by Raja Alem
“I don’t think so,” he said and drained the last of his soft drink. A piece of acting fit to be caught on tape.
“If you’re here because you’re curious, go inside. Do you want her to recognize you, is that it?” Mu’az’s words were like a snapshot that couldn’t be retouched, but it was received soberly.
“I don’t think so.” Mu’az took a mental portrait of the Eunuchs’ Goat’s head at precisely that moment: empty, echoing with words. If he looked for his own reflection in the Eunuchs’ Goat’s eyes, all he saw was the stolen mannequin in the shopping cart.
“It’s idiotic of you to keep saying ‘I don’t think so’ when you’re feeling hindered by this inferiority complex you inherited from Yusuf. So tell me: what grave did you crawl out of? Last I heard you were a fugitive from the immigration authorities.”
“It would shock you to know what desperate people like me can accomplish. They don’t have anything to lose. You should see our little kingdom: castles on the mountainside, hiding places beneath rotting garbage heaps that even dogs wouldn’t venture into. Police and Immigration can’t reach us there. We’re an army of people waiting to be discovered for what we are. We’re not the subject of legend any more. Down in the ground we extract the gold from your garbage. Each day we come face to face with the monster that threatens to devour our planet, and we burn it day after day to replenish our forces. If we stop recycling, garbage will overwhelm you and us and swallow the entire world. Everything you throw away is added to the monster; that’s why we can’t just shut our eyes, relax, fall in love, and settle down somewhere outside the dump where our kids won’t get asthma and cancer.” Mu’az noticed that the Eunuchs’ Goat’s skin wasn’t marble-white like it used to be; there was a layer of ash on his skin, as if he’d just left a crematorium.
“In the garbage dump?” He couldn’t hide the disgust in his voice.
“Your garbage is more valuable than anything you buy in your super-hyper-mega-stores.”
“Like the cursed nations in the Quran? You were cursed because of what you did. I figure the immigration police never did arrest you that night, never booked you for deportation, and you didn’t actually escape. No. You stole the money out of the Eunuchs’ Goat fund and abandoned your poor father and your deranged mother. You destroyed your parents who rescued you from garbage and embraced you, so you could return to garbage. We thought you ran off with a woman but you ran after this …” He said, pointing to the mannequin, disgustedly.
The Eunuchs’ Goat broke out laughing. “All the women you know are just the same woman. You can’t fool them. They know that love can’t sprout from fear and that mannequins and human beings can’t fall in love. Imagine this cork body in love! This is like a disease that’s eating away at me: I need them to feel my touch. I need them to love me back. But who can bring them to life? I collect all the mannequins I can get my hands on and recycle their parts so I can create one real living woman out of them.” He waited for a response from Mu’az. “Look. You have no idea what I’ve been through. You spent your entire adolescence memorizing the Quran and trying to get away from your father’s stubborn agenda. How could you know? I’m the only one who knows what it’s like to miss the feeling of flesh and blood in your arms. That’s what the girls of the Lane of Many Heads were,” he said pointing to the mannequin in the shopping cart. “Your sister Sa’diya …” Mu’az blinked rapidly, but he was too drained to tell him to keep Sa’diya out of it. “Fine, let’s say Azza, or whatever girl, lived in constant fear that we would touch them.” He scratched the mannequin’s body without thinking. “They didn’t want us to discover this: a cylinder where their pelvises should be and metal rods instead of thighs and calves.”
Mu’az’s expression didn’t soften; he looked on the verge of anger. “You think I wasn’t like you guys, the other boys in the lane? That I don’t know what it means not to feel the touch of another body? You say I was too busy being trained to call prayers to notice any of that. No, I felt what you were all going through and I loved all of you. I’m going to level with you: you’re all cowards. You were the Veil Monster, who used to sneak into our rooms at night, but that too was a cowardly thing to do. You and my sister Sa’diya didn’t do a single thing to win each other’s hearts. That’s why you ran away like a kitchen rat and why she didn’t shed a tear after you left.”
The Eunuchs’ Goat started removing the clothing from around the blank space between the mannequin’s legs. “There’s a nymphomaniac in Ta’if who’s demanding that we circumcise women, so that they’ll be like this. So that they won’t want to touch us. And pretty soon, he’s going to call for the castration of all men—after milking us for our semen, of course, so they can create embryos in test tubes and reproduce the human species without a man and a woman ever making contact, not even husbands and wives.” He was silent, then added, “Yes, I live among a super-human race. I take advantage of their superiority and anger, but the whole time all I can ever think about is burning the world down and recycling it.”
The audacity in the Eunuchs’ Goat’s tone, which sounded to Mu’az almost like a threat, annoyed him.
“Why am I talking about women with a boy like you? I bet it shocks you!” He listened to the echo of his own words, then carried on, “The girls of the Lane of Many Heads lived in terror of becoming real flesh and blood themselves. They were so frightened of scandal, they sought refuge in death, and men like Yusuf, or Khalil, or the Eunuchs’ Goat, or even you, the son of the imam who has the entire Quran memorized, are accused of the crime. They expect us to bear the guilt of killing the prey without getting to taste its blood. Tell me something: why would a girl in love want to kill herself?”
Mu’az was now certain that the Eunuchs’ Goat had lost his mind. “As soon as a girl is born, they lock her up in a mannequin’s body. All girls are possessed by a mannequin that wants to control them, but then you and me and him are trapped by it. Look at us! Yusuf should never have stopped writing to her, that way she wouldn’t have disappeared into death. And I should never stop hoarding and burning mannequins or else the neighborhood girls will all drown! The head of the Lane of Many Heads and everything inside it needs to be recycled, and we need to go on smuggling. Smuggling in love and words and candid photos, magnifying lenses, women’s hands and faces. To show that we are made of flesh, and blood, and desire.”
Mu’az was staring at the mannequin in the Eunuchs’ Goat’s shopping cart. It turned his stomach. “Can you honestly tell me, Mu’az,” the Eunuchs’ Goat went on, “which one of us is real: me or the mannequin? We have to figure out whether this is all just the paranoid fantasies of a lunatic. Am I a real human being or just one of these?” He asked, pointing at the mannequin in the cart. “What if somebody is hoarding me in this city? Who can promise me that I’m not just a puppet? That I won’t just be unplugged one day and that another newer model won’t take my place? That I won’t be tossed onto a trash heap while the souls of real humans are transported to some other existence that will forever remain a mystery to us … To some paradise somewhere.”
Mu’az gave up any hope he’d had of following the thread of the conversation so he just tried to tie together the strains that interested him. “Do you think Azza was taken away? Or was she the one who died?”
“While Yusuf was still writing to her? We’re the philosophy of garbage, that’s what we are.” His entire body was transformed into an exclamation mark for a moment, but he regained his previous apathy almost instantly. Without so much as a backward glance he set off, pushing his cart toward the shopping center exit. As soon as he’d disappeared into the darkness, Mu’az noticed a black driver, dressed in white robes and a red-checked headscarf, jump out of a black Mercedes to open the rear door for the artist, who slipped gracefully inside. Her ankle flashed in his memory. The driver shut the door and took his place behind the steering wheel, and they set off.
“That’s the same driver. The one who was driving the woman from social
insurance. The Cadillac at dawn. Azza’s driver.” He leapt to his feet. “When you get this close to her, you’re bound to lose your mind. Just like all the other men who’ve gotten to know her. Life’s too big to revolve around a woman.” He didn’t know who it was that kept repeating that phrase inside his head. The gallery was suddenly still and it was as though the lights had never been on. There was no chance of taking any more pictures. Mu’az looked around him. He wasn’t sure anything would come out in the dim light, but he took one final shot of the great emptiness all the same. The only thing that interrupted the perfect emptiness was a single car-washer, sitting on the motionless escalator counting his takings. He was chatting to a man selling wreaths of jasmine flowers, who was standing at the very edge of the frame, waiting for one last customer. He’d spent the entire evening walking up and down the seafront, selling his wreaths to day-trippers, the wreaths hanging from his wrist slowly withering in the hot, salty air. He caught up with the last of the mall’s shoppers, a family laden with bags, none of whom so much as noticed him except for the young daughter, whose black braids looked like a curled snake. She clung to her father’s arm and asked him to buy her a wreath as he was loading their purchases into the trunk. Almost all his customers that day had been girls like this one, younger than ten; they were life-savers, these girls with their slanting eyes—far from the Barbie model—who were captivated by his wreaths of jasmine flowers.
In that instant, Mu’az realized that as his imagination was taking in a stream of photos, it also was taking in a virus of diaries and mannequins, and was manipulating them. The gallery was the perfect place to meet Azza. He looked around at the crows that, startled by sporadic honking, took refuge in the trees and on the walls of surrounding villas. He paid no attention to them and instead tried to get a shot of the small birds. “Birds move in such a strange way when they’re flying. It’s as though they’re swimming and diving and then catching themselves and diving again.”
He was talking out loud, to the night. “Birds are nature’s desire to be free. It takes the form of little winged bundles, which we know as birds, but which are actually freedom itself. It departs from our bodies, like these little bundles, when we take a photo of a dream that has grown within us, one that we chase after no matter where it leads. When we grab hold of it, even in a picture, these handfuls stream down from our bodies. I saw all this in the dozens of photos I took of the boys and girls of the Lane of Many Heads chasing after their dreams. But did I see those kinds of birds flying out of the artist’s body at the opening?” He didn’t know who it was who’d planted these words in his head, nor from which stolen scrap they’d reached him; he was desperate for his body to speak in those tiny wings, to be freed of all limits, but a blackness settled over his heart.
“Crows are nature’s predatory desires, and that’s how they get their form: smudges of pure blackness.” He felt like he was trapped between the two: bird or crow? That was the choice the Turkish woman had laid before him, and she was waiting to hear his answer. For the first time, he was honest with himself about what she wanted from him: to put his faith in her hands. He was the one who claimed that there was an invisible line, which if crossed would tear one’s body apart. Therefore there must also be a line that assembles the disassembled to create a body. Every photograph he took and edited, every verse of the Quran he’d memorized was part of his search for that line. He tried with his every bundle of freedom, every bird, the desire for freedom in his eye, to break through to the point where everything was gathered together: Azza, life, the city, in a single body that would speak to him. The Turkish woman may not have translated her wish into words, but she would inevitably drive him to collect those disparate strings for her.
Mu’az made up his mind as he was standing there. He approached the glass exterior of the gallery and pressed his face up against the glass. He focused with his every layer of seeing—perception, interpretation, dissection, composition—on the very final painting, the last in the exhibition. He focused on the absent figure in it, on the pool of light, which was the absent figure’s remains, a fog of breath, gradually allowing the handfuls of absence to cloud his eyes. His eyes wide and tearful, his sight was extinguished; the last thing he saw was the dripping lines of longing left behind by the figure who had disappeared in front of him, flowing into the city, and submerging the image of her in his mind, flooding his systems, which came together in the completion of the picture. The pupils of his wide eyes turned completely white. Surely that was the color of Adam’s eyes, from whom he’d inherited the pain of leaving Eden, and the color of Jacob’s eyes, from whom he’d inherited the pain of losing Yusuf.
When he turned to look back at the city and all he could see was a spot of light dancing over the blood fountains in his eyelids, he knew he’d gone blind. Within the blackness that had taken root inside Mu’az, shadows, memories, and reality were all rolled into one. He recognized two faces in there somehow: the face of the Turkish woman’s eunuch, who was sexy even to men when dressed up as a woman, and Azza’s face as she’d appeared to Yusuf, the summation of everything gathered together in the Lane of Many Heads, a mirror, a face that stood for Mecca itself. Mu’az shut his blind eyes against the mirror, squeezed them; he could hear the glass shatter. All he could think about was telling someone what he’d seen. He took out his cell phone and dialed the number he’d been warned never to call unless it was an emergency.
“Listen. This is Mu’az. I have something important to tell you.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Azza’s Aisha.”
“……”
Silence. Mu’az repeated himself. “Azza’s still Aisha.” Hearing his own words, he understood the problem. He was saying the word Aisha, which meant alive, but it was the same word as the name. So he rephrased: “Azza’s still living, Yusuf. She’s not dead. She’s alive. She’s with Long Belt, Khalid al-Sibaykhan.”
He licked the salt spray off his lips thirstily and got ready to head back, but there was no Lane of Many Heads left and the Kaaba was surrounded by barricades. He thought of going back to his father, wherever he was. For the first time in months, he found himself missing the sardine rows his father used to pack them into to sleep after night prayers. When he considered the blackness behind him, and in front of him, and on either side, and above, and below, the thought of how far he’d traveled away from that sardine can frightened him. He desperately needed those blind recitations, which his father forbade. Going to bed after performing the night prayers together and being up for dawn prayers in the mosque. None of the Imam’s children dared miss either of those two appointments. Dusk was when the demons spread through the world and dawn was when the angels appeared. His journey stretched before him between those two appointments.
Blue
THE WHOLE TIME SHE WAS IN JEDDAH, NORA HAD THE TOP FLOOR OF THE SEA-front tower he owned all to herself. All she wanted was to forget about what she’d been through in the desert. She’d been alone with the sheikh on the flight back, but the sullen look on his face told her never to mention what had happened with Bundug.
She had no idea what had gotten into her that day to make her want to cross his clear red lines, but in the end she decided to shove open the glass door that led to his office, which had always been off-limits to her. Once she was inside, she had no idea what to do, though. She plopped herself down onto a chair in front of the desk and sat there, bewildered, like a pathetic little auditor who was out of her depth. As she aimlessly admired the expensive antiques dotted around the place, a box suddenly caught her eye. Perhaps it was the contrast of the rough box to the luster of everything else that drew her attention.
Her curiosity was piqued. She pulled the box toward her and tipped it upward, peeking inside. In the midst of a stack of papers, damp and charcoal-smeared, she spied a blue folder bearing the label AISHA’S EMAILS, standing up against the side of the box. Blood rushed to her head and without thinking she grabbed some of the co
ntents of the folder and ran back to her room. She stuffed them under her mattress and sat down on the bed in the dim light, trying to steady her heartbeat.
That night her sleep was interrupted by the stolen words, shifting and pulsing beneath her bed, enveloping her in their nightmares.
“What’s this gloom? Is this a funeral?” The phrase broke through her shallow sleep. He barged in like a storm, and she leapt up in bed. He pulled the curtains back, allowing the sun to reach her bed, as she spread her arms over the bed as if to protect it. She could tell he was drained from the dark circles around his eyes, and when he examined her, the signs of sleeplessness in the disturbed bedding around her didn’t escape him either. “Get the hot tub ready,” was his order to her assistant and to his own on the phone he said, “Make sure to burn everything. Don’t miss a scrap. I want it over and done with.” When he hung up the phone, he turned to Nora. “We both need to wake up.” Nora was frozen in place, terrified. Had he discovered the missing papers? He stared at her. “Or do you prefer trying to wake up while you’re still in bed?” he asked her sarcastically. She let out a deep sigh and smiled devilishly. His cell phone rang, interrupting them. “Lord let this be mercy not torture!” He jumped onto the bed as soon as his phone call was over. “I hate missing out on these sweet, lazy moments with you, but there’s nothing I can do about it. An empire of demands awaits. Though I do prefer you when you’re this starved lioness.”
It was ten in the evening by the time he put on his embroidered cloak, careful not to disturb the wave in his brilliant headscarf. He left her, swimming in the scent of his agarwood perfume. She knew from the extreme care he’d taken with his appearance that she had several hours, perhaps days, to herself before he’d be back. She locked her bedroom door and took out the few papers she’d managed to nab from the folder. She inhaled the damp smell, with the faintest hint of pine, and ran her eyes over the page.