Looking for the Mahdi

by N Lee Wood

  “I’m not going to burn you, Somerton,” I said, sighing wearily. “I’ve got problems of my own with CDI to worry about right now.”

  He glanced at Halton questioningly. Halton nodded.

  Somerton nodded, chewing on his lower lip. “We repay our debts.” He paused. “We do have a common enemy, Sulaiman.”

  I glared at him, my eyes dry and burning, wanting him to just go away. “I know. That’s why I gave you the goddamned flake. But the enemy of my enemy is not necessarily my friend.”

  He nodded. “And in the desert, nothing is ever what it seems to be, is it?” he said.

  I thought for a moment he was considering sticking out his hand for me to shake, but he smiled grimly, nodded at Halton and walked off to retrieve his jacket and briefcase.

  The waiter set the bill down on the table. In the distance, I could hear the electronically amplified warbling of muezzins calling the matinee crowd to sendees. The café was deserted. Halton sat patiently as I stared blindly out over the rooftops of Nok Kuzlat.

  I’d forgotten what as a journalist I should have taken for granted: Nothing packs a punch quite as hard as the truth.

  FOURTEEN

  * * *

  The month before I’d gone to Khuruchabja I had turned the big Four Oh, which at the time didn’t bother me in the least. I didn’t tell anyone, nobody threw a party for me, no big deal. It’s not as if it meant anything, just another day, another year, so what? I’d been secretly proud of myself—how cool, how nonchalantly, I’d passed this middle-age midlife crisis milestone without even a whimper.

  I’d been happy behind my feed-in desk. I’d discovered I was not the kind of reporter who plunges fearlessly into the depths of hell, risking life and sanity for the chance to interview Satan himself. Those kind of journalists were rare, eccentric birds, adrenaline junkies in it for the sport. I’d done it, and spent the next few years having intimate tête-à-têtes with shrinks. I’d liked the fame and prestige, but learned the hard way that’s not why it’s done. The fire in the belly was what keeps them driven.

  Mine had turned to ash. I thought I’d accepted that.

  Somerton’s words had hurt me more than I realized they could. I had burned out. I hadn’t done field correspondence not just because I didn’t want to anymore, but because I was no longer able to. I hadn’t cared what the politics in Khuruchabja were for a decade, trying to put that part of my life as far behind me as I could. Any illusions I had about my Arab heritage or the exotic mysteries of the Orient had been thoroughly crushed. I wanted to go home, where it was safe, where life made sense, where I could just be any other ordinary American.

  Yet I hated the thought that I was old, so easily manipulated. I’d been played for a fool. I hadn’t avoided my midlife crisis; Somerton simply triggered a delayed reaction.

  Here I was at forty, running around the desert, disguised again as a man, scared and angry, doing the same job I’d done before I’d turned thirty, when I’d thought it was the way up the career ladder. Nothing had changed except me. I was older, creakier, turning gray and still unmarried, no love life on the horizon. My only passion was my work, which had long ago lost the kind of glamour and excitement I’d fantasized about as a young college graduate.

  Being around John Halton wasn’t helping any, either. Fabricant or not, Halton was one of the most desirable male creatures I’d ever seen, which was depressing since it only served to remind me that such men never even glance in my direction when passing me on the street. So you can understand why Halton’s every indication of intense interest confused the hell out of me. He aroused a libido I thought I’d long suppressed, and I resented it.

  I’m too old to do the libido, I thought sourly.

  We drove out into the Greater Khuruchabjani Desert, following a dirt road blending almost imperceptibly with the bleak, flat land, the occasional sandblasted wrecks along the side of the road serving as road markers. I wanted to get some footage of the desolate provinces surrounding Nok Kuzlat to intercut with the royal interviews. A kind of ironic commentary both on the land and its people, as well as the Boy King who ruled them.

  I also needed some privacy. I needed to get away, lick my wounds and think. I was going crazy in Nok Kuzlat, watching every word I said, glancing around at faces who might be watching us. Out here, they’d have to be really goddamned omnipotent to eavesdrop. I doubted they’d spend the effort watching us on a spy satellite, and if they were, I was determined to bore whoever was snooping to tears.

  The last time I’d driven this way, planes had been screaming overhead, the road generally impassable as Behjar bombs blew up convoys of trucks and tankers attempting to escape across the desert to their own countries. Antiaircraft guns and missiles had lit up the night sky. People fled their homes out into the desert in a mad panic, villages bombed into rubble. Both sides had peppered the surrounding desert with vibration-sensitive scatter mortars, supposedly to deter the army engineer crews repairing the roads, or the Behjars raiding and looting the junked convoys. They were also equally effective against a ten-year-old driving a small herd of the family’s sheep. That most of the killing was being done by their own countrymen was of little comfort; the farmers and nomadic shepherds had little grasp of the finer nuances of global politics, but they understood terror and death very well indeed.

  Now, the desert was silent, empty, the hot gusts whipping up only dust dervishes spinning elegantly across the red sandstone wastelands. In the distance to the southwest lay the mountain range the Khuruchabjans called al-Ummah’at, The Mothers, where ancient gods still sang through strange rock formations carved by the windblown sand. On the other side of the mountains lay the border between Khuruchabja and one of its more anti-American neighbors, not that that made the Khuruchabjans like them any better, either.

  We stopped and shot a bit of footage of a nomadic sheep-herder eyeing us suspiciously as he drove his flock across the road, framed by the shell of an abandoned tank crumpled by a long-ago missile, shards of dull metal creaking in the hot breeze. After the war had devastated the people and the economy and the IMF drove what was left into eternal destitution, none of the businesses from surrounding nations had been willing to risk returning to Khuruchabja, their overall losses negligible, but irritating nonetheless. The two sole highways leading to Nok Kuzlat were left half-repaired, and traffic was minimal at best. Our shepherd only looked back once, his expression obscured by the checkered kaffiyeh twisted around his leathered face. He whipped his flock up the other side of a wadi and disappeared over the next sand dune.

  Toward the end of the afternoon it was still blistering hot, the dry air shimmering along the horizon with the illusion of water, nature as apt at contradictions here as the people. I spotted a madja’ in the distance, and turned the sandjeep toward it.

  It was a single room, built of corrugated tin and mud-brick, the door and shuttered window still intact, although it was evident no one had been here in a long time. It had been one of those ambitious and well-meaning Western ideas that never worked, a series of rest-stations for weary truck drivers, shelters from dust storms, that sort of thing.

  The water barrel outside had been long drained and the sink and faucets stolen, leaving naked pipes sticking through the wall as if astonished there was nothing to fit to. Cupboards which were supposed to hold emergency supplies of khaki-wrapped UN medical supplies and MRE food rations now held only grit blown in through the cracks under the door. The faded poster on the wall admonishing visitors in five different languages to respect their fellow travelers, take only the supplies they needed and leave the way station neat for the next guest, had been defaced with derisive Arabic graffiti.

  Three wooden chairs were all that remained; the fourth chair and most of the picnic-like table had been broken up by a previous guest and used as firewood, a circle of ash and charred wood in the sand-carpeted center of the madja. We dragged two of the surviving chairs out of the madja’s broiling interior, and sat in the buil
ding’s shadow.

  We ate the picnic lunch I’d had the hotel pack, and drank most of the water, even though it was hot enough I could have practically made tea with it. The sandjeep’s engine cackled to itself, expanding metal cooling in the slight shade of the madja’.

  The sun turned the sky behind the mountains a blood-red, The Mothers stained a deep turquoise. I heard a high, faint call and shielded my eyes to spot a desert hawk wheeling far above us, hunting the small animals just beginning to come out now that the worst of the heat had begun to fade. Wings spread against the updrafts, the hawk glided in the air, a patch of white along its splayed feather tips. It was throat-stoppingly beautiful.

  Yes, Virginia, there is beauty in the desert. I grew up roaming the Southwestern backlands, hunting Indian arrowheads and trilobite fossils, and had always loved the quiet of desolate, open land, knew how to see more than just heat and lifelessness.

  “They’re lovely,” I said to Halton, still watching the hawk. “So deadly and yet graceful. One of nature’s most elegant creatures.”

  He glanced at me, then peered up at the hawk curiously. I knew from his expression he wasn’t seeing the bird the same way I was. I felt sorry for him at that moment.

  “Last time I was here,” I told him, “I spent so much of my time recording ugliness and suffering, I didn’t have much left over for appreciating anything.”

  I was also getting into feeling sorry for myself too, truth is.

  “Running around, trying to keep my ass from being arrested or shot off, trying to keep both armies from confiscating my film. I was too young to really be scared. It was exciting, at first. But I started thinking that too much of news is just people hurting and dying and I didn’t want to spend my life reporting that.”

  Halton was watching me quietly, listening. I’ve had few friends in my life, and even fewer boyfriends, none of whom really spent much time listening to me. While my girlfriends were going on dates and making out in the backseat, I sat home alone and watched old movies. I’d learned to protect my fragile ego with fast quips and slick stories, but as far as real conversation was concerned, I’d had more honest heart-to-heart chats with the neighbor’s cat.

  “Now, I’m afraid I’ve wasted the best part of my life either chasing blood-and-bomb stories, or hiding behind a feed-in desk.” Boy, had I caught up with the midlife blues in a hurry, the sight of a desert hawk opening up whole floodgates of self-pity.

  “You’re not that old,” Halton said. He wasn’t trying to jolly me out of my depression; he simply stated a fact.

  “How old do I look?” I said, smiling wanly. I should have known better than to fish for compliments from Halton.

  He shrugged. “A little over forty,” he said. Damn, somebody should have taught this guy a bit more tact. I must have looked dismayed. He looked at me curiously. “Is that old?” he asked, ingenuous. “I thought the average person’s life span was about ninety years. In the West, at least.”

  “It’s old for starting over and finding a new career, Halton,” I snapped. “It’s old when you’ve stayed in one place for too long, and nothing’s happened.”

  It’s old when you wake up alone one morning and realize you’re going to spend the next forty years waking up alone, but I didn’t say that. I looked at his young face, still smooth and handsome, and was envious even if he was a fabricant. “Wait a few years, kid, it’ll catch up to you, too.”

  He looked surprised, then smiled. “How old do you think I am?” he asked wryly.

  I didn’t want to play this game anymore. “I don’t know,” I said shortly. “Thirty-two, thirty-three.” I wasn’t thinking.

  “I’m twelve,” he said. “I’ll be thirteen in January.” I gaped at him, and he grinned. “But I’ve been told I look young for my age.”

  Laughing outright, I shook my head. “So you do have a sense of humor, after all.”

  “Working on it,” he said.

  “It’s sometimes hard for me to remember you’re not real.”

  He stopped smiling, blinked and looked back out at the mountains. “I am real,” he said quietly.

  Maybe, while they were at it, someone could have taught me some tact as well. I kicked myself mentally, looking at him as he stared somberly across the empty desert. He had tried hard to do right by me. Hell, he’d saved my life, and I’d just been treating him like everyone else who’s ever gotten too close to me, warding him off with verbal jabs and hostility. I owed him better.

  I felt a wave of affection for Halton suddenly go through me. More than that. I wanted him. I wanted to make love with him under that wide crimson sky, dress up in harem silks and lie back on a thick Persian rug, feel the weight of him on me as I watched a hawk circle above me, graceful, beautiful killer. I must have been suddenly oozing buckets full of hominess pheromones.

  “Oh, the hell with it,” I murmured. He glanced at me, puzzled, and I reached out with both hands to grasp his firmly. He inhaled sharply, and stiffened, tense.

  “Kay Bee…” he said, uneasily.

  I pulled on his arms to make him bend over far enough so that I could kiss him, a long embrace that left us both quivering. When he pulled away, his eyes were wide, almost frightened. “You wouldn’t still be interested in making love with me, would you?” I asked, this time with me feeling like the shy one. I was terrified he’d changed his mind.

  He nodded slowly. “Yes, please,” he whispered.

  Christ, what kind of education had his former lovers given him, anyway? I had the sudden image of an Oliver Twist standing with his stiff little penis in one hand, saying politely, “Please, suh, I’d like some more…”

  We didn’t have a Persian rug, but we did have the tarp from the sandjeep, which smelled faintly musty and was far from being soft against the skin. It was marvelous. I still had a phobia about a spy satellite snapping Polaroids of the birthmark on my butt, so we opened the door and window of the madja’ and aired it out to a tolerable temperature.

  John Halton was the best lover I’d ever had, which actually isn’t much of an endorsement considering the number and quality of my previous bed partners. But I’ve no doubts at all that he would have been in the top percent of anyone’s class.

  We lay on that musty tarp in the gloom of an abandoned madja’ while he undressed me with as much admiration and wonder as if I’d been a Miss Universe runner-up, exploring my body with virginal innocence. I undressed him, feeling guilty shyness. I’d seen him naked before, but not quite this up close and personal. His muscles trembled under smooth skin, curly hair dusting his chest and legs, not an ounce of extra fat anywhere, and I looked, too. He was way far out of my usual league, and I kept thinking, I don’t deserve this, it’s too good, any minute now he’ll take a hard look at me and see…

  He kissed the side of my neck, and pulled back to smile at me. “Look,” he said, marveling, “you’ve got goose bumps only on one side,” and stroked the raised flesh. He kissed the other side to raise goose bumps on that half, playing as joyfully as a child until I was gasping for breath, more hot and bothered than I’d ever been in my whole life.

  I lay back against a pillow of sand molded under the tarp, breathing unsteadily as he moved against me, his hands caressing me, gently here, rougher there, as if he knew exactly what I wanted. Suddenly I realized, he did know; the chemical sensors buried in the flesh of his hands could read my skin as accurately as any laboratory instrument. He was reacting to my own desires like a feedback mechanism. I was telling him what I wanted as precisely as if I’d been doing it myself, which in effect, I was.

  The world’s most technologically advanced dildo, I thought, unable to help myself, and stiffened.

  He abruptly pulled back, eyes worried in the shadows. Shit, maybe he could hear my thoughts as well. “Am I doing something wrong?” he asked anxiously.

  You idiot, Kay Bee. He can’t read your mind, but he can read your fear.

  “No, nothing,” I assured him, pushing the thought away as I
held him tightly. After a moment, he nuzzled me again, his soft lips and rough tongue running against my skin until I was moaning. He slid inside me easily and I locked my legs around his back, the sound of his ragged breathing in my ear driving me up the wall, over the side, and crashing down into the best orgasm I’d ever known. He gasped, shuddering, and I could actually feel him coming inside me, waves pulsating all the way through him.

  His chest was slick with sweat. He slid off me, and I nestled into the crook of his arm. Both of us panted like dogs in heat. A slight breeze blew through the open door, cooling the sweat on our entwined bodies. It felt deliciously good.

  After a while, I smiled up at him and kissed his forehead. “God, that was wonderful,” I said.

  He grinned like a kid, pleased with himself, and hitched himself up on one elbow to lean his head against one hand. His other brushed across my naked body in gentle patterns, tracing lazy circles with his high-tech fingertips around the tiny nubs of my breasts. It made me suddenly self-conscious, and he stopped, looking at me questioningly.

  “I have trouble understanding how someone who looks like me can turn you on,” I said lamely. I could feel the heat of a blush crawling uncomfortably up my cheeks.

  “Why?” he said, matter-of-factly. “My body needs sexual release occasionally, and my head thinks you’re an interesting person. Why is combining the two difficult to understand?”

  “Jeez, thanks a whole hell of a lot, Halton,” I said cynically, and swatted at him. “You sure know how to make a girl feel sexy.”

  He smiled, a little uncertain, but leaned over to kiss me, his tongue gently exploring my mouth. Amazingly, I could feel his cock pressed against my thigh growing thick again. His mouth traveled down the edge of my chin, into the curve between my neck and collarbone, as his hands, his wonderfully sensitive hands, caressed my stomach and chest.

  “I like the goose bumps,” he whispered, his voice muffled against my throat.