Radius Islamicus

by Julian Samuel

  “What were they then? Listen for a while.” I wind back a few seconds so Anver can keep it all linked.

  We had been asked by the various mullahs who visit England from time to time to look into underground tube stops. So, we went underground. While western democracy was licking its wounds and the cultural intellectuals wrote novels and articles about non-state actors and their relationship to Islam, Imran and others were sent to calculate tube stops worldwide. What’s a graduate doing in a job like this, you’re asking yourselves? You’re most likely thinking: Will you be knapsacked in the air, or the sea or on the beaches, or right here en route to the runway? We’ve manners and we’re rational, as rational as your white heads of states. We thought a great deal about viral and bacterial matters but most of us had educations in numbers and not chlorophyll-related stuff and synthetic biologically related class-struggle tools. In hindsight, this was not good. Some of us had long discussions on botulinum neurotoxin, ricin, tetrodotoxin, and other such things, but the institutional atmosphere within biology departments was so alien to us that we stuck to literature, history, and numbers.

  In the vast and airy cabin all were now silent with their collective worries. Seat belt lights off. Why worry? You all look so terrorized. We’re just taking you in another direction from the one you planned on taking Simply changing direction doesn’t make us terrorists, does it? We are accelerants, not terrorists, aren’t we?

  We learnt our customs not only from hills and dales in the sweet-smelling English countryside, from Hadrian’s Wall, and the moors, but also from the culture at large. So we’ll be polite with you. We won’t change your biological status, don’t worry. That’s what you’re worried about, isn’t it? Biological changes that we might bring about against your will? We will be leaving Heathrow in a few moments. Against your will. Just before we get going . . . this is going to sound flaky, I know, but we have a psychologist with us; she is an Islamic psychologist — not veiled, of course — her name is Usha and she’s a Sufi-Freudian and is willing to explain to you why this isn’t an interpretation of a bad dream but actually a reality that you are now in. Maybe your pre-hijacking reality was a dream. She is willing to talk to you one on one. Some of you might need that kind of attention. At any rate, ponder these questions as we fly. Moreover, just to prove that we are not against Jews, we have asked all Jews to leave this flight. The last thing we want is to make this a flying Auschwitz and have the media represent us as people who dislike Jews. I hope this changes your impression. If you have a name that is not Jewish, then you stay. Is this clear? If you pretend that you have a Jewish name and try to leave without our permission, we might make changes to your outward morphologyberg with this thing that I have in my hand. We will be flying at a super low altitude from here to Cairo — this will prevent armed interruption from nations. So sit back, let your respective governments worry about you, and for now enjoy the view of cities and landscapes. For the Catholics among us — we’ll go over the Vatican. Don’t forget to tell the media that we showed respect for your idiotic belief systems. Some passengers turn their heads to look at landing planes. Thai Airlines moves toward the terminal to discharge passengers. Asian passengers swine-nosed to the windows, appear to be watching the unfolding drama but aren’t aware of it.

  A little bit about me: I come from a mid-sized city somewhere in the Midlands. In this city, I frequently see but don’t talk to two women in their thirties who are twins. They always dress identically and have been part of my visual life for at least fifteen years. Once in a while, they get front-paged — or call it “pair creation,” so I am sure you’ve seen them, especially those of you who live in England. They were on the BBC TV programme called Odd Box. These passengers are with us now — I’d ask them to stand up but that might be rude given the current context.

  Let me tell you about our research, our tube research. The train emerges in a mortuary green-tiled subway stop, Dufferin. I leave the train at the middle of the station. Imran, or was it Anver, takes the photos, and in a few minutes he’ll meet me at Spadina on the west platform. No flash. The trains are noisy. One never hears or feels this in Montreal. In Toronto, it’s steel wheels on steel rails, and steel gripping asbestos to make the train stop. I exit to inspect Dufferin Street, which shakes beneath my feet as the trains writhe under the city like Islamic cobras who have immigrated from Parassinikkadavu Snake Park in India.

  All this diary talk of trains, snakes, and twins has made me and Anver fall into a collective sleep like the two Sikhs I saw at an airport lounge. After a few minutes, I wake up and I start daydreaming of Rabi’ al-thani. Anver is still sleeping. I walk down the hall and notice a new woman with sagging jowls sitting in a large red leather armchair. She is wearing pink fishnet stockings. The river is visible from her chair. Refusing to die, she will issue silence for one entire decade. She looks out at the ducks on the ice. Her name is Tatjana. I find her silence resonant, abundant. We make eye contact until an old man — Ralph Das, ex-journalist — shuffles into the small kitchen. There are brown coffee rings and toast crumbs on the counter. He looks into the living room and shouts the word “messy” into the huddle of card players. They collectively turn around and then go back to the card game. Undistractable, the lot.

  Linda, wearing a red dress, walks to the kitchen and looks back at me. I move to another location beside a window. I’m being a gentle and sensitive old-age presence. Minding my own business “far from the madding crowd,” and far from the memory tests. Monday, 14:30, elevator upstairs, Dr. Jefferies, neuropathologist, age eighteen — thinks she knows more than me — will perform tests to see if I have teratomas of the hippocampus and if all the terrorist genetic switches are turned off: or on, or both, at the same time. How many numbers can I remember? Name the last five addresses I lived in? How many fingers do I have? Her games continue.

  In March of a certain year, terrorists — that’s what they call them when they don’t look in the mirror — bombed a European target. The target was not London Bridge. The explosion changed the outcome of the national elections, causing this particular nation to pull their troops out of somewhere where the locals are influenced by only one book, and this book is not the Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica. When a mass accelerates in a million different directions along with a colourful, highdefinition flash, some smoke and some bent train rails, European and North American mores — call it voting patterns — change at a rate inversely proportional to the distance travelled by a patriot to become a terrorist.

  The rate of change of European morals is inversely proportional to the summation of the distance travelled by a patriot towards freedom and liberation. As imperial plunder and tactics become desperate, and the distance to liberation is nearer, the need for violence is inevitably multiplied. If the imperialist walks away, the scope of splattering is smaller.

  Therefore, (dy/dx) of European Morals = Σ (1/(imperialism-Liberation).

  The sub and superscript on the summation sign, will have i = 0 terror at the bottom,

  y = full scale terror on top:

  dy

  - x = plunder

  dx (European morals) = Σ (imperialism freedom)

  c = freedom

  But in the end, all one needs to make the imperialists listen is:

  F = MA + bang + to whatever the spin over the square root of Israelis and their corollaries.

  This is a slightly more perfected expression:

  6

  Blue blankets, Russell Square

  In the corner, on the red chair, still watching the river, Usha receives another call. She utters soft words into her cell phone. It rings again shortly afterwards. Doctor calling to make an appointment? I turn off the radio and detach the alligator clip from the antenna; in the era of the web I listen to my shortwave for fun. An incoherent mixture of two or more European languages comes out in a gush: German predominates. Linda sees me place the radio on the shiny wood table beside the sofa. I will not forget it there. I take
memory pills.

  As night falls, the river looks like flowing pewter. Bright spotlights trailing along the water’s edge, igniting the grass making yellow-green patches. The ice on the blue river moves more slowly than usual. A spiral of mist rolls off the pond into the pointy hats of the nearby evergreens. The evening is a marker: change of clothes, the home winds down. The asthmatics get a hit of oxygen before they sleep.

  Iqbal Masoume, who lives here, is a friend in the operational sense. Yet he, like a few of the others, keeps to himself in a room at one end of a light-filled hall. I am in his room with him. He is not as close to me as Anver. He never seems unhappy, enjoys listening to the news every day. A few remember that he was the brains behind a famous bombing. Free publicity, provided you don’t kill me; that, I’m afraid, would be the ultimate publicity, he tells his friends here. We won’t kill you, we all assure him. Besides, Iqbal, who can find you here? Rotting mind. Buried in snow, in Canada, in the province of Quebec. Who would look here? Don’t worry. More important urban centres are suspected. I’d play that seven of hearts now if I were you.

  Iqbal had gone missing, somewhere, years ago. But he’s here with us now. He didn’t come across on that boat with us. They say he did something wrong. Who are they? Intelligence? Pig-eaters the lot. Now, he’s fine and tucked into bed like a rag doll under the pink blankets. Blue blankets were used to cover the dead at Russell Square underground. In this century, we have foil heat blankets, much lighter than the blankets and duvets of the last century. I say goodbye and tenderly walk out of his room.

  And a few minutes pass. Anver shuffles into my room. He sits. He has new running shoes on. He’s fit. So is his mind. He asks me why I mentioned class and class origins in the last bit?

  “I didn’t mention it and I am not mentioning it. I think you might have made a mistake in hearing. Is this possible?” We hear an old train whistle.

  7

  Bereavement support group

  Is Jean an old operative we used for interconnections? He’s patently too young. Must still be day one of the pill. I can describe how the pill works. I wake up. I go to the doctor, who, in Wolof, asks me to roll up my sleeve. He gives me a shot of a transparent cobalt blue liquid. I look at him through the large, squat syringe. He looks dark black until a cloud of my blood back-spirals into the syringe. But why call it a pill if it’s a shot in the arm? No, that shot in the arm is for some piss or shit test. Dr. Babrika Fall doesn’t give me the pills. No, I take them myself every day, and here’s the procedure: I open my night table draw; I open the container; I take the pill with a glass of non-African water; I close and replace the container in the drawer. Then, a few weeks later, another doctor comes to my room to say that I now have to stop for wee bits. Almost at once, the walls fall and become electrum which I make into earrings. Disclarity. Which I also enjoy. Two weeks on, two weeks off. The New England Journal of Medicine is my patron saint.

  Finally, it’s summer. The entire home population is out on the lawn of blurring memories. Old fathers and mothers who can’t remember the faces of sons and daughters are all there under the unifying sunshine waiting for the inheritance jackpot. When will they next visit — the sons or daughters, that is? Why did this or that one’s son or daughter visit and not mine? Ragged memories of divorces, separations, lawyers.

  In the small reading room of the home, I walk over to aged Tatjana. I ask: “Do you have your boarding pass?” She’s tall, majestic, and introduces me to her daughter, who is shorter. She’s surrounded by her tall sons, dressed in colourful Hawaiian shirts. Her daughter bids me a tactical welcome. The welcome is not about being nice to me: I’m an old fart but I’ve a reputation for being stimulating. The daughter probably thinks that if her mother has a male friend here, then she will feel less obligated to visit. It takes so much time to visit dying parents. Why can’t guilty sons and daughters see that I can see what they’re thinking? After chatting, I visit another table in the room.

  A home picnic with cucumber sandwiches and sunshine is taking place outside. After a while, Tatjana and I walk together, leaving the groupings of old people on the green grass. She touches my hand. The daughter notices. The picnic continues.

  Everyone turns around. Suddenly, a broken bladder pops out of a body heading skyward. It spirals out of control, spurting out a slow trickle of warm piss on wrinkled faces, shiny overpriced computer-driven wheelchairs, diluting the tea. Usha starts singing “Yellow Submarine.” I hold out an umbrella over Tatjana.

  Push a button and the chip on the wheelchair memorizes a certain path to the doctor, to the lawn, to the swimming pool, to the Bereavement Support Group in which we’d hear conversation like this: We’d never discussed his last wishes. Suddenly I had only a few hours to choose a funeral home and make plans that would affect my entire family. The lesson has been well learned. After this experience, I decided to plan my own funeral, right down to the smallest detail. It was actually comforting. I did it mostly for my kids — I don’t want them to have to go through that again. But I also did it for myself. I thought I didn’t have any kids.

  The lawn is filled with leaky piss-bitterness memories of the husband who beat you; the kidney that failed you; the liver you resent; the DNA that unravels more quickly than it ought; the memory of a wife who left you for another man (maybe your best friend); the partner in a law firm who fucked you on the desk on May Day; the man who got you out of the firm so you have to work for The City at a thousandth of what you’ve earned with the more corrupt firm, which you loved, which you and only you got off the ground. Head offices in New York and Bangkok. Filthy employees, behind your back, they say that Jews and Chinks are running the entire show. Blurred short-termish memories of who is winning the current game of lawn bowling, or when the game began, or what happened before or after lunch, or what one had for lunch, dinner, or what dinner or lunch is, or if one has become a cannibal.

  Jeff is the winner at lawn bowling, august, round-faced Jeff. He’s intelligent, but the lawn balls have more memory retention. He wins at lawn balls, but in a way the balls win. He wears a white T-shirt with a few food stains on it. Every time I see him, I make a point of asking him what his son’s name is. He pretends to be hard of hearing. I repeat the question. Nurse Linda gently takes me aside and suggests that I stop asking him this particular question. She saw him crying in his room while looking for his son’s name in his address book. I think I’m doing him a favour by asking him, I say. “No, you’re not doing him any favours, he just can’t remember his son’s name. Just chat with him about other things.” When the nurse goes away, I repeat the question: “So how’s your son, what’s his name? Coming for your birthday, is he?” No nurse is going to stop me from asking what I want to ask. “Can’t remember” means that he ought to go on the memory pills.

  Geriatric skin so elastic that it could be used for slingshots. Just cut some off from the neck and use it. If I had a son I’d remember what his name is, I tell long tall Jeff with black balls in both hands. Expensive shoes Jeff wears.

  Linda approaches my table, which I am sharing with Tatjana’s family with Hawaiian-shirted sons. Tatjana is watching a black ball roll down memory lane: she slowly turns around to look at me. Horn-rimmed glasses. Smiles again. A black ball rolls and rolls. There’s an old Irish woman who forgets things — events very quickly: by the time the ball touches another ball, she has forgotten why she was looking at me. Also, she may have forgotten what the round object is called or what its function is. Clunk. Ah! Ball. But she smiles, yet another smile. The ball is black. The grass is green. She has periods in which her memory functions with average long-term and better than average short-term. Today is not a good day for long or short-term memory — her memory is bringing into view an image of a Kellogg’s Corn Flakes box from 1950. She tells me that her daughter is visiting. She has given her some perfume, which smells of something she can’t remember. “Perhaps,” she says, “I can remember — perhaps it smells like a perfume caught between
two things: the corn flakes in the box and a saucer of fresh dill which has been cooling in the fridge? My memory is good, and getting better. It’s hard to recall the names of smells. I remember you.” She looks at me. “You — John Macleod can sing Zeera Lynn’s ‘We’ll Meet Again’. You sang it when we ate at McDonalds.”

  Who has more memory, the black ball or the man turning toward me after having sent it down the lawn? I’d say the ball. A woman who looks as though she could be called Beulah replies: “Green.” But dark or light green?

  What makes Beulah more appealing than the ones without memories is that she can remember — memory and remembering are two different things. Memory is an object, remembering is a process, I suggest. His head — which may not be filled with intelligence — is filled with precision when it comes to remembering what he had for breakfast, lunch, dinner and what colour socks he put on this morning — blue on the left, olive green on the right. Old people here have the-putting-on-the-different-socks disease. The memory pills change all that: red on the right, red on the left; navy on the right, navy on the left ad nauseam.

  Memory: the final commodity. I can never underestimate the pleasure of talking with a person with a good memory. Beulah, former teacher of history rambles out the following dates: 1688, 1759, 1492, 711, 1947, 1945, 1871, 1215, 711, 1789, 1917, 1648, 1066. What happened in 711, I ask? “Magna Carta,” she says.

  The Man-who-looks-like-a-police-detective-but-isn’t-or-is-Anver, Linda, the doctor, the cook, all have memory. No money, nor real brains, but they remember details. This is what we agers all are jealous of. We have money, that much we remember, but we can’t remember the memories. So what good is money? All you remember is that you have it.

  The conversation concludes. The Man-who-looks-like-a-police-detective-but-isn’t-or-is-Anver comes back another day. I ask him the name of his son.