Free The Good Son by Michael Gruber

dosed, but I take this as a suggestion and not a rule, so I drove my rental home to my parents’ brownstone in the pricy Washington neighborhood called Kalorama. The house was empty, my father being at work and my mother in Lahore. I live with my parents on the few occasions when I find myself off duty. It’s cheap and saves a lot of hassle and it’s traditional.
    I changed into sweats and opened a beer, which I also wasn’t supposed to do on the dope, and plopped down in front of the TV. I do this a lot now. Really, the worst thing about being wounded is the agony of time passing with nothing to do—no, the second worst thing. The worst thing is being weak, slow, off balance, the body no longer the spear and shield it once was. It gets me to the core, makes me nasty at times. I’m not a good patient.
    Also, it’s hard to get involved in American television now. There’s no war here; all that horseshit about everything being changed by 9/11 lasted around two months and then back to sports and game shows. I don’t know, maybe that’s all right; maybe obsessing about money and sex and celebrities and celebrity sex and the teams is a sign that the terror has failed to bite, which is great, but if it’s no big deal why the hell are we breaking the army into pieces over it? Once again, not in my job description. But still, it’s another thing that makes me snap and get pissed at my fellow Americans.
    I switched over to Ary, the Urdu channel out of Pakistan that my father likes, and I watched a news program, mainly about corruption scandals and unrest in the tribal areas and whether there were going to be elections and would they be honest or not. They interviewed a general who lied about the recent killing of a terror leader outside of Quetta; the guy’s car vaporized and the general said it was a Pakistani army op, although children in diapers knew it was a Hellfire missile from a CIA Predator drone. Not even that good of a liar; his eyeballs flickered and you could see the sweat on his face.
    After that came sports, cricket and football, and a longer piece about a
desi
golfer on the pro tour, and after that a talking-head thing and I was about to switch over to Geo, looking for a cultural program, maybe hear some ghazals, when I saw my mom on the screen with an interviewer.
    He introduced her as Sonia Laghari, which is her usual nom de umma, a writer and psychologist, a Pakistani-American, daughter-in-law to the late, much-mourned jurist B. B. Laghari, and one of the organizers of a conference on solutions to the current mess in the country. No mention of her famous books. There was text on the screen; my reading Urdu isn’t up to much anymore but I thought it said that this was a tape of an interview made the previous day in Lahore.
    They were speaking Urdu. The interviewer’s name was Jamil Babar Khan, and he started off by complimenting her on her Urdu, and that was as nice as he got because, although Mom was in full Pakistani rig, he started right off on America and its many sins against the Muslims.
    My mother smiled at him and agreed. America was not good for the umma. Mr. bin Laden was perfectly correct in his goals, although his methods were deplorable, and in her considered opinion he was destined to fry in the hottest flames of Hell for causing the deaths of women and children and of many, many Muslims. Therefore, she said, America should completely withdraw from the Muslim world. It should close its embassies and prohibit its citizens from working in Muslim nations or trading with Muslim nations. It should expel from its shores all foreigners from Muslim nations. This would eliminate the source of any conflict with Muslims and save a great deal of money, since aside from Muslim terrorists, America had no natural enemies. It should be of no concern to America how Muslim nations governed themselves.
    “But what about the oil, Mrs. Laghari?” the man asked.
    My mother made a dismissive gesture. Oh, the