The river kept a tax. People sickened from its bounty, one died from intestinal rot, but the people who roamed here sickened and died anyways. There was no noticeable drop in custom. Imbi wandered far and wide, bartering, gossiping, marketing, and returned with useful things – water filters, glasses, proper cutlery, utensils for Hanu’s kitchen. It would have been safer to move around, but they couldn’t, people relied on them, the gangs left them alone, it was a safe spot, blessed by the river gods.
“Look what we’ve done!” Imbi said, proud. “I told you it would work.”
“It can’t last,” Hanu said.
ONE DAY MEN from the high city swaggered down, uniformed, with their rented armored car and their mercenary badges. Private security. They didn’t like activity in the orange zones, and the river was an atavistic boundary, a dread zone which company men like this avoided at all costs.
“DISPERSE! DISPERSE! RED ALERT! HAZARD! HAZARD!” the armored car was going mad with panic, its blaring voice rising in pitch as it twisted its way through debris. Karka came out with his sword behind his back, Hanu with his cleaver and a decapitated fish head. The score or so people dozing in the sun after lunch sat up blearily. The car louvered open and two men came out in full combat gear, faces hidden inside command helmets, a swarm of sparrow-sized drones buzzing in the air above them. The models were six seasons old, a tried and tested method of crowd control. The new ones were apparently mosquito-sized, and just as lethal.
“Gathering in a red zone,” the company man said. “What for?”
“Easy, we’re just squatting,” Hanu said. “Cardless, see?”
“What is this place?” the security guard walked around, touching the benches, the bowls, the cardboard box of scavenged cutlery.
“Shelter for the poor,” Hanu said, trying to cut him off from the kitchen. “Look, we’re just feeding them. Hungry, homeless people, for God’s sake.”
The company man touched him with one gloved hand, the powered suit amplifying force, and Hanu went stumbling back, a deep bruise forming on his chest.
“Food? This is no vat kitchen. You have set up a micro-climate here. We saw it from above.” The security stared into the kitchen interior, face unreadable. “Why is there a micro-climate in the red zone?”
“It’s not a crime to stay here,” Karka said. “What laws have we broken?”
The company men looked at each other, not answering. They were not unduly worried. In reality, laws only applied to those who could afford lawyers. The swarm shifted a bit towards Karka, the machine whine rising an octave. They had already noted his sword, deemed it next to useless in a fight.
“I don’t understand what this is.” The first man said, knocking down the fab sheets walling the front of the kitchen. “What is this organic matter?”
“Why it’s food, friend soldier,” Imbi said, beaming. Hanu suppressed a groan. “Would you like to have some? Fishhead curry, with brown rice. A princely meal! In my day policemen always ate free! Come, friends, eat a plate, rejoice in the bounty of the river!”
The man took the plate and his helmet became transparent, revealing a face inside. He stared at it, fascinated, and Hanu could almost see the neurons in his brain put together the contours of the cooked fish head with the scraps in the kitchen, with the shape of an actual fish, which he must have seen a hundred times in pictures as a child. A flood of emotions flitted across his face – curiosity, alarm, wonder. For a second Hanu dreamt that he would actually take off his helmet and try the food. Then his face turned to revulsion, and it was all over.
Imbi was standing there, beaming with good will, when the plate struck him across the face. Drones punched into him, tearing out chunks of meat, sending him tumbling back, before his distortion field finally flickered to life, cocooning him. Karka gave a samurai yell and charged, sword up in high guard. The drones were slow to react, confused by the djinn’s quantum field. They finally lunged at Karka, but he ignored them, letting them have their pound of flesh, flying through that mist of his own blood and tissue, terminal grace, and his ionized blade somehow hit the command helmet in the neck join, shorting it out, sending the astonished company man down to his knees.
Abruptly, half of the drones stopped short, hovering uncertainly. The other half of the drones, unfortunately, were not so confused. They slammed into Karka with lethal force, shredding the smuggler like paper. The armored car, programmed to be cowardly, was blaring incoherent alarms, already backing away from the fracas. The second policeman hesitated, then dived into his vehicle, his drones folding neatly into a pocket somewhere.
“YOU HAVE ALL BEEN MARKED FOR TERMINATION! SATELLITE STRIKE IMMINENT! INNOCENT BYSTANDERS ARE REQUESTED TO VACATE! VACATE! VACAAAAAATE!”
And they were gone, leaving their fallen behind.
“I don’t think I can put Karka back together,” Imbi said, tears in his eyes. He was trying to collect the pieces of their friend.
“Never mind. We have to leave. They will destroy this place,” Hanu said. He looked at the dozen or so patrons still left. “We all have to leave. They’ve tagged our chips for death.”
But they all knew nowhere was safe. Tagged for death was death in truth. It was just a matter of how long till the satellites cleared their backlog.
“Load everything into the boat!” Hanu shouted. “Everything! We have to go across the river. Into the country.”
They stared at him, unconvinced.
“Look, there’s fish in the river. That means there’s food outside, you fools! There must be. We can survive! They won’t hunt us out there.” He turned to Imbi. “Imbi is djinn! Djinn! He can clean the air for us, we can gather others, make a micro-climate like we did here. They don’t know he can do that.”
IMBI STOOD UP straight, spread his arms out wide, dripping the blood of Karka, and his distortion field rippled out, encompassing them all. It was stronger than before, colored with rage and sorrow.
“We should leave,” he said. “We should follow Hanu, who gave us food from nothing. I have slept a long time. I remember when they used to chain you to the earth and force you to work, to force your children and their children to the same labor. Now I am awake, I see they have taken your flesh too, they have herded you together like cattle, and living or dying, your bodies are little factories, cleaning the air for them. Your chips are your collars. They kill you without thought. You fear the air, the water, the trees, the very ground you walk on. What more can you lose? Why not leave this place? Let us go forth into the wilderness, where they dare not follow.”
When they heard the djinn, they grew calm, and gathered their meager things. It was resignation, perhaps, or hope. Hanu freed the boat, pushing off into the river, and the poison water splashed over him, but he did not care. It was cool, and dark, and it washed away the blood.
Somewhere in America
Neil Gaiman
(Reprinted, with permission, from American Gods)
NEW YORK SCARES Salim, and so he clutches his sample case protectively with both hands, holding it to his chest. He is scared of black people, the way they stare at him, and he is scared of the Jews, the ones dressed all in black with hats and beards and side curls he can identify, and how many others that he cannot? He is scared of the sheer quantity of the people, all shapes and sizes of people, as they spill from their high, high, filthy buildings, onto the sidewalks; he is scared of the honking hullabaloo of the traffic, and he is even scared of the air, which smells both dirty and sweet, and nothing at all like the air of Oman.
Salim has been in New York, in America, for a week. Each day he visits two, perhaps three different offices, opens his sample case, shows them the copper trinkets, the rings and bottles and tiny flashlights, the models of the Empire State Building, the Statue of Liberty, the Eiffel Tower, gleaming in copper inside; each night he writes a fax to his brother-in-law, Fuad, at home in Muscat, telling him that he has taken no orders, or, on one happy day, that he had taken several orders (but, as Salim is pa
infully aware, not yet enough even to cover his airfare and hotel bill).
For reasons Salim does not understand, his brother-in-law’s business partners have booked him into the Paramount Hotel on 46th Street. He finds it confusing, claustrophobic, expensive, alien.
Fuad is Salim’s sister’s husband. He is not a rich man, but is the co-owner of a small trinket factory, making knick-knacks from copper, brooches and rings and bracelets and statues. Everything is made for export, to other Arab countries, to Europe, to America.
Salim has been working for Fuad for six months. Fuad scares him a little. The tone of Fuad’s faxes is becoming harsher; in the evening, Salim sits in his hotel room, reading his Qur’an, telling himself that this will pass, that his stay in this strange world is limited and finite.
His brother-in-law gave him a thousand dollars for miscellaneous traveling expenses and the money, which seemed so huge a sum when he first saw it, is evaporating faster than Salim can believe. When he first arrived, scared of being seen as a cheap Arab, he tipped everyone, handing extra dollar bills to everyone he encountered; and then he decided that he was being taken advantage of, that perhaps they were even laughing at him, and he stopped tipping entirely.
On his first and only journey on the subway he got lost and confused, and missed his appointment; now he takes taxis only when he has to, and the rest of the time he walks. He stumbles into overheated offices, his cheeks numb from the cold outside, sweating beneath his coat, shoes soaked by slush; and when the winds blow down the avenues (which run from north to south, as the streets run west to east, all so simple, and Salim always knows where to face Mecca) he feels a cold on his exposed skin that is so intense it is like being struck.
He never eats at the hotel (for while the hotel bill is being covered by Fuad’s business partners, he must pay for his own food); instead he buys food at falafel houses and at little food stores, smuggles it up to the hotel beneath his coat for days before he realizes that no one cares. And even then he feels strange about carrying the bags of food into the dimly-lit elevators (Salim always has to bend and squint to find the button to press to take him to his floor) and up to the tiny white room in which he stays.
Salim is upset. The fax that was waiting for him when he woke this morning was curt, and alternately chiding, stern, and disappointed: Salim was letting them down – his sister, Fuad, Fuad’s business partners, the Sultanate of Oman, the whole Arab world. Unless he was able to get the orders, Fuad would no longer consider it his obligation to employ Salim. They depended upon him. His hotel was too expensive. What was Salim doing with their money, living like a Sultan in America? Salim read the fax in his room (which has always been too hot and stifling, so last night he opened a window, and was now too cold) and sat there for a time, his face frozen into an expression of complete misery.
Then Salim walks downtown, holding his sample case as if it contains diamonds and rubies, trudges through the cold for block after block until, on Broadway and 19th Street, he finds a squat building over a laundromat and walks up the stairs to the fourth floor, to the office of Panglobal Imports.
The office is dingy, but he knows that Panglobal handles almost half of the ornamental souvenirs that enter the US from the Far East. A real order, a significant order from Panglobal could redeem Salim’s journey, could make the difference between failure and success, so Salim sits on an uncomfortable wooden chair in an outer office, his sample case balanced on his lap, staring at the middle-aged woman with her hair dyed too bright a red who sits behind the desk, blowing her nose on Kleenex after Kleenex. After she blows her nose she wipes it, and drops the Kleenex into the trash.
Salim got there at 10:30 a.m., half an hour before his appointment. Now he sits there, flushed and shivering, wondering if he is running a fever. The time ticks by so slowly.
Salim looks at his watch. Then he clears his throat.
The woman behind the desk glares at him. “Yes?” she says. It sounds like Yed.
“It is 11:35,” says Salim.
The woman glances at the clock on the wall, and says “Yed” again. Id id.
“My appointment was for eleven,” says Salim with a placating smile.
“Mister Blanding knows you’re here,” she tells him, reprovingly. Bidter Bladdig dode you’re here.
Salim picks up an old copy of the New York Post from the table. He speaks English better than he reads it, and he puzzles his way through the stories like a man doing a crossword puzzle. He waits, a plump young man with the eyes of a hurt puppy, glancing from his watch to his newspaper to the clock on the wall.
At twelve-thirty several men come out from the inner office. They talk loudly, jabbering away to each other in American. One of them, a big, paunchy man, has a cigar, unlit, in his mouth. He glances at Salim as he comes out. He tells the woman behind the desk to try the juice of a lemon, and zinc, as his sister swears by zinc, and vitamin C. She promises him that she will, and gives him several envelopes. He pockets them and then he, and the other men, go out into the hall. The sound of their laughter disappears down the stairwell.
It is one o’clock. The woman behind the desk opens a drawer and takes out a brown paper bag, from which she removes several sandwiches, an apple, and a Milky Way. She also takes out a small plastic bottle of freshly-squeezed orange juice.
“Excuse me,” says Salim, “but can you perhaps call Mister Blanding and tell him that I am still waiting?”
She looks up at him as if surprised to see that he is still there, as if they have not been sitting five feet apart for two and a half hours. “He’s at lunch,” she says. He’d ad dudge.
Salim knows, knows deep down in his gut that Blanding was the man with the unlit cigar. “When will he be back?”
She shrugs, takes a bite of her sandwich. “He’s busy with appointments for the rest of the day,” she says. He’d biddy wid abboidmeds for the red ob the day.
“Will he see me, then, when he comes back?” asks Salim.
She shrugs, and blows her nose.
Salim is hungry, increasingly so, and frustrated, and powerless.
At three o’clock the woman looks at him and says, “He wode be gubbig bag.”
“Excuse?”
“Bidder Bladdig. He wode be gubbig bag today.”
“Can I make an appointment for tomorrow?”
She wipes her nose. “You hab to teddephode. Appoidbeds oddly by teddephode.”
“I see,” says Salim. And then he smiles: a salesman, Fuad had told him many times before he left Muscat, is naked in America without his smile. “Tomorrow I will telephone,” he says. He takes his sample case, and he walks down the many stairs to the street, where the freezing rain is turning to sleet. Salim contemplates the long, cold walk back to the 46th Street hotel, and the weight of the sample case, then he steps to the edge of the sidewalk and waves at every yellow cab that approaches, whether the light on top is on or off, and every cab drives past him.
One of them accelerates as it passes; a wheel dives into a water-filled pothole, spraying freezing muddy water over Salim’s pants and coat. For a moment, he contemplates throwing himself in front of one of the lumbering cars, and then he realizes that his brother-in-law would be more concerned with the fate of the sample case than of Salim himself, and that he would bring grief to no one but his beloved sister, Fuad’s wife (for he had always been a slight embarrassment to his father and mother, and his romantic encounters had always, of necessity, been both brief and relatively anonymous): also he doubts that any of the cars is going fast enough actually to end his life.
A battered yellow taxi draws up beside him and, grateful to be able to abandon his train of thought, Salim gets in.
The backseat is patched with gray duct tape; the half-open Plexiglas barrier is covered with notices warning him not to smoke, telling him how much to pay to the various airports. The recorded voice of somebody famous he has never heard of tells him to remember to wear his seatbelt.
“The Paramount
Hotel, please,” says Salim.
The cab driver grunts, and pulls away from the curb, into the traffic. He is unshaved, and he wears a thick, dust-colored sweater, and black plastic sunglasses. The weather is gray, and night is falling. Salim wonders if the man has a problem with his eyes. The wipers smear the street scene into grays and smudged lights.
From nowhere, a truck pulls out in front of them, and the cab driver swears in Arabic, by the beard of the prophet.
Salim stares at the name on the dashboard, but he cannot make it out from here. “How long have you been driving a cab, my friend?” he asks the man, in Arabic.
“Ten years,” says the driver, in the same language. “Where are you from?”
“Muscat,” says Salim. “In Oman.”
“From Oman. I have been in Oman. It was a long time ago. Have you heard of the City of Ubar?” asks the taxi driver.
“Indeed I have,” says Salim. “The Lost City of Towers. They found it in the desert five, ten years ago, I do not remember exactly. Were you with the expedition that excavated it?”
“Something like that. It was a good city,” says the taxi driver. “On most nights there would be three, maybe four thousand people camped there: every traveller would rest at Ubar, and the music would play, and the wine would flow like water and the water would flow as well, which was why the city existed.”
“That is what I have heard,” says Salim. “And it perished, what, a thousand years ago? Two thousand?”
The taxi driver says nothing. They are stopped at a red traffic light. The light turns green, but the taxi driver does not move, despite the immediate discordant blare of horns behind them. Hesitantly, Salim reaches through the hole in the Plexiglas and he touches the driver on the shoulder. The man’s head jerks up, with a start, and he puts his foot down on the gas, lurching them across the intersection.
The Djinn Falls in Love and Other Stories Page 20