Likewise, after I go to the tailor to be fitted for a suit of clothes respectable enough for my wedding, my drunkenness converts reality into dream. I take the clothes home and hang them from a bare nail on the wall opposite my kitchen table. Nothing too odd there. But the suit broods, on the wall, dark and formal, and I think that I will not get along well with it until it says, at last, “Drink! Drink! Don’t let my silence disturb you.”
We share the rest of that night’s bottle of whiskey together, sip for sip, shot glass slammed down against shot glass. We sing merry songs. Layla plays the banjo. We clasp arms and totter down alleyways—my new suit of clothes, Layla, and me—as though the alleyways are a yellow brick road. Layla and the suit will ask Oz for new bodies. I will ask him for a soul.
And when the Kuwaiti interpreter and his lieutenant return to my store, they find me drunk and befuddled by a dream in which Abd al-Rahim, Layla, and I swim together, with Seyyed Abdullah occasionally jumping in for a skinny-dip. Whenever Abd al-Rahim fins too near to Layla, she morphs into a school of goldfish, several hundred goldfish, and they slide apart, around, over Abd al-Rahim in the same way that a shimmering school of sardines first envelops and then scatters away from the onrushing shadow of a shark. Layla falls apart and then re-forms nearer to me, as if I can in some way protect her. She is wrong, though. I have no special powers. I am no superhero. I am only distantly related to goldfish.
I gurgle and the words I form float from my mouth in hieroglyphics, shiny-bubble, jackal-headed, demon words. From somewhere far away, beyond the veil of my drunken dreams, I hear the Kuwaiti interpreter as he says: “A funny noise, that gurgle.”
The waters of my dream shatter around him as he steps through parting waves. He wipes his shoes on the curb of the Safwan street to keep them from getting muddy.
“I am drowning,” I tell him. “A pleasant feeling, really, once you stop struggling.”
“Sa-Bah Al-Chair,” says the lieutenant, trying out a little phrase-book Arabic.
“You move like a robot,” Layla tells the lieutenant, teasingly, though the lieutenant can’t understand the hieroglyphics used by us goldfish as we speak.
Abd al-Rahim does the backstroke several meters away from me, out in the middle of the market road, floating in the image of the dream as though he were a genie or a hovercraft or a hot-air balloon, his body superimposed about three meters above the surface of the road.
“He’ll turn around and come for you again,” I whisper to Layla. “He looks like he is gone but he is, in truth, afraid of the really deep water. He still needs to stay close. He relies on you.”
“My opinion of him exactly,” says the interpreter, pointing covertly to the lieutenant at his side. I am surprised for a second. He understands what I am saying! He is a friend, a companion, a goldfish whisperer! He doesn’t know that I really speak to Layla. He doesn’t know that we talk about Abd al-Rahim. The Kuwaiti thinks I refer to his boss, but what does it matter? I’m happy to have his company, happy to talk to him, happy to have him as a pal. I take his hand in my hand and begin to shake it.
“He’s young,” I say.
“Yes,” says the Kuwaiti.
“But really not robotic.”
I’m surprised to find myself defending Abd al-Rahim. Layla looks at me as if I am a traitor, as if I am confused, hopelessly undertrained, and never truly able to be taught the mystic understanding of robots.
“Does he have the papers?” asks the lieutenant.
The lieutenant’s face is clean and pink. His hands are scrubbed and hairless. His nails are trimmed and without oil or dirt beneath their white and pearl-like cuticles. He smells like milk and talcum powder and I have to choke down the bile rising in my throat as I remember the curdled taste of the first drink of my defiled whiskey.
“You know that one of our convoys found a jack-in-the-box in the middle of the road near Az Zubayr, don’t you?” asks the interpreter, saying nothing about the papers that the lieutenant wants and needs. I still hold his hand.
I think about getting the adoption papers down from the shelf behind me, but I can’t do anything with them until the Kuwaiti makes his first reference to them. The lieutenant can say all he wants in English, but I can’t let the Kuwaiti know I understand that language. He would surely, then, suspect me despite our shared appreciation of hieroglyphics. So the interrogation continues until the Kuwaiti can no longer resist his master’s insistence. He is free to ask me anything he wants.
He is free.
But I am, too.
I have a defense now. I am crazy and I am drunk and I am ruthless and I am beautiful. As I realize this newfound freedom, I itch to demonstrate its powers.
In the middle of the interpreter’s next rabid bit of questioning I say, apropos of nothing: “Indeed it is a dangerously powerful thing, this appearance and disappearance of goldfish, the school of them dissolving when the shark comes. And—ya Allah! —such gossamer wings.”
This makes the interpreter pause. He doesn’t know that I am crazy. I see his lips move. He repeats the words for fish and for gold in high Arabic: samak, thahab. He says “gossamer.” He recites the word shark, which is qirsh. This word has meaning for him. He looks over his shoulder at the Humvees stationed along the sides of the road, arrayed like huge finning fish.
I continue, still drawing power and code-meaning from my dream: “When she moves she dissolves and reconstitutes herself. She is near me now, then far from me the next moment, then nearer again before I am even aware.”
“She? The network?” asks the Kuwaiti. “Are they recruiting you? Jaish al-Mahdi? Hezbollah? Al-Qaeda?”
“I could help you,” I say. “But I can’t seem to make her hold still long enough. She’s a million pieces of glass shattered on a kitchen floor. She’s here, there, everywhere. She’s gone again now. No…no …there she is!”
Layla appears with an umbrella and a raincoat. She splashes in puddles of ocean and makes mud cakes that she holds up for my inspection. The street would be gray from reflected storm clouds except for the bleeding of her bright raincoat into the puddles, the bleeding of blue-sky colors breaking through cloud. I point to her. The lieutenant and the interpreter both look up and behind them. In the middle distance a low, flat warehouse on the edge of town seems to be exactly in line with the azimuth my finger indicates. The lieutenant motions to one of his Humvees. The turret gunner swivels toward the warehouse and hunkers lower behind his sawtoothed weapon.
“Ask him about the papers,” says the lieutenant, more forcefully now. “We need to go. Ask him if he will sign them or not.”
“Papers,” says the Kuwaiti.
I reach for the papers. The Kuwaiti takes them from me. He sees that I haven’t signed them yet. He points to the places where my signature must appear.
Then, as I scribble the fake and crazy name al-Mulawwah on the documents, the Kuwaiti says, “If you want to talk, if you want to tell us about ‘her,’ as you say, we can arrange for the information to be kept secret. We can reward you for your cooperation. We can maybe make ‘her’ stand still long enough to capture ‘her.’ Goldfishes and sharks and puddles of raincoat-color—however you want to talk about it, I will find a way to understand.”
“Don’t tell them about me,” says Layla. “They won’t believe you.”
“I will tell you,” I say to the interpreter. “I will tell you everything I know. Come back with a tape recorder in three days’ time. I will tell you everything.”
Layla frowns and closes her eyes.
My offer excites the interpreter very greatly. He doesn’t translate any of this for his boss. Maybe he will later. I don’t know. I see the gleam in his eyes, and I know the idea excites him.
When I finish with the papers, the lieutenant shakes my hand.
“It will be a few months,” he says. “I finish here in a week or two. Just trying to get home safe now. I will return for her then. My wife will be so pleased. We can’t have children…”
The Kuwaiti doesn’t even bother to interpret this flow of enthusiasm. He says an elaborate good-bye to me, long enough so that the lieutenant thinks his words have been relayed. I smile. The lieutenant smiles. We all shake hands again. Stars of glory spangle the Kuwaiti’s eyes.
They leave, mounting their Humvees, and I take from its secret spot behind my shack the bottle of whiskey I have stored there. I drink from it, turning my back guiltily away from the street. They’ve taken her, my girl, my Layla. They’ve wafted her away from me and I want her back, I want her back, I want her swimming around me. I want her back at least for these last few hours and days and minutes. The burning liquid, the whiskey, works as an anchor for her. I slip away from my concerns with reality and with the scene at my store into more dreams, more dreams, dreams overlaying the images of the market in various filmy veils, until the floating images seem more real than the reality. My consciousness vacillates that way, drink by drink, from moment to moment, though I cling to the dreams and force the drink on myself in order to keep Layla near and enlivened. I want dream, not dust. I want story, not truth. I want magic, not politics. I want Layla.
During these days of my binge, Abd al-Rahim brings my wrapped gifts to the house of Ulayya, or to the house of her father, Ali, while Layla brings her gifts to me. I find them each morning in my store.
For most of the first day after Michele’s death I think that there is no fourth gift, no jewelry. Layla’s monetary resources or her thievish cunning has been exhausted. It makes sense. How could she afford to purchase a gold necklace? Likewise, the sellers of gold keep much closer watch on their wares. They make it too difficult to steal. In such a way I rationalize the absence of the gift of jewelry. I rationalize it until I see Mahmoud returning with Michele’s family from Kufa. Then I kneel to retrieve the Kalashnikov from under my counter. There, from the crossbeam under the sill of my shop window, dangles a golden necklace, the same sort of golden necklace Abd al-Rahim purchased for Ulayya. It isn’t boxed or wrapped, as Layla’s first gifts to me were. But it has the single orange desert flower tangled in its chain.
The next day it is crystal, a set of six goblets with finely hewed prismatic edges spilling light from within. I find them arrayed on my counter inside the shop. Out of habit, I check the room to ensure that no signs of forced entry or theft are present. Layla has entered, as always, without disturbing my locks, without disturbing my merchandise. I cannot determine her method. I cannot determine her purpose.
The crystal goblets are filled with pennies, American pennies. She must have collected a thousand pennies to fill them all. A fortune for her. Pounds of pennies and one orange flower.
“Pennies?” says Abd al-Rahim when he arrives that day.
“Bombs,” I tell him. “Copper for the projectiles.”
“Fitting end for capitalists.”
“You are a communist?”
“The Great Satan.”
He pokes fun at me. He uses his catchphrases, like a good jihadist, but smiles all the time when he speaks. He knows I like the Americans. He knows I like the ribald West with all its flaws and all its heart. He knows that it troubles me to attack them, even if the injuries I might cause serve a different, maybe better, sort of war.
“Communist or Islamist? What are you?” I say.
“How’d she get in?” he asks.
He begins snooping around the building’s edges. He checks the floor, the joints in the siding. He checks the ceiling, the places where the roof meets each wall. All is tidy. All is well constructed, just as I have already and repeatedly confirmed.
“If there is a way in, don’t you think someone would have already stolen the phones?” I ask.
“I don’t understand,” he says. “You say the girl brings you these gifts. But how? It doesn’t seem possible.”
He climbs onto a chair, balances on top of it, tests the strength of the tin ceiling against the strength of his upthrusting arms. The tin warps but does not dislodge. I slip a little flask from beneath my dishdasha and drink while he isn’t looking.
“We’ll use copper for bombs,” I say. “Melted copper pierces the armor of the Humvees with very little explosive force compared to a traditional bomb.”
“Or we use the copper for making a statue,” says Layla. “Maybe a statue of a mermaid or a merman, something more permanent than Safwan’s blown-up concrete fountain.”
“Shh,” I say. “He’ll hear.”
“Who will hear?” asks Abd al-Rahim, turning quickly to face me.
“The bomb,” I say, and I giggle as Layla steals the sunglasses from Abd al-Rahim’s pocket. She puts them on and strikes a bored, nonchalant pose of exactly the sort Abd al-Rahim often assumes.
The next day it is the clothing Layla brings. Before Abd al-Rahim arrives in the middle of the morning I have already opened the gift. Out of curiosity I’ve donned the full ensemble, putting the dress and skirts over my sirwal pants, over my ghalabia.
“Ya Allah!” he says when he sees me.
I look like a fat peacock, I admit. These are clothes meant to be worn under a woman’s black abaya or inside the house in the kitchen among a gathering of lady friends, fine patterned blue silk and green silk, flowing sleeves, deep neck. They are clothes meant never to appear in the light of day, especially not on the body of a middle-aged man. They are clothes that would be haraam, subject to a lashing from Hussein’s moral police, should a woman—not to mention a man—be caught wearing them in the market. They are clothes meant for Ulayya, not for me, but Layla stays true to form by bringing for me exactly, exactly, the gifts I bade Abd al-Rahim purchase for Ulayya. I don’t want to seem as though I do not honor her gifts, even if they are a bit strange.
I am very drunk at this moment, wearing the women’s robes. I don’t bother to stand up as Abd al-Rahim enters and looks at me and frowns. I don’t think I can stand up, not without holding on to something.
With the voice of a sea captain I say to him: “I didn’t know the little experiment with the jack-in-the-box would disturb you so badly. Look at yourself, Gilligan! Getting drunk in public. Wearing women’s clothes. You should be ashamed!”
My giggle turns into a laugh. Abd al-Rahim in women’s clothes! I have to flatten both hands on the counter in order to hold my body upright.
Outside, in the street, Layla pretends to dance with a trash can. The movements she makes are as lewd as anything Britney Spears ever did in her dances. The movements are unseemly in the extreme. She must think I am laughing at her, rather than at Abd al-Rahim. She is mistaken, though. I don’t find her funny at all. I tell myself I should speak to her mother and find a way to discipline her. We will be embarrassed when we move back to America…nobody dances with trash cans in Chicago…little American girls don’t …
I stop giggling.
Abd al-Rahim thinks he has tamed me. He doesn’t know that I am mad at Layla. He doesn’t know that I am mad at Baghdad. He doesn’t know why I brush my hands through the air, wiping at the air, trying to make the dream of Layla dissolve and disappear and leave me alone. I send him away, Abd al-Rahim, so that I don’t have to sneak the whiskey when he isn’t looking. After he leaves I drink enough so that he finds me asleep when he returns, the blue and green silk clothing cocooned around me. He does not take advantage of me. He is a gentleman. He helps me take off the layers of silk. He helps me walk home. He puts me in my bed, my mattress dusty and oriented diagonally on the cold empty floor. There is no four-poster frame to hold the mattress up, no carved European fantasy of ivy on the headboard. I haven’t used the bed in weeks, preferring the flat stillness of my kitchen table, preferring to sit against the wall.
Abd al-Rahim raises the covers and tucks me in as though I were a child. He flicks the light off when he leaves. I’m hungry. I haven’t eaten dinner. I try to call to Abd al-Rahim. I try to tell him I need food. I try to tell him I need to go to Bashar’s café.
I say, “I need to tell Bashar that you raped his wife.”
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br /> I try to say this aloud but I can’t because when I roll over and pull the covers up to my face I find Annie Dillon in bed next to me. She puts her finger to my mouth, stops any words I might speak. She places the flat of her palm on my eyes, closing them as a mother would close the eyes of a dead baby. I look through my eyelids and through her palm and I stare unspeakingly for a handful of delicate moments into the abyss of her gaze. Her eyes are blue, ice blue, staring at me through the mirage of her face as though they have a life, liquid and fleeting, all their own.
She whispers, “Father Truth.”
Even after the silk clothing, Layla’s gifts continue.
The last day it is henna, the gift of henna from me to Ulayya and from Layla to me. I haven’t decided what to do with it. I keep the box Layla delivers, just a little box, but with a very fragile glass-stoppered bottle wrapped in several layers of tissue. The bottle is dark, the red darkness of the henna impenetrable in its mass. What use is henna to me? What use is it for a man to make marks of celebration, mystic preparation, joy, before his betrothal? Should I draw patterns of hieroglyphics on my wrists before I go to Ali ash-Shareefi’s house for the engagement feast? What will the people think? What will the talkative cousin think, dwelling on his gore, dwelling on such details of death, to see me openly showing my secret languages of celebration? I look at the bottle of henna for a long while, pondering the shapes its liquid might form on Ulayya’s wrists and feet.
I excuse myself from my store around noontime. I trust Abd al-Rahim to take charge of the business for the better part of this day.
“Tonight we do another bombing,” I say as I am leaving.
“Okay,” he says.
“You watch the store now,” I say.
“You already told me to watch it.”
“Well, you just watch it. Watch it. I’m going now.”
I go but I only make it a few steps before I sneak around the corner, through Ibrahim and Maney’a Shareefi’s used-car lot and into the space between our stores. I go to Layla’s little lean-to door, slip under it, and take the whiskey bottle from a hole beneath a masonry block where I often hide it, my secret storage place.
One Hundred and One Nights (9780316191913) Page 24