Looking for the Mahdi

by N Lee Wood

  What I lacked in looks, I made up for in academic achievement, and I was offered a scholarship from one of those vague, oil-rich Arab-American Cultural Leagues, which covered the bulk of my tuition. Not to be outdone, the Kiwanis Club in my hometown cobbled together a half-assed agricultural textbook scholarship. To make up the rest, I sold my soul for the newest version of the Government’s nondefaultable student loan: Pay-It-Back-Or-Rot-In-Prison. My stepdad sent a check once in a while when things got lean, but I knew that, all things considered, I was one of the lucky ones; the entrenched damage to the educational system had already been done. Affordable education in America had been flushed down the toilet years before; only the kids of the very rich or those who could qualify for obscure scholarships ever managed to get a college degree. I was certainly one of the few with above-average skin pigmentation, like, y’know, fer sher.

  Since I was a scholarship student rather than a scion of the leisure class, I somehow felt I had to compete, to show them rich snots that I was better’n them. But after graduating Phi Beta Kappa and summa cum laude, with the usual pins and tassels and pseudo-cabalistic college rites, I found that all my shiny new journalist’s degree got me was a slightly above minimum-wage job as a glorified coffee girl at a secondary city newspaper. Everybody wanted to be a star reporter, and the competition was just plain cutthroat fierce. I couldn’t even get anyone to sexually harass me in exchange for a promotion. My take-home pay didn’t even start to cover the monthly payment on my college loan. I was well into my thirties before the IRS had deducted enough out of my income taxes to pay it off.

  I quit print and went into television, then just starting to go holo. GBN was a fledgling company, and while they gave me a job title fancy enough to satisfy my ego, in reality I still wasn’t much more than a glorified coffee girl with a salary to match. Struggling along with one shit job after another, trying to get someone to pay attention to what I could write, once in a while being thrown a bone and doing a “human-interest” report, and it started being hammered home I was going about as far as I ever would.

  Then al-Husam and his Behjars stole their infrafusion bombs, and the tiny country of Khuruchabja was suddenly the navel of the news universe. Lo and behold, GBN had a bonafide bilingual Ay-rab journalist in its ranks. I was given a promotion, a cameraman and a PortaNet, and a round-trip ticket to Nok Kuzlat.

  Somewhere inside me, I had nurtured this secret belief that I could blend seamlessly into the Arab culture. I had Arab parents, an Arab name. I really was Arab… wasn’t I? I’d be accepted, the prodigal daughter returning to the fold, all that nonsense. I felt smug, my co-workers jealous, when GBN grabbed me from the oblivion of the metaphysical mailroom and sent me off to find fame and fortune in fabulous Nok Kuzlat.

  It didn’t last long. Maybe if I hadn’t been an Arab-American, I wouldn’t have taken the disillusionment so hard. What I knew about Arab life and culture was about as much as any American teenager reading Kahlil Gibran and thinking that made us sophisticated intellectuals. A Thousand and One Arabian Nights and Indrah Shah’s Caravan of Dreams; old Valentino silent movies and I Dream of Genie reruns; all the endless, stupid fantasy novels with exotic spice caravans, romantic sheikhs and juvenile Sinbad the Sailor rehashed ripoffs did nothing to unveil the gritty realities behind the myths.

  Well, obviously they would have the same kind of moral values and have the same logic as we did. Arabs would think as we do, act as we do, be people exactly like us. Except they dressed funny.

  It wasn’t that the various Middle Eastern countries and people weren’t different—indeed the distinctions between them were myriad and copious; all of them, however, were infinite variations on the theme of frustration and repression. Nations hated peoples, hated tribes, hated families, and everywhere the endless, bloody feuds. In the East, lives were short and memories long; in the West, lives were long and memories short. How could we hope to understand each other?

  Cairo, great city of the Pyramids and Pharaohs, was a dusty, crowded slum, the reek of oily exhaust, sewage and rotting produce clotting in your nose and throat, the Nile sludge fermenting with microscopic parasites and bacteria. The relentless noise was everywhere, a solid assault on the senses, the constant throbbing clamor of bargaining, begging and baksheesh.

  Riyadh was a broiling nightmare of Thou Shalt Not and greedy arrogance; half the population, obsessed with their Islamic duty, devoted to repressing the slightest hint of pleasure, blanching every trace of color and flavor out of life, and the other half desperate to escape.

  The gratitude Kuwait might have once had for Americans was as fleeting as the desert spring. The flying carpets and bottled genies of Baghdad had never recovered from the Iran-Iraq and Gulf Wars. The smiling faces of picturesque Bedouins on the covers of travel brochures never quite matched those of the mutilated old Khuruchabjani men, children with bloated bellies, shrouded women weeping with their claws extended, clutching at your legs and arms as you walked the narrow streets, aggressively begging.

  The culture shock was secondary to the unreal horror of death and devastation, an orgy of killing freely indulged in by all sides. Death here was as commonplace and accepted as the ubiquitous flies. Not only weren’t Arabs what I’d expected, we weren’t exactly what I’d believed us to be all these years, either.

  Things were not cut and dried, black or white, the good guys not that distinct from the bad guys. All the justified rationales for “softening up” the enemy still meant bombing the piss out of men shivering in crowded bunkers, arguments that twist principles and morals to excuse what still ends up no more than wholesale slaughter; the sanitized vocabulary with words like “attrition” and “collateral damage” to make the blood and death more palatable to soldiers and spectators alike.

  What’s worse, it was often genuinely necessary. But it was still killing. Finally, I simply went numb. Then I went mad.

  Much later, I went home.

  Here I was again, a decade later, back in Nok Kuzlat. Kay Bee Sulaiman had returned from the dead, accompanied by a machine imitating a man. I thought it might be time to look up old friends.

  And wondered if I was still mad.

  TEN

  * * *

  Iwatched some of the local news that evening to practice my rusty MarkundL mumbling words to myself. The ecclesiastical-controlled state censors were still very powerful in Khuruchabja, and the local news was mostly Pablum. Needless to say, the unfortunate demise of Mrs. Sheikh had been glossed over quickly, more oratory than information. No photo was shown of the dead woman, but I knew she hadn’t died in any car accident.

  Khuruchabjan television consisted mainly of the interminable state-run, cleric-approved prayers interspersed with old tapes of sporting events, the Khuruchabjan team always winning, of course, which cut down drastically on the number of televised games. Variety shows were devoted to carefully choreographed exhibitions of love and loyalty to Sheikh Larry, children dancing and waving flags.

  Occasionally, wrathful reports of various disgusting atrocities being committed in America’s godless inner cities livened up the fare, each played to the hilt. I particularly enjoyed one hydrophobic account about the barbarous ritual practice of publicly devouring charred pork carcasses by alcohol-guzzling men who freely mingled with bareheaded loose women in tight, sleeveless T-shirts.

  GBN had made the hotel arrangements, although I’m sure CDI was picking up the tab. This time Halton and I were sharing the room, since with two beds, separate rooms for two male colleagues would have been an unnecessary expense, especially for journalists on a company expense card. Not that CDI cared; they just wanted everything to look right. It was also, I assumed, so that Halton could keep an eye on me. But the Grand Imperial, in spite of its name, was not the most luxurious hotel in town. It catered mainly to a Western clientele, far reduced from the enormous ostentation visiting sheikhs and flamboyant emirs preferred to something more human-sized in scale.

  Our hotel room was not t
hat much different than one in, oh, say, Topeka, Kansas. Slightly larger than the Orbital Hilton, it was big enough for two queen-sized beds, a decent-sized holoset, be it the off-brand Chinese model, various mismatched pieces of veneered pressboard furniture with a modem Oriental-ish design. The carpet was old, with faint coffee stains and cigarette burns. The bathtub had a handheld shower-hose and the faucet dripped, leaving a rust streak. The hot water was merely tepid, despite the broiling temperatures outside, and the toilet burbled constantly, an oddly comforting sound somewhat like a country brook. The air conditioning was marginal at best, the windows having been cleverly designed never to open, turning the room into a sauna by mid-morning. It was, however, clean, the cockroaches respectfully discreet and the bed sheets changed regularly.

  Halton had found and rearranged the professional bugs, not so much disabling them as adjusting them to send out normal transmissions of nothing much at all. It seemed unlikely they had been placed by one of his erstwhile confreres, since they would have certainly expected their fabricant to be able to seek and destroy the devices. More likely it was a higher grade of Khuruchabjan secret police, intrigued by our personal visit to His Majesty. Halton wired in one of Carl’s electronic toys to broadcast randomly generated sounds, a cough, a sneeze, a toilet flush, a few muttered fragments of pardon me’s and thank you’s with our voiceprints on them, to filter our real conversation. Still, it did take some of the enthusiasm out of any intellectual discourse.

  He was crashed out on the opposite bed, nose buried in a bookreader. He scanned the pages rapidly, methodically, with an expression I’d have expected had he been reading American Scientist.

  I had to stretch to pick the chipcover off the stand separating the beds. Against the background of a luridly painted Wild West landscape, a demure woman with an impossible décolletage had her head thrown back while feebly repelling the embrace of a dark and handsome half-naked cowboy nuzzling her impossibly long swan neck. Another trashy romance novel. God only knew where he found this shit. At least this one was in English.

  “Love Aflame at Paradise Crossing?” I nearly laughed. “You really like this stuff?” I asked, holding up the chip-cover.

  He looked up, blinking. “Yes.” He paused before asking, “You don’t?”

  “Bodice-rippers?” I sneered. “They’re badly written carbon copies churned out by illiterate factory hacks following a bunch of demographic guidelines generated by computers. I’d rather read the phone book.”

  He held up the bookreader. “It’s sold more than three and a half million copies,” he said. “Literary standards don’t appear to be their main appeal.”

  I turned the chipcover over to read the blurb. “‘He loomed above her, a smoldering arrogance in his cold, crystal-blue eyes,’” I read aloud sarcastically. “‘But his skintight jeans and embroidered shirt couldn’t hide the desire raging in his lean body. Her head reeled, a headiness that sprang from out of nowhere as his strong hands took her, his mouth hard against hers. She gasped when his tongue slipped between her soft lips, his unspoken passion beating like a captive bird in his chest pressed against her heaving bosom. It was a dangerous game they played, each seeking revenge against the other, but the heiress and the cowboy would find their hearts had a stubborn will of their own, their fate indelibly etched in the arroyos and echoed in the tremorous howls of coyotes on the night wind.’ Jeez, what crap!”

  I grimaced and tossed the chipcover back onto the night stand, “It’s pornography, Halton. Emotional pornography for women.” I felt offended by this cheap novel, deeply angered by its lies. Only stunningly beautiful women were ever the heroines, winning love and unbelievable devotion from equally gorgeous men. Ugly girls need not apply.

  He looked at me blankly. “Yes?”

  “So if you’re reading it to get some kind of insight into what women like, don’t bother. It’s a cheat, it’s not real. Nobody has lives or feelings like that. Women read this junk because they feel something’s lacking in their own lives. They get vicarious thrills by reading this phony crap and whacking off their emotions.”

  As I said it, I realized. “… Oh.” I had a sudden sour taste in my mouth. “Giving your limbics a good stroking there, Halton?” I asked softly.

  He looked back at me, unabashed. “Yes.” Then he went back to the book. I went back to keeping my mouth shut and concentrating on the turbaned anchorman lecturing on the corruptive influence of pop music, my face suddenly hot. Halton was still reading when I dozed off to the melodious sound of Markundi invective.

  I woke early, having spent most of the night waking up every time I turned over onto some other part of my body that hurt like hell. Taking a shower, I inspected the various bruises, and was happy to notice they were improving somewhat. The half-ring around my eye was more green than purple, but neither color did much to improve my looks. Then I went up to the roof for breakfast.

  Halton stayed in the room, uncoupling and replacing the bugs in their original places in case the maintenance crew decided to double check the equipment. I preferred not to tip off whoever was listening that we knew we’d been bugged. Except for the PortaNet. If I found bugs there, no one would be surprised if I deloused it. I had Halton clean the PortaNet before I took it up to the hotel’s rooftop terrace café. There I could do some private work by myself.

  It wasn’t that I didn’t trust Halton… No, actually, I really didn’t trust Halton; I only trusted him slightly more than I trusted his creators. But I had some resources of my own to play with, and while I was confident that he could snoop out other snoopers, I wasn’t all that certain that Halton’s buddies hadn’t maybe stuck some kind of nano-sized microphones in their fabricant’s ears.

  The day was beginning to heat up, and most of the hotel guests had already eaten breakfast and gone. The few who remained were lounging in the shade of umbrellas and the terrace canopy, well out of the sun. All the protection I had was a pair of dark sunglasses and a thin coating of Number 8 sunblock.

  I picked out an abandoned table at the edge of the veranda, sitting down with my back to the panoramic city view, and opened the PortaNet. The hotel waiter ambled out, blinking in the harsh light. Dressed in an imitation twelfth-century Mameluke outfit with the hotel crest on his turban, he looked more Pakistani than Egyptian. But he’d obviously seen enough insane journalists beavering away over PortaNets in the open air for him to be miffed at being forced to come out in the white-hot sun to take my order.

  I ordered coffee, a large carafe of bottled water, figs and dates, goat cheese, coarsely mashed fava beans in vinegar, and the local flat bread drizzled with olive oil. Coffee and water first, breakfast when I’m finished working. He nodded, scribbling. The Grand Imperial Hotel was one of the few in Nok Kuzlat that catered to a Western crowd: the usual collection of ragtag journalists and a few brave tourists, usually healthy blond Nordic hiking types looking for exotic and cheap adventure, as well as roaming bands of Arab businessmen from neighboring countries who had developed chic Westernized tastes. I wasn’t eating the local food because I was entertaining some romantic idea about going native. Cultures with limited access to experiencing real Western cuisine tend to have some curious notions about its correct preparation.

  I sat with my back to the vista, because unless Spider-Man was crawling up the side of the building to peek over my shoulder, I could keep my transactions on the PortaNet to myself. Blipping wasn’t anything that should trigger anybody’s alarm systems, or so I hoped.

  The PortaNet is the descendant of the original field equipment, bulky independent power generators chugging away hooked up to suitcase-sized transmitters with umbrella-like parabolic disks the size of a two-man camping tent. The PortaNet can be strapped to your back and hooked to the HoloPak for instant real-time relay, or for those less pressing moments, it can fit nice and neat on a café table with enough room left for a civilized cup of coffee and the morning newspaper. I could have used the audio equipment, since it’s also scrambled into
relay codes, but I didn’t want to take the chance that one of my innocent-looking breakfast companions didn’t have a spikemike jammed in his shorts, aimed in my direction. With the sun-hood over the keyboard, it was going to be damned difficult for anyone to eavesdrop on my transmission.

  The waiter brought out my coffee, filled a glass with water from the imported bottle, and walked off without a glance or a word.

  I unfolded the keyboard and slipped in the call card, then hit the automatic send signal, simply an up-link call number for the GBN Cairo Relay station. The PortaNet whirred for a few seconds, searching for an available GBN satellite, found it and caught its attention.

  CAIRO RELAY. YO HOO DAT?

  I chuckled. Somebody real on the other end, my fellow American smartass, and suddenly I had a strong wave of homesickness. There’s no place like home, Toto.

  K B SULAIMAN—I’d almost typed “Munadi”—NOK KUZLAT.

  HI SAILOR NEW IN TOWN?

  SORT OF. SECOND TOUR SOSDD. It meant “Same Old Shit Different Day,” or in my case, “Decade.”

  TELL ME BOUT IT. HOURLY RATES OFFERED. BACK RUBS HALF OFF THIS WEEK ONLY.

  I grinned. THANKS ANYWAY. SENDING RAW CLIPS GBN CENTER. TAG ARLANDO BK PG FILLER. The stuff I had wasn’t really even worth sending at all. Arlando would look it over, wonder what the hell I was up to and probably send it down to the basement just in case anyone wanted to look up names to match the faces of the party animals. Otherwise, GBN wouldn’t bother with airing any of it, edited or not.

  READY.

  I blipped, a high-speed transfer which went up scrambled, bounced off the security-shielded GBN satellite and back down into Cairo, where the station would zip it through a second coded channel on its way home, all within seconds.

  There was always a chance somebody unfriendly-like might be trying to snoop, and the long separation of News and State had forced each side to devise different networks of information, data transmission and methods of ensuring the other side wasn’t listening, while always trying to break in on your opponent.