Radius Islamicus

by Julian Samuel

  “I’m not about to croak. Not this afternoon anyway.”

  What were my intellectual pursuits? Oh, they were fun. In a way of looking at things: Head of an academic department, I was. I tell her all this, because she asks. No it was not fun. Then she laughs. Stupid academic in-fighting. 365 days of the year: the liberals vs. The Liberals vs. the people who really know things. Foxes and hedgehogs. This makes her really laugh. I ran the most important Islamic studies department in the world. Yes, that’s true, it’s true. She smells ever so lightly, touched with a field of not very redolent flowers, fox or mink bladders, and she’s so positive. Her perfume reminds of me of an old girlfriend waking me from an afternoon nap by kissing me: all flowers. Professionally, Linda isn’t obligated to be so positive toward me. I’m falling in love with an old woman here.

  “Oh they all say they were the biggest and the best,” she says, joking again.

  “Why do you criticize me, Linda? Most of the people here are bourgie ex-civil slaves.”

  “Not criticizing. Flirting. You challenge me.”

  Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D minor helps the river flow outside my window.

  I’m in my room sitting and looking out at the river. Linda is wearing a purple sweater, which shows a lovely outline. She emerges into my field of view from the hallway. Where else is she to emerge from? The room exists because of the hallway: the hallway exists because death is part of life. My vision of the hallway exists because my eyes exist. My eyes exist because I am alive. Analytical moments like this make me happy. Happiness is when the sad memories are suppressed. Sad memories can have no hold in the correctly treated chemical mind. Sad memories for killing all those innocent people who did nothing to deserve it. These sad memories become SS memories: Super Sadder memories for the two donkeys that got killed near Paris — where the French had set up a nineteenth-century mock Arab village with whites dressed as Arabs doing Arab things like calculating the sale of dates with abacuses. In the newspaper, the French officials very intentionally said that the donkeys were from the Quresh region of Saudia Arabia. So we had to. And we did. Ah sadness, the mind, and the utterly innocent donkeys, whose heads merged together during the flash and bang. I had the donkeys respectfully buried. I mean in my mind I had the donkeys buried with full Islamic honours. The mind only exists due to chemicals one could argue.

  What I have before me right at this moment are chemicals, the view of the River Ravi from Pierrefonds, all chemicals. Sure, it’s all motion and something, but didn’t one of the big scientists change motions and something with chemicals and something? Isn’t the word something in its print incarnation made out of chemicals? I’m having one of those days when one thing is part of another thing. Circle after circle on the first day of taking new pills. And then on the second day: I see a clear blue day with stark clarity until the satellites come home. However, there is a super rush for four hours after taking the pills: the compartments within my mind generate walls and then almost suddenly I have a history of myself. Here’s when I did this: day number, year number; and here’s when I did that; day number, year number; so on and so forth.

  I’ve made this mistake before somewhere. At once, I initiate things: “Tatjana Lucrece has gobs of money rotting in the bank; rotting like the last piece of pepper steak and Brussels sprouts the embalmer takes out. She has a drop-dead beautiful daughter.”

  Linda says: “You shouldn’t be talking about embalmers. And why are you thinking of her daughter?”

  “All looks. No brains for the market, that’s what she says. That’s what her mother says.”

  Linda sets a tray of food down on a small table. “I saw her daughter and spoke with her. Not all a waste—very intelligent, I thought. She does visit regularly, does she? Is that the impression you got?”

  Sunday. Visitors’ day at the Zoo — a zoo in which the animals are cared for by the same animals who are slightly younger animals of some kind. There is an exchange of money for this service. I look at the vegetables on the plate. I say to myself, I wouldn’t wipe Tatjana Lucrece’s arse with them. Something happened to her the other day, and guess what? A young nurse had to wipe her arse. Nothing replaces the pleasure of having your arse wiped by a young visible minority nurse who can’t get a job elsewhere due to his or her race. Ah, the pleasure of getting old. Guess who told me? Prejudicial shit, pardon the pun, again.

  Dinner is over, the plates and cutlery are being cluttered away. The hallway is now filled with a river of oldies on walkers, wheelchairs, all off to the garden to sit in the sunshine — under sun-blocking umbrellas. Some wait for visiting sons and daughters. How can we have sunshine after supper? It must be summer.

  Here I am again in one of my confused out-loud monologues. Linda isn’t supposed to hear them, but does because I’m saying them into my recorder. Politely, she notices me noticing her.

  I turn to Linda, she expresses no surprise. We’ve become close. “Professionally, you aren’t obligated to be so positive,” I tell her, even though she’s not really the one I’m drifting into love with. I say thank you, knowing that I may be the caring, highly-educated father she may fantasize about. She, of course, knows that her fantasizing must fade. It is impossible to see a father or a mother in every near-pearly-gater in this last stop before ending up as subatomic particles to be judged and reconfigured by God and then spewed out of a galaxy-producing nursery, galaxies somewhere out there in Hubbleland. I tell her all this and she laughs. I hide nothing from Linda. She knows it’s all airless drama.

  Hours later, the drama evolves in my head despite being too old to be a terrorist. Brothers and sisters it’s five in the morning: I can’t sleep because I’ve a tactical odour in my mind. Odour? Tactical? How? If a particular odour is coupled with a precise time when that odour is presented to the public it becomes tactical. The odour that I’m familiar with is urine — Noachian loads of it—but we couldn’t use urine to cause terror. Partially, our Wahhabis connections paid for the smell of piss which is always near our noses; but I’m dreaming of a different smell, different from the gases used in 1915.

  Still in my pyjamas, I confidently and slowly walk past the rooms with different numbers on their doors. I perform cumulative sums of the numbers on the doors and squeeze that sum through the function ψ | x | to determine at the exact time our Mohammads will do the acts I’ve designed. This rewarding mental activity leads me to the time when the events will happen. They will happen at 08:13. These events did happen. It’s all there, not in black and white, as in the old days, but in zeros and ones. Am I boasting unwarrantedly? Aging non-state actors like me never put on airs. Even when we get old we think in rational blocks producing action and balance. Sure, some of us in our youth owned houses with swimming pools in Palestine, and champagne made in the holy city Karachi; of course, the champagne smelt of urine mixed with Egyptian donkeys and camel skins from Bohri Bazaar.

  As early morning light falls on the hallway floors, I walk along to Anver’s room and knock on his door. He’s sleeping lightly, he always does. The slightest noise or sliver of light wakes him. After knocking, I open the door. A knife-like line of light from the hallway falls on his face.

  “Anver, are you awake? Can you listen to my idea for further justice.” Now, he’s as alert as the ethnic nationalist French-Canadian birds outside. I say: “In a few minutes, can you please call the rest of them here so we can organize a simple event in the Montreal metro and the Toronto subway? Call Muhammad, Muhammed, Mohamed, Mohammad, and white-skinned and blueeyed Muhameti.”

  These men are ever so slightly younger than us and are here living with us as false oldies in case something happens. They don’t need any equipment at all, just 1.5-litre containers for gasoline each.

  I look at Anver and say: “I’m sick of getting old. This aging process makes me want to conduct vitrification against the people who conduct imperialism. My memory is better than what it used to be. This is due entirely to the memory pills. I get nostalgic, I think
we need to do something as a parting gift.”

  Anver says: “Who’s parting? I’m in good health. What should I tell our Mohammads?”

  “Tell them we have thought up something that will put two cities into a state of panic and there’ll be a real loss of money, but not people — that, of course will come later. People can’t get to work, this will cost both cities lots of money.”

  “What do you have in mind?”

  “Oh, it’s modest and super cheap; we’ll not have to ask for supplies at all. What’ll we’ll need are a few litres of gasoline. I’m planning to spend only a few dollars and it’ll all be done with gasoline which the collective Mohammads can buy anywhere.”

  “But cars don’t use gasoline anymore. Everything is electric. No gas,” Anver says.

  “Mistake. There was a period in our recent history which had people using electric cars but some drivers went back to gas. In fact, more than seventy-five percent went back to gasoline. Also, most terrorism heats things up. Vitrification happens at -135 C — so of course we can see this as methodological meliorism over hot terrorism. Sure, they’d be dead but not blown apart — just frozen to death. Freezing them to death would cost more than all the oil in Saudi Arabia. It would be fun to freeze the royal family to death in the hottest part of the world.”

  Anver says: “We’ve been here that long? I know we came ages ago thinking that no one would look for us here. Joseph, when on earth did we move in here? Yeah, sure we can get some gasoline. How are you going to use it? It’s not super explosive you know.”

  We came to see the Toronto subway where there is an x, y axis with some extensions at the eastern end of their subway lines. This breaks the symmetry a wee bit but Torontonians have the Yonge and Bloor lines which run under the city. How are we, men and women in our seventies and eighties, to do high terrorism when only young people can do it? And which underground system do we hit?

  We organized it with about six or so litres of gasoline which we purchased from somewhere — it was still possible to buy gas in this early-mid-century.

  “What can we do with petrol?” Anver asks.

  From flexible plastic sacs they’ll wear, they spill gasoline on the various platforms at the Toronto Finch station and the Montreal station Montmorency. The same odour at Kennedy and Honoré Beaugrand. And Berri UQAM-Bloor-Yonge and Kipling-Angrignon; followed by the time-odour complex of Shia Benzine Pars at Snowdon and Saint-Michel.

  “This will not hurt anyone. We’ll have our people empty a litre and a half of gasoline at each end of the metro system as well as some gas in the centre at Yonge and Bloor. The spills will have to be done within a nanosecond of each other. The exact time connected with the exact smell will make the imperialists listen. It’s the least we can do. We aren’t going to live forever. That we do this at the exact time and with the same smell will convert into a threat, showing our skills. Further action will be implied by this act, but we’ll stay quiet and hope the younger ones will convert the smell to other acts. The smell will be read by the youth to act now. Act now. The older generation is dying off.”

  Anver says: “If we spill in Montreal and Toronto at the same time — you say 08:13 in both places — they will close down the transportation system. And, it’ll be normal Hollywood for them to think that Islamics will be sending flaming subways trains hurtling non-stop through stations. Both Torontonians and Montrealers will see burning trains with screaming passengers converting into charcoal, pressed up against windows, speeding through the Yonge and Bloor station, through Finch station, through Kipling station and burrowing through the Canadian earth, under Kingston to violently emerge in Montreal’s Berri UQAM. Flames to high heaven. We’ll fill the entire two metro systems with flaming subway trains speeding through stations.”

  “Anver, nothing like that at all. No one will be killed. We want to show the West that we can be inventive and not as cruel as they’ve been. They’ll close down the transportation in both cities, costing them millions of dollars.”

  Anver says: “Why don’t we do a worthless peaceful demonstration with placards? This doesn’t sound like anything classical: not hot, not cold, polite as a Sunday don’t you think?”

  “We should bomb the Great Barrier Reef — not so Sundayish is it? And the human count would be low. Truth be told, we sunk drums with explosives onto the reefs and powered the cute little colours.”

  22

  Dairy Queen

  I think polite people are ugly. Even if they are not ugly, they become ugly. Their politeness makes their faces wrinkle, their testicles hang, their breasts sag in evacuated pink sacs, thrombotic veins like on the legs of a camel. But this recollection is not about someone polite. This recollection is about a woman I knew. She lived in the Plateau-Mont-Royal area of Montreal in an apartment on Hutchison where the Greek Orthodox church meets the Dairy Queen.

  Usha. Now dead. Now alive. Now standing in a clawfoot bath surrounded by red shower curtains, water falling all over her face, which is no longer covered with the taut olive skin that once graced her facial bones. Showers are always moments of great pleasure for her. Tantamount to the excitement of world football. There’s flirtation in those poignant hazel eyes: her spotted wrinkled hand palms the frizzy luminous hair out of her eyes. It’s grey, not black. Her grey white breasts sag like fried eggs attached to her collar bone with blue veins.

  Voices emerge from the ice cream eaters at the Dairy Queen outside. She washes her vagina; the lips too have extended in wave-like folds, and they droop like my balls. But they are not sad. From the bathroom window I see the Greek Orthodox priest in his black robe walking away from the DQ with a banana split in his hands.

  The soap suds of the aged are gentler than the brutally brushed-on soap of the young. Her furrows multiply in the landscape of drooping skin. She puts lots of cream on her feet — if she doesn’t they become so dry that they look like the Rubia El Khali.

  I’ve walked into the bathroom to watch you bathe, to watch one particular bead of water follow a predetermined stream to the hole in the bottom of the tub. The hole where all existence goes. The suds of the dead or near-dead are modified in the guts of the living. On the undertaker’s table bits of insides are washed down a similar hole.

  “Why and how did we get here?” I ask you. I ask you in my memory of you — I mean as I sit here in front of nurse Linda.

  “Pass me the soap and stop asking the big questions all the time,” you reply, smiling. Linda says: “Pass me the soap — who is asking you to pass the soap. Who’s inside your head today. Joseph, who is there?”

  I ignore Linda’s question and fall back into an old girlfriend’s life.

  Your hair is still dense and is captured in a white shade of grey. The skin on your arms now hangs like fins. I slowly rub soap on them. You make cooing sounds. Yes, my little one I am soaping you. I give birth to gentle old folks’ lather. Your mouth is softened by removed dentures. Slowly, you turn toward the water; the suds wash away.

  “I like your fins, are you becoming a fish?” I ask, touching her flesh under her arms.

  “I’m becoming a fish, yes, you’re becoming a fish,” she says, putting her arms around me. She holds me. I love her. My shirt is wet with her water. I drape a long white towel around her shoulders. She reaches for her glasses. It’s been decades since I had a black hair on my body.

  23

  Schnittke, Stravinsky

  Jean is the cook with whom I’ve become friends. Old Europe, for Jean, means high culture. Saint Martin-in-the-Fields with airborne cooks, pots, pans, cauldrons, and spatula falling on the concrete kitchen floor making a musical noise like the William Tell Overture. Because of his class or ethnic background — one hundred percent French-Canadian, farmer father — he is unable to appreciate the jagged, urban, wood-winds-used-as-metallically-percussive instrumental complexities of Igor Stravinsky. Ethnic background has nothing to do with his dislike of the early modern ones. He told me a few days ago that Stravinsky was d
eeply connected with the church. He’s read the CD cover notes. Yes, that fact had slipped my mind; Stravinsky and I are old pals. How could anyone so modern harken back to the dirty church? What inspiration could such a pre-rational institution give him? There are, precisely, no answers.

  But the music is irrational, it does not refer to birds in a field, a pending thunder storm, a small bird in the Russian countryside, a prattling brook. Stravinsky’s music is like placing some kind of separate boxes of sound beside one another in a large muffin tray and changing their positions so different sound combinations appear.

  I’m English upper class, went to public terrorist school without ever getting sexually molested — that was an accomplishment for the nineteen-fifties: laugh if you want to. I lived for ages in an airport. The teachers did not prey on me, nor did my fellow students. For England, that’s a feat. I ask Jean what he thinks about Elgar: does he think about rain when he listens to composers?

  Jean and I go for a drive in the country. I can see raindrops washing the leaves clean of the raised dust. Due to bumps in the road, we slow down to walking speed. The hot August bush hums with insects and birds. A flock of yellow finches in the dense wall of evergreens gives us momentary glimpses of long, cool lakes. I can hear pebbles being crushed under the tires; then, when the small road becomes asphalt once again, Jean changes to third gear. The walls of bleached wood side barns lean inward toward each other. I see roadside vegetable stalls.

  “Stop, I want to buy some fruit and veggies.” He pulls over on the side of the road, and lights a cigarette. A few cars zip by. A dozen corn cobs for two dollars and fifty cents; a bag of cucumbers, one dollar and fifty cents; squash for even cheaper. Country fruit stalls evolve into the large supermarkets as we pass a few medium-sized towns. Here, far from Montreal, these supermarkets have various spices for making curries; fresh coriander — which no true Orientalist can live without — things that one would never have dreamed of getting a few years ago. Fat farmers with salt-of-the-earth hands sell tomatoes mixed with the genes of white rhinos. The seller hands me what I have paid for in a plastic bag made from oil of Saudi Arabia. “D’autre chose, monsieur?” Yes, more white rhino, less Saudi Arabia in my tomatoes if you please. “No thank you,” I say with a smile. We never used the air conditioning. Pro-environmental types we are.