Harsh Oases

by Paul Di Filippo

  “I am grateful for this refuge. You are good to take me in. Your wife was right when she said I could trust you “

  “Ex-wife.”

  Nadya nodded vehemently. “Yes, ex-wife, exactly, just as I am Zaid’s ex-wife. Thank you for the correction. In any circumstance, I suppose I must tell you something about myself—”

  “That’s not—” I began.

  “No, I owe you something, please let me say what I have to.”

  “Okay.”

  “My father is a big businessman. Many generations in my family were businessmen. ‘Tajir’ even means ‘merchant.’ I grew up in a cave outside Sanaa, our capital.”

  I must have looked puzzled.

  “Maybe ‘cave’ is not the right word. A building carved out of the rocks, into the hillside. There are many such in the mountains outside Sana’a. It is a lovely home, much sunshine, with carpets everywhere. Anyway, I was my father’s only child. Always he promised me that I would become part of his business. I even go to college in Egypt for one year. Then happens the coup. My father thinks it would be of more advantage to him to marry me to Zaid. I think you know the rest.”

  I nodded agreement,

  Nadya said nothing else for some time. Then I noticed one lone tear escape and trickle down her cheek. She began to bang the arm of the chair softly with her fist.

  “I am not a peasant woman to be sold into bondage like some whore! I can read, I am educated, I have plans! I knew one day I would escape that bastard. Now I have done so. Let him try to get me back!”

  I refrained from saying that Zaid was attempting just that, and might very well succeed. I got up and went to another part of the room, wanting to leave Nadya some privacy to cry if she felt like it.

  Idly, I booted the Go disk and began to play. Before I knew it, I was deep inside the game.

  Sometime later, I sensed Nadya behind me, so I took my hand off the mouse and looked up.

  “What is this game?”

  “Go.”

  “And how does one play?”

  I explained. “…and so to kill a man and remove him from the board, you must surround him with his enemies, separate him from his mates. Two opponents suffice to trap a man in a corner, three on the border, and four in the center.”

  “That seems easy enough. Let’s play.”

  “It’s not as easy as it looks. I’ll take black, since it goes first and is at a disadvantage.” I switched to two-player mode and ported in another mouse.

  Nadya won the initial game. But it was only because I was so tired.

  For the first time, she smiled.

  “Hey, Leon,” she said, while I was still trying to reconstruct how I had lost.

  “Yeah?”

  “No sweat.”

  For the next five days—a time which seemed much longer—Nadya and I enjoyed a strange kind of domesticity, like the ideal arrangement of some spurious, apocryphal middle-class culture of at least half a century ago, when only men held jobs.

  I would wake to the smell of coffee and toast—Nadya, I surmised, didn’t sleep well or long—and share breakfast with my surrogate wife. Then it was off to work for me, the ritual departure lacking only a peck at the door. Home in the evening to a unique supper, then settle down for reading and Go and an extravagant beer apiece.

  Nadya never beat me again after that first game. But she was a sharp and good enough player so that I was never bored.

  The only deviation from this marital charade came each night when I unfolded the convertible couch and Nadya disappeared behind the door of my bedroom. But it was only a surface deviation. Below the separation, the closeness that had grown between us was still maintained. There just never developed any sexual tension between Nadya and me. I simply couldn’t see her in those terms, and I doubt she ever once thought of me as a potential partner. To tell the truth, Nadya was rather asexual. Knowing her history—which I found I could now think of without unease—I could see why.

  Once I thought: If life had been this easy with Ruth—

  In the middle of this inexplicably idyllic period, I was paid another visit by Dick Rangley, the NSA man. For a second time, he caught me at the office.

  “How’s Zaid?” he asked after the standard preliminaries.

  “Fine, no trouble. He’s been invisible as far as Pm concerned.”

  Rangley studied his shoetips, before looking at me. “The ceremonial signing is less than a week away. But Zaid’s balking. He says he won’t go to Washington until he gets his missing wife back.”

  I think I kept my voice level. “What’s that got to do with me?”

  “Nothing—I hope. I just want you to keep your eyes open for her.”

  “Listen, Dick. Would you really hand over this woman to Zaid if you found her?”

  Rangley hesitated. “Leon, to me Major Zaid is an ignorant prick who mistreats his wives. But to the country—your country and mine—he’s an invaluable ally who must be kept happy. To answer your question: Yes, I would hand her over.”

  Rangley spoke so vehemently, that once again I wondered what made the reunification of these two poor, non-pivotal states so crucial.

  I didn’t have to wait long to find out.

  On what was to be our last night together, Nadya seemed rather preoccupied. I was forced to play against the Atari, leaving her to work out her troubles alone.

  At last she spoke.

  “Leon. There is something I have not told you.”

  I shut off the machine. “Yes?”

  “The Major does not want me back just for myself. There is also what I know.”

  I braced myself, not entirely sure if I wanted—or needed—to hear this secret that Ruth had intuited. But in the end I didn’t stop her.

  “There has been a discovery in my sister country. Oil. A lot of oil. Off the coast of South Yemen.”

  Suddenly, Rangley’s concern made sense. “Let me guess the rest. The Russians don’t know that the client state they are about to give up possesses this oil .…”

  “That is correct. You see, it was all done on computers. Nobody even goes near South Yemen. Some big oil company just takes all the old hydrophone data from previous surveys and runs it through some special new software that reveals overlooked deposits. Just like that, Yemen goes from nothing to hot shit.”

  “You could put it that way, I suppose.…Well, what do you intend to do with this information?”

  “Nothing. I just thought you should know.”

  “Thanks.”

  “You are very welcome.”

  Everything happened so fast, the day it all blew up, that I still find it hard to order events.

  The first thing that morning, after my usual meeting with Tanager, I handed him an envelope.

  “Burt, if anything should happen to me, I want you to make sure this is mailed “

  Tanager looked at the address of a reporter I knew at the LA Herald-Examiner. Then he looked back to me.

  “Okay,” he said, and left.

  That was the best thing about Tanager. With that one word, I knew it was good as done.

  Around one, my phone rang. It was Ruth.

  “Leon, I just got home.”

  I didn’t ask where she had been all night, although I was surprised to find that I wanted to know. But her next words drove such trivial thoughts completely out of my head.

  “My apartment’s been ransacked. Nothing’s missing but your photo.”

  “Okay, don’t worry. I’ll call you later.”

  On the way home, all my mind would keep revolving was the fact that Ruth still kept my picture.

  Al-Qasiri was already there. I found him sitting negligently with his legs crossed. The creases on his trousers were as sharp as he undoubtedly kept the blade of his dagger. He held a pistol on Nadya, who sat opposite him with a stony expression.

  “Mister Deatherage, we expected you. Please be seated next to Mrs Zaid. I have already phoned the Major, and he should be down shortly. I’m sure he will
wish to repay you for taking such good care of his wife.”

  I did what he directed, saying nothing. I wanted to wait till all the players were present.

  The crisis must have interrupted al-Qasiri during his daily qat chewing. He still had a plug of it in one cheek, and his eyes were distant. Now and then he would spit on my rug. But his gun never wavered.

  It wasn’t long until the Major arrived. He was alone. He stalked in pompously, came right up to Nadya—and slapped her across the face. She winced, but quickly recovered.

  “Bitch!” said the Major. Then he yanked her to her feet, began to shake her and harangue her in Yemeni. Nadya didn’t deign to reply.

  When he was done, Zaid turned to his subordinate, now standing also.

  “Kill him,” said the Major.

  Al-Qasiri leveled his pistol at my gut. Apparently I was to hurt before I died.

  “Don’t do it, Hamud.”

  Rangley stepped into the room, his own gun drawn.

  Now all the players were there.

  “A tap on the Major’s phone?” I asked.

  Rangley nodded. “And yours. But those goddamn hydrofoils only move so fast Jesus, Leon, you played this close. I don’t know why you got involved in this in the first place, and I don’t much care. All I want to know is, what now?”

  “You take the Major to Washington, and Nadya stays here, or goes wherever she wants to.”

  The Major spluttered into life. “Ridiculous! This woman is my legal wife. Mister Rangley, clearly this is a domestic matter in which no one has a right to interfere—”

  Rangley seemed about to agree with Major Zaid, so I voiced the real issue.

  “If I don’t reclaim a certain letter, gentlemen, then tomorrow the whole world will know about Yemen’s new wealth. Including the Soviets.”

  “Jesus Christ,” said Rangley. “Now you’ve really done it, Leon. Do you know what you’re threatening?”

  “Yup.”

  Everyone was dumbfounded. By bringing the dirty unspoken secret out in the open, I had cast our standoff in a whole new light.

  “Listen, Major,” I finally said. “Nadya’s not going to say anything unless you make her, and neither am I. Do you really want to lose your chance to rule a reunified Yemen just to keep a woman who hates you?”

  Nadya stood in the center of the triangle formed by Zaid, al-Qasiri and Rangley. Zaid looked to her, then to Rangley, then to his servant. The Major opened his mouth once, twice, then a third time before any words emerged.

  “Put your gun away, Hamud. We leave our trash here and go.”

  I put my hand out to Nadya. She grabbed it tight and came to stand by me.

  Zaid and al-Qasiri left the house in a cloud of self-importance. (They left the island itself that same day.)

  I had never seen Rangley sweat before. He came over to Nadya and me, a look of mixed distress and relief on his face.

  “If Zaid backs out of the negotiations because of this, Leon, your ass is grass. You know that, don’t you?”

  “Yeah, I know it.”

  “In that case then—shake.”

  I did. Nadya too.

  “Jesus,” said Rangley, “but you were cool. How did you know you’d pull it off?”

  “It was easy, Dick. Zaid had one too few stones on the board.”

  Rangley didn’t get it.

  But Nadya smiled.

  I’ve mentioned elsewhere that “concretizing or reifying a metaphor” is a prime sfnal technique. Or maybe we should say, a surreal or satirical technique, since I’m not sure there’s much scientific rigidity or genuine extrapolation involved in this mode. Stilly the technique can often engender a vivid tale, even as a kind of “five-finger exercise which I suspect this following story might be.

  Stilly in a day and age where mind control is a threat and the expression of certain taboo thoughts is verboten, perhaps the story of a man who comes to an accommodation with his “bad beliefs” is not without merit.

  And one final quirk: for some reason, whenever I re-read this story, I think of a comic strip from the old National Lampoon, wherein the advertising icon Mr. Peanut goes on a mad crime spree.

  That’s probably just a meme at work in me.

  BAD BELIEFS

  I had kept putting off my quarterly mandatory visit to the local branch of the Department of Memes, and now I couldn’t leave the house because of all the Bad Beliefs hanging around on my doorstep.

  Don’t ask me why I had neglected my checkup and inoculations, because I can’t tell you. I know it’s every citizen’s civic duty to keep his antimeme vaccinations up to date. But some perverse streak inside me (possibly, now that I think about it, an anti-antimeme meme) made me keep postponing my appointment until it was just too late.

  Maybe it was the way the nurse had treated me the last time I went to the DOM clinic. She was very pretty, and I wanted to like her. But she regarded me as if I were a leper, just because I was diagnosed as having a mild case of Yuppie Flu. With a look of absolute distaste, as if she had swallowed a fly, she boosted the volume on her white noise earphones and clicked down heavy filters on her protective goggles. I felt like a criminal.

  Or maybe it was the supercilious way the doctor talked to me as he hefted the heavy needle whose tip dripped with antimeme juice. He was the kind of doctor who wore his degrees like a thousand-dollar suit.

  “I’m afraid you’ve got a very bad complex this time, son. On top of the Yuppie Flu, the tests show definite traces of Someone Else Will Pick Up My Litter, Bodybuilders Are Godlike, and Elvis Lives.”

  “But Elvis does live!” I said.

  The doctor just clucked his tongue chidingly while the buzzing, shortsighted nurse swabbed down my right ass cheek with antiseptic. Then he jabbed the needle in, and it really hurt.

  For a whole day afterwards I was very disoriented. As the serum surged through my brain, driving out all the bad memes inside, I experienced frequent hallucinations. Most of these involved a pumped-up Elvis driving a pink BMW while throwing empty soda-cans out the window.

  After twenty-four hours, I was back to normal. Or at least what I had to assume was normal. It was so hard to tell these days. I felt a weird compulsion to pay my taxes early, and that kind of pissed me off. The government isn’t supposed to put any proactive memes of their own into our shots, but you can’t tell me that they don’t. I’ve had several pacifist friends who have just upped and joined the Armed Forces without even saying goodbye.

  Anyhow, for whatever reason—whether out of sheer stubbornness or actual meme infection—I delayed my next shot until the last possible minute and well beyond. And now I was paying the price.

  Besides the antimeme components specific to a patient’s unique illness, each tailored shot contained a general-purpose booster that protected you from a wide range of memes. Mine had run out. That was why all the Bad Beliefs were now camped on my doorstep.

  They seemed to be able to sense when a person was vulnerable, and tended to congregate around a victim’s house. Generally, what with every responsible citizen being well and frequently inoculated, you didn’t see many Bad Beliefs in the good neighborhoods. Oh, sure, you might spot Don’t Mow the Lawn or Thumbsucking Is Cute hanging around, but that was about as bad as it got out in the ’burbs where I lived. In the quarantined inner-city ghettos though, where people disdained DOM and their shots—man, that was another story. You tried to avoid those places if you could. The streets were full of Bad Beliefs of every conceivable variety, and there was no telling what you could pick up.

  Now, though, I was the source of contagion.

  Why, oh why, hadn’t I just gone in for my shot …?

  With a start, I realized that I was falling prey to Crying Over Spilt Milk Will Help. That meme had been one of the first to arrive, and was surely still out there now. Or was it? Maybe they had all gone .…

  I crossed my living room carpet and timidly pulled back the corner of one thick drape, hoping that somehow all the Bad Be
liefs would have just vanished.

  But of course they hadn’t.

  In fact, there were more of them—many more—than the last time I had dared to look.

  They were all shapes and sizes and degrees of solidity. They were big as an elephant or small as a mouse. They were human-shaped, animal-shaped or shapes in between. You could see right through some, but others looked as substantial as your reflection.

  The Bad Beliefs were insouciantly draped over my shrubs and steps. They sat atop my car and on my lawn. They walked up and down or squatted stolid as Indian chiefs. A group of four were playing poker, and some others were performing a kind of frenzied cannibal dance. A clatter from the roof indicated they were up there too.

  The ones nearest the window spotted me, and shouts went up.

  “Hey, Jimmy, come out and play!” “We won’t bite!” “We just want to be friends!”

  I dropped the curtain as if it were aflame, and faded back into the room.

  They knew my name. I hadn’t realized they would know my name. All my previous bouts with bad memes had been low-grade infections, nipped in the bud. But I guessed when things went this far, the memes apparently got more powerful, more tangible and active.

  How active I could not at that moment have guessed.

  I wished for the prophylactic glasses and headphones that the nurse had worn. They might have helped me to escape. But such devices were permitted only to medical personnel. It was felt that such mechanical contrivances were subject to failure, and could cause a person to neglect their shots .…

  My neighbors must be going nuts right now. My deliberate inattention to my own mental welfare had succeeded in lowering their property values immensely. Even yesterday, things hadn’t been this bad. It was only a matter of time before one or more of my fellow homeowners called the DOM and a truck was dispatched to get me. In fact, I thought I could hear the distant wail of sirens even now.