He made no connection between his wrists and his new life; he seemed incapable of making connections of any kind on his own (another symptom of an overprotected childhood). But even then he knew that he was overusing the computer—if not to study, then to watch porn.
He had become addicted to porn. The obsession with porn was an aspect of an obsession with sex. When he arrived in the U.S., he’d only seen a few pictures—his dial-up Internet in Delhi wasn’t fast enough to load videos. That changed quickly. His roommate Eddy, with his Cheshire cat grin, watched porn on his computer openly, obsessively, keeping the door ajar so that the moans of women wafted down the corridors of the dorm. Dealing with some problem of his own—Eddy had been a football player in school, but was possibly gay; he had the largest collection of shoes Mansoor had ever seen, and he cried easily—Eddy plastered the walls with posters of seminude women from Maxim magazine. In the day, with the sun beating against the windows, the room emitted a rank yellowish glow—the glow of an adult store. Mansoor had not known how to resist this assault on the walls. Perhaps he didn’t want to resist—he wanted to buck stereotypes about Muslims, stereotypes that were flourishing after 9/11, and anyway he too liked porn. He talked with disgust to girls about Eddy’s pitiful misogyny but watched days’ worth of porn, on his own, in secret, when Eddy was gone or asleep. He felt guilty, felt watched by God, but it was overruled by the great pleasure of seeing blond naked bodies trapped in his laptop monitor, providing him a template in which to fit the unapproachable girls who roamed the hallways in their towels.
Around the same time he read The Fountainhead and became obsessed with becoming a great programmer at the expense of everything else.
But his body had been unable to take it, and he’d come reeling back to India, his wrists aflame. Now, in India, in the mosque, he saw his body was simply rejecting this selfish way of life; it was begging him to pause, reconsider. And he did. He thought about who he actually was: a mild person, brought up with firm good Muslim values, someone who thrived not on pursuing individual pleasures, but on being among people like himself, living a life of moderation: praying, exercising, thinking healthy thoughts. The more he realized the connection between the mind and the brain, the more he wished to keep his mind clean. If you had horrible thoughts, if you carried rage against your parents and sexual fury against women in your head, as he had—how could you be healthy, happy? Your body imploded. You became the bomb.
When he told Ayub this, shared these revelations, Ayub said, “Again, you’re coming up against the Western belief in the individual.” They were walking once more in the shopping complex near Holy Child Nursing Home. “There are no higher values, people in the West say. Live by your own instincts, for yourself, for your own pleasure. You know, I went once to New York. My brother works for a man in the diamond business in Dubai and I went along. I transported the diamonds in my pocket. That’s how all diamonds are taken—they’re too precious to put in a suitcase. You know what struck me about New York?”
“The women?” said Mansoor.
“No. Not the women, the graffiti, the buildings—nothing. I expected all these things. What I noticed was the things that were missing. Old people, for example. I realized you could go days without seeing an old person. Where are they? I asked my brother. Why aren’t there old people in New York?” He looked at Mansoor. “They’re all in retirement homes, of course. Hidden away from sight the way dead people are immediately put in a morgue or buried. In America, you see, you’re not supposed to take care of the elderly. You’re supposed to look after yourself, chase your dreams. But what happens when you grow old? Will your individualism save you? No—you’ll be put away like the dead. In America, you see, you die twice—once when you grow old, and once when you actually die. But the illusion of youth must be preserved at all costs. This is what I felt about New York. It was a place you could waste your whole life without thinking once about others—until you too were put away and replaced by the young. I could suddenly see why al-Qaeda wanted to target New York. It’s a place that prides itself on being the most awake, but it’s asleep to reality.”
“Everyone I met was struggling with depression,” Mansoor said, agreeing. “It was almost fashionable to be depressed. I didn’t think about it then, but it was because many of them were cut off from their families. They had no way of making meaning. That’s what happened to me too: the wrist problem, it was a type of depression.” He turned to Ayub. “I just remembered something you said when we first talked. That your pain only went away when you started thinking about others.”
“Not just that,” Ayub said. “But when I found God.”