by Joshua Cohen
Decency protocols flashed me—from the HD panels battenmounted above, whose programming looped Islam’s conduct and sumptuary guidelines and a fanatic advisory about creditcard addiction and the abominations of debt. A You Are Here dot danced on an interjacent panel, damning me to the haram department—an annex beyond ahkam, a demilitarized or greenzone accepting dollars, its boutiques stocked with wares that on the homefront would be considered tame if transgressing only of taste, but that here transgressed nature itself and were risky even when folded, when hangered. Dresses cut to skirts, lingerie barely exceeding the size of the average customer’s vagina, what it’d take to muffle a mean set of nipples. Negligees, bustiers, girdles, diaphanous whisperweight giggling. The ladies stopped to admire, never to touch. At least I’m assuming it was admiration, though I wasn’t sure of what—the merch itself? or the confidence to be its consumer?
The outfits outfreaked only by the foreigners who purchased them: a eurobimbo bureau of diplobrat jetettes, drafty castle heiresses, and serial divorcée alimony phonies. Still, it takes volition to decide which products to buy. As my ladies passed, the parties exchanged glances, nods, sophisticated gynics. My ladies had no volition, and by contrast seemed like products themselves.
My abaya’s consort embraced her, then left—clumping that boot toward the domestic appliances arcade, accompanied by two other mosquerading matrons.
We were alone now, though still among a dozen. I had to focus. On her hefty swell, the way she shuffled at turns. Otherwise her abaya was so flowing that it trailed along the tile and obscured her stride, giving her the appearance of hovering.
She boarded a conveyor. I scurried alongside, tarrying at every passage break as she disembarked toward free sample demos of jewelry detarnishing solutions, displays of boudoir organizers, pyramid placements of woks and pans, rotating installations of cognoscente cutlery, magic flying bakingtrays and bathmats.
The ultimate stretch of pathway rose, became a ramp—I boarded—an ascending escalator of an escalating steepness leading to the mall’s upper tier, the uppermost skylit.
If stairs are the model life—prepared for any fate, whether up or down—the escalator is a step in the wrong direction. In one direction only. Like each day, like every day, its steps begin by staggering, only to end by flattening. They stagger, fall flat, then repeat.
I sought the highest sharpness.
As we rose, her shoes were exposed. Aqua heels. They were low heels, the lowest, which she stood in as if splashing around. They got a rise out of me nonetheless.
I clambered up the climbing—staying always four abayat, three abayat, two, behind.
Language is acquired only for the purposes of further acquisition—my abaya, my burqa, my burq. How much does this item cost? how much larger can it get than xxtra-large?
The ancient mystery faiths all held by this, that whosoever knows the name of a thing, owns that thing, and I’m convinced that’s true only by the truth of its reversal: that if you don’t know something’s name, that something owns you.
Because I was hers, and my tongue was the receipt. I kept pace to better appreciate belonging.
Her featurelessness was of a supernumerary tit atop tits, though in her strain to speed ahead a waist was shaped atop that ass. Swishy hips, thighs that rubbed. Becoming again all ass. Even her feet were ass. She was an ass in heels. One cheek to each, wobbling for balance.
In the foodcourt there was a pub called Hybernopub, theme of Dublin. Its façade was fêted with shamrocks, bows rising crassly from cauldrons. Outside the premises an animatronic leprechaun jigged on a plaster keg and listed, in robotic Arabic and this language, robotically but with an Arabic growl, not beers but nearbeers, missed beers, close but no dice beers, pints of simulhops, the demalted and wortless unfoaming, and runed on the keg itself were their bankrupting prices in chalk. Dollars, euros, AED/dhs—that currency whose slick prismatic bills, denominated in every pigment of the oleaginous spectrum, depict skycrapers, sports stadia, falcons? sturgeons? antelopes? rams?—malls, definitely malls.
The chalk.
It was a short thin length like a finger bone, a pointer. I emancipated it from its string, approached her—the other ladies noticed, or didn’t, but parted, humped on.
I quickened, she quickened, tensed from my tension. My shadow crossed hers and was lost.
I was hurrying alongside her—swinging arm and leg caressing her cloth, as if stroking her hair, as if her garment had grown from her scalp—reaching out to her, once more.
It wasn’t a pinch I gave—I’m no pervert—but a mark, a chit, between the shoulders, chalking her for the ease of my stalk.
Just as I did, the ladies—the handful or so remnant, after most had peeled off for meals with their men—exited the foodcourt, and entered the tech sector. They went left, toward the A/V side, featuring televisions (how antique), and stereos (how antiquated)—to the right, the side for computers.
I dropped the chalk stub into a trashcan atop a waxpapered basket of chickpeas.
We passed through a pair of weighted black curtains—like I was passing through the ladies themselves. Suddenly it was night again.
There hadn’t been enough prayers—there would never be. All was frozen dark.
A vacuumsealed interior—it took time to adjust, it took the ladies dispersing. I stood behind woofers, tweeters, subpurrers, gluglugers, supraribbiters, hissers.
My abaya was caught, contained. Glassed plasmatic. She stood in front of a camera, which captured her image, and then sent it to the screen she stood in front of, scrutinizing herself. She moved left, her image moved right. She turned her back, turned her back on herself. It took her—it took all of her sisters doing the same at their own sistered stations—a moment to realize that the cameras were built into the screens.
As they groomed their monitor selves, I monitored them—as they realigned, adjusted. Fascinating how their abayat resembled screens—black screens struck from the walls and curtained around their curvatures.
Still the chalk on my girl’s back shone through, from deep amid the mediaroom mockups. She’d strip before bed to wash that body beneath, the skin the permanent abaya, and find this sign singed into her skin, and take it as intended and find me? though if a symbol was all I could afford, how could I be sure it’d be interpreted correctly?
I considered returning, retrieving the chalk, to outline my body in a very public atrium.
The girls trembled before their trembling, while I wavered undecided between signal and noise, feigning interest in a gadget.
It was a Tetheld 4, a successionary replacement device as new in relation to preceding Tethelds as Allah is to Yahweh: with every capability of spoken life (it had a phone and SUI, or semantic user interface), and of textual life (via Tetsuite), and was equipped for music/pics/vids (multiformat/polyshareable, via mOEs, or mobile operating ecesis), and for any other experience purchasable online (4G). It had a health monitor that took blood pressure, pulse and body temp, body mass index, tested reflexes—I’m sure it even legally notarized.
An Emiri tween—torqued by gym and sleazily pimpsuited—approached sniffing commission, “Any assistance?” And while I was declining his attentions, she vanished—my abaya, disappeared.
I glanced from the flash in my hand, and she was gone, they all were.
Only their images remained for a breath, then faded.
Strike this.
Strike this like an Arab bride.
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I was back in my room switching channels, too wasted to pack. BBCs 1–4, CNN Int’l, Eurosport (volleyball), Al Jazeera (unrest). I sat through a documentary about the Khaleej but clicked away during a segment on its dining facilities. The weather was a rerun too.
Black and white manna crackled across the entertainment system glass.
It’s like with the Korans I’ve been reading, it’s like with any other paradisiacally dictated book. There’s enough of everything for everyon
e, there’s never any call to hoard or grub. When you’re wandering the desert, you get to decide what your manna will taste like. Then you eat it, and whatever it tastes like it is. Pick any verse, interpret it into any texture, any flavor, sweet or savory. Corny honey. Matzah brei. Milk schmilk. Bdellium and coriander dew fondue. Any verse can be historicized, analogized—made palatable.
I paged through my Korans to the sura that one edition calls The Banquet and the other calls The Feast, which concerns—dilating on the dilemma of how to sojourn among strangers while preserving a sense of unblemishedness—Islam’s dietary laws. Abu Dhabi’s free copies were preferential to Dubai’s, more archaic, more Thous and Arts—neither copy credited its translators.
Following the prohibitions against consuming prey, raw blood of any type, any porcine product, and the meat of any oblation dedicated to any god not Allah, The Banquet/Feast serves up a delight—by decreeing that Israel had been deeded to the Israelites, the Jews: “the Followers of Scripture” (Dubai version), “the People of the Book” (Dhabi version).
“Enter the advantageous land [Dubai]/the blessed land [Dhabi] that Allah has assigned [Dubai]/hath ordained [Dhabi] for you.” It’s incredible: the text says just what I want it to say, just what the Muslims, I’m sure, don’t need it meaning.
Revisiting the gastronomical proscriptions had whetted my appetite. But I had no patience for the restaurants. The linen flap. The fork and spoon routine. Oppressive. By the second course even the disdain, the derisive scorn, has spoiled to stale formality.
I was having inexplicable tastes, slavering for a porkwing, like a wing from a pig that flies, the blood of beef roadkill consecrated to Baal, the paschal ewe for two, a chicken flipper—the special?
What on the side? Survival’s just a matter of taking every side.
Pastures of greens, eggplant swords beaten into ploughshares. Starches.
I hung up the phone, went for another dram of brown, then stood on the bed and disabled the nimbus of smoke detector, lit a cig—where’s my drink? atop the minbar or bottledwater minibar? There it is. Water down the brown. The same sura bans this booze.
Towel under the draft to block the smoke.
The chime at the door had me cowering. What happens if you choose your manna falsely? does the divine chef intuit the heart’s hunger and modify the menu?
I bundled all my Hustler UKs and Club Derrieres into a drawer, doubletapped the doorcom monitor, nudged away the towel, unlocked, unbolted, unchained. On the other side was the boy. The bringer and bearer. He was polite and neat in a stealth tuxedo, his moustache pubescent fascist. Ratib, in English at least, his nametag printed in two alphabets, Ratib. He fluttered a napkin, set a chafing dish atop the table, formerly the desk.
He was older than I’d remembered, or younger—point is, how can I be expected to distinguish between the Ratibs? given that they, the Ratibs, aren’t incentivized enough to distinguish themselves? All the Khaleej’s servants, and the Burj’s too: their faces contort in my mind, like wet sand trampled to dry and harden into brick, and I mean that as praise, if management will pass it along.
“Shookrun,” I said, which extended the full courtesy of my fluency, transliterating “thank you.” I tipped him one euro and one quid, the last linty currency I had, and he sneered, withdrew shook running.
The offering, uncovered, was all garnish, preservatived herb celebrating a premature gestation. Not yet brought to term and so borne with dill and parsley.
Rate the Catering? One star charred. Cleanliness? 10 out of 10, but only because turndown’s been forbidden me, by Principal.
Please remit any suggestions in the space below provided:/S’il vous plaît donnez des suggestions dans le champ ci-dessous:/Bitte geben Anregungen in das dafür vorgesehene Feld unten:
Merci, danke, thanks—sheikh’s rume? chic room? Standardized transliteration of pleasantries might empower guests, and encourage their engagement with local culture. Elevator 2 of the north bank should be fixed. All mall escalators should be steep enough to get a wisp of female crotch in purdah. Countries that practice online censorship evince a higher incidence of sexual assault, and a lower level of political literacy, or else it’s vice versa. Ratib was quite simply the best Ratib I’ve ever encountered.
That survey card was my bookmark. I covered the inedible creature as if extinguishing an altar, returned to the Korans.
But the Don’t Disturb had fallen from the knob, was sticking its laminate edge through the draft.
Just as I was about to replace it, another knock. Once, timorous.
It was Ratib returned, I guessed, working up the nerve to blackmail a better gratuity out of me. Good for you, Ratib! go get him (go get me)!
The doorcom monitor showed only a fuscously cloaked dessert cart.
I opened, and made way for her. The chalk was still at her back.
She was a darkling abaya bag, with a cheap overbuckled overzippered velcronated aluminum missile of a case she dropped by the closet.
I leaned into the hall and the rooms numbering upways and the rooms numbering downways were peaceful, and outside their doors platters of blistered doughy pistachio sweets slumbered through their rots alongside the drycleaning and laundry and men’s shoes awaiting polish.
Inside again, lock chain slotted deadbolt, I said, “Your husband?”
She was standing between the chairs, speaking Arabic to them—to me. There are some people who pick up languages fast, there are some people who pick up love fast. But I can be only one of them. Too late.
I said, “Mari?”
She held out her hands, held her fingers apart like her nails were still wet from their dip in the sea—and she went for the stitching, and revealed her face.
Or what of it there was around the sunglasses she was wearing: giant outlandish mosquito moonspecs, their pricetag hanging by a thread. Her injuries seeped a shade matching their lensing.
I’m going to try transcribing what she said, I’m going to try doing every other thing to her, decently: “je veux divorcer,” and then she said something “rien à foutre”—and then something in Arabic again? “khanith”?
I said, “Did you decide to get divorced before he hit you or is this just today’s development? Peut-être he’s been hitting you forever?”
She cried, and my arms led my steps to her, but she recoiled and took off her glasses, and her eyes—haven’t I read that certain Semitic languages never distinguish blue from green? Hebrew does—but what about Arabic? Her ears had no earrings, no holes.
“You sure you weren’t—vous a-t-il followed here by anyone?”
“Je serai toujours seule.”
She stood by the east of the bed and I stood by the west and what was between us was all that sharia blanket she was tangled in.
But even switching directions, changing the poles—stand me by the east, stand her by the west—what was between us was blacker: our ages. Also the sense that my interest in her was erotic because she was also, or merely, exotic—though Rach would knock that down and call racism, if she’d burst into this room just now to find this woman, this girl, Muslim, pretty young and gorgeously wed, facing me across the bed and quivering.
She’d been gathering up her hem, and I circled around and helped her lift it over her head. All she had on underneath was her underwear, which was torture: iron maiden panties, spiked bra.
She took my hands, and laughed, the laughter swollen, “Lentement.”
Don’t worry—“Je ne vais pas hurt you! je ne pourrai jamais hurt you! No pain, no pain.”
Her cheekwound blushed, and yet that blushing was also its bandage. Below the unmentionables she was still in her heels.
She was warm to my touch but how to say shy? just traduce to timide?
Still, let the opposite room eavesdrop, let anyone peep into our window from a wraparound suite. I didn’t care—I didn’t drop blinds or slip drapes.
Her mouth was intensely ovoid
, an almond mouth, of citrus crescents. And under that sling, her breasts were like young fawns, sheep frolicking in hyssop—Psalms were about to pour out of me.
“Vous?”
“Josh,” I said.
“Vous habillé.”
“Je vais me undressed, clothes off, unhabillé, déshab.”
She fussed with her hair, braided it into a fuse. “Lentement.”
Slow, but slowly, I declothed. Though I was shit unfit, though I was every bit as fucking fit as her husband.
She had to her an overbite of hesitation.
Meekness, humility—terror. She sat on the bed terrified in puffed diaper and padded bra. And seizing the elastic, and faltering. Squeezing at the clasps. Like she’d never worn undies before. Like someone else had put them on her, some enemy. Packed her nylon cups to an underwire straining, rigged posterior casings with C-4 plastique. And I wanted her to do it now, I wanted her to just detonate herself and get it over with—launch all the lethal payload that was fertilizing her: shrapnel nail and screw and poisoned syringe.
Blasting me away, blowing us both through the floor, and ticking through the igniferous floors below it, bombing the lobby at mortal checkout—bringing the hypostyle to crash, the arches to collapse, atop a cuneiform of limbs and kilim tatters and fragments of the monogrammed blazon of Allah that’d pendulated over the interactive pillars. Imagine, amid the settling dust, a providentially inviolate vase from which a single peacock feather—drifted.
“Vous étrange,” she said.
“Non.”
She shuddered. “Oui, vous.”
“Non je ne suis pas regardez you strange.”
My last wish before I submitted: let her explosion scramble this diary so that everything will read like my French.
She shimmied out of the bra, let it fall—without a flash, without immolation. No martyr.
Then she tugged the panties down, stopping at the calves to shed the heels before continuing.
She wasn’t shaved. Not in any of her pits.
I was holding in my hands this wild mother of a bone.