by Raja Alem
“How can you send someone away to die alone?” The thought weighed on Mu’az. What recitation could keep him company in his loneliness? He wanted Khalil to recite the Surah of Sovereignty but he didn’t dare suggest it, so he got into the habit of sitting a short distance away and reciting under his breath and blowing the words toward Khalil while he was engrossed in cinematic bloodshed. The flames of the Surah of Sovereignty battled with the explosions and amplified Hollywood sound effects; Mu’az stumbled sometimes but he continued reciting. Khalil looked over at him and noticed his twitching lips.
“It’s no big deal,” he tried to reassure him. “It’s just like bringing a child into the world … Its very first breath is the beginning of a countdown that always ends in death.”
The cancer had filled the void left by the loss of al-Lababidi’s house, which had removed him from the scene. Mu’az and Khalil had formed a front so tight that the cancer could have probably continued its spread from Khalil’s liver straight over to Mu’az’s. With the determination of the early mujahideen, Mu’az neglected his photography so he could devote all his time to fighting the war. When Khalil decided he was too tired to visit the hospital three times a week—once for chemotherapy and twice for serum—Mu’az learned how to administer the subcutaneous injections so he could do them himself.
When the pain got too much for Khalil, he would lie stiffly on the mattress staring at unending scenes of compulsive violence on TV. The Surah of Sovereignty would sink, with heavy sadness, into Mu’az’s heart, as he muttered it, sneaking looks at Khalil who was growing thinner by the second. He couldn’t keep a morsel of food down, and the poison of the chemotherapy, which had sapped the strength from his muscles and joints, left his movements sluggish and clumsy. He’d begun to appreciate science fiction more, though, and he watched the action movie that was playing out on the screen of his body with pleasure, wearing a smile of happiness and nausea.
“Imagine if Ramziya were here now.” He always came back to Ramziya and her faith. During their one short week of marriage, she hadn’t given up. She’d spread herself all over him as though she were a miracle fertilizer that could revive his dead sperm to create a child. Maybe that was what scared him: she had challenged his love of self-destruction, which he’d begun cultivating with his first death, when at the age of twenty he encountered those science fiction liquids—5FU, MVAC, CMV—for the first time. They were like strange weapons out of Star Wars that the doctors dripped, infused, and pumped into his blood, where they remained for hours, days, months, transmuting him and exterminating his sperm … He was nearly fifty now and the invading creatures had lost interest and flown away in their spaceships; there was nothing left in him worth destroying.
“What does a person do when modern science gives up on them?!” The question he posed to Mu’az tugged at his own heart as well. This “modern science” they talked about was like a present-day god who’d turned his back on Khalil and denied him his miracles. The storyline chattered away incessantly inside his head: “They said go and die. But Ramziya’s faith said, ‘Be patient and you shall see those same doctors drop dead before the cancer ever reaches your heart.’ You’re a cancer old-timer now, I might add … Death can’t stand to live inside you!”
Mu’az stuck to Khalil’s conviction that he’d make it through, picking out the Quran’s miracle verses to strengthen his hope that a miracle would land on the roof of the Arab League to rescue Khalil. The imam’s son clung for dear life to Khalil, the last of the heroes of his lost paradise: he snuck up to the roof of the Arab League every day to sit there with one eye following the movie and the other watching Khalil’s breaths for fear they might suddenly stop while he wasn’t paying attention. The cancer might penetrate Khalil’s ribs and leave him rotting up there in the heat … Khalil put up with Mu’az because he brought with him his flashlight smile, his cunning way of looking at life, his faith that images were a worthy substitute for reality. The two shared that sinful faith in the image as a path to resurrection.
Sometimes Khalil was silent for hours, each second an age during which he directed all his senses to the pain, following the cancer’s rapid progress and the decisive moment when it penetrated an organ. It passed from kidney to liver and liver to stomach, and then it broke through his diaphragm decisively. He felt his fragile lungs quaking as it advanced, felt the suppurations at the base of his trachea anticipating the final surrender of his heart at any moment. It was times like that that Khalil would go blind and deaf and lose his ability to concentrate; a feverish pallor would come over his skin, as if all of the supply train of life had been cut off. At times like that, nothing could get through to him except jokes about Ramziya and violent action movies. Mu’az realized that the violence answered some deep need in Khalil, so he began feeding him those movies to keep him going. He came by in the morning to pick up two hundred riyals and returned in the evening with a dozen videotapes at fifteen riyals each, old and brand-new releases alike: X-Men: The Last Stand, The Bourne Ultimatum, 300, Spider-Man 3, Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End and Dead Man’s Chest, Transformers, Miami Vice, Poseidon, BloodRayne, Underworld: Evolution, Second in Command, The Guardian, Road House 2, Living & Dying, Cut Off, Snakes on a Plane, The Detonator, The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift, Hellboy: Sword of Storms, Fearless, Bon Cop, Bad Cop, Undisputed 2, Connors’ War, Machine, Lord of the Rings, Ocean’s 11, 12, and 13, The Matrix 1 and 2 … After a while the titles and actors became irrelevant, sunset and darkness followed sunrise and still Khalil’s eyes were glued to the 45-inch plasma screen. He scarcely noticed when one movie ended and another began: the main thing was to keep the scenes of war coming, to stab the enemy inside him with every heroic move or brave martyrdom performed by a character in his stead. The movies grew into one endless reel, starring Khalil’s own cells.
And so the son of Qarara Hill sat with the son of the Ethiopian imam devouring movies like potato chips salted with the verses Mu’az never stopped reciting. Together they kept Khalil’s life going from one fight scene to the next, as the realities of life and death became a mere game on a TV screen. Mu’az was watching Khalil die and he was certain that his solitary fight against the disease was more heroic than anything Hollywood could ever produce. He was filled with a deep respect for the loneliness of that fighter. It did occasionally occur to him that he was spending his evenings with a dead man and he would be haunted by his father’s terrifying words: “We will be resurrected doing what we died doing … In the grave, we’ll relive the last moments of our lives, over and over until Judgment Day.” Would Khalil lie in his grave and be resurrected like this, watching American cinema? Was that fate worse than being resurrected driving his taxi through traffic in a sandstorm?
He was surprised, then, when on his way to deliver the call to prayer early one morning, he heard no sound at all coming from Khalil’s roof. He raced to the Arab League building and took the stairs three at a time, blinded by a single thought: Khalil had died behind his back. He reached the roof, panting, and was met, to his amazement, by an emaciated apparition kneeling naked against the sky, shoulder bones poking out as he pressed his shining forehead against the ground. Tears welled up in Mu’az’s eyes: was this Khalil praying for the first time? He didn’t stay to find out, but turned and hurried back downstairs, hoping with all his heart that Azrael would descend at that very moment to snatch Khalil’s soul as he was prostrate and record that he was praying, regardless of what for. With that fervent supplication, Mu’az intoned, “Come to prayer …”
In the early stages of his disease, Khalil continued to drive his taxi, except on Wednesdays when he went in for chemotherapy. He’d leave the taxi miles from the Lane of Many Heads and make his own way back to the Arab League, where he lay sweating and vomiting, turning a metallic blue. The next day, he’d wake up with a supernatural determination to get back in his taxi again, sometimes even driving past customers without stopping just to piss them off.
Khalil had t
aken up driving his taxi again during the past two weeks following a break after the doctors issued his death sentence. A chiseled-out skeleton swimming in a huge robe, maybe there was nothing left of him for the cancer to eat. What was certain was that Khalil had decided to go out to face the cancer. With sallow skin pulled taut over his bones, and reeking of garlic, he looked at the city with new eyes: the eyes of a dead man.
EVERY MORNING, KHALIL HESITATED AT THE JUNCTION BETWEEN AL-HUJOUN—left—and al-Zahir—right—but his hands would instinctively turn the steering wheel and he’d show up on time to his appointment with the stranger who had been appearing every day for the last ten days in front of the Martyrs’ Cemetery, always in the same white robes and gray waistcoat.
THE NIGHT BEFORE, THE SAME SMELL OF COFFEE HAD RISEN FROM THE WOUNDS THAT the Turkish woman had left on his impotent body. He’d hidden his illness from her—though she herself was more monstrous than cancer—but of course his frailty gave him away. Nothing satisfied her any more but a bite of his liver. He gasped in the silence of the taxi when his passenger’s eyes alighted on the bite-mark on his right forearm.
“She satisfied her hunger on you but now she’s sick of you, like everyone around you.” This man had been tyrannizing Khalil for days, asking again and again to be taken to addresses that they would then find had vanished from the map of Mecca. That day he’d gotten into the taxi without giving an address, leaving Khalil to drive in confusion; instead, he kept repeating, “This is a nightmare, Khalil. You’re dreaming. You’ll wake up soon. At the next bend in the road, or the next red light. You’ll wake up and this hallucination will go away, so will the dead body with the yellow beard in the seat behind you …”
Khalil tried to relax at the wheel and force his thoughts to submit to what was happening in his car, knowing intuitively that he’d soon wake up to a screech of brakes. That nightmarish situation called to mind the bad dreams that had plagued him since the body had appeared in the Lane of Many Heads along with Detective Nasser. Nasser often came to Khalil in his dreams and subjected him to the usual mockery and the same repeated question: “Did you ever eat a chicken breast, Khalil? Because people who eat chicken breast can’t keep secrets. Anything they’re told is soon blowing in the wind. So what is it you’ve been spreading about the Lane of Many Heads and Mecca, huh?” He’d interrogate him with a torture instrument that resembled the hands of a watch, letting it loose on his heart and leaving it to tick round, tearing the edges. Every time, he’d wake up choking on his own sweat in the Turkish seamstress’s bed, to the sight of her eyebrows arched in such annoyance that the previous night they’d jumped right off her forehead. One floating eyebrow told him that she’d lost her animality and that her magic had been discovered, and her features began to crumble; she turned into a gray-haired heap decaying in a grave of fat before his very eyes, and he knew that he’d have to pay the price for having stripped her naked.
“And the seal-dies, who did you give them to?” The word seal-dies punctured his front wheels like a nail and the car swerved violently, while a voice in his head warned him, “Whatever happens, don’t brake. The car will skid off the bridge.” As coolly as the most sophisticated airplane autopilot, Khalil stiffened his grip on the wheel and forced the metal structure around him back onto a straight path. All that remained was for his passenger to choose where he wanted to go.
“Stop anywhere and sniff. You know most of the ground in Mecca is graves, right? The ground where the pilgrims walk around the Kaaba—between the Hijr of Ibrahim, Abraham’s footprints, and the Well of Zamzam, ninety-nine prophets who came to Mecca on pilgrimage were buried there, and Ishmael’s virgin daughters—and the peaks of Mount Khunduma, where another seventy prophets were buried. Don’t ever think you can get rid of a grave. The ground is stuffed full of death—take a handful of earth from al-Shubbayka or The Martyrs and sniff it. That’s the smell of your ancestors. Death is a destination in Mecca; the ground and the sky never forget a dead body. Sniff your own corpse and you’ll smell your ancestor Uqayl ibn Ateeq al-Hadrami. He stole the sealdies, and you took them as your inheritance to do whatever you felt like with them.”
He tried to claim innocence in vain. This time, the wheel didn’t wobble at the sound of the name; the ancestor, Uqayl ibn Ateeq al-Hadrami, was sitting in the car with them, naked and buried under the pile of rocks that had been thrown at his corpse, one hand still holding the dagger that had pierced his heart. In the speeding taxi, Khalil was stripped of the nickname “the Pilot” that the Lane of Many Heads had given him, and regained his family name, al-Hadrami.
“Both of you committed suicide—he with the dagger he was given as a present, and you with the gift of the seal-dies.” Khalil was frozen like stone, passively taking in this ransacking of the grave of his ancestor Ibn Ateeq al-Hadrami, the minister who’d ruled Mecca tyrannically in the final years of the first hijri millennium.
“They were inside that pillow you always keep in the trunk of this car of yours. They were the only thing you took from your inheritance and your sister. You didn’t rush into the fire to save your mother—you just grabbed the pillow that held the bundle of dies and got out of there.” Khalil saw he’d fallen into the trap his uncle Ismail had laid for him from beyond the grave. He’d been looking for Ismail’s musical instruments and songbooks when he stumbled across the seal-dies, which were hidden inside a large brass incense burner: six dies bearing a line drawing of a gold-plated key. The moment he set eyes on them, waiting silently in the enormous incense burner ready to be lit, some sixth sense warned him that they were dangerous, that they were a piece of Mecca’s very heart, and that he was the reason they’d lain there all those centuries since the end of the first hijri millennium, waiting. He was so impatient to possess them he didn’t want to check their date or owner, but picked them up in humble silence and stuffed them into the pillow he took with him everywhere—to Qarara Hill and Florida and back to the Lane of Many Heads, where they were saved from the fire that took his mother—until they finally disappeared inside the stuffing of the Turkish woman.
“Your ancestor al-Hadrami, who served as the minister of the Sharif Hasan ibn Abi Nama, was highly adept at forging identities. He could impersonate a dead judge by using the man’s personal seal, and get him to sign any deed he wanted from beyond the grave, or proofs of debt owed by deceased people, so as to rob people of their inheritance. In your ancestor’s hands, dates became mere masks that he placed on papers to lend them historicity and respectability, or to deny events that had happened or loans that had been taken out; he had the power to fast-forward and rewind dates at will. Those six dies, or whoever possessed them, owned Mecca’s heart.”
Just the previous day, when the Turkish woman’s disguise had fallen in front of his eyes, taking his good fortune with it, and he realized that his downfall had already happened, and at her hands, he took refuge in that pillow, burying his face into its soft stuffing looking for the reassuring weight of the dies whose ink never dried up. The pillow’s unfamiliar lightness woke him from his nightmare; in a frenzy he tore through the pillow’s insides, ferreting through the damp cotton but finding only a terrifying nothing. He began to punch the fat form lying around him and on top of him; the seals’ disappearance had unmasked her and revealed the animal within. The battle that raged between him and the Turkish seamstress wasn’t a fair fight by any means; still, he left her with a broken arm hanging limply, though she didn’t even whimper, and she left him with bite-marks showing the imprint of every one of her teeth all over his body, stripping him like a tortoise ripped out of its shell.
“When Abu Talib came to power, Ibn Ateeq al-Hadrami was thrown in prison and there he began to scratch his memoirs onto the walls, confessing details of all the inheritances he’d misappropriated, all the witnesses he’d forced to sign his forgeries, and all the dates that he’d faked, explaining at length the secrets behind his power to manipulate time. He also recounted the stories of the old deeds he possesse
d, how he’d given them the authentic flavor of age and made denying them as impossible as denying the existence of Ibn Khaldun’s Introduction to History or al-Tabari’s History of Prophets and Kings. Your ancestor al-Hadrami didn’t close his eyes once during the weeks he spent chiseling his biography on those walls, as though purging his insides of sin onto the walls of Mecca. He told the story of his involvement with Khidr Effendi in full, scratching the details with such fervor that Khidr rose up out of the grave where he was buried in exile outside Mecca to join al-Hadrami on the walls of his prison cell. Together they remembered the certificate Khidr had refused to forge and the vitriol that al-Hadrami had poured on him, the houses that al-Hadrami had expropriated and the furniture he’d auctioned off before the last of Khidr Effendi’s footsteps, disappearing into exile, had even faded from Mecca. Khidr Effendi mocked al-Hadrami’s attempts at suicide, pronouncing that ‘suicide means you never wore the right mask to fool the Sharif into doing what you want. The right mask is more effective than all the judges’ seals; a seal imprinted on the eye of a prince is like the lost seal of Solomon himself!’ On one line on the wall, Khidr Effendi wrote, ‘Do not hurry, for it will come to you: the demand of a wronged person cannot be resisted.’
“Together, they watched his end. The Sharif, Abu Talib, sent a dagger to al-Hadrami as a gift, together with a letter that read, ‘If you want to kill yourself, here is my dagger: take it and send your soul to hell!’ Khidr Effendi helped al-Hadrami engrave a copy of the letter onto the wall, and when al-Hadrami picked up the dagger, Khidr promised him he would record his death in all its detail, as befitted a legend; when al-Hadrami stabbed himself, Khidr made a note of the spot where the dagger had entered—just below the fourth rib and straight into the heart—and described how it remained there, stopping the blood from spilling out, and when they carried him away, Khidr Effendi walked with them like a devoted servant and composed a description of the mangy donkey and the cart that bore his corpse, the water nobody bothered to wash the body with, the prayer that wasn’t said over his soul, the patch of earth in Umm al-Doud, the neighborhood of worms, where they tossed his body, the crowds of commoners who gathered to bid him farewell with a hail of stones, the angle of the sun over the heap of rubble they piled on top of him, the halitosis of the curses that steamed around him like a cortege for his soul.
