“Have you ever seen a modern leviathan, Elwood?”
“Yes. I witnessed one … feeding. At the base in San Diego.” Doughty could recall it with an awful clarity—the great finned Navy monster, the barnacled pockets in its vast ribbed belly holding a slumbering cargo of hideous batwinged gaunts. On order from Washington, the minor demons would waken, slash their way free of the monster’s belly, launch, and fly to their appointed targets with pitiless accuracy and the speed of a tempest. In their talons, they clutched triple-sealed spells that could open, for a few hideous microseconds, the portal between universes. And for an instant, the Radiance of Azathoth would gush through. And whatever that Color touched—wherever its unthinkable beam contacted earthly substance—the Earth would blister and bubble in cosmic torment. The very dust of the explosion would carry an unearthly taint.
“And have you seen them test the Bomb, Elwood?”
“Only underground. The atmospheric testing was rather before my time …”
“And what of the poisoned waste, Elwood? From behind the cyclopean walls of our scores of power plants …”
“We’ll deal with that. Launch it into the abyss of space, if we must.” Doughty hid his irritation with an effort. “What are you driving at?”
“I worry, my friend. I fear that we’ve gone too far. We have been responsible men, you and I. We have labored in the service of responsible leaders. Fifty long years have passed, and not once has the Unthinkable been unleashed in anger. But we have trifled with the Eternal in pursuit of mortal ends. What is our pitiful fifty years in the eons of the Elder Gods? Now, it seems, we will rid ourselves of our foolish applications of this dreadful knowledge. But will we ever be clean?”
“That’s a challenge for the next generation. I’ve done what I can. I’m only mortal. I accept that.”
“I do not think we can put it away. It is too close to us. We have lived in its shadow too long, and it has touched our souls.”
“I’m through with it,” Doughty insisted. “My duty is done. And I’m tired of the burden. I’m tired of trying to grasp issues, and imagine horrors, and feel fears and temptations, that are beyond the normal bounds of sane human contemplation. I’ve earned my retirement, Ivan. I have a right to a human life.”
“The Unthinkable has touched you. Can you truly put that aside?”
“I’m a professional,” Doughty said. “I’ve always taken the proper precautions. The best military exorcists have looked me over … I’m clean.”
“Can you know that?”
“They’re the best exorcists we have; I trust their professional judgement … If I find the shadow in my life again, I’ll put it aside. I’ll cut it away. Believe me, I know the feel and smell of the Unthinkable—it’ll never find a foothold in my life again …” A merry chiming came from Doughty’s right trouser pocket.
Tsyganov blinked, then went on. “But what if you find it is simply too close to you?”
Doughty’s pocket rang again. He stood up absently. “You’ve known me for years, Ivan,” he said, digging into his pocket. “We may be mortal men, but we were always prepared to take the necessary steps. We were prepared. No matter what the costs.”
Doughty whipped a large square of pentagram-printed silk from his pocket, spread it with a flourish.
Tsyganov was startled. “What is that?”
“Portable telephone,” Doughty said. “Newfangled gadget—I always carry one now.”
Tsyganov was scandalized. “You brought a telephone into my private quarters?”
“Damn,” Doughty said with genuine contrition. “Forgive me, Ivan. I truly forgot I had this thing with me. Look, I won’t take the call here. I’ll leave.” He opened the door, descended the wooden stair into grass and Swiss sunlight.
Behind him, Tsyganov’s hut rose on its monster chicken legs, and stalked away—wobbling, it seemed to Doughty, with a kind of offended dignity. In the hut’s retreating window, he glimpsed Tsyganov, peering out half-hidden, unable to restrain his curiosity. Portable telephones. Another technical breakthrough of the inventive West.
Doughty smoothed the ringing silk on the top of an iron lawn table and muttered a Word of power. An image rose sparking above the woven pentagram—the head and shoulders of his wife.
He knew at once from her look that the news was bad. “Jeane?” he said.
“It’s Tommy,” she said.
“What happened?”
“Oh,” she said with brittle clarity, “nothing. Nothing you’d see. But the lab tests are in. The exorcists—they say he’s tainted.”
The foundation blocks of Doughty’s life cracked swiftly and soundlessly apart. “Tainted,” he said blankly. “Yes … I hear you, dear …”
“They came to the house and examined him. They say he’s monstrous.”
Now anger seized him. “Monstrous. How can they say that? He’s only a four-month-old kid! How the hell could they know he’s monstrous? What the hell do they really know, anyway? Some crowd of ivory-tower witch doctors …”
His wife was weeping openly now. “You know what they recommended, Elwood? You know what they want us to do?”
“We can’t just—put him away,” Doughty said. “He’s our son.” He paused, took a breath, looked about him. Smooth lawn, sunlight, trees. The world. The future. A bird flickered past him.
“Let’s think about this,” he said. “Let’s think this through. Just how monstrous is he, exactly?”
WE SEE THINGS
DIFFERENTLY
This was the jahiliyah—the land of ignorance. This was America. The Great Satan, the Arsenal of Imperialism, the Bankroller of Zionism, the Bastion of Neo-Colonialism. The home of Hollywood and blonde sluts in black nylon. The land of rocket-equipped F-15s that slashed across God’s sky, in godless pride. The land of nuclear-powered global navies, with cannon that fired shells as large as cars.
They have forgotten that they used to shoot us, shell us, insult us, and equip our enemies. They have no memory, the Americans, and no history. Wind sweeps through them, and the past vanishes. They are like dead leaves.
I flew into Miami, on a winter afternoon. The jet banked over a tangle of empty highways, then a large dead section of the city—a ghetto perhaps. In our final approach we passed a coal-burning power plant, reflected in the canal. For a moment I mistook it for a mosque, its tall smokestacks slender as minarets. A Mosque for the American Dynamo.
I had trouble with my cameras at customs. The customs officer was a grimy-looking American white with hair the color of clay. He squinted at my passport. “That’s an awful lot of film, Mr. Cuttab,” he said.
“Qutb,” I said, smiling. “Sayyid Qutb. Call me Charlie.”
“Journalist, huh?” He looked unhappy. It seemed that I owed substantial import duties on my Japanese cameras, as well as my numerous rolls of Pakistani color film. He invited me into a small back office to discuss it. Money changed hands. I departed with my papers in order.
The airport was half-full: mostly prosperous Venezuelans and Cubans, with the haunted look of men pursuing sin. I caught a taxi outside, a tiny vehicle like a motorcycle wrapped in glass. The cabbie, an ancient black man, stowed my luggage in the cab’s trailer.
Within the cab’s cramped confines, we were soon unwilling intimates. The cabbie’s breath smelled of sweetened alcohol. “You Iranian?” the cabbie asked.
“Arab.”
“We respect Iranians around here, we really do,” the cabbie insisted.
“So do we,” I said. “We fought them on the Iraqi front for years.”
“Yeah?” said the cabbie uncertainly. “Seems to me I heard about that. How’d that end up?”
“The Shi’ite holy cities were ceded to Iran. The Ba’athist regime is dead, and Iraq is now part of the Arab Caliphate.” My words made no impression on him, and I had known it before I spoke. This is the land of ignorance. They know nothing about us, the Americans. After all this, and they still know nothing whatsoever.
“Well, who’s got more money these days?” the cabbie asked. “Y’all, or the Iranians?”
“The Iranians have heavy industry,” I said. “But we Arabs tip better.”
The cabbie smiled. It is very easy to buy Americans. The mention of money brightens them like a shot of drugs. It is not just the poverty; they were always like this, even when they were rich. It is the effect of spiritual emptiness. A terrible grinding emptiness in the very guts of the West, which no amount of Coca-Cola seems able to fill.
We rolled down gloomy streets toward the hotel. Miami’s streetlights were subsidized by commercial enterprises. It was another way of, as they say, shrugging the burden of essential services from the exhausted backs of the taxpayers. And onto the far sturdier shoulders of peddlers of aspirin, sticky sweetened drinks, and cosmetics. Their billboards gleamed bluely under harsh lights encased in bulletproof glass. It reminded me so strongly of Soviet agitprop that I had a sudden jarring sense of displacement, as if I were being sold Lenin and Engels and Marx in the handy jumbo size.
The cabbie, wondering perhaps about his tip, offered to exchange dollars for riyals at black-market rates. I declined politely, having already done this in Cairo. The lining of my coat was stuffed with crisp Reagan $1,000 bills. I also had several hundred in pocket change, and an extensive credit line at the Islamic Bank of Jerusalem. I foresaw no difficulties.
Outside the hotel, I gave the ancient driver a pair of fifties. Another very old man, of Hispanic descent, took my bags on a trolley. I registered under the gaze of a very old woman. Like all American women, she was dressed in a way intended to provoke lust. In the young, this technique works admirably, as proved by America’s unhappy history of sexually transmitted plague. In the old, it provokes only sad disgust.
I smiled on the horrible old woman and paid in advance.
I was rewarded by a double-handful of glossy brochures promoting local casinos, strip-joints, and bars.
The room was adequate. This had once been a fine hotel. The air-conditioning was quiet and both hot and cold water worked well. A wide flat screen covering most of one wall offered dozens of channels of television.
My wristwatch buzzed quietly, its programmed dial indicating the direction of Mecca. I took the rug from my luggage and spread it before the window. I cleansed my face, my hands, my feet. Then I knelt before the darkening chaos of Miami, many stories below. I assumed the eight positions, sinking with gratitude into deep meditation. I forced away the stress of jet-lag, the innate tension and fear of a Believer among enemies.
Prayer completed, I changed my clothing, putting aside my dark Western business suit. I assumed denim jeans, a long-sleeved shirt, and a photographer’s vest. I slipped my press card, my passport, my health cards into the vest’s zippered pockets, and draped the cameras around myself. I then returned to the lobby downstairs, to await the arrival of the American rock star.
He came on schedule, even slightly early. There was only a small crowd, as the rock star’s organization had sought confidentiality. A train of seven monstrous buses pulled into the hotel’s lot, their whale-like sides gleaming with brushed aluminum. They bore Massachusetts license plates. I walked out on to the tarmac and began photographing.
All seven buses carried the rock star’s favored insignia, the thirteen-starred blue field of the early American flag. The buses pulled up with military precision, forming a wagon-train fortress across a large section of the weedy, broken tarmac. Folding doors hissed open and a swarm of road crew piled out into the circle of buses.
Men and women alike wore baggy fatigues, covered with buttoned pockets and block-shaped streaks of urban camouflage: brick red, asphalt black, and concrete gray. Dark-blue shoulder patches showed the thirteen-starred circle. Working efficiently, without haste, they erected large satellite dishes on the roofs of two buses. The buses were soon linked together in formation, shaped barriers of woven wire securing the gaps between each nose and tail. The machines seemed to sit breathing, with the stoked-up, leviathan air of steam locomotives.
A dozen identically dressed crewmen broke from the buses and departed in a group for the hotel. Within their midst, shielded by their bodies, was the rock star, Tom Boston. The broken outlines of their camouflaged fatigues made them seem to blur into a single mass, like a herd of moving zebras. I followed them; they vanished quickly within the hotel. One crew woman tarried outside.
I approached her. She had been hauling a bulky piece of metal luggage on trolley wheels. It was a newspaper vending machine. She set it beside three other machines at the hotel’s entrance. It was the Boston organization’s propaganda paper, Poor Richard’s.
I drew near. “Ah, the latest issue,” I said. “May I have one?”
“It will cost five dollars,” she said, in painstaking English. To my surprise, I recognized her as Boston’s wife. “Valya Plisetskaya,” I said with pleasure, and handed her a five-dollar nickel. “My name is Sayyid; my American friends call me Charlie.”
She looked about her. A small crowd already gathered at the buses, kept at a distance by the Boston crew. Others clustered under the hotel’s green-and-white awning.
“Who are you with?” she said.
“Al-Ahram, of Cairo. An Arabic newspaper.”
“You’re not a political?” she said.
I shook my head in amusement at this typical show of Russian paranoia. “Here’s my press card.” I showed her the tangle of Arabic. “I am here to cover Tom Boston. The Boston phenomenon.”
She squinted. “Tom is big in Cairo these days? Muslims, yes? Down on rock and roll.”
“We’re not all ayatollahs,” I said, smiling up at her. She was very tall. “Many still listen to Western pop music; they ignore the advice of their betters. They used to rock all night in Leningrad. Despite the Communist Party. Isn’t that so?”
“You know about us Russians, do you, Charlie?” She handed me my paper, watching me with cool suspicion.
“No, I can’t keep up,” I said. “Like Lebanon in the old days. Too many factions.” I followed her through the swinging glass doors of the hotel. Valentina Plisetskaya was a broad-cheeked Slav with glacial blue eyes and hair the color of corn tassels. She was a childless woman in her thirties, starved as thin as a girl. She played saxophone in Boston’s band. She was a native of Moscow, but had survived its destruction. She had been on tour with her jazz band when the Afghan Martyrs’ Front detonated their nuclear bomb.
I tagged after her. I was interested in the view of another foreigner. “What do you think of the Americans these days?” I asked her.
We waited beside the elevator.
“Are you recording?” she said.
“No! I’m a print journalist. I know you don’t like tapes,” I said.
“We like tapes fine,” she said, staring down at me. “As long as they are ours.” The elevator was sluggish. “You want to know what I think, Charlie? I think Americans are fucked. Not as bad as Soviets, but fucked anyway. What do you think?”
“Oh,” I said. “American gloom-and-doom is an old story. At Al-Ahram, we are more interested in the signs of American resurgence. That’s the big angle, now. That’s why I’m here.”
She looked at me with remote sarcasm. “Aren’t you a little afraid they will beat the shit out of you? They’re not happy, the Americans. Not sweet and easygoing like before.”
I wanted to ask her how sweet the CIA had been when their bomb killed half the Iranian government in 1981. Instead, I shrugged. “There’s no substitute for a man on the ground. That’s what my editors say.” The elevator shunted open. “May I come up with you?”
“I won’t stop you.” We stepped in. “But they won’t let you in to see Tom.”
“They will if you ask them to, Mrs. Boston.”
“I’m called Plisetskaya,” she said, fluffing her yellow hair. “See? No veil.” It was the old story of the so-called “liberated” Western woman. They call the simple, modest clothing of Islam “bondage”—whi
le they spend countless hours, and millions of dollars, painting themselves. They grow their nails into talons, cram their feet into high heels, strap their breasts and hips into spandex. All for the sake of male lust.
It baffles the imagination. Naturally I told her nothing of this, but only smiled. “I’m afraid I will be a pest,” I said. “I have a room in this hotel. Some time I will see your husband. I must, my editors demand it.”
The doors opened. We stepped into the hall of the fourteenth floor. Boston’s entourage had taken over the entire floor. Men in fatigues and sunglasses guarded the hallway; one of them had a trained dog.
“Your paper is big, is it?” the woman said.
“Biggest in Cairo, millions of readers,” I said. “We still read, in the Caliphate.”
“State-controlled television,” she muttered.
“Is that worse than corporations?” I asked. “I saw what CBS said about Tom Boston.” She hesitated, and I continued to prod. “A ‘Luddite fanatic,’ am I right? A ‘rock demagogue.’ ”
“Give me your room number.” I did this. “I’ll call,” she said, striding away down the corridor. I almost expected the guards to salute her as she passed so regally, but they made no move, their eyes invisible behind the glasses. They looked old and rather tired, but with the alert relaxation of professionals. They had the look of former Secret Service bodyguards. Their city-colored fatigues were baggy enough to hide almost any amount of weaponry.
I returned to my room. I ordered Japanese food from room service, and ate it. Wine had been used in its cooking, but I am not a prude in these matters. It was now time for the day’s last prayer, though my body, still attuned to Cairo, did not believe it.
My devotions were broken by a knocking at the door. I opened it. It was another of Boston’s staff, a small black woman whose hair had been treated. It had a nylon sheen. It looked like the plastic hair on a child’s doll. “You Charlie?”
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