21

Spring Lake, New Jersey

The last time David saw Marseille was the day of the funeral.

Charlie Harper simply couldn’t bear the loss of Claire, his beloved wife of twenty-three years. He had no idea how to take care of himself, much less his only daughter, under these circumstances. He wasn’t eating. He was losing weight. He rarely spoke. He was clinically depressed and failing to take his medication. So he resigned his job, put the family house on the market, packed up their belongings, and—unable to bear the thought of boarding a plane—drove Marseille across the country from New Jersey to Oregon, where his folks had a farm near Portland.

And just like that, Marseille Harper disappeared from David’s life.

She accepted a hug from David at the funeral home. But she was so overcome with emotion that she couldn’t talk. She could barely even look him in the eye at the memorial service. After she moved, he wrote her letters. They went unanswered. He called and left her messages. She never called back. Once, her grandfather answered the phone and said Marseille was out and that she’d call back. She never did. He even sent her a box of Junior Mints. There was still no reply. David finally got the message and stopped trying.

Marseille Harper had been his first love. He had given her his body, heart, and soul, and she had given him hers. But in an instant of time, it had all been torn away. The feelings she’d stirred in him had changed him forever, but it was all for nothing. Marseille was lost to him now, and he had no idea how to get her back. He grieved for her but did his best not to blame her. He had no idea how he would have reacted if his mother had been murdered by terrorists and his father had lost his will to function—and perhaps to live. And while he and Marseille had spent an amazing week together, the truth—painful though it was—was it had been only a week. He had no real claim on her. He had no right to expect that she would stay in touch with him, and clearly, wishing wouldn’t make it so.

Quietly, privately, alone in his room—or on the bus, or alone with his thoughts during a study hall or at his locker—he would pray for Marseille and her father. He begged Allah to comfort them and heal them—and him, too. He beseeched Allah to let Marseille somehow find a measure of peace and some good friends who would stand by her and encourage and protect her. He asked Allah to let Marseille remember him and to move her to write back to him.

But as fall turned to winter, David began to lose hope. It was as though his words echoed back from the ceiling of his room, useless and ridiculous. He might as well be praying to the rug on his floor or the lamp on his desk, he concluded, and this only accelerated the tailspin.

His grades plummeted from straight A’s to straight D’s. His parents were worried about him. So were his teachers. But nothing they suggested seemed to help. The only good news was that both of his brothers were off at college and not there to tease him.

If all that weren’t enough, David began getting into fights at school. A group of seniors on the varsity football team kept calling him a “camel jockey,” and “the son of a Muslim whore.” He went ballistic every time. It didn’t matter that he was Persian, not Arab. Or that his family was from Iran, not Afghanistan or Pakistan, where the 9/11 attacks originated. It didn’t matter that he and his family were Shia Muslims, not Wahhabis like Osama bin Laden or Sunnis like Mohamed Atta, the leader of the 9/11 hijackers. Or that David himself had been born and raised in America and was rooting for the American forces battling al Qaeda and the Taliban more than anyone else in his school. None of it mattered to the losers who baited him, and he unleashed every time.

Though David was younger than his tormentors, he was at least as tall and possessed a killer right jab and an increasingly volcanic temper. In January 2002, he was put into detention six times and twice briefly suspended for fighting in the halls. When he broke the nose of the school’s star quarterback and broke the arm of the state’s leading wide receiver in the same fight, however, the principal called the police, and David Shirazi was arrested, fingerprinted, and locked up overnight, pending arraignment and a bail hearing.

It was a quiet night in the Onondaga County juvenile detention center, and David was put in a cell by himself. His parents stayed with him for as long as the rules allowed, and though they were loving, they were firm. David’s father said he hoped a night in this place might bring David to his senses, and then they left.

For more than an hour, David paced the floor and cursed anyone within earshot. At one point he punched the cinder block wall so hard, he feared he had broken his hand but refused to call out for help. He collapsed on the bed, stared at the ceiling, and began to grow scared. He knew he was rapidly losing altitude emotionally, spiritually, even physically.

How had he slipped so far, so fast? And what was he supposed to do now? The prospect of actually going to jail for several months made him physically ill. But even if he could plead his way out of jail time, he was still going to be expelled from school. He was going to have a criminal record. How was he going to get into college? How was he ever going to get a decent job?

Lying there in the cell, he thought back to the anticipation he’d had about going up to Canada with his father and brothers for that fishing weekend. He tried to recall just how much he had looked forward to that weekend and how his life had been dangerously unraveling ever since. He’d fallen for a girl who wasn’t even supposed to be there, a girl whose mother had been killed in the towers, a girl who now lived on the other side of the country, a girl who didn’t love him and wouldn’t talk to him and apparently couldn’t care less that he even existed.

How had it come to this? He’d gone to Canada to go fishing. But in those few short days, the whole world had come crashing down. One day, no one he knew cared that his family was from the Middle East. Now they treated him like a murderer and a terrorist. One day, no one cared that he was Muslim. Now they treated him like he was part of some sleeper cell, with suicide bomber belts hanging in his closet, ready to be activated by Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and sent into a mall on Christmas to blow himself to smithereens and take as many people as he could with him. It wasn’t true. It had never been true. But no one seemed to care.

David closed his eyes and tried to forget the last few months. He tried to remember Marseille’s face. He tried to recall her eyes, her smile, the feel of her body against his. He tried to imagine himself back on that island, back in that cabin, before this nightmare had begun. But every time he tried to conjure up such images, all he could see was the twisted, demented face of Osama bin Laden staring back at him. Sickened by the connection, he’d shake it off and try again to dream of Marseille. But he couldn’t. It was bin Laden’s vacant eyes on which he found himself fixated again and again.

David seethed with a toxic level of anger he had never before experienced and didn’t recognize. It wasn’t Marseille’s fault all this had happened, he reminded himself. Nor was it her father’s. This was all the doing of Osama bin Laden, period. It was bin Laden who was the leader of al Qaeda, the terrorist organization behind the 9/11 attacks. It was bin Laden who had recruited the nineteen hijackers, facilitated their training, funded them, and deployed them to seize the four American jetliners and turn them into missiles. It was bin Laden who had murdered Mrs. Harper.

The irony was palpable, David thought. Here he lay in prison, while Osama bin Laden roamed free through the mountains of Kandahar or the streets of Islamabad.