Popular Fiction and 9/11

Finally, the New Yorker has publised a short story. Sometime last fall there was a good one from T.C. Boyle, about Los Angeles car culture and high-speed organ tran- sportation, which coincided nicely with a concurrent car-chase expos� from Tad Friend. But since then it's been a reversion to Murakami (who

I do admire, but) or love affairs with old men and their maids, or other subjects equally mediocre.

But this week's story by Martin Amis, that funny and world-weary Brit, is the most hilarious treatment of September 11 I have seen in the past 4.5 years. Catching up with Muhammad Atta as he wakes up in the Portland, ME motel room, Amis fills in the story of why he might have traveled there before returning to Boston. Atta is portrayed as deeply insecure and suicidal, and competetive with his comatriats not on a jihadic level, but with "nihilistic insouciance." He has also been suffering from constipation for half a year; his stomach "taut and proud as a four month pregnancy." His call to Ziad, who will pilot the failed mission to DC, is full of gloating, for he has drank the holy water that will protect him from damnation: "Your hell will burn with jet fuel for eternity," he tells him. "So there may be some delay before you get those brides of light."

The security administration at Logan is shown as not wholly undiscerning, though oblivious nonetheless. In these bored, snagged moments, Atta meditates on the nature of "dead time," considering that terrorism's contribution, if nothing else, has been a "net increase in world boredom."

From "The Last Days of Muhammad Atta," short story by Martin Amis
Originally published in the New Yorker, April 24, 2006. Excerpts from pgs. 157, 160:

Whatever else terrorism had achieved in the past few decades, it had certainly brought about a net increase in world boredom. It didn't take very long to ask and answer those three questions--about fifteen seconds. But those dead-time questions and answers were repeated, without any variation whatever, hundreds of thousands of times a day. If the planes operation went ahead as planned, Muhammad Atta would bequeath more, perhaps much more, dead time, planet-wide. It was appropriate, perhaps, and not paradoxical, that terror should also sharply promote its most obvious opposite. Boredom.

....Oh, the misery of recurrence, like the hotel elevator doing its ancient curtsy on every floor, like the alien hair on the soap changing its shape through a succession of alphabets, like the (necessarily) monotonous gonging inside his head. It had occured to him before that his condition, if you could call it that, was merely the condition of boredom, unbounded boredom, where all time was dead time. As if his whole life consisted of answering those same three questions, saying "Yes" and "Yes" and "No."

-Dave