“Wow!” My wife clapped her hands in joy. “That sounds like such an authentic accent.”
The Arab sat back down, and my boss’s partner pressed the same app again. The Arab stood up once more. “Driver, bring out the Rolls. I want to buy some girls.”
“We call those the Rich Arab Tricks.” My boss nodded toward his partner to carry on. “We should all move back a bit for the next one.”
The new app produced the sound of a machine gun, and this time when the Arab stood up, his face turned crimson, his eyes grew wide, and spittle spewed out of his mouth as he shouted, “Kill all infidels, slaughter the unbelievers, exterminate all the brutes, down with the Great Satan!”
“My, my,” my wife said, her hand went over her heart. “That’s certainly impressive. He looks so fiercely beautiful. He’s like outsider art, you know, art brut.”
“That was the al-Qaeda trick,” my boss’s partner said.
“Don’t worry,” my boss said. “This will calm him down.”
From the speaker came the adhan, soft, then building volume. The Arab seemed shocked at first, perplexed. I thought I saw him tearing up, but I doubted it because the call to prayer set him in motion. The muezzin’s voice sounded exotically beautiful, for a moment at least. The speakers were obviously of the highest quality. The Arab moved toward the sandbox on the right, bent down, and pushed his hands into the sand delicately. “In the name of God,” he whispered.
“What’s he doing?” my wife asked.
“Cleaning himself,” my boss replied. “They must approach prayer in a pure condition. They use sand if they can’t use water. I thought about putting a faucet in there, but it would clash with the decor.”
The Arab rubbed the sand onto both hands, then scrubbed up to each elbow, up and down three times.
“They’re supposed to brush their teeth or gargle with water,” my boss’s partner said. “Luckily, this one is smart enough not to try that with sand.”
The Arab lifted sand in both palms, bent his head, rubbed his face.
“The second sandbox is his litter box,” my boss’s partner said. “There was an accident once. He used the dirty one to wash up. The poor thing was so distressed he almost killed himself. We had to intervene.”
The Arab took a small rug from behind the chair, laid it on the floor facing east, and began his prayers.
“They’re supposed to do this five times a day,” my boss said. “Can you believe that? Now he doesn’t have to do so many. We actually let him do this trick only when we have guests.”
We watched, all of us, entranced. I thought about making a minor joke but was unable to. The room remained silent as he knelt, genuflected, and stood up, knelt, genuflected, and stood up. My wife was right as always: we were watching something similar to art. When done, he put the rug away, sat down in his chair, and returned to reading his Quran.
“That was magnificent,” my wife said. “You must have worked terrifically hard to train him, but it was so worth it. Thank you—thank you for this.”
My boss and his partner beamed, the cheeks above their matching beards flushed, making them look much younger, like overdressed cherubs.
“He’s tired now,” my boss said. “Let’s let him sleep.”
A large velvet cloth slowly descended from the ceiling, the same purple as the window curtains, with gold tassels at the bottom. It draped over the cage, hiding the Arab behind it.
“Mistah Kurtz—he dead,” I said, but no one seemed to get my joke.
“This is amazing textile,” my wife said, quickly changing the subject. “So luxurious. Where did you get it?”
“It’s original Victorian, the last batch was manufactured in 1852. We couldn’t risk using it to cover the cage until we were sure he’d been totally tamed. He loves it now because it’s so thick, yet soft.”
The party turned out to be lovely, the canapés sumptuous. After engaging with different people, I came to realize that there was no discernible difference between the liberals and my people back in Muncie, we were the same, we could be happy in their lands.
As we were about to leave, my wife turned to me. “We must get one,” she said. “Now I can’t imagine living the rest of my life without my own Arab.”
“I’m not sure we can afford one,” I said.
“We don’t have to get a wild one,” she said. “An acclimatized lighter-skinned Arab would be less expensive, I’m sure.” Then she addressed our hosts. “Though obviously, he won’t be as divinely authentic as yours.”
“The cheap ones can still be fun,” my boss said, quite graciously, in my opinion.
The woman with the large diamond pendant that contained the wealth of the world said, “Mine once rhymed orange blossom with playing possum, which was quite clever, if you ask me.”
“Please don’t get a poet,” my boss’s partner said. “They’re a dime a dozen. Though by far the worst Arabs are Lebanese novelists. They’re the cheapest because all they do is whine. Maybe a sturdy Yemeni, they can be good and are undervalued. We’ll go shopping, you and I. We’ll find you an Arab that’s just right for you.”
As hard as she tried to keep her composure, my wife could not stop herself from blushing. She had arrived. We would most certainly not return to Muncie.
It had been a few hours since the cage was covered. Its Arab was supposed to be asleep, but when I passed by on my way out, I heard him whispering in a winsome singsong voice, “And such are the parables We put forth for humankind, but only those who have knowledge will understand them.”
Satan’s Interviews
Blaise
Tiredness became Satan, his features softened, his cheeks sagged, his posture relaxed, less stark and threatening, and the insanity residing in his eyes departed for a short vacation. He wondered which of the fourteen was best at healing inanition, who the rejuvenator was. Not Blaise.
“Forgive me for bringing this up,” Blaise said, a quiver in his voice, “and please inform me if I am being inappropriate, please. I wish to say that I admire your commitment, and, of course, his. I can see many connections between you and Jacob, but I am trying to understand what—or maybe which one of them—keeps you two inseparable.”
“Inseparable?” Satan said. “You mean like your Armenian saying, Two butts in the same pants?”
“No, I would never speak that phrase.” Blaise blushed streaks of crimson, coralline floating atop a sea of green ascetic robes. “I could not. It’s not Armenian. I’m sure it’s Lebanese, delightful people, but methinks a bit uncouth.”
He looked to be in his late forties, with a riotous white beard, sharp nose, anxious eyes, and a wisp of hair hanging down on his forehead. No rings graced his fingers, no jewelry adorned his person, no cross, no crosier, he held only his two plain white candles, which he laid on his lap. His halo was barely perceptible, a mere shimmer in the air, an old threadbare nimbus. Like Pantaleon, Blaise was a physician, and like Denis, a bishop, but unlike the flamboyant flamer and the pompous dandy, he was pathologically shy, finding the company of others painful, if not the company of beasts. A Eurasian lynx lounged before the sylvan saint, her belly warming his bare feet. Her presence suggested that poor Behemoth might not come out of the closet for a while. On Blaise’s right lay a sizable hound with a wide Cerberean mouth, and on his left sat a wild boar on its hind legs.
Satan’s stomach rumbled. He worshipped pancetta.
“I meant only that you have been with the poet longer than any of us,” Blaise said. “We all care for him, but your devotion is exemplary, as well as inspiring. I wish to discover why you have remained with him, why you returned after so long. If the question is too personal, please feel free to ignore it, for I do not place a higher value on my curiosity than on your peace of mind.”
Satan decided to tell the truth.
“I find him thoroughly entertaining, perhaps my chief delight,” he said. “He is most certainly difficult at times, dull even, but for the most part, our relationship
survives because he amuses me. In spite of his vinegary outlook these days, or maybe because of it, he rejuvenates my jaded heart.”
“And I am sure he values your commitment,” Blaise said.
“I doubt it.”
“He must,” Blaise said, sounding muffled as he bent to scratch between his lynx’s ears. “It may not seem so to you, but I’m sure he finds you as amusing as you find him.” Blaise’s white hair was shaved in a Roman tonsure, and when sunbeams struck his bowed head, it looked like a sunny-side-up egg. “I’m envious, for I miss him. I wish he would call me back.”
“Why do you like him?” Satan asked.
“That’s easy,” Blaise said. “Because he’s likable. He loves his beasts and they love him right back. Who else could have fallen in love with Behemoth? Such a delightful troublemaker, Satan’s spawn.” The palm of his hand quickly covered his mouth; his cheeks turned a deeper coral. “Oh my, I apologize. I meant it endearingly.”
“And I took it as such. I am proud to claim Behemoth.”
Blaise looked toward the closet, shut his eyes for a moment. “It’s time to come out, my dear boy.”
Behemoth jumped out, landing on the hardwood floor delicately. He looked around, sauntered past the wild boar, hesitated momentarily in front of the lynx, then leaped into the saint’s lap. He circled twice, shoved both candles off with his paw. One fell on the floor, the other on the lynx, who seemed perplexed. Behemoth settled in and began to chew on a rear toenail.
“Such a beautiful boy,” Blaise said to the purring cat.
“So you love Jacob because he loves animals?”
“No, but that was how it started,” Blaise said, “the first impression, so to speak. There are a number of monsters who loved beasts, and I don’t return that love, I couldn’t.”
“Adolf loved animals,” Satan said.
“Worse,” Blaise said, “the pope’s pet from Assisi does as well. Francis surrounds himself with cute animals.”
“Don’t mention him, please. Francis needs a fisting.”
Blaise grinned. “No, it wasn’t only about Jacob’s love for beasts. You remember what Catherine Deneuve said about that fascist Brigitte Bardot, that it was easy to love animals, much harder to love people. Well, Jacob loved both, in spite of what he thinks. He was the one that held that group of friends together.”
“You think so?” Satan said. “That’s comical because he believes the opposite. He thinks that they only tolerated him, that he was the seventh wheel!”
“But he was the one Greg loved best. He’d have had nothing to do with the rest of them if not for Jacob. Pinto considered him his doppelgänger. Does he think any of the others would have befriended Lou if not for him?”
“Enlighten him,” Satan said.
“Lou was the pretty one, definitely not the smart one. He once told the poet that he had never read a single book in his life, not one, People magazine was where it was at for him. Where was he from? I can’t remember. Maybe Omaha or Lubbock or Midland. He wasn’t the masculine one either. The others could camp it up, but if need be, they could all pass for normal, or almost normal, as was the case with Jacob, who learned to put on the mask at an early age. Not Lou, he was a hairdresser after all, dedicated to his profession. He made all of them uncomfortable except for Jacob, and Lou loved him for that, adored him. I remember one evening when none of the seven were remotely sober, every conversation ending up lost in a maze as they lay about the room, draped over the couches, splayed on the rug. They decided to play the What Superpower Would You Want game. Doc wanted to be irresistible so he could seduce anybody. Greg wanted flight, Jim, mind control. Of all things, Jacob wanted speed-reading, the ability to read every book ever written within his lifetime. His was not the strangest, though. Lou wanted to be able to stop time like Professor X, not to become famous, rich, or powerful, but because he saw so many horrible hairdos while riding the bus and he always fantasized that he could stop time, give the offending party a quick trim or coup de peigne, and return to his seat without anyone being the wiser. The other five groaned loudly, what a boring superpower, and wondered aloud whether that was his life’s ambition. It was. Jacob, on the other hand, considered Lou’s desire both wonderful and laudable. He loved the idea of someone using superpowers to help others look better.”
“You know,” Satan said, “he hasn’t had a good haircut since Lou died.”
“That hair, my lord!”
At the Clinic
Satan Therapy
Alone in the waiting room. Alone I used to walk the grounds next to l’orphelinat de la Nativité, through the Catholic cemetery with its headstones of moribund marble, so many alabaster Jesuses on crucifixes, where I once saw a cortege of mourners quietly walk between two juniper bushes and away from a crypt within which they had surely discarded the recently deceased and bade their farewells, and I thought that was the one place given to us to be completely alone, but then I had you cremated, Doc, just as you wanted, but you didn’t get a place, I dispersed you all over, where are you now?
The fractious wind picked up in the alley, but the bleared windows, rickety though they were, refused to rattle, it was my time to be rattled, saddled with spooks and Iblis, the angel of the bottomless pit.
I prefer angel of light, thank you very much, Satan said, the most perfect of us all, and by the way, why do you call those fatuous statues with exposed hearts and barbed-wire crowns Jesuses and not Jesi? I am aware of his tongue and its dangers, Doc, his words lead me astray. Satan said, You’re trying to deceive these mental ill-health amateurs to check you into an institution and you think I’m the one who’s leading you off the path, I swear, I’ve worked with thick protégés before but you take the cake and the rainbow sprinkles.
The Lord God always said, It is not good that man should be alone, and the American Psychiatric Association agreed, which is why it gave the world group therapy, and a couple of men came through the clinic’s doors heading directly to the frizzy redhead receptionist behind the triple windows, I could hear their commotion but not see them, psychotics should be seen and not heard, Well, now you won’t be alone for long, Satan said.
I was always alone, Doc, solitary whether I wished to be or not, ever since I could remember I wished to be lost in another, thought that somehow I could disappear into that heart of yours, take walks within your veins, wander through the bones of you. You had friends, Satan said, you loved and were loved, you must not forget that, at least not that. But did I allow anyone in, I asked Satan, and he said, Did you, does anyone?
A man with a snippet of a mustache came into the waiting room, sat in the farthest corner, lowered himself carefully into the chair as if gauging whether someone was already sitting there, refused to raise his eyes from his untied shoelaces and the frayed hems of his khakis, looked as if he had been subsisting on meals that would leave a housefly famished.
Ask him, Satan said, ask him if he’d let you in, and I snickered. Out of his coat pocket, the man fished an orange and began to assiduously defrock it with his thick fingers, concentrating as if he were defusing a ticking bomb, and when he bit into it, a tear of juice slid languorously along the spiral peel still clinging to the white rind of the fruit and dropped onto the floor. Charming, Satan said, and I said, Only the best of us come here, the man was a cleaner facsimile of Deke, asymmetrically gelled flop of blond hair, mismatched shirt and T-shirt, and if that were not enough to signal his heterosexuality, the way he claimed all space within his vicinity by spreading his legs would have tipped the straight scale. I should make wedding arrangements, Satan said, winking at me, but I was not interested at all, whatever pheromones Blondie secreted, my receptors were not impressed.
Hey, Pantaleon, Satan said, bring back the Iraqi, this one is a no-go, and he frowned at Blondie’s outstretched legs, They just don’t teach manners the way they used to, come to think of it, who do you think instilled more decorum in you, the nuns or the whores? I told him to shut up for the umpteenth t
ime, wished I could afford a private shrink instead of the free clinic, but I was desperate, even though I had been working for the same law firm for decades, I had no health insurance, I was hired as a temp and never made permanent, and Satan said, You are a temp in life.
Jacob’s Journals
The Black Bear
The winter had lasted years and years, but the bees in their blissful hive were mostly awake now, the workers made heat by whirling their butter-color wings, the queens lounged about demanding to be serviced, the cold in the air eased, almost disappeared, in floated the fragrance of leaves, of early flowers and fruits. Some bees went to work, filling their bodies with sweetness, some of the small creatures danced and danced, how could we not moan in happiness? Then the black bear woke, much too hungry after hibernating for so long, not a delicate thing that bear, how large a body it carried, hunger demanded destruction. Smack, the hive was torn apart, crack. What could we do? Our stings were as nothing, our resistance flicked away with a mere gesture. We disappeared in his fur, we dissolved under his breath, vanished into the curl of his tongue.
Some survived, befuddled we flew away and flew, we no longer noticed how warm the still-rising sun was, how lovely the shape of clouds, how white the daisies, how unsteady blossoms broke into flames, how swaths of fierce lilacs released bewildering sirens of scent, that stupefying smell of spring. How could we?
Sorrow makes for lousy honey.
Tears do not make good ink.
Let winter return.
Revolution
About a year before the latest Egyptian revolution, Auntie Badeea wrote me a long letter describing many of the changes in the city. She had been keeping me abreast of the goings and comings of her world, about one letter a month for as long as I could remember, and even though I had been e-mailing my replies for years, she preferred old-fashioned epistolary pen and paper, not because she was a Luddite, far from it, but because like most Egyptians, she was a romantic. Naguib Mahfouz once wrote that it was a most distressing affliction to have a sentimental heart and a skeptical mind. What was different about that letter was the exasperated tone in which she chronicled what was happening in Cairo and, more important, at the house with its new clientele of upscale Egyptians. She had always paid protection money to the double mafia, police and army, she’d bribed politicians, but it seemed a new breed of ill-bred idiots were coming to power and coming to her whorehouse, entitled bastards she called them to their face. Apart from protection and bribes, these new boys demanded a cut and an ownership stake, and as part owners, they no longer felt the need to pay for what they fucked. One of the boys was the president’s grandson.
The Angel of History Page 20