Unicorn

by Amrou Al-Kadhi

  THE QUEER QURAN, AND OTHER QUANTUM CONTRADICTIONS

  Leaving university was the first time in my life that I had properly been outside an institution. In my early childhood I had the institution of my family, once unconditional protectors, later omnipresent purveyors of my every move. For a lot of my life I had an unconditional faith in Allah, who also started as a source of love, and had then become a patriarchal watchman. Each of my schools, and Cambridge after them, also provided an institution to which I could aspire. I believed that my sense of belonging would come from my acceptance into such established structures. But coming to London after Cambridge was like being taken out of a playpen and thrown into a swamp of crocodiles. Suddenly, there was no structure on which to pin my hopes, no established rules to trust or reject. For even when I transgressed the rules of the institution I had grown up in, I had come to depend on the institution as a benchmark against which I could measure my behaviour. Now what?

  After graduating from Cambridge, I rented a room in Camberwell advertised on Facebook by a friend of a friend (who luckily now happens to be one of the most wonderful people I’ve ever had in my life). I was now no longer speaking to my parents, besides a courteous monthly call, which consisted of ‘How are you?’ and ‘Fine’, apart from the very rare occasions when I had minus-3,000 pounds in my bank account and would call them for financial help. I no longer spoke to Majid or Lily, and was out of touch with Dennis for a little period. And my entire love life became confined to gay chemsex parties.

  Technically, chemsex just means having sex on drugs, but in the last decade it has become a phenomenon among the gay community. Due to rising prices in cities, many queer spaces and gay bars have closed; this, coupled with the surge of Grindr, and other online gay hook-up apps, has taken sexual activity out of public spaces and into private homes. Chemsex parties tend to be organised through Grindr, and usually involve a group of men who don’t know each other partying naked or in underwear at someone’s house, taking copious amounts of drugs, having lots of sex, and pretending that time isn’t real. Sometimes they can be quite enjoyable, but bleakness is always hovering close by, and it doesn’t take much to fall over the precipice. Even though I never really had a good time at one, I grew somewhat addicted to them.

  Whenever I was out at a gay club, side by side with hundreds of other queer people with whom I could potentially have found intimacy, I often ended up travelling to the middle of nowhere to attend a chemsex party I discovered on Grindr. This would especially be the case if there were people I fancied or felt a sexual chemistry with standing near me. The threat of rejection and fear of intimacy would turn my stomach into a cesspit of dread, and before I knew it I was having sex with multiple men high on drugs in a random person’s house.

  Now, there are many people who are able to attend these parties healthily, seeing them merely as an extension of their sexual identity, and a place to experiment and be liberated. I wish I were one of them. For me, they became the only place I felt I deserved to have sex, and the more drug-fuelled and zombified they were, the more affinity I had with them.

  For the better part of sixteen months, the only sexual intercourse I had was confined to these settings. At one of them, I met a man who looked remarkably like Majid. Let’s call him Tamar. Tamar was an accountant in his forties, rugged, Palestinian, and similar in frame to many of the male patriarchs in my family. Tamar messaged me on Grindr and invited me to a chemsex party he was hosting at his flat in Leyton. When I arrived, I found a pretty pathetic affair, more like a haunted house gone wrong. As soon as I entered, I saw a man syringe himself with some liquid crystal meth – called ‘slamming’. It wasn’t long before Tamar and I had locked ourselves in the toilet to have sex – and to get away from the vampiric gathering outside. It was hot and dirty, and he treated me like his subject. He became a recurring feature of my chemsex adventures, and I was always available to him for sex. No matter what I was doing, if Tamar invited me to one of his parties, I would drop everything to be there. And it’s not like he showered me with attention when I went – I was one of multiple naked high gays roaming the darkened apartment, and there would be times he’d barely speak to me, or even tell me to just ‘shut up’.

  Once, I made the mistake of trying to embrace him. I bumped into him in a nightclub, and we decided to get a cab to his where another chemsex party awaited. In the back seat of the Uber, I tried to snuggle into his broad chest, which had the protective look of a gay Aslan. As I lay my head on his chest, I felt his stomach flinch, and the soft furry pillow I was hoping would provide some comfort became a cold bed of nails. Not wanting to address this colossal error, I stayed there for the entire cab journey, in what felt like an invisible choke-hold. When we got back to Tamar’s flat, I was treated like a dog that had pooed inside the house. I was told to wait in his bed, where he would momentarily come to visit, before then going outside to have sex with one of the other people he openly found more desirable than me. Eventually, I fell asleep.

  While I was out, Tamar clearly consumed a lot of G – a liquid drug that can give rise to epic episodes of horniness (and that can be fatal with alcohol) – and he came into the room and penetrated me as I was half asleep. I came to when I heard what he was saying; as he was fucking me, he was muttering, almost like a demonic incantation, ‘You’re nothing but my stupid fucking assistant.’ Once the not-so-consensual office role-play finished, I fell back to sleep. I woke up to a WhatsApp message from Tamar telling me that he’d gone out to find guys, and to leave the house as soon as I got up and post his keys to him. Like Majid, he turned out to be a bit of a monster. It was the last I ever saw of him.

  As I limped home through the Camberwell fog, all I felt was an extraordinary numbness. I was hollow. I think I felt an odd kind of resolution, as if the night’s debasement correlated exactly with my sexual identity. It was like the first night I did drag, when I equated my queer identity with the filth on the floor. Only this time, it didn’t hurt. For it merely proved something I had come to know and take as fact. I went to bed with a bizarre sense of satisfaction that I had proved myself right, and was content with the fact that at least I knew myself somewhat. But it was only a week later that I suffered a nervous breakdown of colossal proportions.

  There were other challenges for me at this time. Although I had a good degree, I was in financial peril during the initial years after graduating. I was barely making anything as a performer, and was once again being seen for roles as terrorists. The only two jobs I got were for a ‘terrorist’s son’ speaking only Moroccan (which is a different language to Arabic), and as an ‘Indian friend’ in a supermarket Christmas commercial. There was one glimmer of hope when I was invited to audition for the role of an Arab drag queen in a major TV series. I strutted to the casting in full drag, ready to give the performance of my life, which is when I was informed that the character was not a drag queen – indeed, he was a cold-blooded terrorist who wears a burqa to disguise the bombs. And so, in full drag, I had to mime a detonation sequence. Low point. Denim were also completely unknown on the London scene, and I was taking out credit cards to throw events so that we could make a name for ourselves (yes, I still have an appalling credit rating). Throughout the period after graduation, the invisibility became overwhelming, and the lack of institutional structures gave me nothing tangible to hold onto. Where do I go for Christmas? If I died, would anyone notice? Do I have a family? I’m definitely not Arab, but I’m definitely not white. I like boys, but only if they don’t like me or if they can’t like me. I feel happy in dresses, but terrible when I take them off. And many people hate it if I put them on. The combination of this instability with the ongoing chemsex parties and unloving urban brutality eventually had a surprising effect on me: I started to believe that I didn’t exist. This isn’t a metaphor. I genuinely believed I was not real.

  The first episode that gave me the thought took place on a double-decker bus in London. I had g
ot on it at 3 p.m. in the afternoon for absolutely no reason. I sat on the top deck by the middle, and there were only a couple of other people on the bus with me. In front to the left of me was a young female student with headphones, sleeping against the window, her jaw half open. A few seats behind me was a large man, who I realised was snorting a bit of cocaine on a key – he saw that I saw, and gave me a, ‘whatever gets you through the day’ look. No judgement here, hun. As the bus followed the route that was infinitely more structured than anything else I could have hoped for at that point in my life, I felt a slight tingle around the rim of my face, and my head felt very light, as if it might float off at any point. My stomach felt fluttery; less like butterfly wings, and more like a million locusts flapping their way out. The visual field around me became distorted, and eventually, my entire surroundings looked flat, like a 2-D drawing on an extremely thin piece of paper that was going to rip at any moment. It felt so real that I became panicked that this tear was suddenly going to appear, and in an instant there would be no one and nothingness. As my panic intensified, I was eventually thrust back out of the matrix, and into the 4-D world out of which I had almost evaporated. When I looked around me, I realised that the comatose student and highly alert businessman were gone, and that I was in Penge, the final stop of the London bus I had aimlessly taken.

  It happened again, a few days later, and soon these episodes became more frequent, and much shorter. They were usually stimulated by moments of waiting or stasis. They were particularly common when standing in queues to purchase something, and ended when the person behind started shouting for me to move along. They became so common that I started to lose any sense of connection with reality, and instead to consider these episodes as real, actual events. I was once with a friend in a Caffè Nero, and as we waited in the queue, again I felt that the surroundings were imminently about to rip open and dissolve. When I finally got out of it and was being asked if I wanted milk in my coffee, I had no answer to give the barista. I knew that I preferred to have no milk with my coffee, but was unable or unwilling to open my mouth to express this. I simply turned to my friend and asked them to close the deal.

  The frequency of these ‘visions’ grew rapidly, and, with very few things keeping me rooted to anything or anyone in reality, I began to take to heart what they were trying to tell me. It was as if my feelings of displacement and not belonging were being actualised, and I felt an acute sense of comfort that whatever it was that was guiding me towards these rips knew that I didn’t belong in this world either. It was as if every feeling of not belonging had culminated in this very simple solution: of course I don’t belong in this world. It isn’t real.

  I had grown accustomed to feelings of displacement being extremely painful, of desperately wanting to join a group of people and wear their identity; now, I felt that everybody else was a fool for trusting in the fickle semblance of reality. How could they not see that the world they inhabited was no more than a fictional drawing that disguised something altogether different underneath? I had no idea what this something was, but I felt as if I was being pulled towards it. This tear in the surface of life, whatever it might be, had to be a wormhole to the real, to a site of new dimensions where my belonging could not be called into question. I just had to get to it. I tried closing my eyes during these episodes, hoping that when I opened them I would no longer be me, but a different kind of being in a different kind of place, perhaps even a starfish or an octopus, or something fluid and teeming with multiplicity.

  These tears in reality, if I could only find them, seemed to open up the possibility of parallel universes living right under our noses, and I felt a physical pull towards them, as if they were caressing my hair, whispering in my ear a secret I couldn’t quite make out. Maybe this is Allah? Maybe this is some version of Allah I’d never known about? In a period of my life where I felt so rudderless, this quest to find the rips gave me direction. I began to assume that I must be a prophet, who had been gifted with some semblance of a key that would unlock the truth.

  By this point I had started avoiding friends entirely, and they were growing worried. I stopped answering calls, and my whereabouts were largely unknown to them. But once I realised I must be a prophet, it was my duty to let them know so that they could help me locate the rip in the fabric of the world that would redeem us all. And so I accepted an invitation to a dinner party, for most of which I sat in silence, internally pitying these unsuspecting mortals, who I might perhaps be able to save. Eventually, eyes turned on me.

  ‘How have you been, Amrou?’ Well, I might not even BE, you know.

  ‘I’m OK. It’s been a bit of a weird time.’

  ‘What’s wrong? Are you sick?’ Loaded question.

  ‘No. I’ve just been having these visions.’ My group of white friends stared at me, embarrassed and concerned in equal measure, unsure as to the next move. And so I explained my quest to find the portal, and my theory that this world was a fictitious construct that could dissolve at any minute, and that I was a kind of prophet on the cusp of finding the elsewhere. There was an extended pause. Please portal, come now. This is getting awkward.

  ‘Amrou, how many drugs have you been taking?’ one of them asked. This connection hadn’t occurred to me. I thought about it.

  ‘Every weekend.’ Another extended pause. A dear friend of mine from Cambridge then embraced me, and whispered, ‘Oh, I’m so worried about you, Amrou.’

  I went home that night a little bit unsure as to whether my visions were anything meaningful or merely a neurological malfunction because of my chemsex escapades. The next day, my father called to check on me. I really hadn’t thought about him in a while, but when he asked me how I was doing, I decided to try out the prophecy theory to hear his thoughts. After a pause long enough for me to make a cup of coffee, he then said, with an emotional warble in his voice:

  ‘Amoura. Every day me and Mama worry that someone will find you hanging dead from a tree. It keeps us up at night. But … we don’t know how to help you. We don’t understand you. Maybe we never will. But please … just don’t die. I’m going to send you some money tomorrow. Get therapy – or do whatever it takes so that me and Mama don’t find you hanging from a tree. OK?’

  After getting off the phone, I saw a message from my mother: ‘Please take care of yourself habibi. Please. I love you so much.’

  There were two things that helped me out of my dissociative delusions. The first was my extensive time in psychotherapy; the second was quantum physics. During my quest to reveal the ruptures in the fabric of reality, I wondered whether I was experiencing some manifestation of the universe’s black holes. I began reading about these curious things that have bewitched physicists for so long, and this in turn led me to theories about how our universe might be only one in a series of multiverses. From there I stumbled on the possibility of parallel universes. This led me to read widely around quantum physics, in the hope that this might give me proof that my episodes were part of something that was actually happening. And in many ways, I discerned that what I was experiencing was, in a sense, ‘real’.

  Some brief context: quantum physics is a beautiful and strange sect of theoretical physics that caused quite a stir in the world of science in the twentieth century. Whereas standard Newtonian physics ostensibly studies observable reality on a macrocosmic scale, attempting to find the fixed scientific laws that govern our universe, quantum physics looks at the very smallest things in our universe. For quantum physicists, even atoms are huge; even the things that make up atoms – neutrons, protons and electrons – are huge. Quantum mechanics is interested in the subatomic particles inside neutrons, protons and electrons, particles like quarks, leptons, bosons and the Higgs bosons. The way that these subatomic particles behave has completely defied the standard fixed rules and formulae that we think govern the universe. Whereas classical physics treats particles like discrete, definite objects, quantum physics shows
us that the idea of a particle being a fixed ‘thing’ is a construct.

  One of the most famous experiments to demonstrate this is the double-slit experiment. The exercise is relatively simple; an electron is fired through a wall with two slits, and on the other side of the wall, the electron will leave a mark on either the left or right side of the reader. But every once in a while, the very same electron finds itself on both sides, having travelled through both holes on its journey. The same individual particle can be in two places at once. How does this happen? Well, on a quantum level, we observe that a particle isn’t really a particle at all – it’s more like a wave carrying subatomic particles that behave quite chaotically. This discovery undermined the very structure of theoretical physics, and its quest to find order and the fixed formulae to understand resolute laws of our world. It let us understand that the very subatomic foundation of our world is anything but stable; it is always changing. Reality, as a result, is more an approximation of events – our brains can only observe a macro version of the very chaotic happenings really occurring at the core of things. What we are experiencing in ‘reality’ is just one of the events occurring at subatomic level; what is happening physically at the core of the thing we’re observing often contradicts the actual thing we’re observing. Quantum physics is scientific proof that reality really is constructed.

  In the quantum foundation of our worlds, particles are nomadic creatures, roaming from party to party, and sometimes going to all at the same time (they’re like particles with a really great chauffeur). Like shape-shifting scoundrels, they can often change their behaviour on being observed by a human, to alter their dynamics suddenly when we’re no longer observing them. This isn’t sci-fi fantasy, but the very foundation of our universe. It even hints that there is an infinite range of parallel universes around us all the time; if a particle can do multiple things at once, then perhaps we only inhabit one reality in a series of multiple universes.