Sunspot Jungle

by Bill Campbell

  Dik Dik remembers coming to the city as a child in search of the orchestra of night and smiling lips: drive-in cinemas; white-chested crows; amputees with placards telling the history of their bad luck; wild pigeons; old women walking so slow they turn into scarecrows, maybe one of them was his grandmother, for he’s made sure her grave at Langata Cemetery is empty, so she must be out there, roaming the streets of Nairobi, going around saving the children; the man with long nipples—his father.

  The night has a language of empty parking lots, headlights, car horns, incidental white lights on the top of most floors of tall buildings, live bands in famous tourist joints—Miller’s Guide to Nairobi, 2nd Ed, 2067—rooftop pools illuminated by the light from the eyes of long-dead street children. White skin looks beautiful there, like a Standard Chartered banking hall. Bodies come out of nowhere and occupy the empty spaces.

  Dik Dik walks into an alley. Some children are born with congenital heart disorders, holes in the walls of the heart as big as black holes, but he’s special enough to be born only with bowlegs. The country missed the World Cup because of these bowlegs. A distant muezzin affirms his belonging to another world but in a language he will never understand. Come here, child. Be good and be gone. Dik Dik tiptoes. Slowly, slowly. Dik Dik tiptoes. Midway through a whistle—John Coltrane, Carnegie Hall, a lost time—he stops, and the language of the arrangement of his bones in the general order of the skeleton appears to say hi to a cobbler in red and green. He smiles, nods back, and reaffirms a long-standing discount, “You will always have a home here.” The cobbler’s smile is so wide Dik Dik can make out pools of saliva in the gorges of the man’s toothless gums. A three-headed mousebird tucks its head from under his apron, he pats its crest and tucks it back, smiles to Dik Dik by way of an apology. Dik Dik needs no shoes owing to the size of his feet. The size of his penis begs to differ.

  What is home if you don’t have the right size shoes to take you there?

  Dik Dik walks into Marienbad, says, “Good morning, M’bad.” The people laugh with their mouths closed. In the burrows of their smiles and creases are incomplete guides to difficult museum pieces.

  He kisses each man slowly, takes time to get the tilt angle just right, just the right amount of aftershave, just the right amount of tongue. JIMI HENDRIX is playing.

  Conversations circle around modern architecture. Ah, Nairobi is a riot in July. The sun is out, Hartlaub’s Turacos play in certain gardens. Dead children come out to sing the anthem. So much sun in this city. Wounds fester. Everyone is happy with the government, and the children of diplomats are happier with the dollar rate.

  Dik Dik had dated the son of a diplomat not a long time back, he tells them. South Sudan. They toast: here’s to wishing for places much farther from the Greenwich Meridian.

  There was the her—cinematography and choice of costume notwithstanding—he met along the sands of Casablanca. He forgave her for so many things, pretended not to notice other men (and women), as long as she agreed to sign a memorandum stating their memories would not be erased by the happy men at immigration. Casablanca had old men who reminded him of a rundown smoking zone on Koinange Street, but he stayed there for years, long after his parents had left the place and long after they’d stop sending him postcards. He understood the postcards to be a form of their nostalgia, so he forgave them—it was enough that they suffered. He wanted to be near Europe, in Lampedusa, near the cemetery of sunken boats, in commune with so many West Africans, he could dream dreams where he spoke with an accent and impressed the women almost enough to make them smile but not enough to take them home.

  In the end he left, and immigration said the memorandum was a forgery.

  Casablanca stayed with him. In a certain dream Dik Dik can smell the loins of a woman who has travelled from Syria through Jordan though Tunisia to Lampedusa only do die at the shallow shores of a European beach. The morning after a child smiles at the shallowness of the shore: she knows it’s easy to conquer the ocean for her on this other side; no other truth will be truer than the ocean being conquerable and distance being nothing more than the wet lips of a generous lover between her legs.

  Chromosome-1972 calls, says as way of salutation: “What Chromosome sees in the eyes of the goat.” He’s tired but humours her. She’s dialling him in her sleep again. He knows what goat she is speaking of but does not stop her when she goes into the details of its appearance. Finally, she returns to the eyes of the goat. They are far from perfect spheres, she explains. What she means is that she felt something in the way the goat looked at her. It’s the same way children born long ago would look at you with tilted heads, thinking: “asshole.” It’s the same way he looks at her, not entirely trusting her love and all the tongue she offers him, the dead colours, the dead children she brings to life when she licks his anus and tells him it’s okay, you don’t need to be afraid, there’s no shame in enjoying anal. She’s saying goat, but he hears ghosts.

  A beep goes off, and he notices his register is running low. He dials for the police and gives them her address.

  And a Pinch of Salt

  Hal Duncan

  God works in mysterious ways—down strange back alleys mostly, in enchanting side streets off the boulevard, past the corner boys and through, between the narrow of tenement walls warped to concave overhangs, weird tiered storeys of them rising each side of the cobbled lane to swallow an urban explorer of New Sodom, as a crack in the cityscape, a gorge of interstice all dumpsters and darkness and fire escapes zigzagging up to the jut of rooftops limned with moonlight, and framed between them in the distance up ahead, a queer red iron Tour Eiffel straight from Delaunay’s cubist canvas, standing as a foundry-wrought sentinel at avenue’s end, down past the rhombuses of red-lit brothel windows where, inside, nine muses are kissing an amorous john called Humphrey to ecstatic death just as is chalked on the pavement underfoot in couplets.

  God hawks his services in such mysterious ways, down such entrancing angular wynds, loitering in the doorway of a derelict curio shop, collar upturned to the drizzle, cupping a cigarillo in his hands as he watches out for trade. He doesn’t go by God these days, goes by Che Zeus—Hey, Zeus! in Español—ever since the old mad blind lame watchmaker, the daddy of Che who ran that hidden emporium of errata, disappeared into the backroom, leaving his orreries and automata to spin and play chess with each other by his equations, the whirs and clicks of rickety clockwork echoing in his empty establishment, sparking the worry of would-be customers dropping in to the ching of the bell above the glass-paneled door, in hope of him tinkering their lives to bliss, the scuttlebutt of his absence slowly spreading until eventually one day Herr Doktor Nietzsche ventured behind the beaded curtain and returned, homburg lowering from his head, hand fiddling at his voluminous handlebar moustache, and indigestion churning in his guts as he declared the old man dead.

  It was a sweet relief to Che, truth be told, to be shot of the old loon. Nineteen eons of age and still under the thrall of a tyrant’s tantrum surl. He’d tried to steer Sodom’s hanging judge to the justice, mercy, and wisdom that the zealous churl laid claim to, standing proud with the whores and faggots of Capernaum and Rome, preaching so-called sin to be mere stumble over skandalon, a hipster rabbi teaching Hillel’s wisdom, but it only ever led to pogroms, inquisitions, and crusades. And a son is always already underling to his dada, damned to at best usurp and become him, as Kronos did Ouranos, as Zeus did Kronos. Scion offshoot and throwback to the aged authoritarian’s own infancy in a Cretan cave, struggling not to simply follow a Freudian fate of patricide and powermongering everafter, Che Zeus wept. He wept a lot, alone in his cause. There was only ever the two of them, sadly, contrary to popular misconception, just Papa Dada and Junior, the ghost of myth and ritual a mistranslation, Che’s pneuma theos simply any prophet poet’s holy breath, their sacred inspiration. And Jove Jehovah had no love of the rhapsodes of the figurative, those liemakers to be cast out with the dogs and fornicators and magicians.


  So it was a liberation to Che to bury the arcane antiquated Almighty of Himself, to close up the shop peddling its mechanical ceremonies of penitence and perdition, board up the doors and bottleglass windows, take down the marquee lettering that spelled out LORD, and let the pillowtalk redeem that epithet to a princely pauper’s adonai, Adonis, sung rather than written as his clients climax under Che’s tender ministrations, looking down on the Hand of God cupping their bollocks, the Face of God with lips locked round their cock, gazing up at them with a bottom boi’s ardour to know his service is the benediction he aspires to. This is God’s deliverance now, the delivery of the perfect blowjob to any and all who happen upon him in an alley of New Sodom—and all will, sooner or later, in some midnight hour of their lives.

  He’s the best cocksucker you can imagine, you see, the cocksucker you can imagine bested by none—who’d be bested by every cocksucker out there if he didn’t exist, and so must exist. Who’d be bested by any cocksucker that any son of Sodom ever fucked in the face if every single molly and muscle mary of fair Sodom’s citizenry didn’t get to jolt their jism down his gulping throat at least once. After all, the ideal is not ideal if it’s not actual, as Anselm savvied, scorning the unsustainable paradox of a cocksucker bested by none yet bested by all—albeit Anselm missed that perfection (and more!) in his fancy of the deity. The sainted philosopher of Canterbury missed the knock-ons of his notion, how his human perfections of power, wisdom, love, and truth unfold to perfections of care, of communion. Che, perfect in his cunning and concern, did not, and so, as the exemplary salvator of all hanker, all yen, he stood at his father’s grave, placed a stone upon the granite slab, and knew it true: he must perfect his succor with actuality. So saith Anselm. So, lest the ideal is not ideal, Che will give you the ultimate blowjob at some point.

  Or he’ll let you suck his perfect cock, of course, if you’d prefer, if your yen is to swallow the ropy spurted nectar of his cum; or he’ll let you fuck his perfect ass, riding you cowboy as a power bottom, pounding you into him, rapturous to be impaled, pierced to the core and filled with your prick, wild as Dionysus ramming a figwood dildo up his arse and crying out to the gentle shepherd Prosymnus; or he’ll top you as you’ve never been topped, splay your legs wide and high with a clamp of hands on ankles, plunging into and pressing over down upon you, hand at your throat, flip you sideways, up to all fours, grip on your hips now, taking you so wholly he takes you over in a frenzy of eudaimonia, of enthousiasmos in its ancient sense; or he’ll be a she, and dive your muff, tongue you to waves of orgasm, an entire Pacific crashing over and through you; she’ll fuck or be fucked by you in whatever permutation of whatever options will be, for you, perfection.

  All this is proven, ontologically assured by these words themselves conjuring for you the ideal totality of all ideals in the shape of a human, all capacities of power, wisdom, love, and truth fused to a perfect stance, a perfect disposition acting perfectly and so necessarily manifest, that stance substanced in the requisite flesh of requisite fuckability. Even in mysterious ways, Che works, and he’s working anywhen and everywhen, so sooner or later you’re bound to take the right wrong turn hard left and stroll past the hustler in the hoody where he lurks. You’ll take a chance on his cruising glance, and you won’t regret it.

  What you’ve spent on him, or in him (or her) will be all the payment asked for by this hustler God, Che Zeus. This may be a trade to him, a job to work in his peculiar byways, in the queer passages of New Sodom that slice a non-Euclidean angle between this boulevard of San Francisco and that avenue of Pompeii, but his profession is as much vocation, his craft an art, his knack a nature. And what does a God need coin for anyway, or any such token offerings, when he’s drunk the libation from your cock, had your unction splatted over his cheek and chest? Try and pass the bucks to him, with cash or kudos, and he’ll wave away a payoff paltry in comparison to the sacred balm. The charity of caritas is welcome to the vagabond kid, rough-trading rentboy punk, Che Zeus—agape shared simply another aspect of ardour’s concord—but soul debt redeemed was Papa Dada’s way, the barter of obedience and oblations for grace. Fuck that, says Che.

  And you will. You’ll fuck that and be fucked. And all you’ll offer him in exchange that isn’t his already is a hand reached down to where he kneels before you, thumbing a stray gloop at the snick of his smile into a twirl of tongue and smack of lips. In a lock of forearms, you’ll haul him to his feet, and kiss him hard, taste yourself on him as he hauls his ratty jeans up, nooks his unskivvied tackle in the pod of denim, and buttons up, and buckles his bullet belt. Maybe you won’t still be in the alley, so you’ll grab his sleeveless tee for him from the rug at your feet, as you sit on the edge of the hotel bed to prise your heels into his scuffed white vintage baseball boots, and kneel yourself to lace them up for him as his John the Baptist. You’ll sniff the armpit of that sleeveless tee, white cotton and lycra blend printed with a pencil sketch of an Antinous statue, snuffling half to test if it’s too rank to wear and half to relish the Sweat of God, the gorgeous goaty kinabra of God on this skintight second skin of him that you pull on now, to pose, slinked as the hustler Che to have communed in the giving and getting of the perfect lay, so perfect that who can say who’s who now in the mingle of flesh scents?

  And maybe you’ll dig a cigarillo from the pack in the pocket of your jacket, fetched from the hallway where it was dumped, and set it twixt yer lips, and he’ll light it for you with his Zippo, or vice versa, and he’ll hand you the first, as you light a second one for him. He’ll make you coffee in a little scullery off his kitchen living room, in your wee steel moka pot, setting it on one hob of the gas cooker to heat to a rabid gurgle while the butter melts into the olive oil in the frying pan on the hob beside it, and he cracks two eggs into a glass jug, adding dried basil from a flip-top jar, and garlic powder, and a pinch of salt, and a splut of milk, folding and stirring the mix with a fork before pouring it into a sizzle of pan, gently crunkling the edges inward—with a tip of pan after to spread the unsolid egg into the space—until the thin round flattish rumple of omelette is ready to be flip-folded with a spatula and slid onto a plate, and served with the coffee to Che where he sits on your black leather sofa, sunlit, in your candy-striped boxer briefs, checking messages on his Nokia, an unshaven Galilean, swarthy and lithe as a fisher on a Minoan fresco. Fucking A, he’ll say. Cheers, man.

  No worries, you’ll say.

  Whether it’s you or he who’ll scoff the nosh down is … unpredictable, a quirk of the perfection’s happenstance actuality which, born of the haccaeity of you, can only be unique in every instance, unique as any instant’s thisness. Either way, one of you will blow on your java to cool it, and the other will savour the lush of pursing lips, the swrrp of a sip sucking Nicaraguan Arabica, Indonesian Robusta, or Philippine Liberica. Eyes glancing round the room in a comfortably awkward silence, scanning the shelves for totems of identity … best left for you to fill in as and when the moment’s come. Kitsch teraphim? Or trinkets as simply elegant as a nautilus shell? Wait and see.

  Take it as it comes.

  And then move on with a parting kiss, out the door, down the stairs of the tenement close and out into New Sodom’s streets, on a stride of pride, headed wherever home is now, Che, everywhere and anywhere.

  Escape to Hell

  Iheoma Nwachukwu

  Two days in this sewer. Saif and Motassim are where? Saif returns with news from Misrata yesterday as I’m fucking Hana, my smallest bodyguard, a quick one before her shift ends. Saif curses and crawls out—am I crazy because I’m horny in war? Because fuck is neat and sweet in a sewer?

  It’s hot in here. Midday hot. It’s like sensing the world in a black oil drum. I have crushed what must be Afra somewhere, and its smell floats about like a won’t-leave ghost. I feel an odd buoyancy like that time I floated in water for the first time here in Sirte. Sound slams into my ears. Ti-ti-dum! Ratatat-titi-dum! Supporters holding the city. I’m a beast on all fours
in my yellow jelabia and faded brown trousers, trying to find the least-hurting angle for my back.

  I cut my face shaving this morning, and I’m wondering what it would be like to die. They died unable to hurl themselves in my dreams: the stupid students I hanged every April in the gym room beginning in 1977! The Cyprus businessman I told Ramadan to shoot in the mouth, in his office, until he dies! Mahmoud in Tripoli—I packed his body in a short box back to his wife! Political prisoners whose mothers are whores, I fed to crocodiles! Yes! Each one of those scheming rats! How could their deaths affect me? It was my life or theirs! I chose mine!

  I feel strange making this tape. Why am I doing this today? Who am I making it for? Am I afraid of something? Will my voice in this rectangle-shaped thing mean what I want it to mean? Mean anything to you? Who are you? I am not a crazy man.

  I have been meaning to write another collection of short stories. Like Escape to Hell, that first one. Again this one will be called Escape to Hell, Part Two.

  This whole war, I will talk about it, in an essay in Escape to Hell. This life, this funny life, of Muammar Qaddafi. The world is a cuddly chameleon. That’s why the hardiest of men are fooled time and again. Anti-American riots in Tripoli in 1962 over the Cuban missile crisis and today the same people, my people, support the same country they rioted against?

  I gave them free electricity, go in the cities and look! They pay nothing! I told the banks, “Give loan to man and boy at zero interest.” The banks do it! When any Libyan buys a car, my government takes fifty percent of the cost! Largest oil reserves in Africa! Low cost of oil production! Libya has no external debt! I did it! Libya has foreign reserves of fifty billion dollars! Look in your computers! Look in your computers! Don’t be fooled!