Empire Dreams (23 page)

The Swords of Allah pelted us with bottles. A scimitar-thin youth came at me, chair-leg raised. Ruthie forgotten, everything forgotten save my need, my lust for expression in violence, I stabbed him in the gut with the fire extinguisher. I knew his face. I had taught him T. S. Eliot and the emptiness at the heart of modern man. As he doubled up, a bolt of blue light took him across the eyes. I looked about me to see tiny, ferocious Hannah Tellender clasp hands together, point fingers, and stab another blue-hot blast from her wrist-lasers at the burning
basiji
. A charging demon figure fell with a wailing cry, hands pawing at blinded eyes. Three further stabs of light, three figures fell. My eyes met those of the ultra
improvisatore
.

“Baraka,”
I said.

“Baraka,”
she replied. She smiled.
Baraka
, the charisma that makes a beggar a king. For an instant there was almost communication, then the crowd broke over the stage and swept me away from her, dazed, confused, dazzled, out into the street filled with unfamiliar faces and the apocalyptic chorus of police sirens. And I suppose I loved her from that moment, but did not know it because I could not see past the dazedness, confusion, and dazzlement into her true light.

* * * *

Ruthie picked me out of siesta-sleepy boulevard Pasteur in a big black car that was not Ruthie’s driven by a man who was not Ruthie’s—not any of hers I could recall.

“I phoned you, I phoned your friends, I bribed my way past the concierge of that rue Ibn Ben Moussah slum you call an apartment, I even phoned the police to see if you’d been thrown into jail by mistake, and the only thing which kept me from phoning the morgue was that I heard on the radio news that no corpses had been dragged out of the Rififi. Name of Allah, girl, what have you been doing?”

Prim and cool in print frock, straw hat, and bandanna, Ruthie sniffed huffily and peered over the driver’s shoulder into the rearview mirror to paint a pair of crude, persimmon lips onto her face.

“Geez, Morrisey, I’d a thought you’d be grateful. It’s not every flatlifer gets invited to a claybreaking.” The driver, whom I had until now ignored, laughed a sudden, too-knowledgeable laugh. “Oh geez, I forgot. Morrisey, this is Armand. He played synth? At the club? Last night? Armand, this is Morrisey, my best friend, aren’t you, Morrisey?” She gave me a play tickle that made me cringe. “Armand’s one of them.” Needless explanation.

The big black car hooted its way across the Grand Socco, then suddenly, suicidally, darted through the medina gate into the labyrinth of streets that divided and subdivided like the human arterial system into the capillary alleyways of the old town.

“He’ll never get a car through here,” I whispered. Armand laughed again and a sudden stab of braking threw us to the floor (Ruthie bitching and flapping over spilled cosmetics) as a three-wheeler motor-dray leapt out of nowhere into the bedlam of vehicles and pedestrians. A swerve left and we were in a warren of medina streets so narrow the side mirrors scraped against the venerable Moorish plaster. The constant stop-start, the constantly blaring horn, frayed the never-too-firm fabric of my temper. Just as it seemed we must annihilate an entire generation of Tangerines from eldest grandmother down to most junior in parasoled baby buggy, the ultra chauffeur veered the big black car down an entry I had not even suspected was there. We lurched to a stop scant centimeters from a wall that had stood sound and solid since the days of the Cid.

Ruthie dabbed her face in nervous relief.

“This is it. This is it. Geez, a claybreaking. This is so exciting.”

I had no idea of what a claybreaking might be.

Locked wooden shutters excluded the street but admitted long slats of afternoon light and little djinns of air that sent the suspended petrol lantern swaying, dodging, weaving erratic shadows over the congregation that had gathered in a circle of crouchings and squattings on the bare clay floor, a circle of mutterings and the furtive communion of touching hands.

She was there. Not the creature of spirit and laserlight of the night before: different, a shrouded painting, a candle in an alcove. She sensed my presence, raised her eyes to meet mine.

“Hannah Tellender.”

“I know. Sheridan Morrison. The Rififi …”

“I know.” Her smile was enigmatic as a Madonna’s. “Ultras never forget.
Baraka.”

Before I could speak, she pressed fingers to my lips and pointed at the thing on the floor.

At the center of the circle of hands and faces lay a supine clay Venus, slightly over life-size, crudely shaped from mud. Mountain-breasted, insect-waisted, the steatopygous buttocks were splayed out on the floor by the pressing weight of heavy clay flesh. The coarse thing was daubed with swirls of black-oxide fingerpainting which reminded me of the meaningless meandering patterns of Altamira man. Between the conical thighs, labia had been vulgarly incised with a stick.

Questions flocked to my lips; Hannah’s fingers brushed them away. This was a holy moment, I was not to profane it. A murmur ran through the small, crowded room. Those squatting closest reached out to lay hands to the effigy.

And I thought I saw a tremor run through the clay thing.

The fluttering hands reached out again and there was indeed a tremor, more; a shudder, and a sound, a splitting, cracking sound. The clay thing flexed. Its mud carapace crazed over in a web of cracks. Pure dread possessed me. There was a spasm, a subsentient moan, scales of sun-dried clay fell to the clay floor and something moved inside, something sun-starved and ghastly. I almost cried aloud … And the hand-music began; hands dancing, hands tapping, hands clapping, hands slapping the clay floor, the rhythm of the heat, the street, the swinging petrol lantern; rhythm of the shadows. Another primal cry. The hands beat faster, faster, the whole room became their drum.

“What is it?” I whispered to Hannah Tellender. She swayed unconsciously to the song of the claybreaking.

“One of us, Mr. Morrison.”

Soft human hands brushed cold clay, pitter-pat, pitter-pat. The spiral-painted face-mask split and sloughed away. There was a face beneath, a girl-face, stupid, newborn, blinking. The mud-crumbed lips shaped silent syllables. A sigh rippled across the room and the hands drummed harder, louder, until it seemed that the whole city throbbed to their hand-song. The entombed girl struggled to heave herself free from her chrysalis, for now I saw the truth of the coarse clay Venus. The tension peaked toward the edge of hysteria, then abruptly, terrifyingly, there was silence. Still, silent hands reached to pull the naked girl from the broken clay shards. A gust of red wind swung the petrol lantern and for an instant of pure insanity I saw diaphanous wings unfold from her shoulders; rainbow-sheened, as delicate as oil on water. Then the shadows re-formed and I saw only a stupid, confused girl of about twenty, blind and reaching. Flakes of mud clung to her blonde hair. The naked newborn passed around the circle of ultras and each in turn pressed his flesh to hers. Yet there was nothing in the least sexual in this pressing of nakedness; quite the opposite, I felt like an infidel witnessing the administration of some precious sacrament.

Then I saw Ruthie gather the blonde ultra-child into her arms and I did not want to see any more. Hannah’s simultaneous whisper voiced my feelings.

“Take me away from here, Mr. Morrison. Anywhere, I just want away from here.”

* * * *

What else could I do? Where else could a beach-bum street-exile draft-dodger take his ultra-poetess-
improvisatore
but the Mermaid Cafe where all beach-bums street-exiles draft-dodgers are fetched up by the tides of war, sorry,
police action
. Spiritual flotsam, drifting toward the edge of the twentieth century under the rueful proprietorial eye of Fat Sonny, expiating his own particular brand of patriotic guilt by dressing in helicopter-pilot fatigues and shades. Time makes us all into the things we despise most.

Over a bottle of Fat Sonny’s House Vintage, Hannah confessed why she had fled the claybreaking.

“It was just too personal for me, Mr. Morrison.” The wine was clear and cold and carried a faint bouquet of apricots. “Seeing her come out of the clay reminded me too much of when I came out of the clay like that, naked, vulnerable, newborn. You can’t begin to understand what it’s like; only someone who has been through it can, it’s a precious, precious time, alone with yourself, catatonic in the clay chrysalis. You learn, you see, you become; new paths of perception are mapped out in your brain, new ways of seeing reality. Connections are made between areas of your brain that haven’t been connected since the dream-time, new neural networks laid down … Alone, you learn that you are an extraordinary creature in a universe so extraordinary no dull, flatlifed ordinary person can ever begin to touch the splendor of it …” She gazed wistfully into her glass. Then, sensing she had wounded me as unthinkingly as a child might maim a fly, she said, “Oh God, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean that about dull, flat lives.”

“Yes you did,” I said.

“Yes, I did,” she agreed. And it was as if the recognition of the unbridgeable distance between us somehow bound us together.

By day, after the consular brats had scampered back to their porno discs and cocaine habits, I showed Hannah the city of Tangier and amidst the tangled laneways of the medina and the bustle of the fruit market found a new freshness in her appreciation of what, to me, was contemptibly familiar. By night, after the streets had emptied of evening strollers and the cafes had put up the shutters, she whirled me through the small cafes and bars and after-hours clubs and took me as close to the heart of the extraordinary universe the ultras inhabited as any flatlifer could come.

Fragment by fragment, stone by stone, like some shattered clay stele of an ancient revelation, I learned her story: rummaging and haggling in the Souk for dubious souvenirs, sipping afternoon coffee at the sidewalk tables of the Mermaid Cafe, among the evening crowds walking the Terrace amidst the schoolkids and grazing herds of paparazzi with the green hills of Spain rising behind us, fragment by fragment, stone by stone, I learned how an ultra
improvisatore
is made.

In Deerfield, Tennessee, they had a saying: God made the world but the TVA made Deerfield, Tennessee. And in that place that God forgot to make, there was a little girl, born little, grew up little, but who was big inside, bigger than Deerfield, Tennessee. She had to be big inside to contain all the dreams, for they were big dreams, bigger than Deerfield, Tennessee. Big dreams of big places: walled cities and desert caravans, crescent moons and high snowy mountains, places larger than truth, big as dreams, places she had read about in the
National Geographic
magazines in the waiting room of her father’s dental surgery. As she grew the dreams grew to fit her, the dreams of things she could not put a name to which she wanted more than anything. So the poems flocked into her head, good poems, poems much too good for Deerfield, Tennessee, for sometimes she would recite the poems in her head to people in a bar who did not understand them, not at all, because the poetry they wanted to hear was pretty words and pretty thoughts and pretty pictures trapped on pretty paper and her poems were not like that, not at all. And so she was unhappy.

“Then I saw this TV news report about a doctor down in Memphis who was up in court because he was giving DPMA to anyone who would pay him three hundred dollars and I knew that I had to have it. Had to. No other way to make the dream spark into life. So I worked in the surgery and after hours in a diner and I saved every penny until I had my dream ticket. Then I took a bus to Memphis, put the cash down on Dr. MacKinley’s table, and he slipped the needle up the back of my skull and when I woke up it was the dream-time again. For always.”

We were kicking around in a souvenir shop on some anonymous alleyway just off the Petit Socco. Hannah picked up a large enameled plate.

“You like this? I think I might buy it for you as a present.”

But the wind blows where it will, as the Berbers say, and with the joyful, carefree times came times of melancholy when a great silence welled out of Hannah like blood and we would sit for hours, not speaking, yet desperate for communication. On one such occasion, over glasses of afternoon coffee in a roadside cafe overlooking the place of legends where the waters of the Mediterranean and the Atlantic break upon each other, I asked, purely for the sake of making noise,

“So, was there a Marrakech?”

She smiled within her sorrow.

“There was. There still is.”

“And an Arthur?”

“No. Not really. There was someone, back in Deerfield. He was a skipper, that was what we called them in Deerfield, skipped off the draft and ran to Marrakech. Impossibly romantic. But as for being an Arthur. No. Never.” Presently she said, very quietly, “But you could be him if you like.”

We never came any closer to saying it than that.

* * * *

By trading in on an old favor down on rue Ibrahim Sultan, I was able to secure the indefinite usage of a black-and-white Mercedes taxi. I could have asked for more, much more, in return for smuggling synthetic death-hormone suppressants across to Algeciras on the hydrofoil, but nothing else would have afforded me as much pleasure as taking Hannah away from Tangier and the rag-end years of the twentieth century into the timefree lands of the Rif. I felt she needed space and silence and time away from the comradeship of her Soul Circle. New cities, old faces; the strain was beginning to tell on Hannah. So we drove all morning through olive groves and orchards of oranges and almonds. The sun beat down on us through the open sunroof (“It’s stuck,” said bio-smuggling Bakhti, showing me the sheet of polythene which served as protection in case of rain) and glinted from the last of the Rif snows.

“Just where are you taking me?” Hannah asked.

“Chaouen,” I replied. We skirted Tétouan, the old capital of Spanish Morocco in the days of the protectorate, crossed the snow-swollen river, and began the long climb up the south road which threw itself across the foothills of the Rif in swoops of exhilarating switchbacks. “Little town on the side of a mountain. Old Spanish governors used to keep country villas there, lovely quiet timeless atmosphere, the perfect retreat, until the tourists come by the busload.”