Last India Overland

by Craig Grant

  Patrick’s daybook entry

  And on the thirty-ninth day of the Great, albeit Possibly Truncated, Indian Trek, there came possibly truncated terrorists to visit upon that travelling conveyance which some call Coach a blight of fire, a hail of gunpowder, a plague of explosives. The one eyewitness to this calamity, Mr. Michael McPherson, claims that had the miniature terrorist commando been able to gain access to that small dark hole where all the diesel goes, when we’re able to steal it, then the outcome of this particular episode would have been far different, far more tragic. Be that as it may, this is definitely, as my dear mother was often wont to say, a turn up for the books. The gist of conversation gleaned from hovering near the front desk and imbibing lethal spirits in the lounge suggests that the revolution has moved into Mashhad from the south. Six students were killed yesterday in the downtown area in what is blithely being labelled a “small riot” outside the Bank of America. The carpet craftsmen have raised their prices dramatically, in anticipation of hard times ahead, and they refuse to barter price. The service in the eatery downstairs could be described as surly, at best, although extremely hostile would be more accurate. And Peter Cohen is having a hard time of it. The soldiers patrolling the street keep wanting to interrupt his work on the bus and tell him jokes aimed at the American ethos.

  Still, there are bright spots, though minuscule ones, in all this. The sign the girls painted yesterday is eliciting many admiring glances and general approbation, from the soldiers at least. We will have stories to tell our grandchildren, provided we survive this debacle. A perfectly clean and comfortable toilet is always close at hand. The beds are comfortable, the showers are hot. We have the opportunity to sharpen our chess and backgammon skills. And we have a chance to catch up on correspondence back to the home fires. Correspondence, I’m sure, that is suitably discreet concerning the exact nature of our present predicament. So, all in all, it isn’t so bad. The fesejan in the dining room was delicious, and so, by all reports, was the ab-gusht and the shirin polo.* The chai is excellent. And so, I suspect, it is merely a matter of keeping our upper lips safe from the risk of rigor mortis and doing our best to seize the day. Such as it is.

  Mick

  Dave says talk about Dana. He says I’ve been avoiding the subject and that’s not good. He says it’s important to keep mentioning Dana, because this book might resolve its complications by having Dana walk through that door and kiss me on the lips and take me out of this hospital and back to civilization, where we’ll both live happily ever after on the spoils of Dana’s law practice earnings in London. A nice little flat in something Gardens. Because, he says, the buying public likes an upbeat ending. He says I hardly even mentioned her during my litde summary of the events that occurred on Nov. 18. He said she put her own two cents in every now and then, particularly when Kelly was talking about the light that people see when they have a near-death experience. Right at the end of a long, dark tunnel. I said it’s probably the light of a freight train coming at you. Dana said she saw a light like that once. Kelly said yeah? Dana said yeah, when she almost froze to death in a blizzard when she was six. She said she got lost one night when she went out to find her cat when her mom and dad were celebrating their anniversary in the bedroom, and just before she woke up in a hospital, she saw a big white light, like a spotlight on singers, and she felt herself being lifted, floating, and as she came closer, it was like a huge chandelier of candles, and it felt warm.

  Well this huge depression just swept over me and I know it’s Dave’s doing, he has this way of always getting what he wants, and besides, I won’t have any problem—alright—so the sex was hanging in the air above that dining room table like charcoal smoke—this is Dave’s imagination—so her eyes were always on me, seldom anywhere else—and yeah, maybe Kelly was a bit spaced out on some acid that Rockstar gave her and was trying to make a point by being centre stage, I don’t know, this is just what Dave tells me, but he says they’re important points to get across. I can say this much. Dana was looking tired, that day when we drank too much and ate in the dining room. Dave says she was anaemic because she was still bleeding so much. She had huge wads of Tehran Hotel toilet paper in her panties.

  She also kept up a pretty good clip when it came to the drinks. But we were all, as Dave puts it, under some stress.

  The next morning when I woke up I was feeling a bit dehydrated myself, so I went down to the Coke machine on the second floor to get a Coke, but all that was left was a 7 Up, and when I got back to the room, Patrick was up and asked me if I might possibly be interested in a game of chess. Kelly and Dana were still sleeping in their bed, and Suzie was on the cot, snoring away worse than I’ve ever heard Patrick snore.

  Patrick had this neat little chessboard, piece of wood, square of course, little pegs in the shapes of rooks and knights and bishops, etc. He had it at the bottom of the black plastic case that held his two decks of cards. I’d made a bad move and Patrick was taking my queen when Dana got out of bed in those long sea-blue flannelette pyjamas she wore. She borrowed some rials from me, not Patrick, and went down to the Coke machine. I told her all that was left was 7 Up.

  Patrick was saying, “Le shah est mat,”—important detail, says Dave, for symbolic reasons—when Dana burst—yeah, that’s right, burst—through the door like a rhino in heat, like a Redskin running back through a Cowboy defensive line.

  She was basically hysterical. Threw herself down on the bed, and Kelly was pretty slow to come to her senses and the first thing Suzie said when she cased the situation was, “You ran into Rob, huh?”

  So it was up to either me or Patrick to do the right thing, and Patrick wasn’t making any moves, because Dave says Dana spurned one of his advances, as Dave puts it, back in Venice, and so it was up to me, and I probably wouldn’t have done it if Dave hadn’t put a bug in my ear. She was lying on the bed, crying into her hands, great racking convulsions that shook her whole body. I put my arms on her shoulders and said hey, hey, you’re okay, safe and sound, you just had a walking talking malaria nightmare, I had one too, two nights ago—this is what Dave told me to say.

  And it was then I noticed that the front of her pyjamas were wet. It was then that I noticed her fingernails. They looked just like Kelly’s. Chewed down to the quick. But there was something stranger about her fingertips. They were crooked, kind of. A little crooked, like she maybe had them slammed in a car door when she was young, which happened to me once or twice.

  But what I said to her seemed to calm her down some, and she dried her tears and tried to get hold of herself, and when we finally talked her into telling us about her nightmare, she said she was walking down this long, long hall until she got to a dark stairway and she went down the stairs and it was cold and she opened the door and saw this red thing in the shape of the thing in 2001. Coke machine. She stood in front of the Coke machine and she was putting coins in the slot when this door next to the Coke machine opened and out walked this guy in a beard wearing white and carrying a sword, and he said to her, “You’re American,” and Dana said to him, she said, not quite, but give us time, or that’s what she dreamed she said, or thought she said, and she looked around at all of us, and she felt the front of her pyjamas.

  I don’t think she was quite convinced this was just a nightmare.

  She said he suddenly whipped aside the white thing he was wearing, cloak, whatever, and what she saw was a huge bandage in the... and here she paused, finally said, groin area, and a belt with a bag of urine attached to it, and he said to her, look what the Savak did to me, they tied me to a ceiling with wire and waited until I dropped, and then he hissed at her and screamed, Great Satan! Ripped the plastic bag off his belt and doused her with what was inside it. And that was when she was supposed to wake up, she said, suddenly dry-eyed, thinking now. But she had to go back up the stairs and come in here, and then she looked at me, and said, “So I really don’t think it was a walking talking malaria nightmare.”

  She said, “
You guys were playing chess, right?”

  Patrick said, after a fashion.

  Then Suzie starts giggling.

  “What’s so funny?” Dana says.

  Suzie says she ran into Rob. That was Rob in a sheet and that was likely just apple juice. Dana sniffs her pyjamas, and then she says, I don’t think this is apple juice. But she didn’t sound certain.

  I knew I wasn’t going to sniff it.

  Dana grabbed her clothes and went into the can and got dressed, and when she came out she asked me if I’d mind coming with her to talk to Rob, who did, it turned out, happen to have his room next to the Coke machine on the floor below.

  A guy can’t say no to some questions, and that turned out to be one of them as far as I was concerned.

  Patrick said, “Perhaps we all should go with you.”

  Which was real nice of Patrick, I appreciated it.

  And so we all went down and knocked on the door of the room next to the Coke machine, the one Dana told us to knock on, even though Suzie said that it wasn’t Rockstar’s room, it was two doors down, but there was no answer, and the door, of course, was locked, and so we knocked on the door Suzie told us to knock on, and there was no answer there either.

  Where, Kelly wanted to know, would Rob get a sword?

  Suzie said he could’ve gone shopping and found it anywhere, they were all over the place probably.

  Patrick said he hadn’t seen any on his little shopping expedition.

  “It was probably just a nightmare,” said Dana.

  Nobody mentioned her wet pyjamas.

  We went back to our room and Patrick looked at me and said, “Now where were we?”

  from Kelly’s diary

  Nov. 19

  What a long strange trip it is. We’ve suffered instant karma for theft of diesel. And now D, who I’ve been sleeping next to, or, rather, not sleeping next to, for the past 2 nights has suffered instant karma for that little theft of life that happened back in Istanbul. An Iranian fanatic who claimed to have been hung from a ceiling with wire tied to his genitals until he dropped sprayed D. with something from a urine bag. It might’ve been Rob, dressed up in sheet & beard, but D. said his accent was thick. S said well then it had to be Rob because he’s thick as a two by four. But R. isn’t answering our inquisitive knocks, so we may never know. Speaking of trips, I did run into R. in the hallway yesterday. He looked crazed & high & lonesome. He gave me 2 hits of acid, & since life, yesterday, seemed short & brutal, I dropped it, & proceeded to make a fool of myself for the rest of the day. In a private moment, Pat. said he doesn’t exactly know why but I seemed, well, particularly lubricious for some reason. Or was the word, he said, loquacious? So I asked him straight out, do you want to fuck me, Pat? He just smiled & said the idea had crossed his mind, but really, in all likelihood, the heavenly aspects were not propitious for such an event, or were they? I told him they were perfect for such an event. He said well, that was certainly something to ponder, scratched his chin and walked away. I wonder if that will find its way as grist into S.’s rumour mill. Still feeling spaced out. The western, late evening sky is blood red & scarlet. A mosque floats, surreal, in the near distance. I’m waiting for the evening muezzin.

  Mick

  The next day was Malaria Monday. Another one of those memorable days I won’t forget till the day I die. I remember it was Malaria Monday because Kelly and me were having breakfast down in the dining room and when Kelly offered me a malaria tablet, I said no thanks. She said you’d rather take quinine shots for six months in the stomach? Dave told me you don’t get them in the stomach, she was confused with rabies, but I got the point anyway and I took the tablet.

  The big news that day was that the revolution had moved north. It’d been real quiet the night before, like the proverbial calm before the storm. Kelly and me had sat out on the veranda for a while, on pillows. She tried to tell me that pain is all in the mind and I should try meditating on the toothache, see if I couldn’t turn it into pleasure, or something interesting at least, though that wasn’t her word, interesting, that’s my word, Kelly hated it. Asked me once not to use it, it showed a lack of imagination. First time I’d ever been accused of a lack of imagination.

  But I humoured Kelly. Like I humoured Hasheeba once, when she tried to get me to do the same thing. Except Hasheeba told me I could visualize what she called the Loved One naked and focus on the sensation of the blood cells in my ugly filling with blood and she called that meditation. For this we had to be naked, candle in front of us, incense in the air. There was something incestuous going on between me and Hasheeba, but both of us were smart enough not to make anything out of it. The thing is, though, her method kind of worked. I did get a buzz of some sort. Teeth started chattering a little, and the image of the candle flame against my eyelids kind of floated up and my inner eye, whatever, had to follow it, while I thought about Peggy dil-Schmidt in the shower, soaping herself slowly, eyes closed. And I did get a reaction. A definite reaction, which Hasheeba said was good old Kundalini doing his magic.

  And so I tried the same thing that night out on the veranda, except this time it was Kelly, not Peggy, I thought of naked. Kelly, naked, stepping off that high cliff at Kusadasi. And I’ll never forget the sounds. No rifle fire from anywhere and hardly any traffic. Just a low keening of wind. A weird-sounding siren, like a wounded banshee. Pete down below, working away. While I’m trying to focus on Kelly’s breasts, her nipples, the place where skin and nipple meet. Felt a stirring, but it wasn’t like it was back in Kits. Maybe you have to be naked

  for that method to work.

  As for trying to turn that toothache into something pleasurable, that didn’t work either.

  What woke me up the next morning was gunfire. Lots of it. And it wasn’t from all that far away.

  Everybody else, though, slept right through it. Except Kelly, who wasn’t even in the room.

  I was hungry so I went downstairs and I found Kelly by herself, drinking coffee in the dining room. No one else except a busboy in the place.

  Kelly and I ordered omelets. They were taking a while. But we had coffee. And Kelly had been up, she said, since dawn. She said she had trouble sleeping in the bed with Dana because Dana tended to spread out when she slept. So she did some wandering around in the lobby and that was where she heard the news that a hundred students had been shot dead during an early morning protest march in front of the Exxon building.

  “Not good news,” I said.

  “No,” said Kelly. “Not good news.”

  The conversation dragged for a bit, so I went into the kitchen to see if they were waiting for a rooster to lay the eggs. The busboy was sitting on what might’ve been the ice cream freezer, doing what busboys do best. Picking his nose and smoking a cigarette. The chef was sitting on his butt, watching a small black and white TV. Looked like a newscast. Bad footage of the riot, gunfire, bodies falling to the street.

  “How’s them omelets coming along?” I said in my friendliest tone of voice.

  He looked over his shoulder at me, said something in Farsi that may not have been too complimentary given the sneer curled up like a lazy panther on his lower lip. Looked back at the TV.

  I figured maybe the guy didn’t understand English. Or maybe he just didn’t realize that it’s rude to insult people and then ignore them.

  I picked up a plate off a nearby stack and let it crash to the floor.

  The guy looked back at me.

  I smiled at the busboy and then the chef. “Oops,” I said. “I’m such a butterfingers. Now how are them omelets coming along?”

  The chef picked his big butt up off the chair and swayed over towards me like a crippled elephant and planted a fist the size of a large canned ham in my face. It knocked me flying back against the wall. I felt like I’d just been hit by a shotgun blast.

  The chef was wearing big black shoes.

  My mistake was letting myself slide to the floor. No, maybe my mistake was dropping that pla
te. Could be my mistake was getting out of bed that morning.

  One of those shoes kicked me in the ribs, twice, and I felt a blackout coming on. When he kicked me in the head, that blackout settled down around my skull like a big black crow and the last thing I heard was the phrase that proved this whole fiasco was a simple case of mistaken identity.

  “Focking Yankee,” said the chef, as that crow’s claws dug deep into my scalp and I felt myself being lifted up and carried away.

  from Kelly’s diary

  Nov. 21

  Yesterday a hundred people were murdered by the Shah’s rifles in downtown Mashhad, could be as many as 25 more in critical condition. M is also in critical condition. He made the mistake of invading the kitchen in search of an omelet. What he got instead was knocked unconscious & maybe cracked ribs. He comes to every once in a while to swallow a morphine tablet & knockout pill the hotel doc left behind. So we’re sitting on a powder keg, as Pete put it. We’re going to have to make tracks, with or without a radiator, 1st thing in the morning. S cheered, Pat. poured himself a Scotch. D. helped herself to the bottle. I feel numb. & all C. can do is worry about the money. Pete wants us to contribute more to the camp kitty, because it’s lower than it should be, thanks to “unexpected expenses.” But of course no one has the money to spare.

  When I came to, I saw Jenkins standing above me. He had a real sad look on his face. It looked like he had a rope burn around his neck. His whole body was peppered full of red splotches, and he just kept standing there, looking down at me. I closed my eyes and saw that phone booth out on the wharf. The weather was even greyer than usual. It was raining and the phone was ringing. I have to crawl across splintered planks to answer it. I feel like I’m broken in half. But I get there. Because I want to talk to Dave. I break the booth window and reach above a shard of glass to get to the phone receiver. Dave says, “Goodday, mate.” Doesn’t sound like Dave. And then there’s this loud crackling cackle on the other end of the line and the voice says, “Is anyone out there?” Sounded a little bit like Teach but not quite. I hang up just in time to see this car coming at me, an old Studebaker. I open up my eyes and I hear Charole saying something about a kebab and rice. I have to twist my neck to see who’s there and that hurts but I do it. Kelly has two or three candles lit and she’s on top of Dana. Pressing her fingers down, giving her a back rub. Kelly’s wearing a T-shirt but I can see candlelight spread out all over Dana’s skin like orange melted butter. It’s so beautiful it hurts, that little scene. I close my eyes and all I can see is a rat chewing at my legs. I try to shake my legs but can’t. This time it feels like somebody stuck Krazy Glue on my eyelids and when I finally manage to get them pried open again, it’s daylight and the muezzin’s screaming right in my ear. I get a sense of something white getting unwound, and an Iranian voice saying, that should be very, very good. Ribs just cracked. Then the voice fades into the scream of the muezzin. But it’s not the muezzin, it’s Rockstar. He’s peering down at me and he’s asking me, you feeling kind of thirsty there, Muck-hole? and a plastic glass of orange juice floats into view. As a matter of fact, my voice says, I am a tad thirsty, but I can’t move my arms. Doesn’t matter, because my arms still move. My hand grabs that glass, the bed and glass and Rockstar’s face sways up, and I hear my voice saying, “Thanks, Rockstar, that was tasty,” and then Patrick’s face comes into view and then Pete’s. Pete’s looking down at me. Think we can move him? Pete asks