther and fartlier out from the initial point of nothingness, God having willed the great transition from non-being to being. This was the will of the Beneficent, the Merciful, ar-Rahman and ar-Rahim, the Living, the Patient, the Generous, the Perfect, the Light, the Guide. He does not want us to desecrate His creation by willing death. He wills life.

Ahmad returns his right hand to the steering wheel. The two children in the vehicle ahead, lovingly dressed and groomed by their parents, bathed and sootlied every night, gaze toward him solemnly, having sensed the something erratic in his focus, the something unnatural in the expression of his face, mixed with the glaze of his windshield. Reassuringly he lifts the fingers of his right hand from the steering wheel and waves them, like the legs of a beetle on its back. Recognized at last, the children smile, and Ahmad cannot but smile back. He glances at his watch: nine-eighteen. The moment for maximum damage has slipped by; the bend in the tunnel is slowly being pulled into a widening rectangle of daylight.

"Yeah?" Levy asks, as if he has not quite heard Ahmad's response to his last remark. He sits up from his slouched position.

The black children, similarly sensing rescue, make faces through the back window of the Volvo, pulling down the corners of their eyes with their fingers and wagging their protruding tongues. Ahmad tries to smile again and repeats his friendly gesture of finger-waving but weakly; he feels spent. The tunnel's bright mouth grows to swallow him and his truck and its ghosts; together all emerge into the dull but brightening light of another Monday in Manhattan. Whatever was making the traffic in the tunnel so balky, so maddeningly sticky, has dispersed at last, dissolved on an open paved space among apartment buildings of modest height and billboards and brick row houses and, several blocks distant, fragile-looking glass skyscrapers. It could be a nameless spot in northern New Jersey; only the silhouette, dead ahead, of the Empire State Building, once again the tallest building in New York City, signifies otherwise. The bronze station wagon speeds to die right, south. The children are distracted by metropolitan sights, their heads swivelling this way and that, and they do not give Ahmad a farewell wave. He feels snubbed, after die sacrifice he made for them.

Beside him Mr. Levy says "Man!" in stupid imitation of a high-school student. "I'm drenched. You had me convinced." He senses that he has not assumed the right tone and adds, softer, "Well done, my friend. Welcome to the Big Apple."

Ahmad has slowed and tben stopped, not quite in the middle of the great wide space. Cars and trucks pushing into freedom behind tbe halted white truck swerve and blast their horns; side windows slide down and insulting gestures spit out. Ahmad spots the accelerating midnight-blue Mercedes and smiles to think diat for all its angry attempts to pass it had been still behind him, with its presumptuous and unwordiy investment thief of a driver.

Jack Levy realizes that he is in charge now. "So," he says. "The question becomes, What do we do now? Let's get this truck back to Jersey. They'll be happy to see it. And happy to see you, I regret to say. But you committed no crime, I'll be the first to point out, except drive a load of hazmat out of state on a Class C CDL. They'll probably lift your license, but tbat's O.K. Delivering furniture wasn't your future anyway."