A magic maze of fairyland beauty complicated by gray misery. There, late at night, beside the Nile, one or two fishing boats still out on the water. Men cast nets in the moonlight. What did such midnight fishermen seek? That which came up from the black mud. Somewhere amid the many suqs—or specialized markets—probably in the Old City, was a bazaar open only long after sunset, specializing in the dark catch.
Jason smiled to himself, thinking here is my dark catch.
She fought, trying to cry out. He struck her in the mouth with his fist, breaking many of her teeth, cutting his knuckles. He would have hieroglyphs of scars across them as a memento. He leaned in after subduing her and murmured, “Shall I tell you a story of an Arabian Night? Sometimes there are no sugar-coated build-ups, no idyllic preludes. Sometimes the darkness begins immediately.”
He kissed the tip of her nose and added, “It begins now.”
This time Jason was more inventive, leaving a pyramid of her on the sandy bank, torso as the base, legs then arms, head at the top. A tomb fit for a slum Cleopatra.
The third night he caught sight of a woman in the severe traditional Moslem garb. The yashmak veil with the vent for her eyes fluttered next to him. She coyly allowed her gaze to meet his, unheard of for an orthodox Mohammedan. At least he thought she was staring at him. He couldn’t see her eyes. The vent for them was a grid of gauze.
The more modern Egyptians (including the many Christians) adopted western dress. He caught a whiff of patchouli and heard the soft rain-like tinkle of cheap jewelry beneath the chador.
He saw only a glimpse of beauty and was reminded of that female djinn sewing up the defiled women of hell. This might have been why he chose her. Because she might be that djinn, come to lead him to the other world without horizons.
She moved off into the crowd which buzzed in several dialects about the murders of the previous two evenings. The authorities were sure the killer wasn’t from Cairo. They believed it was a soldier, and they were anxious to apprehend him before the various countries sent their military contingents home.
People brought up in the States had no idea what foreign cities with their poorer quarters smelled like. Not even those U.S. citizens from the worst ghettoes could readily identify with the reek of rampant bilge. In a country of scarcely two centuries, it was hard to perceive the choking gag of places where the millennia of outside latrines had drenched the environment with pungent human slop. Even in the arid desert, relics of mummified turds from the time of the pharaohs, of Moses, mingled with the newer resins of ejecta. Or maybe it was just him, able to detect such things, sensitive nose eager to find it out. The true Superman must investigate every nuance before he could understand—and then control—damnation. There was another place of suffering and joy. Where dominion existed for the truly despotic at the end of the puzzle of arterial miles and unraveled bundles of nerves.
Victims always called to their beasts, by gesture or simple expression. By pheromone or faint echo. Usually without their conscious realization of this on their part—but it must be subconscious. Death wish or the craving for a nihilistic sex which would rescue them from the gray, useless/senseless/hopeless lives most lived.
Jason followed the woman through the old city, many stretches still surrounded by ancient battlements. They passed the crenelated walls and militant towers of the enormous mosque erected by al-Hakim, ruler from 996 to 1021 A.D. This caliph had been a member of the famed Fatimid Dynasty, claiming descendence directly from the prophet Mohammed through his daughter, Fatimah. It was said that al-Hakim was insane, with staring blue eyes that terrified all who saw him. He would buy slave children, play games with them for a short time, and then disembowel them with his own hands. Not far from there, they went through the Khan al-Khalili, the high-priced bazaar for the idiot tourists with more money than brains. Last they passed the al-Azhar Mosque, where the world’s oldest functioning university lay.
Jason watched the rolling muscles in her gazelle ass, the ample melons of her breasts beneath the black linen of her garments. She would occasionally…furtively…glance back at him.
As if to see if Jason still followed.
And was she frightened or reassured to find him there?
Perhaps she was going to lead him out of the city completely. Out onto the moon desert. What the ancients used to call the Land of the Dead. And maybe under all those swishing, rustling robes was the body of an unearthly, gorgeous Isis.
Or perhaps under the yashmak was the head of Hathor—a cow.
Jason tried to get close enough to catch the patchouli perfume again. Like a mysterious tease of paradise in a concentration camp of fecal horrors.
He recalled that the desert was to the west of Cairo. They were walking east where the city was hemmed in by the somber cliffs of the Muqattam Hills.
But they were indeed entering the Land of the Dead. Or rather, one of the Cities of the Dead—the medieval, Eastern cemetery. Here were straight, intersecting streets and lifelike houses built for bones. Some of it was neat, clean. But many families were squatters living in these tombs. Some had been there for generations. Grandfathers, fathers and sons living their entire lives in this graveyard. Ragged kids ran between the mausoleums. Garbage was piled high outside many. Jason peeked into one place and saw an old lady in wrinkled black gauze chopping melon upon a marble cenotaph.
His quarry glided through mobs of black-eyed, swarthy men in white cotton galabiyahs (which just looked like women’s nightgowns to him). They turned slightly to observe her, as if her beauty had briefly stuck to them. She disentangled herself from obstacle courses of cripples crying for alms. She floated between streaks which seemed to reach out from the sunset, flapping scarlet bandages of cloud like a bloody dysentery.
Suddenly she darted into a tall crypt. This wasn’t one of the well-kept ones. Anti-American, anti-European, and anti-Israeli slogans had been written in a mortar of fingerpainted crap. The door’s hinges sounded like a Saracen’s curse.
Jason followed her inside.
She just stood there, as if she’d known all along he would come in. As if that had always been the plan.
He had no problem with letting her see the bayonet right away.
“You are an evil man,” she said in perfect English. There wasn’t even a trace of that clipped, singsong accent he liked.
“You ever hear of existentialism, baby?” Jason asked, leering. “One of the great existential minds was a guy called Berdyaev. And he said, ‘Without the freedom of evil, good would not be free; it would be determined and imposed by force.’ Can’t have one without the other, see?”
She dropped something on the floor. Jason took a split second to perceive what it was. A badge. She was a policewoman. She’d lured him there to arrest him. Was that it?
Jason laughed, it rattling from his chest like a long range missile along its track, anticipating firing.
He brought the bayonet across his own arm, splitting a nest of needle marks, spraying blood.
He said, “Ooh, I like it rough. Let me get started for you. There! Maybe you’ll be more fun than those other two. I respect sincere conflict.”
He saw the object on the floor. It had only seemed like a badge. It was gold, imprinted with hieroglyphs and a queen’s profile. Not a cop. A smuggler maybe. Yeah, she ought to know some moves all right.
But she made no attempt to draw a concealed weapon, to position herself for a fight, or even to call out for whatever partners in crime might be waiting in this stinking outhouse of a hovel. She lifted the hem of the chador from the ground, bringing it high to her waist. Not grabbing for a gun in garter or boot top. Nor did she give him any sign that she was supernatural. She opened no gateways to exalted horrors. She slowly revealed herself, the eyes behind the gauze in the yashmak’s vent were just a blur in the dark room.
Jason’s jaw dropped. All he could think of was one of those giant chocolate Easter bunnies that were hollow inside. The heavy dark brown body hung together for
a moment, as if carved from cocoa candy, as if sculpted from a heap of Arabica coffee grounds. Then it began to slide floorward, the form of pure shit losing volition.
««—»»
The Code of Jewish Law said not to enter any house of prayer with even as much as a speck of waste inside the anus. It also said you mustn’t pray anywhere near a soiled baby. And you mustn’t even THINK of holy things while you were in a toilet.
—Sacred Sepsis
Dr. Louis Godard and Dr. James Singer
— | — | —
Chapter 17
The clock went off, playing music, something of relentless percussion and a baritone chanting the most violent obscenities about bitches in general and some whores in particular.
Dorien fought her way out of the darkness, sat up in bed, trembled hard.
What was that?
Just another perplexing dream. Being someone else. Being someone else who became the now-familiar goddess.
But in the other nightmare excursions, she was always in a past era, a clearly separate incarnation. (That is, assuming that these things were actually connected to her, part of her.) This one was during the Gulf War and she’d been alive, as Dorien Warmer, even if just a little girl. She’d had no such dreams as these then. She’d have remembered anything so unsettling. After all, she’d never forgotten the nightmare of the screaming children and the smell of orchids.
(And that had been connected to her—even if only in the case of an after-the-fact.)
The recent dreams had made up a sort of crazy logic. Now that was gone. For the time reference here was all wrong.
This one began as she’d passed through a tomb in ancient Egypt. Or maybe it was an ancient tomb in modern Egypt. At any rate, a tribute to an unknown queen. Sealed in, it was so dark there her eyes didn’t hurt anymore. She found some ornament on the floor, picked it up, felt its pure metal vibrate through her skin, slipped it into some clumsy robe she wore.
And then suddenly she’d passed through the walls and was in a marketplace, leading some strange man toward a reckoning.
Well, she had lately been aware of a male presence in part of her dreams. But she never really saw him. So she couldn’t say for sure if this GI was him or not. She only knew that the male presence was important to her somehow, at least peripherally.
Peripherally in-a-reckoning-kind-of-way? Not that she knew what that would have been. The alarm had sounded, waking her to get ready for court.
Dorien had received the summons to appear as a witness. What would happen? What would she have to admit to? How would she be forced to demean herself, taking down even further what little dignity she had left?
But she got up and dressed. Pulled on pantyhose. Odd material. Something she’d never thought about before. That stockings were from some petroleum-based synthetic. Oil black and viscous, from dead things which had piled up and then decomposed over millions of years to ride so close to her flesh. Pressed against her steamy crotch, some saber-tooth cat…or a slope-headed man barely away from walking on his knuckles to seek his food by bashing its brains out with a club. The polymer in her inexpensive dress was the same, a winding sheet from a primeval graveyard. She stuck her feet into shoes of man-made fake leather, feeling the insides as humid tongues of prehistoric ant-eaters and hummingbirds.
By the time she was finished and glanced in the mirror, she had an idea of herself as an insect encased in amber, nothing more than another dead prisoner.
Dorien sniffed. Why did the place smell worse than usual? On top of the brownness which had crept past the duct tape on her windows and the reek of those who lived in the apartments around her?
That stew Annet had brought and left outside the door, she’d tossed in the trash.
“Guess I haven’t taken the garbage out in a while,” Dorien said aloud to herself. She made a mental note: garbage should be taken to the chute more often than once a month, especially if there was food in it.
She hadn’t eaten any, of course. (Didn’t seem to have many teeth to eat with lately, had she been so inclined.) She’d seen that restaurant her sister frequented. But how had she known the aroma was dog? Some time between her father’s death and Annet’s delivering the bag from CANE, Dorien’s senses had sharpened until she recognized the species of meats both simmering in the early summer heat or putrifying in someone’s bowels.
Dog.
CANE.
Not as in Kane with a long ‘a’ and silent ‘e’. But as in Cah-nay. A Romance Italian word out of the Latin root: canis.
(Dorien knew how long she’d known. Ever since she had the Roman dream.)
Her sister had been there last right before she’d had that dream. If Annet had come afterward, would Dorien have smelled dog inside her sister?
Going out of the building, she had to walk down to the car park. This was where she kept her cheap, creaking old but cute little Volkswagen. Only had to pay about four hundred bucks for it since it was forty years old and three different colors. Still had the tacky shapes from where some love child back in the late sixties (during an uncontrollable seizure of Herbie The Lovebug-itis) had stuck dayglow rubber flowers to it, probably the kind folks used to put on the floors of their bathtubs to keep from slipping when they showered. Never could be completely removed.
She turned the key in the ignition and heard it grind before it finally started. She had to let it warm up for about five minutes. The car emitted a tiny fart from its exhaust that sounded like a piglet full of beans.
She drove down to the courthouse. There were cops all over the place by the entrance to the main parking lot across the street. Media, too. And the usual crowd of voyeurs. She saw the body just before the wagon crew shoveled it onto a stretcher (couldn’t blame ’em for not wanting to touch it) and covered it up with black plastic (more petroleum from the tar pit).
She smelled it a block and a half before she got there. Even with the car’s windows rolled up and the exhaust’s farts smelling of sausages ground with coal, she caught the strong stench of human excrement.
“Another victim of The Shit Detail,” someone said. Maybe a cop or a reporter.
The victim (or VIC as the current chop-em slang went with word abbreviations, nominally etymonistic decaps) had been found spreadeagled beneath a populist mural of Blind Justice (commissioned by the city from some civic-friendly artist who didn’t do the hoity-toity, cocaine-up-the-snobbish-leftist nostril, anti-religious smut that an earlier mayor had so campaigned against). No one ever mentioned how big Blind Justice’s cha-cha’s were, painted on the side of the building where one had to take a number and pay ten bucks for a parking spot.
The VIC had down her throat one very long, hard turd which had been excreted and then sprayed with a quick-drying polymer…(which might have passed for a dildo in any number of underground porn films to be found on the web). There was evidence of lientery all over the body. And there was the ubiquitous saying left smeared upon the mural about two or three feet above where the strangled face stared up at the sky with its peculiar eyes.
“Art happens—no hovel is safe from it…” Whistler
Even the dot-dot-dots were there, sordid and brown in their biffy punctuation.
Dorien blinked, read the saying. Thought to herself, actually I would have said, “Art should never outlast its usefulness.”
She recognized those peculiar eyes. For the trimmed eyelids that couldn’t have closed no matter how much this unfortunate girl might have wanted to close them and wish the attack away. The same one Dorien had paid two bucks to for a glimpse of her personal tragedy.
“Who do you suppose she was? There’s no ID,” Dorien overheard one officer tell another.
“Just another vagrant. One of the lost,” another said tiredly, speaking through a handkerchief pressed across his nose and mouth. Ah, sensibilities.
Should Dorien come forward and say she knew this young woman? But she didn’t, really. What would she tell them? That she’d purchased entrance to
a freakpeep a few weeks ago, in a moment of moral weakness?
She shivered, the smell of that shit…well, there was a facet to it that disturbed her. She refused to think about it. Hell, she didn’t know what it could mean and didn’t have the time to mull it over.
Instead she drove down to the next lot and paid, put her card on the dashboard as she parked, locked up, walked toward the courthouse. Smelling shit in the brown wind.
Neela Wilson was in the waiting room. In a wheelchair, thin as a skeleton and twice as weak. Yet she managed to smile when she saw Dorien. Dorien went to sit next to her.
There were women everywhere, some visibly ill, others not as much. There were sniffles, coughs, dry husky murmurs. Heads under scarves, heads under wigs to hide patchy scalps. Lots of sunglasses—the only thing Dorien had in common with them other than some missing teeth. She felt guilty because she wasn’t sick.
(Not sick? Not sick?! What would you call somebody who didn’t eat anymore, didn’t shit anymore, turned her bathwater into sewage just by sitting down in it, and who could smell what kind of meat rotted up your ass?)
“Hi…” Neela managed softly.
Dorien touched her hand and smiled. “Good to see you.”
“You still look terrific. Radiant actually,” Neela said. “Did you get tested?”
“Yes, I did. I’m negative.” Well, so far the teeth she’d lost had come from the back, so it didn’t show when she talked. Probably gave her great cheekbones.
Neela’s eyes shone. “Thank God.”
“Are all of them…?” Dorien jerked her head at the other young ladies. Was the one who’d filed the charges there or was she in the courtroom? Perhaps she’d already testified and now watched from a seat in the back, near where the jury could see every lesion and hear every cough.
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