Gorgeous East (36 page)

To one side of the yellow throne stood a narrow-faced man, with an air of self-importance about him, Al Bab’s prime minister or vizier. A scraggly mustache and moth-eaten beard drooped forlornly from the man’s face. For a while, no one spoke.

“State your name, Enemy of God,” the vizier said at last, in French.

“I’m not an enemy of God,” Smith said.

The vizier raised an eyebrow and one of the Marabout guards smacked Smith in the head with a leather quoit and Smith’s vision shattered into a scattering of light and yellow squiggles.

“Hey!” Smith said, shaking himself.

“Blasphemy is rewarded with pain,” the vizier said. “Be warned.”

“How is it blasphemy to say I’m not an enemy of God?” Smith managed, trying to keep his voice calm. “I like God—” Though this wasn’t true. He felt nothing but bitter resentment toward the divinity that had struck down his sister at thirteen and taken his father and mother and now poor Jessica without consulting him first. Anyway, he believed himself to be an atheist.

The vizier frowned and Smith was hit again.

“Your name!” the vizier commanded.

“Legionnaire Caspar P. Milquetoast,” Smith gasped. “1e RE, Musique Principale. Serial number 9938947.”

“Your are an American.
C’est vrai?
”

“The Legion is my country,” Smith said, stiffly. “I’m a soldier in the service of the French Republic. Currently attached to MINURSO, the United Nations Peacekeeping—”

The vizier interrupted with another gesture and Smith was hit a third time on the back of the head. Al Bab watched, his black eyes without emotion.

“An American. You are an American. Say it!”

“All right,” Smith said when he had recovered sufficiently to speak. “I’m an American. Have it your way.”

At this, Al Bab beckoned with a hennaed hand and the vizier knelt down and listened, nodding.

“As an American, you are an unholy cancer,” the vizier translated, when he had absorbed the Hidden One’s message. “America is the cancer of all cancers, infecting the world with the AIDS virus grown in a laboratory as a weapon against all brown-skinned peoples.”

“That’s a bunch of conspiracy-theory bullshit—” Smith began, and again he was hit.

“A cancer,” the vizier continued, “corrupting the world with your iPods and your computer Web full of naked women and naked men engaging in many sexual acts and perversions, sometimes with each other, sometimes with household pets.”

“I hear you guys have a Web site!” Smith shot back.

“Our Web site is holy and therefore necessary,” the vizier said. “Your Web site is an abomination.”

“It’s not that bad,” Smith said. “A buddy put it up for me. An actor who waits tables at Toast, in the East Village—this crazy place that only serves toast with various kinds of toppings, peanut butter, almond spread, Cheez Whiz, caviar, whatever. Stupid idea you say, but a monster hit with the late-night munchie crowd. Anyway, Toby does computer stuff on the side and he did my Web site as a favor. I guess it’s not great, maybe a little user unfriendly, but it was free.”

The vizier paused, confused, then conferred with the Holy Gateway. “Not your own personal Web site,” he said after a moment. “His Holiness speaks of the Internet as a whole. Full of filthy perversions.”

“Got me there,” Smith admitted. “The Internet’s definitely 70 percent porn.”

“Aha!” The vizier wagged his head. Then: “They say you are also a singer of songs. Is this true?”

“I sing,” Smith admitted. “I also dance and act. The old triple threat.”

“Be that as it may, we do not permit singing here,” the vizier said. “It is an affront to God. Nor do we permit the flying of kites or the eating of pork, or swimming, which is an activity only meant for fish, God be praised.”

“You have a pool?” Smith said.

Al Bab crooked a finger and the vizier leaned in close for a quick word.

“Correction,” the vizier said. “We will permit singing under certain circumstances.”

“O.K.,” Smith said.

“The Holy Gateway wishes you to sing something now.”

“I’m not in the mood,” Smith said.

“You will sing,” the vizier said. “At once.”

Smith did a couple of scales, then sang “One Enchanted Evening” from
South Pacific
, which he’d done at the 6th Avenue Play house in New Paltz and that, truthfully, is a song better suited for an operatic baritone. When finished he wished he’d sung something else, but it was too late.

Al Bab spoke aloud; the vizier translated: “The Hidden One does not like this song. He wishes you to sing another one. Something better.”

“I agree with”—Smith couldn’t decide what to call a semisupernatural being wearing Birkenstocks—“with His Magnitude. But it’s hard for me to sing while kneeling, it’s all about breathing, you know. May I stand?”

The vizier nodded. As Smith rose, chains rattling, he saw the Hidden Imam’s eyes glance down for the barest moment, measuring the size of Smith’s penis tucked in its matted nest of yellow hair. The old locker-room syndrome, Smith thought ruefully, even out here in a place where there were no locker rooms. He cleared his throat and decided on a whimsically comic number: “Good Old Days” from
Damn Yankees
.

“Cannibals a-munchin’ a missionary luncheon”—Smith did his best to give it the old comic zing—“ha-ha-ha-ha! those were the good old days . . .”

This is the lament of Mr. Applegate, who is the devil, for the passing of the bad old days of cannibalism, pestilence, and war, which to him, being the devil, were actually the good old days. Funny stuff. It was a song, Smith always thought, that could only have been written from the high ground of 1958, when things seemed to be getting better in the world for everyone: infectious diseases on the wane, totalitarianism on the outs, the stock market up, and America a gleaming beacon of personal liberty, excellent hygiene, frost-free refrigerators, and gigantic cars with fins that got eight miles to the gallon. Mr. Applegate would be very pleased with the way things were sliding these days.

But this number also fell flat. The Marabouts exchanged confused looks, rustled restlessly in their djellahs.

Al Bab sighed and spoke again at length.

“The Gateway to the Age of the Hidden Imam, peace be upon him, does not like your singing at all,” the vizier translated.

“Then I guess he’s not a fan of show tunes,” Smith said peevishly, crossing his arms.

“This is an accurate statement,” the vizier conceded.

Just then, a door opened at the back of the room and two more Marabouts entered. Before the door closed, Smith caught an intriguing glimpse of the next room: He saw a shelf crammed with books and DVDs and what looked like a shortwave radio. And, on a small table by a bowl and a spoon neatly laid out, a narrow red-and-blue box covered with garish cartoon graphics. This box was utterly familiar to Smith, and yet so alien in this context he could hardly say what it might be. Then the door closed and the identity of the thing was gone from him.

“Someone has come looking for your colonel,” the vizier said presently; his voice sounded the serious note that all men’s voices have when they speak about money. “They have entered the souk at Laayoune, offering bribes for information concerning his whereabouts. Do you think”—he paused, stroking his thin mustache—“someone might also come to offer money for the sake of your head?”

Smith thought about this, his skin prickling from more than the unaccustomed warmth. The Legion was looking for Phillipe! If they were looking for Phillipe, this must mean they were looking for him too! The Legion would never abandon its lost children!

“Of course,” Smith said, grinning. “Absolutely.”

“Your family in America, they are rich?”

“Very rich!” Smith said enthusiastically. And he gave them the same absurd story he’d given Kasim Vatran, way back in Istanbul: He came from a family of Iowa lumber barons, rich like Rockefeller for a hundred years. They owned lumber mills, acres of property, railroads, the entire city of Montezuma. More, they held the monopoly on all of Iowa’s vast lumber preserves.

“Forests,” Smith said. “One-hundred-foot-tall Iowa pines. Far as the eye can see.”

Suddenly, Al Bab shifted in his yellow chair and uttered a short, incredulous bark. He became animated briefly, jabbed his hennaed finger repeatedly in Smith’s direction, speaking rapidly in the Saharoui Berber dialect. He seemed angry. Smith’s heart sank.

“You are a liar!” the vizier exclaimed, outraged. “There are no such forests. This place you call Iowa is much like a desert. With only”—he paused searching for the word—“many fields of corn!”

Smith wasn’t given a chance to explain himself or make any emendations to his fantastic tale. Someone hit him from behind so hard he fell to the floor stunned. And he was dragged by his chains across the nice soft carpets and down the concrete hallway, out of the warmth of Al Bab’s comfortable pink ranch house and back into the darkness and the cold of the mountain.

6.

S
mith awoke to the sound of Phillipe jabbering to himself and the usual lapping of cold night air on his bare feet and ass. Phillipe’s madness always intensified in the dark. Now, an odd, tuneless snatch of Satie’s
Musique d’ameublement—Pom-pom
-pom-pom; pom, pom,
pom
!—emanated from his dark corner. The colonel was mimicking the sound of his old baby grand, the piano that had kept him more or less sane through all those sleepless midnights at the Fort de Nogent. You could ask him to stop, scream at him, but it was no use. He would stop for a minute, maybe two, forget himself, and start up again.

Smith clenched his jaw to keep his teeth from chattering, and tried to put his finger on something he’d forgotten, something he needed very much to remember. Then he had it: He’d been dreaming, but more than a dream. Rather, a kind of hyper-real, color-saturated memory experienced as one. He’d been having a lot of these lately—the inevitable mental byproducts of his drab captivity.

In Smith’s dream-memory, an undulating countryside, the smell of a new car. His father’s carefully maintained 1979 Mercury Montego, its seats covered with rich Corinthian leather, this phrase echoing down the years from a popular television commercial of the era.

And there he was, a kid again, riding in the backseat, his sister Jane swatting at him maliciously with a Wonder Woman pencil. They were headed west on 80, out across the prairies, fields of corn and wheat and sorghum extending in vivid greens to the horizon on either side, the long glittering ribbon of highway ahead. They were on their way to Muscatine to do some shopping. Or to Omaha for their obligatory biannual family visit to Great-aunt Lucy—though his mother’s happy, singing presence in the front seat nestled in the crook of his father’s arm suggested the former. Or maybe they were just out for a Saturday drive across the luxurious blaze of an Iowa spring. Bored, young Smith extracted something from the pocket of his pocket T—a small card printed with stickers—and he began to peel them off and stick them to the Montego’s back window. First a cartoon pirate, his crooked nose and mustache cartoonishly exaggerated. Then a couple of cartoon kids in sailor outfits and a cartoon dog in a sailor shirt. Finally, a funny-looking cartoon man with a bulbous nose wearing a cartoon captain’s hat and a blue naval uniform. Now, from the darkness of his captivity at the far ends of the earth, Smith watched his younger self stick and unstick and restick those cartoon character stickers to the window of his father’s Montego and their names suddenly came back to him: Petey the Sea Dog. Jean La Foote . . .

“Cap’n Crunch!” he cried aloud, sitting bolt upright in his chains.

“
Non, non
,” the colonel muttered from the gloom. “I am Colonel de Noyer.”

“Not you, Phillipe! Listen, I think . . .”

But the colonel had already slipped back into his miasma. Smith clanked in his chains impatiently. Those stickers had come out of a box of Cap’n Crunch cereal, the preferred breakfast food of Smith’s youth, purchased by his mother at the Piggly Wiggly on North Grant in Montezuma, nearly thirty years ago. He remembered pulling the stickers out of the bottom of the box against his mother’s specific orders not to extract the prize until the box was done, his small hand covered with guilty yellow cereal crumbs. He remembered munching the cereal later that morning, hunched over a TV tray while watching
Land of the Lost
in which Marsha, Will, and Holly, whilst on a routine expedition, were swept into an underworld full of slithering bipedal lizards, in much the same way that Smith had now landed himself in his current pickle.

The box glimpsed on the table of Al Bab’s inner sanctum was definitely the same stuff, a box of mouthwatering Cap’n Crunch!

Smith grinned to himself, absolutely certain of the identity of that red-and-blue box. Like those other great commercial icons, Uncle Ben and Aunt Jemima, Betty Crocker, Mrs. Butterworth, and that Quaker Guy from Cream of Wheat, Cap’n Crunch—altered only slightly from a graphic standpoint over the years—abided. Having digested this fact, Smith now asked himself a couple of pertinent questions: Where could this sugary-sweet utterly American breakfast cereal be obtained in the arid waste of the Western Sahara? Surely there wasn’t a Piggly Wiggly located anywhere in a radius of, say, ten thousand miles! And what sort of person would eat such a cereal, even if it could be found?

Smith’s mouth watered at the thought of his own lost childhood breakfast of Cap’n Crunch, awash in milk, yellow sugary nuggets floating in his Cap’n Crunch bowl (purchased with eight box tops and a postal money order for $2.99), lit by the overhead fluorescent light of the old kitchen back home in their house on Blue Bird Lane in Montezuma, before his sister’s death, before his father’s fatal depression, his mother bustling about in the background always humming a Gershwin tune. But this happy memory called up mysteries that could not be answered. As he drifted back to sleep moments later, the purple flash of heat lightning illuminated the distant peaks of the Galtat Zemmur. Thunder, answering, echoed out across the desert.