‘Then tell me who I am,’ I said.
There was a silence, and finally the voice said, ‘Thou art Daniel, the infidel who is known as The Arm of Ibrahim, and thou hast struck down many enemies of Allah and also many enemies of the sons of Abraham. Thou hast faced peril and known terrible strife, yet thou hast survived to wield great power in the service of peace and righteousness, though thy life is as secret to the world as a stone at the bottom of the Nile.’ The voice paused, then said, ‘I do not understand thee, for it seems thy past and thy future are the same.’
(At this point I heard a scream, a tremendous noise, and felt a tearing pain in my right arm; but I was overwhelmed by the opium and it was as if these things had happened to someone else to whom I was somehow remotely physically connected.)
I, of course, understood the Oracle’s confusion. Was not her past my future, and vice versa? ‘What must I now do?’ I asked.
‘Thou must return to the city of Saladin, and there thou will build a city within the city, and all I have told you will come to pass.’
‘And who will sustain me against the peril and strife that you have prophesied?’
‘I will,’ said the voice. ‘I will sustain thee.’
‘Tell me who you are,’ I said.
‘I am the Oracle, the soul of the machine,’ the voice said. ‘Yet I am also, and this I do not understand, the love of thy life come across the centuries to find thee.’
And from the pool there emerged a woman all of white metal save only her right hand which was bone and blood and milky flesh, and her eyes had the shape of the pond and were of a like colour, indigo, and it seemed I had known her for many years, though I could not call her to mind. I took her hand, and as I did, the flesh of her hand began to spread, devouring the metal, until she stood before me, a woman in all ways, complete and mortal.
(I heard anxious voices, ‘Where’s the driver?’ ‘She was thrown out.’ ‘Have you got him?’ ‘Oh, God! I can’t stop the bleeding!’ and felt even more intense pain. The vision had begun to fade, and I saw flashes of red light, of concerned faces, the interior of a van.)
And I lay down with the woman among the bamboo stalks, and we touched and whispered, and when I entered her she gave a soft cry that went out and out into the world, winding over the green plain and into the dark valley like the wail of a siren or a call to prayer, and in our lovemaking it seemed we were moving at great speed past strange bodies of light and towers, heading for a destination beyond that of pleasure and release, a place where all my wounds would be healed and all my deepest questions answered.
The doctors in Haifa tried to save my right arm, but in the end they were forced to amputate. It took me six months to adapt to a prosthesis, six months in which I considered what had happened and what I should do next. Kate had also been in the hospital, but she had returned to America by the time I was well enough to ask for her. She left a note in which she apologized for the accident and for involving me in her ‘misguided attempt to recapture what I never really lost’. I felt no bitterness toward her. She had failed herself far more than she had failed me. My fascination with her, the psychological structure that supported strong emotion, had died that night in the ruined mosque, its charge expended.
Neither did I feel bitter toward Mahmoud Ibrahim. In retrospect, it seemed he had been no ordinary fanatic, that his poise had been the emblem of a profound internal gravity, of peacefulness and wisdom. Perhaps I manufactured this characterization in order to justify my folly in terms of predestination or some other quasi-religious precept. Yet I could not wholly disbelieve that something of the sort may have been involved. How else could Mahmoud have known that I came from Cairo, the city of Saladin? Then there was his prophecy of my ‘punishment’, the vision with its curiously formal frame and futuristic detail, so distinct from the random lucidity of the usual opium dream.
A gift from the Prophet?
I wondered. I doubted, yet still I wondered.
Claire came to Haifa, distraught, horrified at my injuries. She slept in the hospital room with me, she washed me, she tended me in every human way. The similarity between her and the woman of my vision was not lost upon me, nor was the fact that her studies in artificial intelligence and her secret project with the mosque gave rise to some interesting possibilities and paradoxes concerning the Oracle; yet I was reluctant to buy into something so preposterous. As the months passed, however, I could not ignore the way that things were changing between us, the tendrils of feeling that we had tried to kill with drugs and cynicism now beginning to creep forth and bud. If this much of the vision had a correspondence with reality, how then could I ignore the rest of it? The life of power and strife, the building of a city within a city: my business? It occurred to me that I had only played at business all these years, that now I was being tempted to get serious. There was much one could effect on an international level through the agency of the black market. But if I were to get serious, it would call for an increased ruthlessness on my part, a ruthlessness informed by a sense of morality and history, something I was not sure I had in me.
I did not know what I would do on my return to Cairo, but on my second night back I went for a walk alone through a secluded quarter of the Khan al Khalili, heading—I thought—in no particular direction, idling along; yet I was not altogether surprised when I came to a certain door in a certain whitewashed wall, the retreat of a wealthy businessman. I hesitated. All the particulars of Mahmoud’s vision came before my eyes, and I began to understand that, true or not, it offered me a design for life far superior to any I had contrived. At length I opened the door, which was locked, with no great difficulty, and stepped into a courtyard with a tiled fountain and lemon trees. I moved quietly into the house beyond, into a long study lined with books, furnished with a mahogany desk and leather chairs. I waited in the shadows for the man, idly playing with the coins in my pocket, a habit I had picked up during my rehabilitation. I left one of the coins on the desk for him to find. I knew he was a poor sleeper, that soon he would wake and come into the study. When at last he did appear, yawning and stretching, a plump fellow with a furious moustache and sleek black hair, I did not hate him as much as I had presumed; I saw him mainly as an impediment to my new goals.
He sat at the desk, switched on a lamp that cast a pool of light onto the writing surface, shuffled some papers, then spotted the ten-piastre coin that I had left for him. He picked it up and held it to the light. The coin was bent double, the image on its face erased by the pressure of my right thumb and forefinger. It seemed an article of wonder to him, and I felt a little sad for what I must do. He was, after all, much the same as I, a ruthless man with goals, except my ruthlessness was a matter of future record and my goals the stuff of prophecy.
There was no point, I realized, in delaying things. I moved forward, and he peered into the darkness, trying to make me out, his face beginning to register the first of his final misgivings. I felt ordered and serene, not in the least anxious, and I understood that this must be the feeling one attains when one takes a difficult step one has balked at for years and finds that it is not so difficult at all, but a sweet inevitability, a confident emergence rather than an escalation of fear.
‘Hello, Rollo,’ I said. ‘I just need a few seconds of your time.’
BEAST OF THE HEARTLAND
Mears has a dream the night after he fought the Alligator Man. The dream begins with words: ‘In the beginning was a dark little god with glowing red eyes…’ And then, there it stands, hovering in the blackness of Mears’ hotel room, a twisted mandrake root of a god, evil and African, with ember eyes and limbs like twists of leaf tobacco. Even after it vanishes, waking Mears, he can feel those eyes burning inside his head, merged into a single red pain that seems as if it will go on throbbing forever. He wonders if he should tell Leon about the pain—maybe he could give Mears something to ease it—but he figures this might be a bad idea. Leon might cut and run, not wanting to be held responsible sh
ould Mears keel over, and there Mears would be: without a trainer, without anyone to coach him for the eye exams, without an accomplice in his blindness. It’s not a priority, he decides.
To distract himself, he lies back and thinks about the fight. He’d been doing pretty well until the ninth. Staying right on the Cuban’s chest, mauling him in the corners, working the body. The Cuban didn’t like it to the body. He was a honey-coloured kid a couple of shades lighter than Mears and he punched like a kid, punches that stung but that didn’t take your heart like the punches of a man. Fast, though. Jesus, he was fast! As the fight passed into the middle rounds, as Mears tired, the Cuban began to slip away, to circle out of the haze of ring light and vanish into the darkness at the corners of Mears’ eyes, so that Mears saw the punches coming only at the last second, the wet-looking red blobs of the gloves looping in over his guard. Then, in the ninth, a left he never saw drove him into the turnbuckle, a flurry of shots under the ribs popped his mouthpiece halfway out and another left to the temple made him clinch, pinning the Cuban’s gloves against his sides.
In the clinch, that’s when he caught sight of the Alligator Man. The Cuban pulled back his head, trying to wrench his right glove free, and the blurred oval of his face sharpened, resolved into features: blazing yellow eyes and pebbly skin, and slit nostrils at the end of a long snout. Although used to such visions, hallucinations, whatever this was, Mears reacted in terror. He jolted the Alligator Man with an uppercut, he spun him, landed a clubbing right high on the head, another right, and as if those punches were magic, as if their force and number were removing a curse, breaking a spell, the Alligator Man’s face melted away, becoming a blurred brown oval once again. Mears’ terror also grew blurred, his attack less furious, and the Cuban came back at him, throwing shots from every angle. Mears tried to slide off along the ropes but his legs were gone, so he ducked his head and put his gloves up to block the shots. But they got through, anyway.
Somebody’s arms went around him, hemming him in against the ropes, and he smelled flowery cologne and heard a smooth baritone saying, ‘Take it easy, man! It’s over.’ Mears wanted to tell the ref he could have stood up through ten, the Cuban couldn’t punch for shit. But he was too weak to say anything and he just rested his head on the ref’s shoulder, strings of drool hanging off his mouthpiece, cooling on his chin. And for the first time in a long while, he heard the crowd screaming for the Cuban, the women’s voices bright and crazy, piercing up from the male roar. Then Leon was there, Leon’s astringent smell of Avitene and Vaseline and Gelfoam, and somebody shoved Mears down onto a stool and Leon pressed the ice-cold bar of the Enswell against the lump over his eye, and the Cuban elbowed his way through the commission officials and nobodies in the corner and said, ‘Man, you one tough motherfucker. You almos’ kill me with them right hands.’ And Mears had the urge to tell him, ‘You think I’m tough, wait’ll you see what’s coming,’ but instead, moved by the sudden, heady love that possesses you after you have pounded on a man for nine rounds and he has not fallen, Mears told him that one day soon he would be champion of the world.
Mears wonders if the bestial faces that materialize in the midst of his fights are related to the pain in his head. In his heart he believes they are something else. It could be that he has been granted the magical power to see beneath the surface of things. Or they may be something his mind has created to compensate for his blindness, a kind of spiritual adrenaline that inspires him to fiercer effort, often to victory. Since his retinas became detached, he has slipped from the status of fringe contender to trial horse for young fighters on the way up, and his style has changed from one of grace and elusiveness to that of a brawler, of someone who must keep in constant physical contact with his opponent. Nevertheless, he has won twelve of seventeen fights with his handicap, and he owes much of his success to this symptom or gift or delusion.
He knows most people would consider him a fool for continuing to fight, and he accepts this. But he does not consider himself a greater fool than most people; his is only a more dramatic kind of foolishness than the foolishness of loving a bad woman or stealing a car or speculating on gold futures or smoking cigarettes or taking steroids or eating wrong or involving yourself with the trillion other things that lead to damage and death.
As he lies in that darkened room, in the pall of his own darkness, he imagines attending a benefit held to raise his medical expenses after his secret has been disclosed. All the legends are there. Ali, Frazier and Foreman are there, men who walk with the pride of a nation. Duran is there, Duran of the demonic fury, who TKO’d him in 1979, back when Mears was a welterweight. The Hit Man is there, Thomas Hearns, sinister and rangy, with a cobra-like jab that had once cut him so badly the flesh hung down into his eyes. Sugar Ray Leonard is there, talking about his own detached retina and how he could have gone the same way as Mears. And Hagler, who knocked Mears out in his only title shot, Hagler the tigerish southpaw, he is there, too. Mears ascends to the podium to offer thanks, and a reporter catches his arm and asks him, ‘What the hell went wrong, Bobby? What happened to you?’ He thinks of all the things he could say in response. Bad managers, crooked promoters. Alimony. I forgot to duck. The classic answers. But there is one answer they’ve never heard, one that he’s nourished for almost two years.
‘I travelled into the heartland,’ he tells the reporter, ‘and when I got done fighting the animals there, I came out blind.’
The reporter looks puzzled, but Ali and Foreman, Frazier and Hagler, Duran and Hearns, they nod sagely, they understand. They realize Mears’ answer is partly a pride thing, partly intuitive, a summation of punches absorbed, hands lifted in victory, months of painful healing, hours of punishment in the gym. But mainly it is the recasting into a vow of a decision made years before. They would not argue that their sport is brutally stupid, run by uncaring bastards to whom it is a business of dollars and blood, and that tragedies occur, that fighters are swindled and outright robbed. Yet there is something about it they have needed, something they have chosen, and so in the end, unlike the asbestos worker who bitterly decries the management that has lied to him and led him down a fatal path, the fighter feels no core bitterness, not even at himself for being a fool, for making such a choice in the folly of youth, because he has forsworn the illusion of wisdom.
Mears is not without regrets. Sometimes, indeed, he regrets almost everything. He regrets his blindness, his taste in women, his rotten luck at having been a middleweight during the age of Marvin Hagler. But he has never regretted boxing. He loves what he does, loves the gym rats, the old dozers with their half-remembered tales of Beau Jack and Henry Armstrong, the crafty trainers, the quiet cut men with their satchels full of swabs and chemicals. He loves how he has been in the ring, honourable and determined and brave. And now, nodding off in a cheap hotel room, he feels love from the legends of the game returned in applause that has the sound of rushing water, a pure stream of affirmation that bears him away into the company of heroes and a restless sleep.
Three mornings later, as Mears waits for Leon in the gym, he listens happily to the slapping of jump ropes, the grunt and thud of someone working the heavy bag, the jabber and pop of speed bags, fighters shouting encouragement, the sandpapery whisk of shoes on canvas, the meaty thump of fourteen-ounce sparring gloves. Pale winter light chutes through the high windows like a Bethlehem star to Mears’ eyes. The smell is a harsh perfume of antiseptic, resin and sweat. Now and then somebody passes by, says, ‘Yo, Bobby, what’s happenin’?’ or ‘Look good the other night, man!’ and he will hold out his hand to be slapped without glancing up, pretending that his diffidence is an expression of cool, not a pose designed to disguise his impaired vision. His body still aches from the Cuban’s fast hands, but in a few weeks, a few days if necessary, he’ll be ready to fight again.
He hears Leon rasping at someone, smells his cigar, then spots a dark interruption in the light. Not having to see Leon, he thinks, is one of the few virtues of being
legally blind. He is unsightly, a chocolate-coloured blob of a man with jowls and yellow teeth and a belly that hangs over his belt. The waist of Mears’ boxing trunks would not fit over one of Leon’s thighs. He is especially unsightly when he lies, which is often—weakness comes into his face, his popped eyes dart, the pink tip of the tongue slimes the gristly upper lip. He looks much better as a blur in an onion-coloured shirt and dark trousers.
‘Got a fight for us, my man.’ Leon drops onto a folding chair beside him, and the chair yields a metallic creak. ‘Mexican name Nazario. We gon’ kick his fuckin’ ass!’
This is the same thing Leon said about the Cuban, the same thing he said about every opponent. But this time he may actually be sincere. ‘Guy’s made for us,’ he continues. ‘Comes straight ahead. Good hook, but a nothin’ right. No fancy bullshit.’ He claps Bobby on the leg. ‘We need a W bad, man. We whup this guy in style, I can get us a main event on ESPN next month in Wichita.’
Mears is dubious. ‘Fighting who?’
‘Vederotta,’ says Leon, hurrying past the name to say the Nazario fight is in two weeks. ‘We can be ready by then, can’t we, sure, we be ready, we gon’ kill that motherfucker.’
‘That guy calls himself the Heat? Guy everybody’s been duckin’?’
‘Wasn’t for everybody duckin’ him, I couldn’t get us the fight. He’s tough, I ain’t gon’ tell you no lie. He busts people up. But check it out, man. Our end’s twenty grand. Like that, Bobby? Tuh-wenty thousand dollars.’
‘You shittin’ me?’
‘They fuckin’ desperate. They can’t get nobody to fight the son of a bitch. They need a tune-up for a title shot.’ Leon sucks on his cigar, trying to puff it alight. ‘It’s your ass out there, man. I’ll do what you tell me. But we get past Nazario, we show good against Vederotta—I mean give him a few strong rounds, don’t just fold in one—guy swears he’ll book us three more fights on ESPN cards. Maybe not the main event, but TV bouts. That’d make our year, man. Your end could work out to forty, forty-five.’
Barnacle Bill The Spacer and Other Stories Page 31
