De Niro's Game (18 page)

The only coward here is you, I said.

He looked me in the eye. Then he said, You are leaving. I see your bag. You think you have to go. Your face is all cut. Your eye has a scar.

It is from your boss, I said. It is his goodbye gift to me. You have killed. I know you have killed. You killed that old man as well. And his wife. You always killed.

We
always killed, Bassam, George replied. He looked me in the eyes again and repeated,
We
always killed. The man who killed Al-Rayess, that man confessed. He mentioned your name. You gave him the plan for the foundation.
You
killed Al-Rayess.

That is why you came? I asked him.

Yes, I came to take you to the
Majalis
. They want you back there. You know, a few more bubbles. A few more slaps.

So, why did you drive in this direction? I asked him. The torture chambers are on the other side.

No, Bassam, the torture chambers are inside us. But I am fair, and you are my brother. I will give you a way out, De Niro said. I took Rana from you, he said, and he pointed his gun, and his eyes emitted red like blood, harsh as a stone, veiling lives, and shining in the windshield's light.

I ARRIVED AT THE PORT AND WENT TO FIND THE SHIP. I
looked for the Egyptian captain.

There you are, he said. Do you have the money?

I paid him, and he led me down to the engine room. This is Moustafa, the mechanic. You stay here with him until the ship leaves the port, then you go up on the deck. We are leaving soon, the captain said. He climbed back upstairs.

Then the engine roared and chuckled, and the pipes swelled and ticked, and Moustafa smiled at me and said, First time on a ship?

Yes.

He laughed. If you feel dizzy, go up and get some fresh air. He smiled again.

The boat moved slowly into the sea.

A COUPLE OF HOURS
passed, and during all that time I sat very still and made my mind blank. I wanted it to stay blank for a long time.

Finally, I went up on the deck and watched the little light on the shore fading into the black of the night. A few sailors rushed up and down the stairs and onto the decks. I watched them and held my bag, my money, my gun, and my jacket on my knees.

The air was still, and the ship sailed quietly from darkness and into darkness, from water into water, from earth into earth. I watched the slow death of the distant twinkles on the land.

Ten thousand waves passed under the floating tank that moved away from my home.

Ten thousand fish sang underneath the waves and nibbled on the garbage thrown from the cook's hand.

I looked at the sky. It was covered with light signals from faraway planets bursting with gas and the happy bonfires of dead humans singing warriors' songs in a landscape of burning rocks, and sending Morse code signals to ships steered by alcoholic captains into islands inhabited by sirens who sing in cabarets and offer up their salty sex organs that taste like the marinated fish of Sunday's family gatherings after the families have endured the moralistic discourse of fat priests who douse congregations with incense spilled from the pendulum motion of their jerking hands, a motion that rocks like the swings in parks that are swamped with baby strollers pushed by Filipino nannies on temporary visas and with small paycheques that are transferred at Christmas to faraway families who live in huts by the sea and receive Morse code signals from those old creatures from astral space. The creatures read oracles and long letters home from nannies who watch the kids of executives pouring sand in
plastic buckets and climbing geometrical cubes in red-striped sailor's shorts, and the creatures can also explain letters home from orderlies dressed in white aprons who cruise the elevators in old folks' homes, changing the sheets of senile, retired sea captains and society ladies, who are in complete ignorance of the presence of their three-piece-suited sons and oblivious to the repetitive, high-pitch complaints of their daughters-in-law, complaints like those of seagulls that feed on the sea trails of sailors' food, and rest on the deck, ogling me with xenophobic eyes, sharpening their beaks, and taking off to other planets on mythological wings.

MOUSTAFA SOUGHT ME
out, sat next to me, and offered me a cigarette.

I have seen passengers vomiting for days; you do not get seasick. You are leaving. He smiled.

Yes, there is nothing for me there.

Yes, there is nothing in these places, he agreed.

We smoked, and Moustafa walked down to the stern of the ship, above the ceaseless waves that passed under our fleeing feet.

The little lamps went off, and only the captain's room shone in the middle of the sea. The wind got cooler, so I went downstairs, through the narrow alleys, and sat in the kitchen. The captain came down slowly and sat, pensive and calm. Then he stood up, filled a kettle with water, and offered me tea.

I have a cabin for you, he said. You can have it after eleven. Mamadou, the African sailor, has a shift at eleven, and you can lie down in his bed.

We drank tea in silence. At eleven, I followed the captain. He banged on a cabin door, and an African man slowly opened up. The captain explained the situation to him. Mamadou nodded and waved his hand to invite me in. I lay on the bed and tried to sleep through the sound of the omnipresent engine, a sound that was loud but muffled like underwater signals from a clanking factory buried under seven layers of seas. I imagined a factory with armies of slave monkeys packing tuna in metal cans, and sticking on labels with esoteric languages, and arranging the cans in waterproof musical boxes screeching diabolic symphonies, and shipping them on the backs of seahorses to underwater villages filled with drowned soldiers, kidnapped maids, invading barbarians, treasure hunters, and a princess who had been enslaved in a sealed bottle by a jinni with a single earring, and who was now waiting for a fisher to solve the riddle and take her back to her lost palace, where she would rejoin the caliphate in a garden of jasmine and amber, and stroll through the arches of Baghdad before the invading armies burned her favourite books and destroyed thousands of tales.

IN THE MORNING
, Mamadou knocked at the cabin door, and we exchanged places. As I was stepping out, he smiled and said that the last passenger had refused to share his bed with a black man. He shook his head and smiled again.

I went up to the deck. The ship was surrounded by blue water and blue sky, and nothing else. Sailors rushed along the deck, and up and down the metal stairs. The boat cut its way through water that merged with the sky.

MOUSTAFA FOUND ME
on the deck and asked if I had eaten. No, I said.

We went down to the kitchen, and the cook offered us food in plastic bowls. The boat rocked, and the dishes swung in our hands, and the food shifted side to side in our mouths. Everyone was silent. The engine's hum cut through the sailors' bashful eyes, their quiet manners and balanced feet. After a time, a blue-eyed sailor spoke to Moustafa in broken English, saying something about the boiler in the back. Moustafa stood up and slowly shuffled his feet. The man sat in Moustafa's place and started to eat, ignoring my presence. I finished my food and walked up to the deck. The wind had risen. The smell of water surrounded the boat. I sat and thought of my home. I tried to locate its direction but found I was lost in the roam of the drifting-away earth, as if my neighbourhood drifted on the tide, and my chunk of land, with its war and my dead parents, floated on the seas. I stretched my neck, and stood on my toes, but could not see it; it floated away all around me, it was swept away in the flux of things. I leaned over the rail and watched white foam passing the bottom of the ship, caressing its edges and changing shape. And a partridge appeared and said to me,
No condition is permanent. I shall bring you a branch when the floating mountains are closer to your feet
.

I PACED THE DECK,
the splashing waves staining my face in ocean blue, and when the boat rose above a high wave I stretched out my hand, and touched the sky, and pulled it down, and took a peek over it, and released it. It bounced back, fluttered, and settled again.

When night returned, Moustafa sat next to me and asked, Do you like a little
kayf
(hash)?

I nodded and smiled.

He pulled out a small bag, and we rolled oily hash into a thin sheet that we cut, with giant scissors, from the drape of the stretched-out sky. Moustafa passed his tongue along the edge of the sheet, and the liquid, like carpenter's glue, sealed it. I extended my arm and picked a light from a burning star, and Moustafa grabbed the wind and squeezed it in his chest. Then he passed the wind, the sky, and the fire to me, and I pulled all these toward my lips, and like a black hole I sucked them in, held them, released them. They floated and landed on the water's surface, bounced on the waves, and attracted a school of flying fish that circled inside the fumes and sang ultraviolet, watery melodies to the enslaved underwater monkeys who repeated the tunes over the pounding noises of the tuna machines, sweet tunes reminiscent of the jungle sounds in their long-destroyed habitats, their abodes in swaying branches.

You will never go back. You seem like the wandering type to me, my brother, Moustafa said to me.

What is there to go back for? I whispered.

I have been on the seas for many years, Moustafa told me. I left Egypt when I was young. I have travelled places, my friend. I went to Japan and saw glittering lights, I had massages with tiny women walking on my back, I went to Africa and got drunk in bordellos, I slept with whores of all colours in all continents. I wasted my money on restaurants and bars, I smoked opium and snorted the best cocaine. I worked on many ships. I have seen prostitutes with black eyes like deep wells who asked me to save them from the fists
of their gold-toothed pimps. I have walked in cities where men's arms were stamped with anchor tattoos, and women perched on windowsills, calling out to you to make haste before their husbands returned.

Moustafa and I smoked and told stories, and for days the ship slid over the waves, and waves passed by and never came back, and the sailors pulled their sails, and the wind puffed and huffed and pushed us north and stole the smoke from our breath, and when the winds were high up, the sea slowed down and the water slowed, and the sail slowed, and the fish slowed, and the partridge glided above our heads under the sheet of the Hellenic skies, and one-eyed nymphs saw us and gathered to listen to our fantastic tales, charmed by the smell of our burning plants, mistaking it for the incense of their flying gods.

Two days before our arrival in Marseilles, the partridge took flight and disappeared.

WHEN THE BOAT ARRIVED IN PORT, A GROUP OF THE SAIL
ors led me down to the engine room. I stayed behind the boiler, sweating, and hid from the inspector who checked the cabins. When the inspector left, Moustafa and Mamadou ran to me and brought me water, laughing at my wet hair and clothes.

That night, Moustafa and I sailed to shore in a small boat. We crossed a fence and some train tracks. Then Moustafa smiled and said, You are in Marseilles. You are on your own now.

I WALKED
.

I walked through vacant streets, past doors that opened directly onto the curb of the street. A few dogs barked at my passage. My shadow was pasted to the ground; it moved and shifted shape depending on the position of the street lamps that hung high on curved poles. A car passed me by; loud music blasted my ear and then faded behind the buildings when the vehicle made a sharp turn. I walked on, looking for
the centre of the city, for a place where I could rest. I looked at the sky: the purple light of dawn was starting to break, rising from underneath the sea. Then I heard that same bombastic music approaching again. I recognized the sound of the car without looking behind me. I grabbed my bag, switched it from my back to my belly, opened its useless lock, dug both of my hands into it, and cranked the gun inside the bag.

I could tell, from the stretch of the headlights on cobblestones, from the slow passing twilight on the doors of houses, that the car was slowing down behind me. I kept on walking. The car drove up beside me. Three kids were in it, and they all stared at me. The driver's hand was extended from the window like the hands of our taxi drivers from car windows back home. The two passengers shifted their heads to get a better look at me.

I heard one of them saying,
Une merde de beur ici chez nous
.

Hey, the driver called in French, we do not want filth like you here.

I looked him in the eye, said nothing, and kept on walking.

The kids cursed at me and drove away fast. At the top of the street, the car made a U-turn. Its lights beamed in my face. The kids opened their doors, got out of the vehicle, and slowly walked toward me. Their long, evil shadows touched the tip of my shoes; they swung sticks and pipes in their arms.

I turned and ran in the opposite direction, away from the car lights that were blinding me. I heard rushing steps on the ground behind me, and promises to bash my head and stomp my body with heels.

When I turned the corner, I stopped in the middle of the narrow street, between two houses. I could hear dogs barking
on the horizon. I waited for my pursuers. They rounded the corner and stopped suddenly when they saw me. I kept my gun hanging behind my back, and when they approached me, tapping their sticks on their palms, flashing their sarcastic smiles, telling one another jokes, and mocking my masochistic tendencies, I pulled it out slowly. I cursed my pursuers in my own language, and waved my hand, daring them to accept that my bullets would kiss their high boots, shred their leather jackets, enlighten their shaved heads, rewrite their tattoos, colonize their souls, twist their skin like water faucets, block holes like Tuma's fingers, and make them sing a church-choir tune.