When Gravity Fails

by George Alec Effinger

  Selima wasn’t moved. I thought she’d meet me halfway at least, but then I remembered who I was dealing with. “It isn’t all right, you know,” she reminded me. “I’m still worried about Nikki.”

  “The letter she wrote might be true, after all,” I said, pouring tea into three cups. “Those clues you mentioned, they might all have some innocent explanation.” I didn’t believe a word of it, even as I said it. It was only to make Selima feel better.

  She took her cup of tea and held it. “I don’t know what to do now,” she said.

  “It may be some crazy trick is after all three of you,” Yasmin suggested. “Maybe you ought to hide out for a while.”

  “I thought of that,” Selima said. Yasmin’s theory didn’t sound likely to me: Tamiko and Devi had been killed in such completely different ways. Of course, that didn’t rule out the possibility of a creative murderer. Despite all the old cop truisms about a criminal’s modus operandi, there wasn’t a reason in the world why a killer couldn’t use two offbeat techniques. I kept quiet about this, too.

  “You could stay in my apartment,” said Yasmin. “I could stay here with Marîd.” Both Selima and I were startled by Yasmin’s offer.

  “That’s good of you to offer,” said Selima. “I’ll think about it, sugar, but there are a couple of other things I want to try. I’ll let you know.”

  “You’ll be all right if you just keep your eyes open,” I said. “Don’t do any business for a few days, don’t mix with strangers.” Selima nodded. She handed me her tea, which she hadn’t even tasted.

  “I have to go,” she said. “I hope everything is straight now between us.”

  “You have more important things to worry about, Selima,” I said. “We’ve never been very close before. In a morbid way, maybe we’ll end up better friends because of this.”

  “The price has been high,” she said. That was all too true. Selima started to say something else, then stopped. She turned and went to the door, let herself out, and closed the door quietly behind her.

  I stood by the stove with three cups of tea. “You want one of these?” I asked.

  “No,” said Yasmin.

  “Neither do I.” I dumped the tea into the sink.

  “There’s either one mighty twisted bastard out there killing people,” mused Yasmin, “or what’s worse, two different motherfuckers working the same side of the street. I’m almost afraid to go to work.”

  I sat down beside her and stroked her perfumed hair. “You’ll be all right at work. Just listen to what I told Selima: don’t pick up any trick you don’t already know. Stay here with me instead of going home alone.”

  She gave me a little smile. “I couldn’t bring a trick here to your apartment,” she said.

  “You’re damn straight about that,” I said. “Forget about turning tricks at all until this business is over and they’ve caught the guy I’ve got enough money to support both of us for a little while.”

  She put her arms around my waist and laid her head on my shoulder. “You’re all right,” she said.

  “You’re okay, too, when you’re not snoring like a go-devil,” I said. In reprisal, she raked my back hard with her long, claret-colored fingernails. Then we stretched out on the bed and played around again for half an hour.

  I got Yasmin out of bed about two-thirty, made her something to eat while she showered and dressed, and urged her to get to work without getting fined for being late: fifty kiam is fifty kiam, I always reminded her. Her answer to that was, “So why worry? One fifty-kiam bill looks just like all the others. If I don’t bring home one, I’ll bring home another.” I couldn’t quite get her to see that if she just hustled her bustle a little more, she could bring them both home.

  She asked me what I was going to do that afternoon. She was a little jealous because I’d earned my money for the next few weeks; I could sit around in some coffeehouse all day, bragging and gossiping with the boyfriends of the other dancers and working girls. I told her that I had some errands to run, and that I’d be busy, too. “I’m going to see what the story is with Nikki,” I said.

  “You didn’t believe Selima?” Yasmin asked.

  “I’ve known Selima a long time. I know she likes to go overboard in these situations. I’d be willing to bet that Nikki is safe and happy with this Seipolt guy. Selima just had to invent some story to make her life sound exotic and risky.”

  Yasmin gave me a dubious look. “Selima doesn’t have to make up stories. Her life is exotic and risky. I mean, how can you exaggerate a bullet hole through the forehead? Dead is dead, Marîd.”

  She had a point there, but I didn’t feel like awarding it to her out loud. “Go to work,” I said, kissing her and fondling her and booting her out of the apartment. Then I was all alone. “Alone” was much quieter now than ever before; I think I almost preferred having a lot of noise and people and provocation around. That’s a bad sign for a recluse. It’s even worse for a solitary agent, for a tough character who lives for action and menace, the kind of bold, competent guy I liked to think I was. When the silence starts to give you the nervous jimjams, that’s when you find out you’re not a hero, after all. Oh, sure, I knew a lot of truly dangerous people, and I’d done a lot of dangerous things. I was on the inside, one of the sharks rather than one of the minnows; and I had the respect of the other sharks as well. The trouble was that having Yasmin around all the time was getting to be enjoyable, but that didn’t fit the lone wolf’s profile.

  I said all of this to myself while I shaved my throat, looking in the bathroom mirror. I was trying to persuade myself of something, but it took me a while to do it. When I did, I wasn’t happy about my conclusion: I hadn’t accomplished very much during the last several days; but three times now, people had dropped dead near me, people I knew, people I didn’t know. If this trend went on, it could endanger Yasmin.

  Hell, it could endanger me.

  I had said that I thought Selima was getting excited over nothing. That was a lie. While Selima was telling me her story, I was recalling the brief, frantic phone call I’d gotten: “Marîd? You’ve got to—” I hadn’t been sure before that it had been from Nikki; but I was certain now, and I was feeling guilty because I hadn’t acted on it. If Nikki had been hurt in any way, I was going to have to live with that guilt for the rest of my life.

  I put on a white cotton gallebeya; covered my head with the familiar Arab headdress, the white keffiya, and held it in place with a rope akal. I put some sandals on my feet. Now I looked like every other poor, scruffy Arab in the city, one of the fellahîn, or peasants. I doubt if I’d dressed like this more than ten times in all the years I’d lived in the Budayeen. I’ve always affected European clothing, in my youth in Algeria and later when I’d wandered eastward. I did not now look like an Algerian; I wanted to be taken for a local fellah. Maybe only my reddish beard whispered a discordant note, but the German would not know that. As I left my apartment and walked along the Street toward the gate, I didn’t hear my name called once or catch a glance of recognition. As I walked among my friends, they did not know me, so unusual was it for me to dress this way. I felt invisible, and with invisibility goes a certain power. My uncertainty of a few minutes before evaporated, replaced by my old confidence. I was dangerous again.

  Just beyond the eastern gate was the broad Boulevard il-Jameel, lined with palm trees on both sides. A spacious neutral ground separated the north- and southbound traffic, and was planted with several varieties of flowering shrub. There was something blooming every month of the year, filling the air along the boulevard with sweet scents, distracting the eyes of those who passed by with their blossoms’ startling colors: luscious pinks, flaming carmine, rich pansy purple, saffron yellow, pristine white, blue as varied as the restless sea, and still more. In the trees and lodged high above the street on rooftops sang a multitude of warblers, larks, and ringdoves. The combined beauties moved one to thank Allah for these lavish gifts. I paused on the neutral ground for a moment;
I had emerged from the Budayeen dressed as what I truly was—an Arab of few kiam, no great learning, and severely limited prospects. I had not anticipated the feeling of excitement this aroused in me. I felt a new kinship with the other scurrying fellahîn around me, a kinship that extended—for the moment—to the religious part of daily life that I had neglected for so long. I promised myself that I would tend to those duties very soon, as soon as I had the opportunity; I had to find Nikki first.

  Two blocks north of the Budayeen’s eastern gate in the direction of the Shimaal Mosque, I found Bill. I knew he’d be near the walled quarter, sitting behind the steering wheel of his taxi, watching the people passing by on the sidewalk with patience, love, curiosity, and cold fear. Bill was almost my size, but more muscular. His arms were covered with blue-green tattoos, so old that they had blurred and become indistinct; I wasn’t even certain what they had once represented. He hadn’t cut his sandy-colored hair or beard in years, many years; he looked like a Hebrew patriarch. His skin, where it was exposed to the sun as he drove around the city, was burned a bright red, like forbidden crayfish in a pot. In his red face, his pale blue eyes stared with an insane intensity that always made me look quickly away. Bill was crazy, with a craziness he’d chosen for himself as carefully as Yasmin had chosen her high, sexy cheekbones.

  I met Bill when I first came to the city. He had already learned to live among the outcasts, wretches, and bullies of the Budayeen years before; he helped me fit myself easily into that questionable society. Bill had been born in the United States of America—that’s how old he was—in the part that is now called Sovereign Deseret. When the North American union broke into several jealous, balkanized nations, Bill turned his back on his birthplace forever. I don’t know how he earned a living until he learned the way of life here; Bill doesn’t remember, either. Somehow he acquired enough cash to pay for a single surgical modification in his body. Rather than wiring his brain, as many of the lost souls of the Budayeen choose to do, Bill selected a more subtle, more frightening bodmod: He had one of his lungs removed and replaced with a large, artificial gland that dripped a perpetual, measured quantity of some fourth-generation psychedelic drug into his bloodstream. Bill wasn’t sure which drug he’d asked for, but judging from his abstracted speech and the quality of his hallucinations, I’d guess it was either l.-ribopropylmethionine—RPM—or acetylated neocorticine.

  You can’t buy RPM or acetylated neocorticine on the street. There isn’t much of a market for either drug. They both have the same long-term effect: After repeated doses of these drugs, a person’s nervous system begins to degenerate. They compete for the binding sites in the human brain that are normally used by acetylcholine, a neurotransmitter. These new psychedelics attack and occupy the binding sites like a victorious army swooping down upon a conquered city; they cannot be removed, either by the body’s own processes or by any form of medical therapy. The hallucinatory experiences are unparalleled in pharmacological history, but the price in terms of damage is exorbitant. The user, more literally than ever before, burns out his brain, synapse by synapse. The resulting condition is symptomatically indistinguishable from advanced Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s diseases. Continued use, when the drugs begin interfering with the autonomic nervous system, probably proves fatal.

  Bill hadn’t reached that state yet. He was living a daylong, nightlong dreamlife. I remembered what it had been like sometimes, when I had dropped a less-dangerous psychedelic and had been struck by the crippling fear that “I would never come down,” a common illusion that you use to torture yourself. You feel as if this time, this particular drug experience, unlike all the pleasant experiences in the past, this time you’ve gone and broken something in your head. Trembling, terrified, promising that you’ll never take another pill again, you huddle up against the onslaught of your own darkest dreams. At last, however, you do recover; the drug wears off, and sooner or later you forget just how bad the horror was. You do it again. Maybe this time you’ll be luckier, maybe not.

  There were no maybes with Bill. Bill was never coming down, ever. When those moments of utter, absolute dread began, he had no way to lessen the anxiety. He couldn’t tell himself that if he just held out long enough, in the morning he’d be back to normal. Bill would never be back to normal. That’s the way he wanted it. As for the cell-by-cell death of his nervous system, Bill only shrugged. “They all gonna die someday, right?”

  “Yes,” I replied, clinging nervously to the rear seat of his taxi as he plunged through narrow, twisting alleys.

  “And if they go all at once, everybody else has a party at your funeral. You don’t get nothin’. You get buried. This way, I get to say good-bye to my brain cells. They all done a lot for me. Good-bye, good-bye, farewell, it’s been good to know ya. Give each goddamn little fucker its own little send-off. If you die like a regular person, bam! you’re dead, violent stopping of every goddamn part of you, sugar in the gas tank, water in the carburetor, come to a grinding halt, you get one second, maybe two seconds, to scream to God that you’re on your way. Awful way to come to an end. Live a violent life, live a violent death. Me, I’m sneaking across the bar one neuron at a time. If I have to go into that good night, I’m goin’ gentle; the hell with whoever said not to. That sucker’s dead, man, so what did he know? Not even the courage of his convictions. Maybe after I’m dead the afrit won’t know I’m there if I keep my mouth shut. Maybe they’ll leave me alone. I don’t want to be fucked with after I’m dead, man. How can you protect yourself after you’re dead? Think about that, man. I’d like to get my hands on the guy who invented demons, man. And they call me crazy.”

  I didn’t want to discuss it any further.

  Bill drove me out to Seipolt’s. I always had Bill drive me when I went into the city for any reason. His insanity distracted me from the pervasive normalness all around, the lack of chaos imposed on everything. Riding with Bill was like carrying a little pocket of the Budayeen around with me for security. Like taking a tank of oxygen with you when you went into the deep, dark depths.

  Seipolt’s place was far from the center of the city, on the southeast edge. It was within sight of the realm of the everlasting sand, where the dunes waited for us to relax just a little, and then they’d cover us all like ashes, like dust. The sand would smooth out all conflicts, all works, all hopes. It would swoop down, a victorious army upon a conquered city, and we would all lie in the deep, dark depths beneath the sand forever. The good night would come—but not just yet. No, not here, not yet.

  Seipolt saw that order was maintained and the desert held back; date palms arched around the villa, and gardens bloomed because water was forced to flow in this inhospitable place. Bougainvillea flowered and the breeze was perfumed with enticing aromas. Iron gates were kept in repair, painted and oiled: long, curving drives were kept clean and raked; walls were whitewashed. It was a magnificent residence, a rich man’s home. It was a refuge against the creeping sand, against the creeping night that waits so patiently.

  I sat in the back of Bill’s taxi. His engine idled roughly, and he muttered and laughed to himself. I felt small and foolish—Seipolt’s mansion awed me, despite myself. What was I going to say to Seipolt? The man had power—why, I couldn’t hold back even a handful of sand, not if I tried with all my might and prayed to Allah at the same time.

  I told Bill to wait, and I watched him until I saw that somewhere down in his careening mind he understood. I got out of the taxi and walked through the iron gate, up the white-pebbled drive toward the front entrance to the villa. I knew that Nikki was crazy; I knew that Bill was crazy; I was now learning that I wasn’t entirely well, either.

  As I listened to my feet crunching the small stones, I wondered why we all just didn’t go back where we’d come from. That was the real treasure, the greatest gift: to be where you truly belonged. If I was lucky, someday I would find that place. Inshallah. If Allah willed.

  The front door was a massive thing made of some kin
d of blond wood, with great iron hinges and an iron grille. The door was swinging open as I raised my hand to grasp the brass knocker. A tall, lean, blond European stared down at me. He had blue eyes (unlike Bill’s, this man’s eyes were the kind you always hear described as “piercing” and, by the Prophet’s beard, I felt pierced); a thin, straight nose with flaring nostrils; a square chin; and a tight-lipped mouth that seemed set in a permanent expression of mild revulsion. He spoke to me in German.

  I shook my head. “‘Anaa la ‘afham,” I said, grinning like the stupid Arab peasant he took me for.

  The man with the blond hair looked impatient. He tried English. I shook my head again, grinning and apologizing and filling his ears with Arabic. It was obvious that he couldn’t make any sense out of my language, and he wasn’t going to try any harder to find another that I might understand. He was just on the point of slamming the heavy door in my face, when he saw Bill’s taxi. That made him think. I looked like an Arab; to this man, all Arabs were pretty much the same, and one of their shared qualities was poverty. Yet I had hired a taxi to drive out to the residence of a rich and influential man. He was having trouble making sense of that, so now he wasn’t so ready to dismiss me out of hand. He pointed at me and muttered something; I supposed it was “Wait here.” I grinned, touched my heart and my forehead, and praised Allah three or four times.

  A minute later, Blondie returned with an old man, an Arab in the employ of the household. The two men spoke together briefly. The old fellah turned to me and smiled. “Peace be upon you!” he said.

  “And upon you,” I said. “O neighbor, is this man the honored and excellent one, Lutz Seipolt Pasha?”

  The old man laughed a little. “You are mistaken, my nephew,” he said. “He is but the doorman, a menial even as I am.” I really doubted that they were all that equal. Evidently the blond man was part of Seipolt’s retinue, brought from Germany.

  “On my honor, I am a fool!” I said. “I have come to ask an important question of His Excellency.” Arabic terms of address frequently make such use of elaborate flattery. Seipolt was a businessman of some sort; I had already called him Pasha (an obsolete title used in the city for ingratiation) and His Excellency (as if he were some sort of ambassador). The old, leather-skinned Arab understood what I was doing well enough. He turned to the German and translated the conversation.