Radius Islamicus

by Julian Samuel

  We’re back to another small road. Jean turns to the left, avoiding potholed passages. Trees, thinking that the road is a river, cower as if to drink through the eddies of dust our car makes. The windy wake leadeth them to still waters, and, with optimism, the low branches recoil back to their loftier positions. More rain is imminent, and we have ample proof that a fox must be getting married, because the sun is shining at the same time that it is raining.

  The subject now has become classical music. “People who haven’t any training in classical music tend to try to pass judgments of one kind or another. Why try to guess who composed it? You want to make yourself sound cultured, educated and sensitive?”

  “I just like it,” he confidently replies, adding: “Push the lighter in for me, will you.” We’re good enough friends to have an argument.

  “If you just enjoy it, then why do you have to let me know that you’re oh-just-so-curious about, what, when, and who composed it?” I had no idea that rural Quebec had such a vast network of roads with so many turns. “This isn’t a highway? Why is every road named after a saint?”

  The mood has changed, and it’s all my fault. Jean thinks that I am trying to annoy him. I subject him to further opprobrium: “Why can’t you simply keep the questions about who and when composed whatever inside you? Why try to indirectly embarrass me by saying: ‘Look, you don’t know.’ Why not go to the library one day and spend a few hours about who, what, baroque or not baroque, atonal or not atonal, modern or not so modern, plainsong or not plainsong? The learning experience would satisfy you. But no, you have to try to be cultured about it. You have to let others know that you know about classical music, even if it’s an awfully tiny little bit. Whoopee shit. So you can name a few composers — the most obvious ones — wow can you really tell the difference between Mozart, Paganini and Schnittke? Holy shit, this makes you an expert on classical music. Thing is, you don’t know the first thing about music technically. Certainly nothing about it historically. So what’s the point in name dropping? Does this represent culture for you? Bucolic curiosity makes you cultured. Yes of course that will make you look highly cultural in the French-Canadian world.”

  “You’re making it impossible to have a discussion with you. Why are you like this today?”

  His old black car of Germanic extraction moves down kilometres of gravel road.

  “Mean? About a truth? What truth were you’re going to utter?”

  “Your attacks say nothing to me; they don’t expose my character flaw, but yours. All you want is to hate and embarrass me. That’s it, isn’t it?”

  He lights another cigarette. “That’s the truth about your real intentions isn’t it? Admit it. You see nothing nice in me. I am all pretentiousness, simple-minded — admit that’s all you see in me. I’m always nice and generous with you.”

  As the car moves on, more self-deluded trees lap up water. A splendid pewter-coloured lake tilts in the horizon as we turn. My homily continues: “Yes, I admit I’m fond of invective. Nothing wrong with that when truth is concerned. Invective produces truth. Politeness hides the truth. You haven’t any real interest in anything except for Hollywood banalities, and even there it’s just so you can say that you’ve seen it.”

  “Should I leave real ideas to intellectuals such as you? Why are you hitting me like this? I am Jean, your cook. You opened my world a little and now you’re hitting me.”

  “Yes, Jean, you’re right. A pusillanimous thinker such as you can’t really hurt me back, can you?” Whoops, I can see the tears? Whoopsy, he’s crying now.

  “You’re a one-dimensional cook.”

  “I am not crying.” He has a tremor in his voice.

  “Now what are your interests? Gardening? Bad cooking? Non-newsworthy news? Phoning your mother? Soliciting your father’s views on politics. So learned that twenty black ants could carry all his ideas for twenty years.” He’s fully in tears now. I bring a unencompassable rationality to his thinking. And he’ll win because, in the end, I’ll have to apologize before we get back to the home. He’s the servant I’ve beaten. I offer to light him a cigarette: that’ll calm him. Mustn’t get to the tears, not quite, not now.

  The conversation has hidden the fact of indicator lights blinking on and off in sync with the light on the dashboard. Click, then the dashboard light, click, then the dashboard light, click, then the dashboard light.

  “Turn the indicator off for fuck’s sake, are you turning or what?”

  Providentially, more rain begins to fall in fat drops on the windscreen. My memory of Damascus fades into a long lake. He closes the sun roof. God replaces his tears with rain. Allegorical afternoon we’re having. Music, composers, rain, tears, no tears. Smoke, more smoke. Our conversation is unending. I say I’m sorry. He says ok, no problem, but I feel like a bit more argument, just to keep me in shape.

  Linda’s at the routine task of taking my blood pressure. She has on fox bladder perfume.

  “Linda, tell me where you were born, I don’t know a thing about you.”

  She’s wearing a long black dress with a V-neck today. She’s tanned because she just came back from a Caribbean vacation.

  “Well then, if you can’t tell me about yourself, can you tell how your vacation was? Who did you go with? Where did you go?”

  “I went with a friend.”

  “Male or female? Female until midnight?” I ask. Silence.

  “I see. No information, I see.”

  “I was born right here in Montreal.”

  “You deserve better.”

  “Joseph, that’s a very biased remark, isn’t it?”

  “Suppose it is. Suppose it is.”

  “Get into trouble in the slave-dominated Caribbean?”

  “What could you possibly mean by that?”

  “What do I possibly mean by that?” I repeat into her nice face. “What is it about me that you find . . .”

  “I know you were accused of something very bad . . . maybe murder, but you were . . . ”

  “It was thrown out of court. No proof.”

  “I know you’re innocent. But you did arrange it all, didn’t you?”

  “You see, you’re falling in love with me. Yes, I arranged it all.”

  “How did that happen? What did you do?”

  “I love it when you ask for details.” I point my hand to birds on a tree on the snowy lawn.

  Nurse Linda admits that she did some research on the issue of the codex. She must have been reading my diary, or someone told her something.

  “That’s about it. And now there’s some new evidence.”

  “Are you ever going to talk to these detectives?”

  “Haven’t I just done exactly that?”

  24

  Strait of Hormuz, Bernadette Aodhfionn

  Idream that Usha, dressed in a black skirt and white shirt, waits for me to arrive. She’s the same age as when I met her, north of 77 and thin. She’s at the airport and she’s back to smoking. In the distance, she sees the arrival and departure announcement board. She is nervous. It has been ages since she has seen me. A red line under a certain flight announcement flashes “arrived.” I walk down to arrivals so she won’t have to see me from the observation café. She is excited despite the funeral she has to face tomorrow. She is coming to the home to live. Is that what is happening, am I picking her up so she can live with us?

  For some strange reason, she’s late coming out of arrivals. Why? They have nothing on her. They have nothing on me. The authorities always arrest the wrong Islamics. They supplied us with the explosives — they got that right. Open the bodies — you’ll see the traces of steak and kidney pie explosives — they didn’t do that. They arrested a few Moslems from working-class backgrounds. As usual. Stupid cunts. What are they asking her? Where were you on the morning of such and such a terror date? Who are you to ask? On the morning of the events of London Bridge, I was in Iran — advising them on how to block the Strait of Hormuz, how to hit Israel; how to ad
mit that the Palestinians are over. And, now the project is to stop the Jewish State from taking over Islamabad. The Palestinians no longer matter. They are cannon fodder. Well, Mr. Canadian-Immigration-officer-working-to-keep-Jews-happy: I was in Bloomsbury performing Moslem blowjobs on a corpse while my Islamic friends pull jewellery — rings and necklaces — off the dead and deadish heavenish.

  I continue waiting for her to come out of arrivals. Christ, they are not questioning her, are they? I remember my training in terror central. Stay cool. Never move too fast. I imagine her within transit walking from McDonald’s to a bookstore; then back again to a transit bar; chatting with the woman working in the bar; chatting with the staff working at various ticket counters. She is walking slowly throughout Trudeau International. She is now staring at the Zionist Air Lines counter. She shows her landing card to the uniformed white French-Canadian nigger. White nigger nods. I’m too old to do anything anyway. And yes, I balanced all those people in Bloomsbury. What are you going to do about it? Up your arse — you piece of intentionally uneducated white shit. What gives these bastards the right to ask a world citizen questions about how long she will be staying here and if she has a medical plan or not. Now fuck off and let her into Canada so I can die in Pierrefonds with my terrorist friends. If you don’t let me in, I promise I’ll inspire the next generation, and this inspiration will make sure that your city’s ambulance workers will have job security for the next five centuries.

  These thoughts erode in the airport air. She’s cleared immigration —the doors swing open. Perfunctorily, we hug. Escalators down to the parking lot. As we drive away, we see the open undercarriages of landing airplanes. Our faces inside the car are in darkness; slowly, facial details emerge as street lights and cars go by, we put things back together but not by talking about our projects. I can’t for the life of me remember the conversation we had. It was the same-old same-old stuff; there was nothing new. Did we chat about the few Abduls who were our masters? Not at all. Did we have a significant number of white intellectuals with us? One or two, but significant. Lips traced in red lipstick, her left hand is on the steering wheel while her right hand neatly flicks ashes into tray. I’m a little rounder for the years, but a physically strong old man.

  A large colourful laser highway sign flutters past in the night sky, a few ad-halos also flash by. But these are near-dream-near-accurate descriptions, so anything goes. I wonder why she has set the car computer to read road signs? She turns it off, and we now see only the few holo road signs. McDonald’s has been engaged in a long legal battle to protest the state’s demand that it remove all its holographic adverts and replace them with optional signs. Since the sign law, the night sky has become visible and many people go for short star-watching romps on the highways.

  As Usha and I get closer to Pierrefonds, bright yellow sodium lights obliterate the calm. This is in my recent past: I’m picking her up at Trudeau Airport to bring her to live with all her old friends.

  “Good, you’ve come to Montreal. Thanks for all those postcards. Did you give up your apartment in London? Your money holding out?”

  “Yes, money all ok — and I have enough to pay the home. Thanks for inviting me to live with you.”

  I look towards her with ancient excitement. I tell her: “I need your friendship. Very much. Faraway places we went to. What do you remember the most?”

  “Mostly your wonderful leadership.” She is smiling. Road signs flutter past.

  ¬ The compartments in my mind flutter to clarity like an old airport announcement board. Must be the pills I took this afternoon. I remember once when I met Usha in a hotel in country X. My hand touches elevator button forty-five. Our eardrums pop as the mirrored, carpeted box hushes upwards. We step out of the elevator and I notice an empty hallway; her coat rustles against her purse. We are doing a job in an easy Canadian city with tons of snow. The door clicks open. A large picture-window frames skyscrapers breathing out white woolly steam into the freezing winter night. The bright rotating landing pad lights make the steam glow. We drink wine, and after a while, the city lights in the tall buildings extinguish in unified blocks: first, the lights of an entire floor of a bank building; then a few more at the extreme west end of a building a few kilometres away; then, all in one blink the lights of a building directly across from us. The city falls into a coma for a few hours and wakes up to one of our operations. Through the windows, we see an ambulance glide by on the street below. For fun, I open the window and a gush of cold wind enters the room; we hear a low-decibel phhut-phhut of a police helicopter crossing the city; its trailing silhouette falling on some of the lit windows. I put my arm around her to protect her from the cold. We kiss for a long time. Did we really kiss? She looks out at the uneventful city. “Light pollution coming to an end tonight I see . . . ah, maybe now we’ll be able to see the stars?”

  25

  The milk of human kindness

  My head turns away from the window in an afternoon on a particular Sunday, seven days exactly before my birthday. A bright blue car passes, then a roundish brown one. Never much traffic outside. My grey hair, like the tail end of galactic spiral arm, follows my head, which turns again toward the window. From the hall comes a persistent smell of urine mixed with floor-cleaning products.

  A nurse — in white this time. Nurses don’t wear uniforms anymore — so why’s this one in white? Must be because of a medical emergency of some kind or another. Yes, I see that Mrs. Gandal in room 215 has a transparent tube in her arm and that she is lying down, eyes closed.

  “How’s she doing?”

  The doctor is wearing a tweed jacket. “She’ll be fine. You’re a friend?” I look at him thinking: Why keep her alive? Give you a paycheque? What else are you going to do with your life?

  “Well, yes, I know her a little, not too much. Is she going to be alright?’

  “We should give this a bit more time.”

  I look directly at the tube. I show him that I am looking at the tube.

  “Oh, don’t worry about that, she’s getting some sleep now.” The tube is attached to a machine with LEDs in all colours, which tick, tick, tick away.

  ¬ I tell Nurse Linda about a woman. I’m friends with the wife of a dead man, you see. This makes her smile: her pink lips lift into her multiracial face. She presents me with the pills. Imagine, I say in my when-I-was-your-age tone. I am trying to impress her with my vast knowledge: Imagine trying to impress a dead banker’s wife, here in this last stop before paradise, with the economic details of why Mohammed (PBUH) moved from Mecca to Medina. She doesn’t know Muhammad, she doesn’t know Mecca, and Medina was a little shop were she would sometimes shop before the zamana of the old folks home.

  I get a flutter when I see Tatjana. Linda bids me an unprofessional “Bye until the next time,” which will be for my four o’clock or whatever o’clock. I must take the pills because I don’t have an illness. Memory is an illness.

  Well, then what am I dying of? Tatjana’s slender hand reaches for the door knob. I am not lonely. I have my thoughts: She is seventy-ish, somewhat mannish, and waves to cars. No chance of DNA repair capability even if they try enzyme telomerase. We have a patient who is suffering from dyskeratosis congenita with telomeres out of whack, I suppose. I don’t mean to imply anything about her mental processes, which are sound. But I’ve never really liked sound women, have I? Linda is not around to listen to this. Just as well. Over-disclosure destroys even the most patient of nurses, even the ones born on the theatrical stage of the milk of human kindness, I suppose. I’m not one to be too demanding: I’d be scared to push her away from me.

  I visit Tatjana. The name sign on her door reads: Tatjana Lucrece, dead-banker’s wife, now living in impressionistic-medico-uric splendour, beside a river, next to Arles if you’ll have it, and she’ll have it because it does not really matter — because she can’t tell the difference between Picasso and a photograph of a wriggle-de-piggedly car accident on the front page of a newspaper.
Today’s papers are ever so light, and not transparent. She has a drop-dead beautiful daughter of some worth.

  Was the daughter ever a student of Islam? Keep away from uneducated dead bankers’ wives, I keep telling myself. But whom will I talk to then? Why should I discuss Islam with her? What should I discuss with her? Am I giving her a prior-to-perhaps-purgatory course in Islam before she visits her heathen’s heaven?

  It’s another day: Tatjana has slippered off along the west hallway.

  Yesterday, when we were in her room, she held up a toothbrush and asked: “What’s this for? It looks so familiar, but I can’t remember what I used it for. Tell me. And please, please don’t tell anyone I asked you.”

  26

  Panther’s claw

  Winters have drifted by. She touched my hand. She remembers what happened a few nights ago. I wandered over to her room late at night. No, that was last month. Perhaps nothing has drifted by. A buzzing fly just shot by. What sort of noise does a DNA chain make when it replicates for the last time? What sort of noise does it make when it is not replicating? Experimental gerontology. What could a last time possibly mean? Are we aware that it is replicating for the last time? Do we know about this final replication because researchers know that DNA command central is saying ok cell, go fuck off, it’s all over? No, that is not what happens. Here’s what happens: the research shows that a final anti-replication command is given because research strongly suggests that this kind of command ought to take place given that all previous research has established that this ought to be the case. When we become conscious of precedent, we become conscious of something we are not yet fully conscious of, we understand things only partially. But you see when the young researcher is looking at a past experiment, he is looking at it in continuous time — what the fuck does all that mean? Face the fact that the researcher — and they are mostly men still, even after so many years of changes in other fields, including terrorism — is looking at the past in a partial future. As we age, the past fades, like passing mustard fields seen from a train moving from Marseille to Adge. I see distinct parts of the corner of a wall where I as a child buried a bottle with a note inside. It was a rainy day. Black macintosh. A father at work. I’m to make the coal fire in a little house outside London.