by Raja Alem
Nasser’s fist had left a searing pain which ran from his jaw to the back of his neck and reminded him of his car door, which Nasser had crashed his own car into during the pursuit. That was right before he arrested him. The Turkish woman took pleasure in the bloody bite-marks she left on his shoulders.
“Are you angry, precious?”
His stomach twisted in disgust at her hissing, but he didn’t recoil from her bites. He thought back to the comic car chase, the sadistic pleasure he’d felt in his spine when his car crumpled as it crashed into the rubble on Qarara Hill. Nasser had forced him out of the car like a common criminal. Khalil couldn’t help but laugh when Nasser clamped the Hollywood handcuffs on his wrists, but the scenario became a nightmare when Nasser took his police thriller fantasy to the extreme. He threw Khalil into a filthy cell with hardened criminals and put him through intense interrogations day after day. Like all corrupt cops, Nasser enjoyed torturing suspects and Khalil wasn’t cut out for the challenge. He collapsed like the Twin Towers and confessed in the most exacting detail to having taken his passengers hostage, frightening them and dropping them off miles away from where they’d wanted to go.
Under torture, Khalil would have confessed to anything had the cursed Turkish woman not intervened. He had no idea what strings she’d pulled to get him released, back into this fetid bed. He turned over and deposited those days of torture in her fleshy punching bag of a body. She, in turn, received his brutality with a satanic hiss, “Give me your rage, all of it.” She egged him on while he simply buried his face in the pillow, hoping to suffocate, to rid himself of this revolting thing. That pillow was the only thing he had left in the world. He took it everywhere with him like a turtle takes its shell, from Mecca to the U.S. and back. When he’d brought it with him to the basement that night, the Turkish woman had spotted it straight away, her teeth chattering like a rat-trap. Her entire body chattered when she danced.
Beneath the gallery, music blasted and then stopped. It started playing again and then stopped. Somebody was going through their entire vulgar collection. Khalil didn’t bother to look to see what was happening. He was stuck like a bug in the wooden nest that the Turkish woman had installed beneath the basement’s vaulted ceiling so she could spread out her large bed.
“Don’t be afraid! So long as your Turkette is alive and kicking no one will dare lay a finger on her pleasure-saurus.”
She bit his earlobe hard and what sounded like a pack of hyenas roared within her. Jail had broken something in him—not his body, but his sense of superiority, the idea that he was untouchable, a heavenly creature.
The night he got out of jail it was Mu’az who found him. From the bus, the imam’s son had spotted Khalil’s car on the side of the road some distance from the Lane of Many Heads. It looked like the sand at the edge of the Umrah Road had reeled the electric-yellow car in and swallowed its front tires. It was past midnight. Mu’az jumped out of the bus before it had even stopped, muttering the Throne Verse as he approached the car. It looked broken down and like it was surrounded by demons. Up close, in the light of passing cars, Mu’az spotted Khalil’s face, ashen, smashed against the steering wheel. The sweat on Khalil’s unconscious face poured hot out of Mu’az’s temples and forehead, blinding him. For Khalil, time had come to a standstill. He had a vague sensation of being manhandled and stuffed into the first passing car, and then ending up at Zahir Hospital where they succeeded in reviving him. That was when he came face to face with the dinosaur inside of him, the creature that he no longer controlled.
“This time the cancer is spreading out from your right kidney.” The doctor began that way so as to soften the blow of what was coming next: “This form of cancer is the most aggressive.” A week passed in the blink of an eye, like it does sometimes in movies. The surgery to remove the tumor behind his kidney went smoothly and Khalil came out of it cracking jokes, almost pleased that the dinosaur had taken a bite out of his body.
The relapse hit hard, though. In the days that followed, it seemed as though the cavity that the surgery had left in his back and abdomen had given the dinosaur a foothold and it began to spread through his body. The blank look on the doctor’s face as he examined the X-ray terrified Khalil. He was trying to hide the fear from Khalil’s body, to communicate what was happening without getting Khalil worked up. “Your condition is disconcerting. Such rapid and aggressive cell division is extremely rare. It’s like a fire through dry straw. It won’t take more than a few days, a month at most, before, uh …” The doctor struggled to collect his thoughts. Khalil seemed to have gone deaf, lost in a Hollywood daydream-thriller in which he’d have to play the part of crowd-pleaser and insist on leaving the hospital to confront his dinosaur nemesis on the streets of Mecca.
“But where would they discharge you to?!” The walls were deaf to Mu’az’s pleading questions. He was the only person in the audience, the only person there to object to the suicidal plot. Khalil was running away from the prospect of further amputation. “You can’t convalesce in a taxi!”
For the first time, Mu’az understood what kind of person Khalil really was: he was hostage to a fatal solitude. He belonged to no one and the sadness that enveloped him was unbearable. It tore at him.
The first course of chemotherapy was the worst. It laid waste to Khalil’s bones, all the way through to the marrow, but despite how frail he was, he was up on his feet an hour later, paying no mind to the nurse standing by with a wheelchair as he staggered out of the hospital.
Beneath the fiery Meccan sun, he was blinded by the sweat pouring from his forehead and the rest of his body. He turned to Mu’az suddenly, clutching at the arm that propped him up, and stopped in the middle of the boiling asphalt. He held Mu’az’s head between his feverish palms, ignoring the prickle of his coarse hair and squeezed as if to wipe the events of the past week from his memory. “This movie isn’t to be replayed for the gawkers in the Lane of Many Heads, got it? Just forget you ever saw me like this.” Mu’az nodded, assenting to a command that came across as part plea and part threat. He hid his pity for the former legend of the Lane of Many Heads, the Hero of the Streets, who stood shrunken on the black asphalt, as pallid as quicklime.
Privacy seemed to matter more to Khalil than anything else. The first time cancer attacked him was back when he was in flight school in Florida and he’d kept it a secret—from his own father even. Ever since then, whenever he spoke about his illness it was as if he was talking about a film he’d once seen. Privacy and a creative imagination were the only weapons Khalil had against his self-destructive impulses. In one way or another, cancer was something he felt he could be proud of. To him it was like an excess, or an eruption, of cellular production in which he played the role of nuclear reactor, setting off a chain reaction, producing boundless energy.
Khalil took his time outside the crumbling Zahir Hospital building where he’d received a dose of radiation that spread through his body, poisoning his cells. He stood up straight. He wanted Mu’az to see him as the six-million-dollar man, a hero who’d just received an injection of enriched uranium and was off to do battle with viruses from outer space.
“I swear on the Quran, I won’t tell a soul. But you really should follow the doctors’ advice and stay in the hospital for another week. The food here is good at least, and they’ll keep tabs on your treatment.”
Comforted by the promise, Khalil drove off in his cab, escaping from the look of cancerous fear in Mu’az’s sad eyes.
He was careful not to show any hint of illness in front of the Turkish woman. All she could talk about was how Nasser had rammed Khalil’s cab with his car.
“Don’t let them beat you down with a couple of dents. When you get better, just hobble over to the nearest car dealership and pick out whatever toy you want. Just so long as you promise never to take my favorite toy away,” she said, wrapping her iron grip around him. “If you treat your Turkette right, she’ll get you all the latest toys.” The look of disgust he
gave her was like a slap across the face. He would never let that succubus buy him. Not because he wasn’t for sale—no, there was definitely a price-tag hanging around his neck—but because the interested buyer was such trash. Whenever she bragged about being Turkish, he felt like spitting on her and calling her trash. A word like a cleaver to decapitate her with.
She pressed her lips like blotting paper against his face, murmuring, “You’re this Turkish woman’s soul.” An atomic meltdown of hatred was unleashed inside of him, stronger than the cancer that had exploded out from behind his recently operated-on kidney. He trembled with the pleasure of oppressive hate, and right away—as though her body were a finely tuned vibration-sensor—her desire was awoken. She reapplied herself, but for the first time in his campaign, the dinosaur inside him let him down. No matter how many times he swung at the Turkish woman, the dinosaur wasn’t moved by the violence, the spilled blood. It played dead, lying there like a limp worm. The Turkish woman, on the other hand, had been taken over by a nymphomaniac lioness. She was bashing his dinosaur around in her claws, desperately trying to excite him, only vaguely aware of his sudden impotence, while his mind raced, thinking of all manner of possible cures and remembering how he’d once snickered at the warnings about the increased risk of heart attack from those blue pills he used to take. He wished he could have had a heart attack right then; it would at least spare him the embarrassment of impotence. On a third level of consciousness, he was aware that he was smashing those bulges of fat with his fists and feet in order to compensate for his impotence until her bubbles floated climactically to the surface.
Finally, miraculously, he managed to drag his worn-out body away from that fatty mass, and with superhuman strength pulled his clothes on. He stumbled over to the wooden staircase that led down from her bedroom to the dance floor below. He didn’t even glance at the bodies gyrating around him, and they just watched him indifferently as he struggled to find his way out, any way out.
As soon as his lungs filled with the air of the lane, he began to cough and he hawked up something yellow. The last of the smell of her. As he staggered on, he stepped on an alley cat’s tail; it hissed, baring its teeth. He stepped on the filth that had turned the white cat’s coat gray, the signs of its last dust-up with some stray dogs.
“You and I are a lot alike, kitty. We’ve got eight souls, but have you heard of cancer? It’s not just a stray dog that wants a bite. It’s a dinosaur with gigantic feet that chases me and stomps on my souls, one after the other. The first time it attacked, it destroyed all my sperm, robbing me of the chance to have children. Now it’s crushing the rest of me, Khalil the devil, my manhood.”
He drove off in his cab. Alone in the car, the last thing the Turkish woman had said to him, the last he’d smelled of her, came back to haunt him. He scratched at his face because it still bore the marks of her lips. Her constant generosity always aggravated his dreams.
“Without your dinosaur, you’ll never be anything but a sewer worm, Khalil.”
Defeat. He slammed on the brakes, stopping his cab in the middle of an overpass, and considered everything he’d lost.
Every attempt at arousal had failed to revive him, but his lower half, which seemed paraplegic to him now, shot back, “How long is the Turkish vampiress going to let you get away with it?” He drove on recklessly, arriving at Mina, where he turned off the engine and sat in the blackness of the darkest night. He summoned the genies of Mina to revive his dinosaur. He wasn’t in the mood to acknowledge that he was a man devouring the very last crumbs of life. If all he had left was a single day, he’d spend it as drunk as an animal. The thought of being drunk made him laugh. How could he hope to get drunk in the midst of all the garbage that seemed to be his lot in life? He was so deep in the mound of garbage the only way to get rid of it was to burn it all. It wasn’t just the cancer, it was also his addiction to that piece of Turkish trash.
“That Turkish woman is the only one who can tear the dead flesh off your heart to see through to your true, unadulterated, desires,” a voice inside chastised him. “She’s the only one who can go toe to toe with your dinosaur, may he rest in peace. You deposit all the hatred you feel toward those people who are waiting patiently for the Mahdi inside of her. You belong to a race of people who are trying to engineer Judgment Day. You nurture wars so that they’ll wash the earth away with pure blood. You dream up all these plots that will wipe the slate clean, but they’re about as realistic as a Bollywood film. And yet it still pisses you off that they won’t even give you a supporting role.”
It killed him that they insisted on giving the lead role to the Antichrist in the war to come. They were even going to give a speaking part to a rock by the side of the road that will say “There is an infidel behind me” to believers, but they continued to ignore his talent. Come on! Khalil was a walking database of every action scene in every American movie ever made. He could act. He could tell you which corner every bullet and missile came from and the exact type of cruelty they would visit on human tissue, both living and dead. He used to drive to the edge of Mecca and park amidst the brutal volcanic mountains, just to think about the different types of homemade explosives that existed and how to pack them. All his passengers could attest to his encyclopedic knowledge of hydrogen bombs, their mass, and how deep through the ground their blast radii would reach.
“Out of all of us, I’m the one who’s best prepared to kill but still you guys go out and attack the Antichrist without me!”
All throughout their peculiar relationship, the Turkish woman had listened carefully to all his complaints. His every drop of rancor produced more evil in the lane. In the darkness at Mina, surrounded by demons and the ghosts of slaughtered animals, Khalil felt like he himself was the cancer that gave rise to the saga of the malignant cells that were ravaging the neighborhood: the appearance of the body was just the opening scene. It was followed by the destruction of Mushabbab’s priceless orchard and the story really reached its climax when Yusuf was hounded into exile. He suddenly had the feeling that he was writing the script, in invisible ink. Khalil remembered sitting with the Turkish woman, watching her copy down his story in magical ink as he dictated it. He pretended that he’d been enlisted to help her, that he was under hypnosis, that there was a whole troupe of Hollywood actors waiting in the lane, preparing to film scenes for a film about the role of Arab minorities in global terrorism. They were the ones who put up the YouTube video that broke open the scandal of the Lane of Many Heads.
“Khalil the pilot, always escaping from reality into your cinematic delusions.”
No matter how much Khalil gave into his love of Hollywood’s plots and sacred jungles, he always guarded a few things fiercely: his life, his cab, his special pillow, his mother’s ashes and his resolve never to let the Turkish woman record Azza’s story in her magic ink. His heart was seized by a fear that writing these things down would produce a chemical whose capacity for disfigurement was beyond comprehension. As soon as that nightmare struck him, his fingers jerked and he shook the hypnotized agent inside him awake. “That Turkish woman is Ottoman trash!” He’d upturn the Turkish woman’s table and break her inkpot, rip the role of spying and whoring out from beneath her, banish her from the most important plotline in her heart.
Sometimes, when his dinosaur overpowered him, he was desperate to sacrifice Azza, who was taming him like Jessica Lange tamed King Kong: he thought about dropping her from his gorilla palm and giving her as a burnt sacrifice to the Turkish woman. At moments like that, their demonic qualities brought him and the Turkish woman closer together, evil pulsed through their veins, their heads drew nearer, and being alone together was like being in an opium den filled with the smoke of devilish intentions. In bed together, perched near the ceiling of the basement, above the dance floor, they looked like they were sitting on a bench suspended in the air like demons who sit in the sky eavesdropping on humans below and dodging God’s angry shooting stars. Together they listened i
n on the bloated or anorexia-stricken fates of the female dancers below as the lights from the different dance sequences played across their faces. Against the backdrop of that lighting, which wouldn’t have been out of place in a nightclub, there was no limit to the photographic tricks his cinema-soaked mind could play. He imagined that he was the Turkish woman and that she was him, as if they were starring in the film Face/Off. She had his elongated face with his long, wide, even nose, his ears that pointed backward with clipped tips like a bird’s wings, his mouth, and his drop-shaped eyes. It was easy to imagine his own stretched-out face atop the rolls of fat on her neck, and her own monstrous face above his Adam’s apple and body, the muscles of which had slackened after all those immobile hours behind the wheel in the unbearable Meccan heat.
When had the Turkish woman changed her strategy so she could attack Khalil himself?
Khalil drove on blindly, aimlessly, nearly running into pedestrians and other cars at intersections that appeared out of thin air. He knew he needed to get out of the car before he caused a massacre.
He eventually made his way back to the Arab League Building, and discovered that it was ready to be knocked down. He snuck up to the rooftop, careful not to let the eunuch see him, and headed for the storage unit where the old film projector was stored. His body was a sponge heavy with his sweat. The moment he opened the door and stepped inside, he sensed some strange presence was in there. An evil laugh lay behind the box where he’d hidden his rare projector, the only thing he’d inherited from his father. He yanked the cover off to find a smashed mess sneering back at him. The only thing that had survived the destruction was a single reel: the black-and-white dinosaur. The vandal had left it untouched among scraps of other reels stuck to its tattered scenes.
Khalil fell to the floor sobbing, the roll of film lying in his lap like a dead child. He slouched, allowing the cancer to spread from his kidney to his liver, tearing through his gall bladder and spurting bile all through his insides. For a moment, he died there violently, and he only came back to life so he could experience the suffering of an even harsher death.