Obviously, an “anticlimax” is very far from being considered a success. But there is a whole other order of failure—a whole other universe of failure. We don’t talk about it. Mekhlis doesn’t talk about it. I don’t talk about it. This explains the fact that the moment in the changing room is also, if you like, a confession: a confession of the male vulnerability and flaw…To err is human. Every double does it—on occasion. But we all know the point at which we can expect the lavish, the inwrought wrath of the potentate. And we all know why this second order of failure—so radical, so all-deciding—especially incenses Nadir the Next.

  At nine o’clock we repair to our separate bungalows in the grounds. Fraternization among doubles used to be vigilantly discouraged (to thwart plotting), but now, in these days of laxity and dissolution, as the Next weakens, as we weaken, there is a more or less nightly bazaar of black-market aphrodisiacs in our compound, all kinds of potions and philters—every known pharmaceutical, as well as every known quackery. To step out into the capital is of course an impossibility; a double wouldn’t last half a minute in the capital, or anywhere else. But here at night, with all these pots and packets and powders, so needfully assembled and dispersed, we can still get a sense of the forgotten static of the city.

  I stand before the mirror. I am choking on my own tongue—it looks like the fin of a flayed shark—and must soon submit to my third lingual “carve-down.” Is that myself I see, or am I staring through a window at another double?…We break mirrors. Doubles are always breaking mirrors. The vital thing is to resist the impulse to do so with a butt of the forehead. Keep a hammer nearby. It’s on the rest day that you notice it. Servants, workmen, going to and fro with mirrors, broken mirrors, fresh mirrors. And heaps of smashed glass like ponds of fire in the midday sun.

  The months pass. And it can’t be long now. For us, and for the Next—so ceaselessly are his bastions mined, his bunkers tripwired, his bolt-holes booby-trapped.

  Some doubles say that there have been worse times to be a double. Years ago, before my arrival at the Palace of the End, the son of the dictator used to send the doubles out to give fiery speeches in city squares, to parade in open limousines, to march at the head of ticker-tape tattoos. All, of course, were briskly assassinated, thus somewhat alleviating, for a short time (or so he felt), the danger posed to the Next.

  Other doubles say there have been better times to be a double: when, for instance (this is Mekhlis), the doubles were asked to uphold their mercilessness as they moved from one wing to the other. You make your “pact with pain,” he says—and that’s that; besides (he argues), rape is less boring, and much quicker, than the marathon “tongue work” expected of us now. I haven’t forgotten those days, and the mental atmosphere was certainly very different. More high-strung, you might say. Even the coffee break was like a prison riot.

  Enmeshed in an atrocity-producing situation, the human being, I have read, responds with one of two psychological strategies or mechanisms. The first is called “numbing.” I remember numbing: it resembled submission to a drug of unwelcome and alien efficacy. The second strategy or mechanism, curiously, is called “doubling.” That’s what we all do now. There is the person of the morning, and then, following the period in the changing room, there is the person of the afternoon.

  And we doubles have doubled. I think I can prove it. The laws of our country do not permit the execution of female virgins. Circumventing this stricture, by mass rape, used to be one of our privileges. But ever since Nadir was shot in the face, and the Recreation Wing was refurbished for romance, no double will have anything to do with the “squad bangs” on the scaffolds. We leave all that to the bucket-boys and poker-warmers and the other, humbler torturers of the Interrogation Wing.

  The destiny of the failed double (one who repeatedly creeps in tears from the luxurious apartments with the rims of his pointed slippers held between finger and thumb) is probably worth mentioning. Such a double must watch all his clan submit to the antic horror of the confessionals, but the double himself is dispatched by lethal injection—put to sleep, like a toothless dog. No further harm or disfigurement is visited on his body.

  This morning, as I was about to supervise the “de-gloving” of an elderly suspect, Mekhlis, in contravention of a major ground rule (doubles are never to be seen plurally in the Interrogation Wing), took me aside and passed on the rumor of the latest attempt on the life of the son of the dictator. I had just started work, and so there were several hours to get through before I limped into the doubles’ commissary at 12:45.

  There are only seven doubles now. Some have died from complications arising from their more recent injuries (notably the bazooka attack); some have taken their own lives. Many, after grimly monotonous failure, have attracted the special execration of the Next…Because, you see, Nadir is impotent. He has ever been impotent. All his grown life, helpless, as in a dream, surrounded by naked women he could do nothing with.

  Where there is no settled truth, rumor stops feeling like rumor: briefly but palpably, it feels far more convincing than any mere fact… The doubles’ commissary was of course an aviary of mobile phones, and for the first hour I just sat there, strafed by the usual tumult of calamity. A mortar blitz, a kiloton daisy-cutter, a thermobaric cruise missile. Semtex, botulism, acid shell, carcinogenic aflatoxin, particle beam, Agent Orange. After a while, and again as usual, the rumors became rather milder (Nadir had simply been bayonetted in the guts, poleaxed in the groin, harpooned in the head), and then milder still. Some cook, it seemed, had tried to serve him a rotten egg. Some kid, it seemed, had thrown a pebble at his armored pantechnicon. Then re-escalation—all the way back to certain death.

  Which is what we prayed for, naturally. Certain death. That way we had a chance. We doubles are not like the doubles of Old Nadir. Because Nadir the Next is also Nadir the Last.

  “Come,” said Mekhlis.

  And together we hobbled into the conservatory bay: the gardens, with their parrots and apes.

  “I think we should prepare ourselves,” he said, “for an injury of the middle range. An arm.”

  “A foot. Maybe an ear.”

  “Maybe the other eye.”

  I said, “The other eye? What would that mean for our work of the afternoon? We could still do it, I suppose. It would be harder. But we could still do it.”

  “Yes,” he said. “But think. Why would he want us to?”

  His phone gave its gurgle. He looked at the screen and said heavily, “My cousin’s friend at Special Forces.” And then: “Yes. This is Double Mekhlis.”

  I’m sitting on the bench in the changing room, under the marquee of my cream kimono. By my side, the tasseled tarboosh; at my feet, the pointed slippers. I am wondering, as I always do at this time of day, why the body’s genius for pain so easily outsoars its fitful talent for pleasure; wondering why the pretty trillings of the bedroom are so easily silenced by the impossible vociferation of the Interrogation Wing; and wondering why the spasms and archings of orgasm are so easily rendered inert and insensible by the climactic epilepsy of torture. You don’t need to dim the lights for torture, or play soft music. People will respond. You don’t need to get them in the mood. Everyone’s always in the mood. And consider how pain can be made to ramify and proliferate. Where is the role, in the realm of pleasure, for the three-year-old daughter, for the mailsack, the rodent, the amphetamine?

  It is all over now, anyway. The fate of Nadir the Next? From a double’s point of view, it was pretty well the worst possible outcome. In his quest for peace and quiet he had taken to his submarine—for a week-long wallow on the floor of the Red Sea. That morning, after breakfast, he went to the bathroom with a newspaper under his arm…The dreaded “toilet bomb.” The toilet bomb—now doubly legendary. He will join his father in the spaceship of intensive care, his center of gravity replaced by a raw hollow. And we will go the way of the doubles of Old Nadir. The fetish of verisimilitude will draw each of us to the sandbagged cell and its rigged white bowl, with the stool-sensitive limpet mine tucked into the U-bend, and the surgical team standing by.

  This afternoon in the Palace of the End I shall strive, as Nadir’s proxy or prosthesis, to be ever more tremulously tender. I think I understand this gravitation of the Next’s: the tendency to the tender, in the Recreation Wing. I am well placed to empathize with him, after all—and I feel something like a hard vacuum in the side of our heads where our eye used to be. But I am not the Next. I am only his double. And my share of it reads like this. When you have been hurt yourself, there awakens a part of you that doesn’t want to hurt anyone. When you love something as intimately fragile as your own body, you don’t want to hurt anyone. That’s what I’m saying to myself, now, in the changing room. Please let me not have to hurt anyone.

  MARCH 2004. The New Yorker

  Terror and Boredom: The Dependent Mind

  It was mid-October 2001, and night was closing in on the border city of Peshawar, in Pakistan, as my friend—a reporter and political man of letters—approached a market stall and began to haggle over a batch of T-shirts bearing the likeness of Osama bin Laden. It is forbidden, in Sunni Islam, to depict the human form, lest it lead to idolatry; but here was Osama’s lordly and unintelligent visage, on display and on sale right outside the mosque. That mosque now emptied, after evening prayers, and my friend was very suddenly and very thoroughly surrounded by a shoving, jabbing, jeering brotherhood: the young men of Peshawar.

  At this time of day, their equivalents, in the great conurbations of Europe and America, could expect to ease their not very sharp frustrations by downing a lot of alcohol, by eating large meals with no dietary restrictions, by racing around to one another’s apartments in powerful and expensive machines, by downing yet more alcohol as well as additional stimulants and relaxants, by jumping up and down for several hours on strobe-lashed dance floors, and (in a fair number of cases) by having galvanic sex with near-perfect strangers. These diversions were not available to the young men of Peshawar.

  More proximately, just over the frontier, the West was in the early stages of invading Afghanistan and slaughtering Pakistan’s pious clients and brainchildren and brother Pathans, the Taliban, and flattening the Hindu Kush with its power and its wrath. More proximately still, the ears of these young men were still fizzing with the battle cries of molten mullahs, and their eyes were smarting anew to the chalk-thick smoke from the hundreds of thousands of wood fires—fires kindled by the multitudes of exiles and refugees from Afghanistan camped out all around the city. There was perhaps a consciousness, too, that the Islamic Republic of Pakistan, over the past month, had reversed years of policy and decided to sacrifice the lives of its Muslim clients and brainchildren and brother Pathans, over the border, in return for American cash. So when the crowd scowled out its question, the answer needed to be a good one.

  “Why you want these? You like Osama?”

  I can almost hear the tone of the reply I would have given—reedy, wavering, wholly defeatist. As for the substance, it would have been the reply of the cornered trimmer, and intended, really, just to give myself time to seek the fetal position and fold my hands over my face. Something like: “Well, I quite like him, but I think he rather overdid it in New York.” No, that would not have served. What was needed was boldness and brilliance. The exchange continued:

  “You like Osama?”

  “Of course. He is my brother.”

  “He is your brother?”

  “All men are my brothers.”

  All men are my brothers. I would have liked to have said it then, and I would like to say it now: all men are my brothers. But all men are not my brothers. Why? Because all women are my sisters. And the brother who denies the rights of his sister: that brother is not my brother. At the very best, he is my half-brother—by definition. Osama is not my brother.

  Religion is sensitive ground, as well it might be. Here we walk on eggshells. Because religion is itself an eggshell. Today, in the West, there are no good excuses for religious belief—unless we think that ignorance, reaction, and sentimentality are good excuses. This is of course not so in the East, where, we acknowledge, almost every living citizen in many huge and populous countries is intimately defined by religious belief. The excuses, here, are very persuasive; and we duly accept that “faith”—recently and almost endearingly defined as “the desire for the approval of supernatural beings”—is a world-historical force and a world-historical actor. All religions, unsurprisingly, have their terrorists: Christian, Jewish, Hindu, even Buddhist. But we are not hearing from those religions. We are hearing from Islam.

  Let us make the position clear. We can begin by saying, not only that we respect Muhammad, but that no serious person could fail to respect Muhammad—a unique and luminous historical being. He remains a titanic figure, and, for Muslims, all-answering: a revolutionary, a warrior, and a sovereign, a Christ and a Caesar, “with a Koran in one hand,” as Bagehot imagined him, “and a sword in the other.” Judged by the continuities he was able to set in motion, Muhammad has strong claims to being the most extraordinary man who ever lived. And always a man, as he always maintained, and not a god. Naturally we respect Muhammad. But we do not respect Muhammad Atta.

  Until recently it was being said that what we are confronted with, here, is “a civil war” within Islam. That’s what all this was supposed to be: not a clash of civilizations or anything like that, but a civil war within Islam. Well, the civil war appears to be over. And Islamism won it. The loser, moderate Islam, is always deceptively well represented on the level of the op-ed page and the public debate; elsewhere, it is supine and inaudible. We are not hearing from moderate Islam. Whereas Islamism, as a mover and shaper of world events, is pretty well all there is.

  So, to repeat, we respect Islam—the donor of countless benefits to mankind, and the possessor of a thrilling history. But Islamism? No, we can hardly be asked to respect a creedal wave that calls for our own elimination. More, we regard the Great Leap Backward as a tragic development in Islam’s story, and now in ours. Naturally we respect Islam. But we do not respect Islamism, just as we respect Muhammad and do not respect Muhammad Atta.

  I will soon come to Donald Rumsfeld, the architect and guarantor of the cataclysm in Iraq. But first I must turn from great things to small, for a paragraph, and talk about writing, and the strange thing that happened to me at my desk in this, the Age of Vanished Normalcy.

  All writers of fiction will at some point find themselves abandoning a piece of work—or find themselves “putting it aside,” as we gently say. The original idea, the initiating “throb” (Nabokov), encounters certain “points of resistance” (Updike); and these points of resistance, on occasion, are simply too obdurate, numerous, and pervasive. You come to write the next page, and it’s dead—as if your subconscious, the part of you quietly responsible for so much daily labor, has been neutralized, or switched off. Norman Mailer has said that one of the few real sorrows of “the spooky art” is that it requires you to spend too many days among dead things. Recently, and for the first time in my life, I abandoned, not a dead thing, but a thriving novella; and I did so for reasons that were wholly extraneous. I am aware that this is hardly a tectonic event; but for me the episode was existential. In the West, writers are acclimatized to freedom—to limitless and gluttonous freedom. And I discovered something. Writing is freedom; and as soon as that freedom is in shadow, the writer can no longer proceed. The shadow was not a fear of repercussion. It was as if, most reluctantly, I was receiving a new vibration or frequency from the planetary shimmer. The novella was a satire called “The Unknown Known.”

  Secretary Rumsfeld was unfairly ridiculed, some thought, for his haiku-like taxonomy of the terrorist threat:

  The message is: there are known “knowns.” There are things that we know that we know. There are known unknowns. That is to say, there are things that we know we don’t know. But there are also unknown unknowns. There are things we don’t know we don’t know.

  Like his habit of talking in “the third person passive once removed,” this is “very Rumsfeldian.” And Rumsfeld can be even more Rumsfeldian than that. According to Bob Woodward’s Plan of Attack, at a closed-door senatorial briefing in September 2002 (the idea was to sell regime-change in Iraq), Rumsfeld exasperated everyone present with a torrent of Rumsfeldisms, including the following strophe: “We know what we know, we know there are things we do not know, and we know there are things we know we don’t know we don’t know.” Anyway, the three categories remain quite helpful as analytical tools. And they certainly appealed very powerfully to the narrator of “The Unknown Known”—Ayed, a diminutive Islamist terrorist who plies his trade in Waziristan, the rugged northern borderland where Osama bin Laden is still rumored to lurk.

  Ayed’s outfit, which is called “the ‘Prism,’” used to consist of three sectors named, not very imaginatively, Sector One, Sector Two, and Sector Three. But Ayed and his colleagues are attentive readers of the Western press, and the sectors now have new titles. Known Knowns (Sector One) concerns itself with daily logistics: bombs, mines, shells, and various improvised explosive devices. The work of Known Unknowns (Sector Two) is more peripatetic and long-term; it involves, for example, trolling around North Korea in the hope of procuring the fabled twenty-five kilograms of enriched uranium, or going from factory to factory in Uzbekistan on a quest for better toxins and asphyxiants. In Known Knowns, the brothers are plagued by fires and gas leaks and almost daily explosions; the brothers in Known Unknowns are racked by headaches and sore throats, and their breath, tellingly, is rich with the aroma of potent coughdrops, moving about as they do among vats of acids and bathtubs of raw pesticides. Everyone wants to work where Ayed works, which is in Sector Three, or Unknown Unknowns. Sector Three is devoted to conceptual breakthroughs—to shifts in the paradigm.