Nekropolis

by Maureen F. Mchugh

  “Ahh,” I say, pleased to be enlightened.

  “For your customers, use that room,” she says, and points to a doorway on my left.

  The next man comes with a blue ribbon for the harni girl. She stands up. She’s young; her body has hardly any curves and her breasts are tiny, pointed things. She doesn’t look at the man, but keeps her head down, as if she were shy.

  “Hello, Ubu Hraith-salah,” she says in a little voice and leads him to a room.

  A servant girl hurries upstairs and says, “Tabi, Fadima, Suyet, downstairs.”

  Tabi sighs and gets to her feet and the girls go. There are voices and music downstairs.

  More men come up and take Ebuyeth, some of the other women, the painted boy dressed as a girl, and the other boy who is painted but wears trousers.

  Finally a man comes up holding a red ribbon and stops in front of me. He holds out the ribbon to me. He’s middle-aged and his face is heavily lined.

  I take the ribbon and lead him to the room that my harni told me to use. I wonder how much money I’ll make. The room is tiny and dim. There is a lamp covered with a red cloth and the whole room is red. The man’s face is red, as if he stood in front of a fire. He’s irritated with me. It’ll be hard to make him happy-I’m not sure he wants me to.

  “Do you want me to lie on the bed?” I ask.

  “I want you to kneel. Face that way,” he says.

  On the table beside the bed there are jars and packages. He takes a wide-mouthed jar and and smears my ass with it. It’s cold and the goose bumps stand up on the skin of my thighs. Then he pulls up his robes and, looking over my shoulder, I see that his cock is aroused. He smears it with the same gel. Then he gets on the bed, on his knees, and knee-walks until he is between my legs.

  He puts the tip of it against me and pushes it in. I tighten up. “Relax,” he snaps.

  It hurts. The skin feels stretched. I relax as best I can. I can really only feel him at the opening, and inside a strange sensation, as if I need to defecate really badly. It hurts. I’m trying to figure out if he wants it to hurt or not.

  He starts to move back and forth. I grit my teeth and kneel on the uneven surface of the bed. I feel as if I’m torn and I can’t help making a cry, but he doesn’t seem to notice. I drop my head and breathe out through my mouth-harsh breaths.

  Finally he shudders and pulls out. He gets off the bed and walks out without looking back at me.

  I don’t know if I did well, or if I did badly and he’s mad at me, but I hurt and I’m startled and not sure what to do. When I stand up, a little trickle of blood runs down the inside of my leg. I find a washcloth and dip it in cold water and try to clean myself up. I walk bowlegged back out to where the harni boy and Ebuyeth are sitting.

  Ebuyeth takes me back to a place where I can clean up better and washes me, then puts a cold gel on that makes me feel numb. Then we lean together for a while. Skintalk.

  We go back out and wait.

  That night I have one more customer, but he wants oral sex. He’s dark, darker than anyone I know, and his hair lies in tight curls against his head. He has fleshy, feminine lips. I think, From the way he is dressed, he drives a lorry or does some sort of construction work. He follows me into the little room. In the little room I catch the smell of him-unwashed male. His knuckles are grimy. When he drops his pants, the smell is stronger. He’s wearing no under-clothing.

  He won’t look at me.

  Oral sex is easy, although a couple of times I choke. He grabs my head near the end and pumps away, but afterward he smiles at me and I smile back. He’s pleased.

  * * *

  Some nights I don’t have any customers and some nights I’ve five or six. Karim seems pleased enough by the arrangement. After the customers, I stay for a while with the harni before I go back to Hariba.

  She’s getting thinner. Her knee knobs are thicker than her thighs and her collarbones stand out like wings. Sometimes she has a few good hours, but then the headaches come back and she gets sick. The headache pills make her stomach hurt.

  Two weeks after I start working, I find a death house we can rent. It’s more comfortable than the hotel and not as expensive. The death houses are small and square, with thick walls where the coffins have been closed up in the masonry. Sometimes two death houses will be joined back-to-back. They have tiny windows and they’re dark, but they are sturdy and cool in the day and warm at night.

  “You’ll feel better here,” I tell Hariba. She’s too frail to walk. I hired a pedicab to bring her here. But the death house makes her happy. “It’s nice. It’s a lot like the one I grew up in, but here, ours didn’t have this carving on the lintel!” She holds her veil together, her fist tight against her chest. She points out things to me.

  I settle her on her pallet with her lamp and her paper. There is a bank of solar collectors on the roof, and I buy a burner and a pot and a pan and we’re all right, I think, for the moment. She’s happier and I can feel the warmth of it.

  The headache is bad and she has dry heaves. Then she lies back and I stroke her damp forehead. “I’m not afraid to die,” she says.

  “Ask Tabi,” Ebuyeth says in the evening. “Tabi might know what to do.”

  Tonight Tabi is wearing her pink robe, and she has rubbed rouge into her nipples. She’s putting her hair up into a knot with a long tail hanging out of it. For a short woman she has a lot of hair.

  “You look delicious,” I say.

  She accepts the compliment. Tabi doesn’t dislike us, but she thinks we’re very intelligent animals.

  “I need your advice, Tabi,” I say.

  “If you’re really going to talk to me, go put some clothes on,” she says.

  I go put on my shirt and come back.

  She sighs and shakes her head.

  “It’s about my” -I’m not sure what to call Hariba-“my owner,” I finally say. “She was jessed, and we ran away.”

  Tabi cocks her head at me. “That was stupid,” she says.

  “Yes,” I say, “yes, I know. But she felt she had to.”

  “The poor thing thinks she’s in love with you, doesn’t she.”

  I shrug. “She’s sick, all the time, because of the jessing. She has headaches and her stomach is sick and if she doesn’t eat something, she’ll starve to death.”

  Tabi lets her hair fall. “Why don’t you just go back?”

  “They would put her in prison, she says.” They would put me down as unstable. I’m not ready to die.

  Tabi stretches out one leg and studies it. “You might try hashish,” she says finally. “It’s good when your stomach is upset.”

  “Do you have some?” I ask.

  “Ask Mouse,” she says. “Mouse sells it.”

  Mouse sells me a bit no bigger than my thumb. “Do you have a pipe? I’ve got one you can have.” Mouse’s room is a dusty mess. It’s a narrow room with a high window and there are clothes all over the floor-surprising because Mouse doesn’t wear much, ever. I’ve never seen Mouse with shoes on, but there are a pair of sandals and three shoes. He rummages under the bed, his skinny ass in the air, then he looks into a wide-mouthed jar, like the kind housewives use to store oil. He pulls out a pair of scissors, a spool of ribbon with much of the ribbon off the spool and winding through the contents of the jar, a chopstick with a burned end, a much crumpled scarf, and a plastic toy truck the size of my hand before he evidently sees what he wants. “Here,” he says.

  The clay pipe is as long as my finger and it doesn’t look as if it’s ever been used. “How much?” I ask.

  He shrugs. “I’ve got a bunch of them somewhere. Nothing. Are you going to smoke it?”

  “No,” I say, “it’s for Hariba.”

  “Is she a harni ?”

  “No, she’s human. She’s sick and she can’t eat. Tabi thought hashish would help her.”

  “It will, it’s good for that. I was wondering because harni don’t smoke hashish, I mean, not that I know of. She’s not pr
egnant, is she?”

  “No,” I say.

  “It’s not good for pregnant women,” he says, serious.

  “Thank you,” I say.

  “Why don’t harni smoke hashish?” he asks.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Does it work for you?”

  I shrug. “Probably. Wine makes me drunk. But I think it isn’t what we want. I think humans smoke hashish and drink wine because they’re lonely, and even when they’re together, they’re still lonely, and they smoke and drink to forget.”

  “Maybe,” Mouse says, looking into the jar. “Let me know if you need more.” His voice seems to come from the jar.

  I go back to the harni and wash Ebuyeth’s hair and we all sit on the balcony in the last of the evening sun so it will dry. We sit all together so we all touch and I close my eyes and our skin is against skin. Then I forgot I-am-I and I’m just warm sunlight and skin and cinnamon scent.

  The only time the boy and the girl are ever apart is when one or the other has a client. What would happen if we were allowed to grow up right? Without being separated in the crèche, without being taught where our skin ended and someone else’s skin began. It would have been nice to find out.

  It’s too late for me, though. I’m aware of myself most of the time. I even enjoy being together in a harni pile as myself. Whenever there is “I” there is “other” and when they separated my siblings and me, I became “I” and lost all the rest to “other.”

  I like sex. I have one client who comes and does oral sex to me while I do oral sex to him, lying head to genitals on the bed. I like the feeling and I like coming. Like hashish and wine, in the moment of coming there is utter forgetfulness of self. But that’s as close as humans ever seem to come to the merging of “I” and “other” -the momentary forgetfulness of separation, which isn’t the same.

  That’s why humans are only happy when they are doing, because when they’re absorbed in something they forget the awful loneliness of being themselves.

  * * *

  “I brought you something,” I tell Hariba in the morning. “Tabi said it would help you feel better.”

  “Who is Tabi?” she asks, sleepy.

  “The owner’s wife where I work,” I say.

  “Medicine,” she says, sounded defeated.

  “To help you not feel sick.”

  “If I feel sick, how can I take this medicine so I don’t feel sick?” she says, but smiles a tired smile, trying not to be peevish.

  “Ah,” I say, “there’s the secret. You smoke it.”

  She sits up and pushes her heavy hair back from her face. “What is it?”

  “Hashish,” I say, and push back a strand of hair that falls back across her forehead.

  “Akhmim!” she says. “Hashish? Old men sit at hashish bars and smoke it, it’s not a medicine!”

  “Tabi said it would help,” I say, coaxing and cajoling. With Hariba sick, it’s hard to get moments of peace. I’m always anxious, trying to please, trying to satisfy.

  “I…can’t,” she says. But I know I can get her to do it. She doesn’t have the energy to resist. I sit on the bed next to her and she watches with dull eyes while I unpeel the foil from around the hashish. It’s dark, resinous stuff. I put some in the bowl of the pipe and light a match, and, as I’ve seen men do, lay the lighted match across the bowl and carefully hand her the pipe.

  She takes a draw and coughs out smoke. “It’s harsh, “ she says, “and the smoke is hot .”

  “It’s okay,” I say. “Try again.”

  She manages to hold it a moment before coughing, and then she hands me the pipe, shaking her head. “I can’t, Akhmim, I can’t.”

  She lies back. Her eyes are watering and I wipe them with the edge of the sheet. “It’s okay,” I say. “It’ll get better.” Her plain square face is very dear to me. Sometimes it amazes me that we aren’t the same thing, that she’s human. Her otherness hits me most at moments like this when I’m understanding her well and I suddenly wonder how much of that understanding is just my assumptions of sameness, and then I wonder what she’s really thinking and feeling. Her face becomes familiar and strange. She’s really a stranger in my life, this human, who has turned everything upside-down.

  She doesn’t know I’m looking at the animal she is, human animal. I stroke her hand as a kind of apology. I live with her every day, in this place of animals. In a bit the strangeness will pass and she’ll be just Hariba to me again.

  “Try some more,” I say.

  “Akhmim,” she protests weakly, “I can’t.”

  But she does. After a bit, I can see that her pupils are big and dark. “I feel strange,” she says.

  “It’s hashish.”

  “I know,” she says, and pauses as if she were going to say something, but doesn’t say anything.

  “Have some rice.”

  “I wish we had something sweet,” she says.

  “How about a little milk and honey in your rice?” I offer. I make a kind of pudding of the rice, cooking it in milk and egg and sweetening it and even dusting a little cinnamon on top. She eats it in tiny bites off the spoon, but she eats all of it, the whole bowl, and then, her shrunken stomach full, she falls asleep. I lie down next to her in the dim, cool death house, with the dates of the dead in the wall barely visible, and sleep, dreaming of sex and cinnamon.

  In the evening she smokes more hashish, doing better this time. “I will become a regular rich man’s wife,” she says, “expecting my hashish.” She’s languid and happy and something rises within me, eased.

  I buy some tangine to celebrate, but although she eats a little of it, the stew of pigeon and fruit in pastry is too rich for her. “Make me rice pudding,” she begs, so I do, and watch to make sure she eats most of it before running out into the hot evening to go to Karim’s house. I’m almost sad to go, it’s nice to be with Hariba when she’s smoked the hashish.

  “Tabi,” I say, coming up the stairs. “Tabi!”

  Tabi is sitting in her room, peering into a mirror at her eye makeup. “It’s too hot for all this rushing around,” she says.

  I kiss the top of her head. “Thank you, thank you. The hashish really helped.”

  Tabi smiles, genuinely pleased.

  Mouse sells me more, and suggests that I buy a water pipe. “It cools the smoke,” he says. “It’ll be easier for her.” He tells me where to buy one.

  It’s hot, so I’m glad to strip my clothes. I sit hip to hip with Ebuyeth, skin to skin, while the boy and the girl lie together on the couch, watching nothing with sleepy, empty eyes. Away from human needs is such a relief.

  The girl is the busiest of all of us. Most nights she has an unending stream of customers. They come in looking for her. Some are hopeful, some are hangdog, a few, here for their first time, are scared, but very few are happy.

  My first customer is here for anal sex. I’ve learned a lot since the first night. Anal sex isn’t that bad. I take him back into my little room with its red wash of light. I have a basin and a cloth and first I have him lie down and I soap his penis and clean it gently until it’s standing for me. Then I use the gel, warming it in my hands before I put it on him. He watches me, his robe hiked up so that he is exposed and vulnerable, but he likes the feel of my hands. I don’t feel as if he wants me to talk, and when I glance at him, he looks away. I don’t look at him again.

  He’s not pretty, this one. His face is sunken in and he has a thin beard full of white and gray. His thighs are thin, his calves are poor. His breath smells.

  When I’ve greased him up, I grease myself. I’ve learned to relax, and it’s easy now. One customer told me a human can never relax the way a harni can-he said it so I’d know that he considered me no better than a slut by nature, so after that I’d act ashamed for him and he was pleased.

  There is always some resistance at first, the customer must push past the tight ring of sphincter. That is where most of the feeling is for me. Once he is inside me, I feel
him as a fullness, and deeper inside me, a pleasant excitement, if I’m not too tired to care.

  This one sighs, “Ahhh,” as he pushes inside me.

  I think of Hariba and of how I’d like to sleep while he is pumping. As long as he doesn’t come out of me unexpectedly, I don’t have to think much to stay relaxed.

  It’s hard, working all night and tending to Hariba during the day. I’d like to sleep for a whole night. I’d like the smooth suppleness of skin, warm and living, lying next to me as I fell asleep. Maybe if I don’t have many customers, I can sleep tonight.

  That’s what I think while he jerks and moans.

  After midnight, we have soup and bread. The girl has a bad tooth and she soaks her bread until the crust is soft before eating it. I go downstairs and find Karim.

  “Put a robe on if you come downstairs,” he says absently.

  “Yes, Karim-salah,” I say. “The girl has a toothache.”

  “Wassyla?” he says.

  I don’t know her name. “The harni, “ I say.

  “Holy One,” Karim mutters. “Now a dentist bill. Can she still work?”

  “I believe so,” I say.

  He gets up and I follow him down the hall, watching his heels lick at the hem of his robe as he walks. He comes upstairs. A rare enough thing. There is a flutter among the human girls. Ebuyeth sits with her hands in her lap. The girl and the boy gaze up mutely.

  “Your tooth hurts?” he asks.

  “Yes, Karim-salah,” she says. I’ve rarely heard her voice. It’s sweet and high.

  “Open your mouth,” he says, and takes her face in his hand to tilt her head back. “Which one?”

  “One the left side,” she says, “on the bottom.”

  “Her cheek is swollen,” the boy says. I’ve heard his voice even less than the girl’s. It might almost be hers, dropped an octave but still sweet.

  She winces slightly when Karim touches her cheek.

  “All right,” Karim says, “enough for tonight. You go in back and go to sleep.”

  “Karim-salah,” she says, “may I stay out here?”

  He has already started to walk away and he turns around in a swirl of striped robe. He looks suspicious.