Radius Islamicus

by Julian Samuel

  “If we are to have a friendship, then you must let me play a role in your life,” she says.

  “Okay, play the role of a woman who is sexually with a father figure, electrolysis of nurse.”

  “You’re a nasty man.”

  “Who’s paying me to love you?”

  “No one’s paying to love you,” she says. Affectionately, she leaves my room. I hear the sea outside. Maybe it’s just the ear chip charging. The chip works with light. Ears get lots of light. The uneventful waves gently slap at the hull; the shoo-shoo of the night wind enabling the refuge of sleep. Sleep, of course, but not without my headphones.

  Talk to me in a working-class London drawl.

  The time for multi-religious suicide bombers is on the horizon. We are just at the beginning. Nicaraguan liberation Catholics, Bolivian class-strugglers, Sikh goondas, and Colombian coke growers who don’t like Americans flying down from think tanks in Washington D.C. and privatizing their rain water will eventually see the power of the radius. Why should we use Gandhian tactics when you don’t?

  Whites have produced such smart people as Erwin Schrödinger, who showed us a dead cat and an alive cat at the same time. This trick is easier to do with two Korans. He said that the superposition of a dead cat and living cat in a quantum state means that a cat is alive and dead at the same time. No Arab has done this. Certainly not with camels in a superpositioned dual Hellenized quantum state. Riyadh superpositioned over Washington, Washington superpositioned over Riyadh. Dead camel in between. Border controls and ID cards will, in fact, make things easier. We already have so many ID cards that we could construct an airplane with them.

  This isn’t the old days of dealing with an IRA Paddy-puppy army whose members had their last Guinness at room temperature. With the belt, or the knapsack, or a duffle bag things aren’t at room temperature. Islamic intellectuals translated the Greeks for Europe. Europe wouldn’t have TGVs or particle accelerators if the Arabs hadn’t translated Socrates for them. From Iberia, the Islamic scholars carried these old translations to the British Library in duffle bags.

  A political scientist at a Chicago university thinks that these are not religious acts but political ones.

  Obama thinks these are religious acts. Both, Obama and this Chicago professor live in the same America at the same time, just like a dead and living cat.

  We sound that religious to you?

  15

  Van Gogh

  I hear another sound that drives me around the bend: the sound of Christmas carols, and of course, the tinkling of spoons against ornate china cups that guilt-ridden sons and daughters offer their parents. Oh, so slowly do they stir. My breathing is slow. Our collective breathing is slow. Our collective urine is fast. The asthmatics are kept elsewhere. No they are not; we all live together.

  The singalongers should be set aside, or should have a bowling ball lobbed at their heads. Bastards. The asthmatics have access to oxytaps at every corner — all bronchial congestion is gone for up to forty-eight hours. The geezers say that you could go to one of the three eternal places in the next forty-eight hours with previously congested lungs now working as clean as whistles, arriving at the pearly gates with clean lungs, and blackened souls.

  I blame, again, the guilty children. I’ve no children, so I must be jealous. Really, I have no children? Ah come on. What about that woman in the airport? The smell of old age urine, medicines, and cleaning chemicals annoys me. Squeaky wheelchairs add to my hearing loss. Even with the modern hearing-aid. Their squeaking erodes my eardrums. But I keep hearing them more and more clearly. Can my hearing be improving? Is there a new pill for deafness? Nowadays, yes, there’s a pill — an ear pill.

  Our hallways are broad. Large majestic reproductions of Cézanne or Van Gogh in his Arles-or-something-like-it phase don’t impress me. We have a pretentious director of this home for the aged, the dying, and the voluntarily non-contemplative. No shortage of this last group.

  One old man buzzes by them on his motorized wheelchair. The wheelchair buzzard leaves a trail of art historian urine. He’s drooling from the mouth, tearing along, loudly pronouncing all the names of all the painters in the long hall: “Cezanne, Renoir — Dejeuner sur l’herbe, The Raft of the Medusa — with blacky on top, Pissarro —too many dots . . . too many dots . . .” Our home director had a thing for the 19th century European painters.

  I never thought I’d continually see trees swaying in the south of France to the smell of old age, and a view of the Saint Lawrence River marking off the days. This art historian life ends. I want to go to Montreal for a medium smoked meat.

  I have not quite closed my codex: a voice emerges asking me if I am sure I want to shut down. It is a voice with an accent I’ve never heard before. It’s a computer manufactured voice, the pull down menu on the screen offers:

  Select geographical accent:

  The pull-down menu offers two hundred choices of current countries in addition to another hundred voices for countries in different historical eras.

  Select accent voice layering accent:

  Three hundred choices, by country. I’ve selected a downtown, working-class Port Moresby accent, layered with California Valley Girl, I kid you not: this is actually a choice my codex offers. And for background sound, I’ve selected nineteenth-century train whistles.

  Please allow me to return to that plane we hijacked. This is exactly the kind of old-fashioned terrorism we don’t want to conduct any longer. It is messy and anti-intellectual, and turns the West against us; ideally we want to do things that will make the West like us more.

  We want to — or rather it is not a question of want so much as need to — invent new ways. We took photos of ourselves with the passengers, some of whom resented this. People in these kinds of situations want to retaliate against us — I can see it in their eyes. A Finnish woman of forty-five, with blond hair and an hourglass body, seated in row 21 seat C — travelling alone to a vacation resort in the darker parts of the world referred to our photos as trophy photos and found us rude. The word “rude” hurt me. I mean, does she not find all the inequality in the world rude? I mentioned this to her while I was patrolling the A380. As I confidently walk the aisles she adds: “Surely, there must be other ways to address your problems?”

  “Aren’t my problems your problems?”

  “Your problems are your problems”

  “Perhaps I will have a problem if the army arrests us all when we land.”

  “Where are we landing, then?”

  “Where are we landing? Where they can’t arrest us. If they arrest us, we will kill many people in their cities.”

  What we are doing is called terrorism, but as you can see this is not terrorism; it is a kind of near-tourism. Passengers, you are now part of “Operation Balance Israel.” The current head of the U.K. has banned showings of The Battle of Algiers — a film we saw in Kandahar, during our graduate studies, I mean our real graduate studies, so graduate that some of us didn’t come back for further earthly studies. The current head of the U.K. is spending ten million extra to protect his elected members of parliament. We’re having an effect. We have degrees in literature, history, chemistry, and queer studies and we even know a bit about a Russian poet who always wore yellow shirts.

  Do your soldiers have funny accents? No. Neither do we. We’re the New Islamo-Model Army. Right on your doorstep. Right here beside your red top milk bottle. Ah, here is the chief of your airport now addressing you. A tense silence like the one that Mullah X786 used to instil in our classes now exists in our captured plane.

  His image appears on all the seat screens. A grey man in his early forties calmly states: “We are unable to prevent take off. We regret this. They — they have asked me to use the word they, and this exact text has been written by them. They have surrounded many airports, Hong Kong, Heathrow, O’Hare, Ben Gurion and Charles De Gaulle with nuclear bombs. We’ve given them clearance. We regret this. They said they regret this also. I have bee
n asked to read it all to you.”

  I use the address system:

  “Hello passengers, Sandra Qureshi directly from the tribe of Mohammad (PBUH) will offer you some pork-free food as soon as we’re in the air. It’ll be the very first flight you will take without those boring emergency demonstrations. Madame Mazlooum to my left with the Uzi is not veiled and is wearing a modest mini. Would you like me to continue with my A-rab accent or ought I to continue with my normal Lake Districtesque English? I see a few nods. Okay, Lake District it is. Please to tell me yanne. Qwais. We’ve arranged for you to watch Lawrence of Arabia, One Night Stand, and/or Harry Potter with wog subtitles. In the hold we are carrying the Elgin Marbles with parachutes. You have our permission to use your cell phone to make calls for the duration of the flight.”

  Anver interrupts: “You’ve mentioned cell phones. This is false.”

  “Anver, this is a personal diary of our past — surely I can make up a few things.”

  And now, it is time for takeoff. And for anyone whose battery power has run out we can offer you one of our phones. By special arrangement we will fly low sometimes as low as 850 metres. You’ll get a better view of the cities — cities, which, as one of your progressive gay and lesbian French historians writes are always stages in the preparation for war. This view of cities and the land will give you a unique once-in-a-lifetime flying experience — thanks to what you might call terrorism. Use your cell phones and tell your friends and loved ones that you are fine. Here are the phone numbers to the main newspapers — send them photos: we’ll pose with your children if you want. I want to be on the front page of The Telegraph hugging one of the kids.

  Notice the Harriers starboard side? Watch, I’ll make them drop their course. Imram Khanmann, dear. The vector-thrusted Harriers fall from view. What’s worse: being hijacked or listening to my stories?

  16

  Teleportation

  It’s Monday afternoon: singalong time. My wrinkled mouth makes the required sounds. Why should my wrinkled mouth make the sounds? Hell with that. I walk away. However, within myself, I protest, and I shall in writing. I have a petition in hand. No, I don’t. It is all in my head. No physical petition. Yes, I’m very capable of making the sounds for the singalong. A Beatles song. People in this century are fond of dismissing things that happened a few years ago by saying that something or another happened in the last century. Well then, what is the name of the song? Now, what would be suitable to sing at an old folks home? Rigby something? Martha Rigby, no, that’s not it. Must be Michelle Rugby. Guess again, old man. No, it is Yellow Submarine. And we’ve — no they’ve — been singing this song all week. I am thinking about complaining to the director. I’ll get a petition together after all. I want to be entertained. I know I’m way over seventy, but what can I do if I don’t march with this petition. Grin, geezer. And I will not sing Yellow under the waves of Britannia. Yellow World War Two, sausages with windows under the ocean blue. What old geezers are going to sign my petition? Geezers, that is forbidden. The Forbidden City of Geezers. Words offend, but I never get offended, because I’ve an education.

  Birds twitter on the fertilizer-driven lawn in a summer afternoon. I can see a few bowling balls clanking against each other. This is my last rendezvous with the literary world of the personal diary. My thought filled life diminishes.

  The nurse comes into the false-sun-filled room to give me my three o’clock; she’s young, the sun never sets for her. Endless blossom, born in the last century, or so she says. She should be promoted to head nurse, because she gets emotionally close to the residents. Biologically speaking, we are at the beginning of the human clone era and, in the news, there is vague scientific talk of teleportation.

  Someone in Hong Kong moved a wonton to Macao via a telephone line, or via satellite or something. I’m sure that’s what I heard on the news. The oil companies are very interested in this way of moving goods. Why? Well, because there are insurance fees: the scientists tell us it’s so flawless that nothing ever gets damaged. Someone in California is trying to move a mouse to New York with stringweb, mouse to satellite and back. I’ll see it when I believe it. Our goal was to demolish this empty capitalism which took a mouse from one hemisphere to another; we wanted badly to replace capitalism with something nicer; sure we were prepared to use some capitalist modes of production but we had had enough of this global neoliberal mouse-eat-mouse-ism. We were and are to this day for the collective ownership of production. Before boarding any flights for distant operations, I lectured my unit about capitalism before, during, and after every operation.

  17

  Servant

  Usha walks into my room in the middle of day. Will she die today while talking on the phone to her son or has that already happened? I think she is sitting in front of me showing me her family photographs. I have taken to Earl Grey and its aroma brings her back, not as the Irish woman with her son James across the pond, but as another woman whom I knew.

  Here’s what happened a few minutes before her departure: We are sitting chatting in her room looking at photos of her past, some as crinkled as mountain ranges on an old globe. She takes the photographs with shiny black and white surfaces out of the box. Because of the sunlight falling into her room, I have to tilt them to get a clear view; otherwise the content of the photos is obliterated. Moving the photos out of the sunlight adds drama to seeing them.

  “When was this taken?”

  “This one with me in the navy blue V-neck sweater? Yes, that’s me. What did you want to know? This is me when I was engaged in Cairo. That’s my boyfriend beside me. He now works at the Asian Bank in Manila. Lots of smog there now, I wouldn’t want to live there.”

  Her shaking hands present me with another photo: again sunlight clears away the content until I tilt it away from the sun.

  “This one’s by the seaside?”

  Delicately, she turns the less-than-palm-sized photo over and reads: Photo studio, Alexandria, nineteen something, something, something.

  “Scared to tell me your age?” I ask, touching her knee. She passes me another nearly faded one in colour.

  “A servant?”

  “She was like family. We took her on vacation with us. Not so sure if she had an idea what a vacation was. She is dead.”

  “Yes, vacations. Do you think we’re having one now?”

  “This servant — all dressed in a galabaya — we loved her: we went through many servants. One from the Sudan. She died.” Usha sips her tea. The scent wafts by my nose. I offer her a cookie.

  “Diabetic. Don’t you remember?”

  “What’s this? A class trip to upper Egypt?”

  “Yes. Lovely, isn’t it? There’s Nina Berunie, Huda Lufti, Saleem Kiddy, Rasheed Nadeem, la petite Italienne, Carla Florenteno, Patrick the English diplomat’s son. He had a Scottish accent. I slept with him due to Nassar’s revolution. He was circumcised. Raoulf, in the corner, that one is married and now has three children in their sixties. Our families were friends. His sons and daughters visited me, you know. But that was when you weren’t here. Yet. Or was that when you had gone to England and were coming back by ship. I don’t remember, do you? I remember you called from the ship or from somewhere. Here’s another. In colour.”

  “Were you at university, or high school when this one was taken?”

  “This was second-year university. Here’s another one of a religious aunt. Have I already shown you the one of the religious aunt? Lovely bonnet or cowl. Do you want more tea? She never got married. I remember remembering her. And there’s my father. Banker. Kind banker. You’d have liked him.”

  18

  Frankfurt School

  Everyone is sleeping. A few night nurses are on duty. They don’t wear white uniforms at night; that’s how forward-looking this home is. I’m in my room. My clock freezes for sixty seconds at twenty-three hours and thirty-two minutes. I’m not sure if I’ve been talking to Anver or Iqbal — who is Iqbal anyway? Was it today or the nig
ht before? I walk down past rooms 259, 260, 261 to his room, or let me ask myself if I was walking back to my room after having already visited him earlier today, because things don’t seem to be in order: rooms 261, 260 and 259? Sequentialism and its discontents.

  Iqbal falls asleep later than the others, like me. The home is filling with night sounds: a blood-filled cough way down the other end, a Frankfurt School snoring from 259, buckets of blood coming out from 261. Nurses are slipping and sliding all over it. The scene fades to old-age black. The wall-to-wall carpet on the second floor where they do routine tests is grey with tiny threads of pink and blue like an intestine opened up at a metro stop. Guts meshed in marble. All the other floors are some kind of stone faux-marble or granite or something cheaper. It’s easier to clean a hard surface than a carpeted one. A few weeks ago, I think someone spilt some blue liquid on this faux-marble floor.

  I’m in my room sitting beside the window. The snow-covered carpet outside looks like something fluffy at Walmart. I get up and walk down the hall, which is being repainted a faint blue; it’s night time — the people painting the halls have left. A section of the shiny concrete floor, or whatever kind of stone, is covered with a green plastic tarpaulin; this makes my slippers sound different than walking on the shiny floor. My hearing-aid catches rustling plastic the painters use to cover the floor. This is the second time I hear the sound of my footsteps change today. Quite an event. I am — with due respect for chronology — coming back from Iqbal’s room. Yet, now, suddenly, Iqbal is lying on his bed looking directly forward. Thought you’d died?

  “Hello, John,” he says.

  I am moving out of my own dream into Iqbal’s world. But is Iqbal’s world in my dream? How could I be moving out of my dream into Iqbal’s world without both of us being in my dream?