Or Tatjana is near me or has just walked past me. Tatjana’s a bit sunny, not stupid: she laughs at my political jokes so she can’t be stupid. They have made her memory much better. She adds a little something to the place where we come to kick the bucket. She sits in a red leather armchair beside the big window. We sit together and watch the black river move. My hand almost touching hers.
I disclose all this to Linda. I give her all the details. If I give her all the details, then this disclosure will drive her closer to me; she’s young and she’ll become my personal friend. Ah! To have a young friend. What a joy it is to have a mind that operates at such a different speed and with a cataloguing system that is so much clearer than mine. My narration of Usha’s (or was it Tatjana’s or was it Jean’s?) crying works. Linda invites me to her house. That’s what life is about — attracting people to my somewhat ugly being. Who says I’m ugly? They’ve done terrible things — much worse than poor little me. What they did, however, was not for free. They were dead. I’ll be dead. Linda will age, and she’ll forget me. She has no options. Her cells will delete me from her memory before she dies. She will die a few years after my departure. What’s the point of having a memory when in a few decades the brain’s circuitry snaps soundlessly like a spider web torn by a panther’s claw? Was my fight for higher morals worth it?
27
Calendar
Muḥarram
Ṣafar
Rabīʿ al-Thānī
Jumādā al-Ūlā
Rajab
Shaʿbān
Ramaḍān
Shawwāl
Dhū al-Qaʿda
Dhū al-Ḥijja
We always needed money for operations, and we always had to save a bit from one operation to the next, because we had to have money for air tickets to go see people for project money. The process was like getting a grant for a university department. The sound of low-flying airplanes coming in from Europe to Pierre Elliot Trudeau International takes me back to a zamana when I spent lots of time in airports. From the window of the aircraft, I see eight-hundred-metre buildings shaped like bananas made of steel and glass, standing in sand. As the plane moves nearer the ground, I think, all that glass was once sand. The thought vanishes when I hear an abrupt screech as the undercarriage melts into the hot runway. I notice that the rabbi who is wearing a shtreimel and has blonde locks running down the sides of his head can no longer read The Jerusalem Post jiggling in front of his eyes: I smile inside. Iqbal once told me that no rabbi lands in a place like Dubai. Walking down the steps, I inhale deeply. There must be a living sea somewhere nearby. Air time, dark green vegetation, cadmium sand, and jet exhaust produce jet lag. Remove from the journey these four things but keep the dark green vegetation, sand and jet exhaust and I’ll still to this day get jet lag. What I have now at this very moment is externally triggered de-synchronicity. Can we use de-synchronicity to get more funding? We had to come up with new things to get the money, just like any other job.
Is it impossible to use time itself as a terrorist instrument? Say we did a time related event: what would those extreme and unconditional friends of country X be saying on CNN? How did these terrorists use the forth dimension to subject innocent people to terrorism? What actually was it — what did they do? What did the Arabs do with time to hurt us so badly? How can we prevent this from happening again? They might establish a Home Time Security Agency to prevent us from doing it again. All we did to the Americans was to reset the clocks in banks and other state institutions such as airports and military bases to metric time. The retards couldn’t find a way out until someone — a scientist with a Jewish-sounding name like Smith used his knowledge of an inflationary universe to adjust Americans to another system. To our credit, the total damage was impressive. One million people who were airborne at the time in various airplanes all died due to measurement errors: tons and tons of planes crashing into runways, seas, oceans and lakes, Walmarts; many planes crashing into each other, producing firecracker colours; hundreds of surface and underground train “accidents.” Not to mention problems at hospitals: total light failure in operating rooms — 500,000 (approximately) patients died painfully. We Moslems inflicted great pain on America by changing the measure of time.
I’m mentioning a series of events to whom? Am I talking with Iqbal, who has no hair, or to Anver, who has decided to dye his hair black these days? Here, in sequence, are the events: imperial contact; colonialism, resistance, social decay, departure, rebirth, self-knowledge, oceans, ships, seas, clouds over rivers, life as an emergent hermaphrodite (khusra) in Sialkot (s/he was not part of our unit but met us a few times); life as a kid in Zamalik; seeing black and white television for the first time; shirts made in Manchester; and then resistance within. And then Bang. Resistance equals bang, which is now boring. Western democracies were not the only ones getting bored with conventional B. B works wonderfully, but we now want a renaissance: Brothers, I would tell my unit (excluding Ms Sialkot), brothers, we must to yannie, hit the golden age of terrorism. No more R = B. Of course: it’s still B that we are aiming for. But how to make a B that will have them reeling for a decade? Only Allah could help us. Of course, we full well know only numbers will help us. Allah is a zero, and zero is his messenger, the other side might be thinking. The rank-and-file did the smaller things that Islam might or might not have made them do. We believe the white police at the command of the Jew did most of it, someone in another cell said.
Imran Smith asks: “What about the King David Hotel? Who did that?”
Another unit member, Said, answers: “What was the King David Hotel? Some of us have a far vaster canvas to correct the wrongs, and correcting the wrongs does not mean using mild political objects like social democracy or an easy-to-get nuke, or an easy-to-organize demo. Any old agent can get a nuke, go to Kiev and take a right down the main street, continue for ten minutes and knock on the blue door. A man with a blonde beard will serve you — take a number. Nukes — what a joke. Keep reading — I’ll take you far from the madding crowd into the world of super-T without R = B. “T” is not time in the Newtonian sense, but T = Terror-Time. The chap who did our numbers told us something utterly meaningless: T and T are complex conjugates of each other. We snickered into our kafiyas and the discussion shifted to something less complex.
At any rate, all they have to offer is Risk = threat x vulnerability x consequence.
Why did I do this thinking and all this travelling and glad-handing for supplies and money? Well, it was not simply to get justice in the world, as the naive left in the West thinks: I did it all to get admiration from Jews. There were women in our unit, not the cover-up lower-class types (who got raped once in a while, but not by anyone in our units) but ones with the same colour hair as the rabbi on the flight to somewhere that felt like Bishkek: Bishkek, where we believe our future lies.
We would ask ourselves, what is it that we can’t use as an instrument of retaliation? We talk until the Wee Willie Winkie non-hours. Sure, we can use trains, boats, buildings, and old-fashioned passenger aircrafts, but we’re now thinking about making righteous retaliations that would be as important as a scientific revolution, leaving old Newton dead at Westminster — forty Euros to visit his grave. Can we use jet lag to screw the West, someone would joke? There is jet lag up there now — 750,000 to one million people airborne every nanosecond of human existence. Surely, we can use figures like this to tell you: please stop the pillage, if you don’t, we will Islamo-time-machinecide you in the cunt. Tons of emergent jet lag to exploit. Can we produce permanent jet lag if we do B? But why return to smelly old B? I simply don’t like all the nails we have to stuff in the package: I do have some moral standards. How can we get all the planes currently airborne into permanent jet lag? We were inventing the El Alan Turing Terror Machine. Endless discussions in our little home near Hayes and Harlington.
Some people like to save whales from the Japanese, but I would like donkeys to survive our struggle for human li
beration. I had badges made for our unit: “I heart symbol Donkeys.” A donkey was never killed in any operation I governed, and I organized many operations in Islamic lands that were Sialkot-free.
Imran Smith would say we should invent time-based terrorism. Everyone in our unit thought he was loopy. He wasn’t loopy at all. Nor was he an agent provocateur. We knew him. Did he mean time without B? He did numbers for us on trains that always move in synchronicity to democracy. During a meeting, someone with an Oxford accent from Peshawar asked if Smith meant that we use time as replacement for the old B? We knew that we had to replace the old means, so on and so forth — they couldn’t be used forever, endless chatter in large high-up rooms in seven-star hotels in our many nights in the electrified cities of South Asia and beyond.
More about our funding: I am picked up in the airport lounge. The man with the goatee sitting in front of the steering wheel looks like Usha on a masculine day. The sunlight dazzles off the black car’s chrome and back into the atmosphere. The car was recently made by Turks who are the final keepers of the flame of internal combustion and the Caliphate of the twenty-first century. My hand moves across the severely air-conditioned space to shake the manicured hand of Abdul Sincere Abdul, representative of one of three South Asian-Asian countries — take your pick, but not Myanmar. For comic effect, he “Salams-al-lic-cums” me directly in the face with an intentional English accent.
“Joseph, do you have any luggage?” He seems friendly-neutral with me, despite several meetings in small-minded English towns.
“Just this little carry-on. If I do any more shopping, I’ll have to shop for a suitcase. Thanks for having me.” Smiles, but no further chatter. The driver takes me to where I am staying.
We move along a perimeter highway that Europeans engineered. Thank Allah they didn’t make the road. An idiotic flag on the antenna flutters regally. My lungs have always been my Achilles heel. Tomorrow, in this home for the unrepentant, I have to go down the hall and then up the elevator to the X-ray department. But now, I am not talking about my last years in this home. Currently, I am telling you about my funding contact. I have a slight case of tight-chested Mercedes-arctic-osis. Lungs have always been my weakness. Massive asthma if I come near cats, dogs, or horses.
Linda comes into the room as I relive this story somewhere in front of my mind. She says hello and looks at some wall-mounted papers connected to my health. My mind says to itself, Anver, are you there? Black-haired Anver. I know Linda has just walked into my room, but my mind is saying Anver. Fellow capital-T terrorist Anver.
I should tell this story to Iqbal, who might have come with me. Bastard is sitting in front of me, while I read to him from my recollections. He’s fallen asleep. Why do I keep calling him Iqbal? Is his name Anver? Pills for MIC lead to a multi-framed memoreality. All at the same time. Sometimes I can’t take it. Sometimes I cry with the flood of it all coming back to me. I don’t mean guilt in any sense at all.
28
Damascus, toothbrush
We are walking to the car parked in the driveway. In the large black Mercedes, we move through a thinly populated part of the city as if Damascus or a city like that ever had a thinly populated part. After winding through smaller and smaller streets, we pull up to a large white villa surrounded by palm trees and birds flying in paths like airplanes. The traffic sounds from the main road fade, but I can still hear planes landing at Trudeau Airport not far from here. Let me get this straight: I am talking about getting funding during the nineteen-eighties, although I now am living sometime in 2040? These pills to fight off early onset hot dogs in the mind are confusing me — memory imbricationosis, as my eighteen-year-old doctor jokes. Are my memories, my goals — all my states — being affected by these pills? Are my levels of guilt adjusting to normal? Of course, I feel guilt. But then I focus on the West. I say, not guilty, not then not now not ever. Now, I thank Allah for the pills, which are letting me fall back into my memory, like a head falling in Saudi Arabia.
I am staying in a place with a large usury-inflected garden. Scarlet flowers jet out of emerald green leaves, and beside this place of botanical beauty stands a very current flower, which is surrounding us with green petals of money. We can, within the programme, do whatever we like with the money. And then, in old age, we will not feel guilty about having blown things up. And people. The money comes like a long electronic snake from there to here, then a bomb goes off and/or an entire section of South Kensington has super-acute dysentery for six weeks. Brown fluid terrorism — yes, that is what the press actually called it. We got part of the English water supply. We send a message: We are responsible for the dysentery. Get your troops out or your Thames will flow brown: the River Ravi at Westminster. We ate ham and cheese sandwiches afterwards; we just had to eat.
Driving around in this city, I swear I saw a Viagra ad beside an equally huge poster of their head of state.
From my two-floors-up window I see two gardeners dressed in worn hand-me-down suits chatting under the shade of a tree. They’re having a bucolic conversation, no doubt — I can tell by the way they’re moving their hands. On a green hump in the middle of the lawn the size of Delaware, a fountain shoots out a one-millimetre-thin beam of water, rising ten metres and splattering back on a black marble fountain base. The democracy of some people.
I walk downstairs and out toward a waiting car. Naseem, the older one, in a blue galabaya, opens the car door. We drive. I see a few donkeys tolerating abuse and carrying heavy bulbous television sets on their backs — they have been carrying these televisions since the time of Christ. I pray for the donkeys and pray to Allah that I will never kill one of these beasts during an operation. A fat brown palm ushers me up clean marble steps to a room with white walls. Behind thin gauze curtains, French windows give way to a broad patio with a view of another garden the size of the Isle of Man.
I’ve lost my geography again: I don’t know where I am. Am I in the old folks home as an old man or am I the younger man undressing and opening a transparent plastic bag in the bathroom of a hotel in Dushanbe or some similar city in a similar region? It’s clear. I’m a young man whose anger has been displaced, rather, by airports, than absorbed in airports. I went to about six million airports, and I lived in one. I was innocent when I actually lived in one for five days. I waited for days for our partners to arrive — they arrive dressed all in black. I am actually innocent now. The imperialists are the guilty ones. The plastic bag reveals razor blades. I lather my face: the razor painlessly and violently moves over my skin. Then I sit down on a white leather armchair (which is not made from shaving lather). In front of the window I meditate on jet lag and how it might be changing the way our brains work. Jet lag always makes me ask myself: Why did I make this long journey? What’s this journey I’m making? Why couldn’t I have become less familiar with airports?
Effortlessly, my head sinks to one side and then, assertively, I sit up straight: I look into a day dream. I connect the massive Arab eagles flying high above me with jet lag. Eagles. Jet lag. The Syrian eagles ride Zionist thermals in the blue air, which is Jewish air when you think about it. All air has radar bouncing through it. And they’re making radar signals which are kosher — radar blessed by a Rabbi: a happy mixture of science and religion. Above me, in all that endless blue, the eagles masterfully twitch their wings for a precision that only they can define, eyes like moles in the sky. I remember the mole on the stewardess’s face on the way here. Her mole became the visual centre point for the current trip. Black radial spokes spreading out from her mole are my life and all its directions. All those lines coming from her mole. The pist-pist spitting of water sprinklers outside pulls me out of my genetic indolence. There is someone knocking at the door.
A cold December brings us to a freezing French-Canadian January. Now, a younger version of the Naseem says: “Good afternoon, Docktor Macleod.” An Islamic nod means that the man, Funding-us-Underground-Islamicus, has arrived. He is waiting downstairs. I nod an
d walk down a hall with white carpets. The door clicks shut. My body falls into the routine of dressing up: a clean white shirt, left arm in first, and grey pants. I half Windsor the tie, but then remove it, thinking: formality. I run my white collar over the collar of the blue cotton jacket like an innocent little Iranian in the middle of Terminal E somewhere in Thailand. I walk down the wide wooden steps I walked up earlier in the afternoon. Razor-sharp winter wind rumours were circulating today that my pills are producing good results. Marble old-aged steps. I decided not to take the elevator. It was nothing for a man of my physical condition. I now have on a pink undershirt over a black silk shirt. A regal looking young woman of Italian origin asks me to go in there and show my lungs to her. But before she click-clicks the camera she makes two mole-like dots on my chest with a marker. I’m walking down the steps. The jet-black ravens caw outside.
Radius Islamicus Page 16