Free The Good Son by Michael Gruber Page B

fortunate in the Palestinians, because otherwise America would be the stupidest nation in Middle Eastern affairs.”
    “You think that wanting freedom and an end to a brutal occupation is stupid?”
    “Of course not, but look at how they resist! They could have had their own state and an end to the occupation twenty years ago by using the same methods that were successful against the British, right here where we’re sitting. India defeated the greatest empire in history using Gan -dhian noncooperation and nonviolent resistance. You think that Israel’s nasty little empire cannot be defeated in the same way? But they don’t do that, they love their posturing and their face masks and the rifles waving, and the people are controlled by bandit gangs who are constantly selling one another out to the Mossad. It would be ridiculous if it weren’t tragic.”
    The interviewer seemed not to want to pursue this line so he asked her about the conference and they talked about that for a while, and it was here I learned that they intended to meet not in Lahore, where there was at least some security, but in Leepa House in Pakistani Kashmir, which was a long fly ball from the Northwest Frontier Province, otherwise known as Jihad Central.
    The rest of the interview was about who she was supporting in the coming elections, but I hardly listened, and as soon as it was over I switched it off and dialed my mother’s number on my cell phone. It was past midnight in Lahore but I didn’t care.
    I got a not-available recording and left a message. I was pretty calm, considering that she had just pissed off on international television every bunch of armed maniacs on the planet except the Basques. What was she thinking? Did she
want
to get blown up?
    As soon as I had that thought it hit me that maybe she did, maybe that was part of what made her Sonia, what my father called her trapped-fox part. I had that too, if I was honest with myself; I got it from her and from how I was brought up, maybe an adrenaline deficiency, the whole dicing-with-death thing. Or maybe not. I know guys who do sport jumping, motorcycle racing, whatever, but it’s not like that. There has to be an opponent; death has to show himself in human form; you have to beat the angel on its own terms.
    These old thoughts were boiling into froth, and under them the thrill of real fear. I kept calling through the evening, the last one at eleven-thirty, and still nothing, even though it was now morning in Lahore. My mother never turns her cell phone off during the hours she’s awake. I left a message demanding an instant call-back. Then I called my Auntie Rukhsana, who keeps hers on even when she’s asleep. Also no answer. I left a similar message. Then I took another pill and had another beer, after which I conked out in my room upstairs. I’d been out a little over three hours, by my watch, before the ache and thirst and the need to go to the can got me up, which was a pretty typical night for me, and when I was up and around I heard the sound of the TV in the living room. I recalled switching it off, which meant that my father was up.
    He was sitting on the couch watching Pakistani cable, and he didn’t take his eyes off the set when I came in, which was funny to begin with because my father is a formal guy, always stands up and gives a hug anda kiss when we happen to meet. I sat next to him on the couch and asked him what he was watching. The screen showed a couple of talking heads, the usual morning anchorperson and a guy with the familiar sleek and sneaky look of a Pakistani pol. He didn’t answer me and I looked at him and saw that tears were streaming down his cheeks and I knew what it was and cursed.
    “Something happened to Mother,” I said.
    He pointed mutely at the screen: a shot of a mountain road with a burnt-out Land Rover on it and two empty minibuses with their doors hanging open like a dead bird’s wings and Pakistani military swarming around them, looking