Radius Islamicus

by Julian Samuel

  “Here are your glasses, my dear.”

  I kid you about your flesh hanging like fish fins. I’m helping a fellow terrorist age in comfort and affection. We’re human beings also.

  I touch the small of her back again. Despite the black towel, I gently touch her crotch, your bum, and your nipples following the folds of history. I kiss you. My fingers touch your neck of many folds.

  The cold has stripped the trees of leaves, making it a clear morning with a soundless sky. Are we moving toward spring or winter? The Earth’s axis has tilted further away from the sun as the cults predicted. Last year, Canberra got thumped with six centimetres of snow, and it didn’t thaw out for five days. What, we are moving toward autumn or spring? Are the days getting longer or shorter? I do remember that there was a change sometime in the recent past. But in whose recent past?

  13

  Prayer bruises

  The screen contains no images connected to what the voice is saying. Anver, sometimes, looks at the codex screen as though he were looking for moving images that go along with the voice. Cinematic conditioning, I reckon. To keep Anver amused, I have added still photographs from our initial calculations for bombings. Here he is laughing like a camel in Cairo, and in another he’s eating a swine-laden hot dog outside Union Station in Toronto.

  Anver is beside me. I press enter.

  A voice rustles out of the computer:

  The subway takes us from the cool suburban Maadi to Merigis to the urban Heliopolis, past Sadat near Tarir in downtown Cairo, where many men boast prayer bruises — zebeeb — on their heads, but no more action than a bruised forehead. In a tunnel, the sexy crucifixes of Coptic women catch the train’s fluorescent lights, only to be blasted to white as we clear the tunnel into — ascension — sunlight. A young Arab boy sports a knapsack with a button: I heart symbol NY. It’s Easter.

  Anver is listening. “Please, John, can we please change the voice accent setting? Somehow this hijacking of the plane doesn’t go well with this World War Two voice-over. I am getting tired of those old world World War Two voices that you continually use.”

  “Alright, how about South West American? Early Black English or contemporary English — sort of from around North Carolina? You didn’t need much convincing back then; back then, you and the job merged. You just slid into the job. Bang, bang. You liked it.”

  “North Carolina? Why that place — no metros there, are there? Why are you now going to use a yank voiceover for your hijacking diary? Americans are idiots who don’t want public trains or healthcare for other American citizens; we wanted to spend our last days in the belly of the beast, but we choose Canada, because Canadians are even more stupid. The Americans want individual trains — you know, ones with four seats in them. I mean, really, it’s 2040 and the Canadian idiots still haven’t installed maglev trains. In chopstickland they have trains that travel at the speed of light.”

  Anver gives me with a familiar look. “We are more or less fit old men. No one would think that we could correct imperialism so why don’t we do something really independent? I mean, why don’t we do some damage here or somewhere near here? We’re old but we can still do something.”

  “Why should we? We’re old now. No point. Imperialism won — look what it made me do.”

  “Come off it. We should. Aren’t you even going to think about it?”

  “What are we going to use? Knives and forks from the kitchen?”

  I look at Anver. He continues to look at me. I’m thinking about his proposition as the written diary becomes a North Carolinian voice: Will the Montreal metro change some of its names also? The Prime Minister is thinking of making some changes. The first stop that should be blasted off — sandblasted off that is or double named — is Lionel Groulx. Groulx, that fascist, would have knapsacked all the minorities in Montreal if he were alive. To Knap or be Knapped that is the question. My Kingdom for a Knap, The Merry Wives of Knap, Romeo and Knapp, Knapp’s Last Tape. Although there weren’t any knapsacks in early human history, Anver would have found something similar. Homo terrorristicus.

  I look at Anver. “Do you think we could blast that religious place on rue Mordechai Vanunu, in the Plateau area of Montreal? The left-wing people live there.”

  I say: “Why not something else? Why an innocent religious place? Aren’t we too old to even be thinking about this? And how do we get supplies? Why an innocent little . . .”

  Abstractly, Anver says the word “innocence”.

  “Should I re-start my literary masterpiece?”

  “Dying to hear more.”

  “More of the diary? You really want to hear more of my diary?”

  “Yes, I do want to hear more. And what about Mordechai?”

  “Anver, how old are you? We’ve stopped. Listen, just listen. Get old. Here. Why get excited about something we’re too old to do? Forget it. Here, enjoy our youth. Listen.”

  The voice continues:

  The Hong Kong metro wouldn’t be useful to us, but we explored it nonetheless. Dimitri, Mohammad or Charlemagne gave us tickets and expenses. We didn’t have to cloak and dagger to get the money; we just went to their offices on Great Russell Road. There was a sign outside that read: We terrorize rats, mice, ants, and other vermin: telephone 020 7249 5632. We used some of the money to meet prostitutes who ate pork five times a day. Circumcised dicks and pork breath.

  The trains in HK don’t have partitions and are long, hollow, metal snakes that drink water at each station because the geomancer tells them to. These trains would require front-end and back-end knaps with some timing, though I suppose we could wait until the trains were moving along a long straight stretch so the head and tail knaps could see each other when acceleration becomes a derivative of time. Allah-o-Akbar to the snake soup eaters. These Chinese stops do not fit into our mindset; the name-sound-mechanics don’t really work.

  Anver interrupts: “Are the stops in sequence? You may want to publish this thing one day.”

  “Just listen.”

  Tsim Sha Tsui, Lam Tin, Mei Fou, Fortress Hill and Admiralty. And it would not sound great on the telly—Terrorists Bomb Tsim Sha Tsui or Admiralty. The event would sound much better if it were something like Westminster Bomb Blast, London in Panic.

  It’s difficult to eat here: wall-to-wall pork. No, it’s not difficult at all. So we left them in peace. Besides, they have the dim sum nuke, so no one will touch them.

  A train moving in the opposite direction decelerates across my favourite Paris metro stop, Sèvres Babylone — did any one of you get on at this stop today? I ask people in the airplane that we once low-jacked (we forced the non-Islamic pilot to stay at 1000 metres above sea level).

  We thought about the Boston T for obvious reasons. It’s square, grid-organized, un-European, not a poetic system like Paris.

  One arm of it gushes out to the airport — where Mohammad Atta took his flight to NYC — with nonchalant-coat-over-the-shoulder Bill Clinton elegance.

  “Couldn’t have been Clinton.”

  “You’re right.”

  I don’t think any American is going to accept a Boston train stop named Mohammad Atta or Mohammed Ya’nni Kuss-Atta.

  “Why so many Mohammads in it?”

  “I could change the Mohammads. But to what? Javids? Wouldn’t that make it too local?”

  “And, I know you’re going to mention information you claim to have gotten in the 1980s but that you really got from the web today. This makes your diary inaccurate.”

  Nordic countries were a no go from HQ Wilberforce, U.K. Islam has no midnight sun and they have more human rights types than China. More utterly inconsequential human rights professionals than you can shake a stick at. I have translated the names via an online translation programme.

  Ruoholahti: Grass Bay;

  Rautatientori — Railway Square; Kulosaari . . . some kind of burning island; Siilitie — Hedgehog Road; Itäkeskus — Eastern Centre; Kontula — this could be the translation for the Hobbit
s’ homestead; Vuosaari — Bay Island in Finnish, North Sea in Swedish, whatever. We were there for twenty-four hours and came back on the tube, Fabians we are.

  Anver again interrupts: “You missed a word, it’s the Piccadilly Line.”

  “Thank you, Anver.”

  “What were you thinking about, rue Mordechai Vanunu?”

  We’re always, and I mean always, calculating Far Rockaway, Beach 25 St., followed by the imaginatively titled Beach 36 St. and Beach 44 St. These Anglo-Saxon boiled meat banalities are followed by Grand St. and a Mayflower echo: Brighton Beach.

  14

  Pilots Integrated with Allah

  On a large sea cruiser, we sail through the Arabian Sea at twilight. The call to prayer fades as Karachi becomes a red dot on the horizon. Liverpool. White English kids knee the young Paki’s nose in the slum school yard. Broken. Four British citizens with the help of an Egyptian national (recently proven to be innocent) suicide-bomb three underground tube stops and the number 30 bus. The Hollies sang about a bus stop, a girl, and an umbrella. They were referring to the number 30 bus in London. But how could The Hollies have known about the bombing, an event taking place forty years in the future? Rock musicians can be perceptive, eerily clairvoyant, and endlessly humanitarian. A few people were killed. Much ado about nothing, all things being equal — unless, of course, you’re an aunt or a father or brother or sister or a mother or a head of state who has to pretend to care.

  Career journalists say the Moslems who did the bombing are of Pakistani origin. Their mothers come from the following Pakistani cities: Yaro Lund, Croydon, Bradford, Leeds, Multan, Islamabad. The British authorities are asking Moslem leaders to expose the extremists within their fold. The Islamic leaders will do what is required. Publicly, the Prime Minister told us that the Iraqis had weapons of mass destruction. Some embassies helped us.

  Recently, the English crime-solving people tried to blackmail British citizens born in the terrorist countries.

  The white world unconditionally supports the Israelis. We are going to fly over a few settlements today. We’ve asked Tel Aviv control to let us descend to 500 metres. One wrong move and Ben Gurion will come back to life, lips and all. Israelis want land for Holocaust museums and shopping malls where Brooklyners can go shopping. Rock stars raise money for Africa, but Africa is finished, yet still good for Darwinians. Africa is a source for their books, which sell well and give these intellectuals prestige. Some of them love lions, tigers, snakes, and cats more than they love humans. A model of compassion created through an affection for lions, tigers, and snakes. Rock stars, giddy with money, think their twanging guitars will save the world. We should continue stealing their music on the internet and put an end to their Rolls Royces. Does Bruce Springsteen want starving Darfurians to sing “Born in the USA” or “I was born a rambling man”? Niggers with AIDS, clap your hands with Bruce Springsteen, remember we control the Strait of Hormuz; you need oil to transport that electric guitar from Seattle to Vancouver to Oman.

  The British intellectuals — all stupor mundi — who grew up eating chapattis and lamb curry see the suffering of weaker people including North Koreans. This — this whole community affair has nothing to do with Islam really. Democracy has two meanings simultaneously. Simultaneously — this is the key word. Who could have predicted we young Moslems with East and West Yorkshire accents would become the real activists independent of the embassies? Depending on someone else — why do that now? Now? When is now exactly? Democracy means support for policies that promote endless hate and decades of poverty for people without any power for niggers — PFPWPORN-General Command. This is what the democratic process is. Any fool can see that. One can’t legally send money to Hamasbergers. But you can send all the money you want to Tel Aviv. Like, this is kosher?

  Why did the Hounslow bombers take Turkish Airlines to Pakistan for madrassa studies? Why did they support the Turks? The Turks are Israel’s friends. Why didn’t they fly PIA: “Perhaps I Arrive” or “Please Inform Allah” or “Pilots Integrated with Allah”?

  You don’t have to be as smart as Edward Said or a whiz kid like Noam Chomsky to see through this? Doktor Said could play the piano and tennis and he banged a major literary critic from Ulan Bator. Really, you don’t have to play the piano or be an Egyptian-Palestinian tennis champ to see any of this. He played tennis with a famous tennis player and lost. MI5 won’t win either. The bang in London happened. This means they lost. MI5 are stupid pigs with posh-to-not-so-posh accents and degrees in linguistics from Oxbridge. Last fucking Oxbridge cunt I met could not spell jeeehad in Arabic. In the earlier post World War Two recruitment years they could write Arabic. But the PM takes the cake for stupidity. We have no intention of offing him. His final humiliation will be to legislate underground name changes for better cultural integration. PM, we are going to teach you a lesson that the Prince of Wales might understand before you will. Change the tube names or else we’ll bang your wife. And it’s that kind of bang not the other kind of bang — a bang that will get more minorities jobs doing weather reports on the television or something like that.

  Many blacks — even ones who have been denied education — now realize that they were pulled by their vaginal lips onto wooden ships. There will be black suicide bombings if the whites in power don’t become politically correct as per our standards.

  Usha’s in her apartment in London. She looks at the cell phone. A prolonged stare at the phone produces results: four earth shattering rings. “Hello,” the friendly telephone voice says.

  “They said do it? Yeah, you too, thank you. All okay? The location has been changed to neela tuttay. He is supposed to be . . . at another underground stop. Which one?”

  “Yeah. So I’ll call you later to give you address in London . . .”

  “You know exactly where that is? You’ll tell me more when I get there.” It’s an old person who answers the phone — a bit of a story left behind in my mind. Happens all the time, sometimes even with childhood friends. The twenty-first century memory pills take all the bugs out of the diskette of the previous century.

  “Good morning. How are you? Joseph?”

  “Who is speaking with me?”

  “Your doctor. Keep things together for a moment, we’ve some tests to do.”

  “I was pleasantly distracted for a few moments. Personal history. What’s in the newspaper today? I’m fine, thank you for asking.”

  “We have to do another test. Nothing serious.”

  “What’s serious at this stage?”

  “Just in case you live to two hundred years of age,” Linda says pleasantly.

  “Do you see me as just another patient?

  “No. But you’re my patient.”

  Joseph Macleod asks: “How can I be both? I’m your friend first right?”

  Linda looks at a book in the room. “What’s that book you’re reading?”

  “Nothing. It’s there just to attract your attention.

  They say old folks here sometimes fall in love.”

  “You don’t need to attract me with books. I like you without the books.”

  “Propaganda for the home. Loving nurse-client relationship.”

  “Can I take you for a walk outside?”

  “Let’s go. Where shall we go?”

  “What’ll you lecture me on today — local or global politics?”

  My nurse could go to the pearly gates before she gets to my age, perhaps in a car accident. I am still, even at my age, filled with pursuits. The other geezers were bankers or wives of geezer-bankers who still paint their nails. Bankrupting tissues — effects of the genotype on aging. See I’m reading about it all the time, as I wither.

  I’ll check my e-mail now, because I’ve not done so for days. Here is one I didn’t send:

  My Dearest:

  Why am I writing you again? In a distant way I felt the pain you must have felt. I’ll write again. Your occasional e-mails are manna from terrorist heaven. How’s your life by
the water? Lots of sunshine?

  Your Joseph

  I fold the codex and let the Muzak version of the Rolling Stone’s “The Last Time” bleed into my ears. A sunny summer day at a home’s small bowling green. An elderly person’s foot taps. Geriatric shoes. Geriatric skin. Balls rolling on the green lawn, crippled hands picking up balls. Breakfast, lunch, dinner, purgatory, hell or heaven.

  A tall, black nurse who has gone from man to woman, whom I don’t know, walks over to where I’m sunning myself. Now she’s gone and Nurse Linda enters the room.

  “Brittle winter day, obviously. Is this my five o’clock? Metallic multicoloured pills. Which tract is clogged now?”

  Nurse Linda is sombre today. “It is not for a clogged tract.”

  “Okay fine.”

  After a tactical pause — a few seconds. “Another detective called for you. He’s trying to get information from me. I’ll guard your secrets well. I know them all.”

  “Silly, what secrets do I have? They have nothing better to do than worry about something that happened years ago?”