Radius Islamicus

by Julian Samuel

  Tatjana Lucrece nears my table as Anver leaves. I say good bye to him without introducing him to Tatjana. I’m a few natural numbers away from eighty-five. Eyes sharp as a hawk’s, more memory, and other possibilities.

  8

  Perfidious Albion

  There’s an old Irish woman here with Homeric storytelling skills and who is as innocent as an underground tube stop in London. Her name is Usha, she has light blue eyes. She immigrated to Canada many moons ago because she wanted to live in a classless society. Bloody Sunday for some has become a faded memory; she had grown up in a working-class neighbourhood where English soldiers walk. Her stories pull me in: I sit with her and while away the hours in a room where the walls are painted a light blue. She sits in such a way that I can see the fertilized green lawn behind her. I am the only one in this house who knows and understands her stories: Perfidious Albion meets a humble representative of Mohammad (PBUH).

  Usha has lovely upright shoulders, which are usually covered with white cotton shirts. She has luminous white hair, and she wears stockings of different colours — I mean left leg one colour, right leg another. We take our exercise together — walks in the woods surrounding the home. Occasionally, when I have supper with her I see how she cuts the food on her plate. She composes a colourful morsel of food on a fork, which she uses in an un-American way — inverted. The fork methodically migrates around the plate, picking up a bit of pale green overcooked asparagus, amalgamating it with a bit of shepherd’s pie; all this touches a bit of gravy on the northern part of the plate before rising into her mouth, where false teeth slowly masticate the food. She smiles at me when the morsel has gone down. “The afternoon whisks by, doesn’t it Joseph,” she says. This gravely touches me. “Gravely” — nice word for geezers to be using. I’ve fallen in love with her. And I’ll tell Linda all about it. We are in love. I think I’ll settle down now. With her. Beside the river. Her old hands touch me, her arms move around my waist when we stroll on the grounds when everyone in Pierrefonds is sleeping. We know this is the end, and it’ll be a whimper, a sleep that never ends, so there is an intensity to our glances. You see, without being overly dramatic — she’s trying a new drug — Guinea pig-Usha, that brings back memories —that final commodity that only us rich can afford. Besides, what do they have to remember? Chef Boyardee? Cigarettes and warm milk? And, fuck their memories.

  Late at night, as I make my way to Usha’s room, I walk past Iqbal’s. I see him lying on his bed, looking out the window. Sometimes I knock, walk in and chat with him. Tonight, I ask him if he really had been the brains behind it all. Or was it me? Where are you now, I ask him — in that high-rise where we once met or are you here with me in this home? I’m here, he’d say, ultra-rationalist, no memory loss for him. Yes, I know you grew up in London near Hampstead Heath among the starlings.

  Having tucked him in, I walk toward the cold window. Three airplanes in the night sky are lining up for landing. I think about Usha before I head in the direction of her room. I remember the broadcast of many years ago. Or was it the voice in the airport? 13:00 hours Greenwich Mean Time. Iqbal Masoume, please come to the information desk. A few passengers from Jeddah, Teheran, Islamabad and Detroit want to ask you a few questions about your blank blank relationship with blank blank. I decide not to visit Usha tonight.

  The upside-down opaque bowl on the ceiling of my room beside the river houses a security camera which sees all the time. A kind of Allah of the modern age. Not all the residents have a room camera. The nurses can watch me, in case something happens. I try to look into the eye of the security camera — but there is only an infantile, shiny black bowl with an evenly coloured surface: dead personified.

  Moonlight falls on our purgatory. The slow river sags into a pond, making a mirror filled with stars. Most geezers have 20:20 vision if they want, and most want, but only rich old bastards like us can. A friend was telling me that he has a poor friend who is old and needs money for an operation. Only the rich can see.

  Reflected in the river-pond, I can see nearby Alpha Centauri in the dotted, fast-flowing cosmological clock which can’t stop but can only change speeds and times, just as the Jew predicted. Another century whisks by, reptiles become things with two feet, lungs and feathers. Morning birds chirp outside my window. My legs are tired; this explains why I am from time to time inhabiting a luxury wheelchair which glides along, wheels not touching the ground. I can walk, I am just playing with someone else’s wheelchair. The off-white hall is graced with twenty-first century versions of French-Canadian impressionist paintings. The painkillers make the French-Canadian landscape paintings an Abstract Expressionist blur, and almost tolerable as art. But when I slow down I can see the ugly paintings for what they are. “Why am I moving like this?” I ask my wheelchair pusher. “Why does life become a stream of questions? What sort of tests does he want to do? Why do all questions become useless? Why does intellectual laziness set in in old age?”

  Nurse Linda has long hands that move me. Something moves inside me when I see her orientalist halfmoons. Her touch is hushed, kind, her conversation’s never filled with idiocies, banalities, misconceived star clusters. Unique nurse. When we get to the long smooth hall, we take the elevator up two floors. “Nothing complicated,” she assures me.

  “Am I flirting with you again? Trying to get into your pants at seventy-something makes me feel good.”

  “Intimate language today, my, my. How are you getting along with Tatjana? Have you met her daughter?” I hear the not so subtle ding of the elevator door at the same time I notice a fallen pine cone in a snowscape in one of the revolutionary French-Canadian paintings of evergreens. “The dead banker’s wife’s daughter moves with the movements and the sounds of old age,” I say.

  “The daughter is no more than fifty-something.”

  “Numerically young. Linda are you going to leave me after giving me my four o’clock pills?” We surface on another floor. I add: “Notice how I’m not nosy. I can stay with you until six this evening, or should I say that I want to stay with you until six this evening.

  Here I’m sitting in a chair. I look out of the window. In regular rhythmic movements, fine snow moves past. My favourite nurse is in the room. She sees my theatrical stare. “What is it about me that you find . . .” She moves with finesse and directness. “I know you were accused of something very bad — this is what you keep telling me, isn’t it? Was it murder?” she asks, then stops to look at my wheelchair and continues: “What about all those silly radio programmes you listen to on your computer with your friends here? We’ve never had a group of old people here before, most are individually here — I mean they are not family like you all seem to be. How did you all end up in the same old folk’s home together?”

  I say: “I didn’t do anything wrong. We’re all old friends — commune friends. Codswollop. Thrown out of court . . . no proof. Proof, that wonderful toy of western democracy. Bunch of cunts. Never even went to court — except in my diary.”

  Linda responds: “Oh, you’re angry. I know you’re innocent. But you did arrange it all, didn’t you? So are you really innocent?”

  “You have to use that word arrange, I notice.”

  “Thrown out of court . . . no proof. Proof, that wonderful toy of western democracy. Evidence. Make me repeat myself why don’t you? Never went to court. All fantasy.”

  “I know you’re innocent,” she concedes.

  “You see you’re falling in love with me. Yes, I arranged it all, but, or should I say and I’m innocent.”

  “What are the details?”

  9

  Haeinsa Codex

  I open my computer, which is as small as a popsicle stick. The keyboard — still with us — is all H-graphic: so is the screen, which I can make as large as a house but if I make it too large, others can read my diary — usually of a very personal nature — and the image-text resolution is not impressive. Even if I were to project my screen on a cloud or on a fog patch in the s
ky or at 8000 metres or on the home lawn, I could still read it super clearly with a telescope. And they are not even called computers any more. My codex — that is what computers are now called — is a super-fast model made in the UK (United Korea): the Haeinsa Codex comes with time-licensed software called 0-47. These things still have hardware — all you do is rub the stick once and the codex appears like a movie before your eyes. Same thing happens when you rub a bunch of foreskins — they expand into a suitcase. The codex is about the size of a book, an early edition of The Wealth of Nations.

  There is a section of my voice diary I call British Hairs. I’ve set it to voice a similar accent and I’ve set the background sound to nineteenth century train sounds with a whistle here and there. Nobody is around, except Anver. All alone in the cosmos with my popsicle stick.

  Here’s my past life of action with some still and some real time pictures — all projected on my white towel, pinned on the wall in my room. My current life is also one of action — but the action doesn’t require passports and old-fashioned boarding passes, and standing in lineups to move through the elephant trunks. Whenever I’ve moved with passport in hand through the tube that takes you to the aircraft, I’ve looked at the walls of the trunk, which are light grey. I’ve felt this tube contract and expand, undulate with a thin mucus film that ushers in the passengers. There is a miasma of hydrogen sulphide and coca. British Hairways.

  Montreal trains emerge in vast, spacious stops, sometimes surrounded by three-storey high coloured panes of glass decorated by feminist artists. The station names always appear in smaller-than-European station font cut into ceramic tiles: Bonaventure, Champ-de-Mars, Square-Victoria. In the late afternoon, the Outremont metro stop fills with Russian teenagers smoking and necking with other Russian kids. The overweight white and black kids watch the Russians in tight jeans. As young Moslems, we enjoyed this metro scene, but, unfortunately, our religion prevents us from copping a feel in public.

  Anver laughs — that isn’t what they say in Cairo. I stop the diary and wait for him to stop laughing.

  “Anver, you finished?”

  “I’ve finished. All this for a deathbed confession?”

  Montreal’s metro trains run on rubber wheels; their departure from the stations creates a Doppler sound effect. I keep imagining a musician from the Montreal Symphony Orchestra sitting among the passengers while playing one single note on a French horn. Passengers get off the Sherbrooke metro station into a minus 40 Celsius morning. More harmonic departures. We prefer morning rush hours. We prefer the Doppler trigger, but some like to judge when the train has hit full speed. Here in Anglo-Asian Toronto we are part of an underground system where steel on steel is the rule. This French-Canadian city — Montreal — has the most spacious and cheapest metro system in the world, tickets cost $3.00. This is a world record, take it from Immy and me. I think Anver came too but I am not sure. Also, Immy thinks this is the best Metro in the world. However, the thinner gauge might require another kind of rucksack — er — knapsack due to the passenger density and train velocity. And we’d time it so it would go off at the end of the French horn Doppler effect, when the train has reached full speed. If we hit between 06:00 and 07:45, we splatter the dark immigrants. The white passengers use the Metro after 08:12. A fact not worth overlooking. We made calculations that the Islamic radius of destruction is the greatest at the fastest speed, but the blast trail elongates, spreading innards along the Judeo-Christian tunnel walls.

  The radius islamicus is the farthest distance a camel part is thrown from the blast centre. I mentioned doing state vectors, but our supervising Mullah didn’t understand anything beyond first year cal.

  The ultimate fantasy for a knapper is to be on a mis-railed train accidently heading toward a telescopic collision with another train hitting peak speed at Westminster. But our ultimate fantasy is now OT — orbital terrorism.

  Anver touches the stop button on the computer and asks: “Why didn’t we . . . why didn’t we do that? Why? It would have been so much more fun than riding all those underground trains. We could have gone to space.”

  I restart the reading by touching the computer, saying: “Anver, we would not have gone to outer space. We would have launched the thing to hit the International Space Station and other orbital targets. All we needed to do is to buy a few rockets — that can do the escape velocity thing — from our chink friends and bob’s your chacha. But I digress . . .”

  In Montreal, on the Orange Line, during Ramadan, a young Arab reads a mini Koran about six inches from his nose. Immy and I almost approach him, but he could be a plant. We find it pretentious that this provincial hick, most likely from Libya, would read the Holy book in front of kaffers who have tons of make-up on. We don’t mind make-up. We notice that his eyes detach from the holy Koran when the metro stop Plamondon is scraped into our ears. Robotically, the good book goes into his pocket, and he steps beyond the sliding doors onto the next stop, which is Namur. The dark orange ceramic tiles cover the entire station. From there, Aliwatch-me-as-I-read-the-holy-book-on-the-train catches a bus; to where, one wonders.

  We’re not going to knap in the early morning because there are too many non-whites. After 08:12 the white nine-to-fivers waltz in.

  Someone in the home is playing the Blue Danube by Johann Strauss II, composed in 1866 according to the World Narrow Web. Did I just use the word waltz in my diary? This level of synchronicity plagues my life — there is one connection after another.

  Somehow, Mirza Marlow, also known as Mr. Kutta Kunjar, an ex-Czech helper, got us advanced plastic, which is light as Kleenex. And, these days, you can see through it, and it smells like Munich on that inspirational Tuesday.

  Toronto subway stations are sombre-toned in relation to Montreal’s uplifting metro stations, and therefore automatically deserve sui-knapsack. The Toronto subway system has announcements in a bucolic English transmitted via broken-sounding speaker cones. The Old Mill stop is surrounded by glass, making the enigma of arrival like gliding into a sodium light-filled station, surrounded by a view of a deep inner-city valley filled with green trees — Toronto is indeed Canada’s model city. But nothing in the world beats an arrival in a Montreal metro stop.

  Toronto’s subway names are English. Islington is followed by Kipling followed by more meat-and-potato names such as Warden and Keele. The Wardenites and Keeleists lead to High Park which takes us to thunderous heights: Runnymede, where, in 1215 rebellious barons imposed the Magna Carta on Toronto. This TTC stop symbolizes the roots of modern western democracy. Today, the spirit of the Magna Carta has converted into an Uzi aimed at heads of Palestinians.

  Anver leaves for a few minutes to water his elephant and then walks back into my room. He looks at the screen near my lap and points to his ears with both hands. I wind back a few seconds so he can catch up.

  He sits and listens, making no comments.

  The Toronto subway system is not a sealed underground; trains occasionally ride on surface tracks, letting the sunlight burst into moving trains. Torontonians, who are mainly from China and other countries where Caucasians don’t come from — watch the condos-for-sale blur past Lake Ontario as the sunset sets. We have to consider these east-west Bloor trains which start off underground but also surface like mammals. These trains offer excellent media. I mean we could have a blast just as the train comes out of a tunnel into the sunlight, couldn’t we? This is what we did. This augmented the sunshine after the darkness of the tunnel.

  And, because we are sympathetic to the working-class crew of South Asians who have to clean up the mess — in fact our mess — we have decided to calculate a double eastbound-westbound knapblast — that is, explicitly: have both trains popped simultaneously in the same area where the trains surface. This way the entire city will not be paralyzed and we will not be hated by every single neighbourhood in Toronto. I admit that when we do things indiscriminately we get hated by all the neighbourhoods in any particular city. We don’t want to be
disliked city-wide. Surface blast areas are also cleaned up more quickly than tunnel events. We would like the city to get back to normal as soon as possible. We have decided to have the double pop-pop take place within seven minutes’ ambulance ride to a very nearby hospital. Seven minutes? How do we know? We timed it: three ambulance trials. Our partners in these operations phone ambulances a few minutes before the actual event so as to keep causalities within reason. Of course, we’d like to give hours and hours of notice to the hospital to get ready for more beds, but if we gave hours and hours of notice we’d lose the other effects that we need to get on with. We pre-warn the ambulances: we do this to prove that we’re not cold-blooded terrorists. We’re green-minded, book-loving types who are aiming for some sort of balance. When was the last time you heard of troops from a white country informing the local hospitals that something was coming down the line?

  We continually inform the hospitals, the ambulances, and then, lastly, the media. Keeping the hospitals and nurses’ unions in the loop reduces suffering. And surface bombings require maximum speed for TV. Some of our partners have said that nothing beats a banged-up tunnel for pressing the flesh and winning elections by using Islam. We thought about conducting internal tunnel jobs but our Christian side got the better of us: in our filthy homelands, many of us went to private Christian schools. Of course, we even thought about end-to-end station pops — at Kennedy and at the other far end of the line at Kipling with a triangulated bang at Dundas, and a two-knapsack bang for the Magnacartaites at the Runnymede stop. And even one innocent little bang on Ward’s Island — about a fifteen minute ferry ride from the Toronto Ferry Docks at the foot of Bay Street and Queens Quay. But that Toronto Islands stuff got nixed by us not our leadership. We simply do not want to be hated by every neighbourhood in Toronto. We successfully created a dot-to-dot star of David with our mathematically organized bombing of locations across the Greater Toronto Area, but usually we’ve been selective and operate only on one part of the city. Long ago, we gave up being monkey-see-monkey-do and causing all that flamboyant global impact. None of us committed suicide, that was a myth. We planned. We placed. We left. We saw it on TV. We went to the next city, all in search of balance. We played tennis with cousins and nieces, we ate ham sandwiches with mayonnaise and mint. We didn’t do hematidrosis in the Garden of Gethsemane.