When Gravity Fails (5 page)

Abdul-Hassan asked me something in English. It was a mystery to the casual bargain hunter just what Hassan’s shop dealt in. That was because it was virtually empty; Hassan’s shop dealt in everything, and so there was no vital reason to display anything. I couldn’t understand English, so I just jerked my thumb toward the stained, block-printed curtain. The boy nodded and went back to his daydreaming.

I passed through the curtain, the storeroom, and the alley. Just as I came to the iron door, it swung outward almost silently. “Open sesame,” I whispered. Then I stepped into a dimly lighted room and looked around. The drugs made me forget to be afraid. They made me forget to be cautious, too; but my instincts are my livelihood, and my instincts are firing away morning and evening, drugs or no drugs. Hassan reclined on a small mountain of cushions, puffing on a narjîlah. I smelled the tang of hashish; the burbling of Hassan’s water pipe was the only sound in the room. Nikki sat stiffly on the edge of a rug, evidently terrified, with a cup of tea in front of her crossed legs. Abdoulaye rested on a few cushions, whispering into Hassan’s ear. Hassan’s expression was as empty as a handful of wind. This was his tea party; I stood and waited for him to speak.

“Ahlan wa sahlan!”
he said, smiling briefly. It was a formal greeting, meaning something like “you have come to your people and level ground.” It was intended to set the tone for the rest of this parlay. I gave the proper response, and was invited to be seated. I sat beside Nikki; I noticed that she was wearing a single add-on in the midst of her pale blond hair. It must have been an Arabic-language daddy, because I knew she couldn’t understand a word of it without one. I accepted a small cup of coffee, heavily spiced with cardamom. I raised the cup to Hassan and said, “May your table last forever.”

Hassan wafted a hand in the air and said, “May Allah lengthen your life.” Then I was given another cup of coffee. I nudged Nikki, who had not drunk her tea. You just can’t expect business to start immediately, not until you’d drunk at least three cups of coffee. If you declined sooner, you risked insulting your host. All the while the coffee- and tea-drinking was going on, Hassan and I asked after the health of the other’s family and friends, and called on Allah to bless this one and that one and protect all of us and the whole Muslim world from the depredations of the infidel.

I murmured under my breath to Nikki to keep downing the odd-tasting tea. Her presence here was distasteful to Hassan for two reasons: she was a prostitute, and she wasn’t a real woman. The Muslims have never made up their minds about that. They treated their women as second-class citizens, but they weren’t exactly sure what to do with men who became women. The Qur’ân evidently makes no provisions for such things. The fact that I myself wasn’t exactly a devotee of the Book in which there is no doubt didn’t help matters. So Hassan and I kept drinking and nodding and smiling and praising Allah and trading pleasantries tit for tat, like a tennis match. The most frequent expression in the Muslim world is
inshallah,
if God wills. It removes all guilt: blame it on Allah. If the oasis dries up and blows away, it was Allah’s will. If you get caught sleeping with your brother’s wife, it was Allah’s will. Getting your hand or your cock or your head chopped off in reprisal is Allah’s will, too. Nothing much gets done in the Budayeen without discussing how Allah is going to feel about it.

The better part of an hour passed this way, and I could tell that both Nikki and Abdoulaye were getting antsy. I was doing fine. Hassan was smiling broader every minute; he was inhaling hashish in heroic quantities.

At last, Abdoulaye couldn’t stand it any longer. He wanted the conversation to get around to money. Specifically, how much Nikki was going to have to pay him for her freedom.

Hassan wasn’t pleased by this impatience. He raised his hands and looked wearily heavenward, reciting an Arab proverb that meant “Greed lessens what is gathered.” It was a ludicrous statement, coming from Hassan. He looked at Abdoulaye. “You have been this young woman’s protector?” he asked. There are many ways of expressing “young woman” in this ancient language, each with its own subtle undertone and shade of meaning. Hassan’s careful choice was
il-mahroosa,
your daughter. The literal meaning of
il-mahroosa
is “the guarded one,” and seemed to fit the situation nicely. That’s how Hassan got to be Papa’s ace strongarm, by threading his way unerringly between the demands of culture and the necessities of the moment.

“Yes, O Wise One,” replied Abdoulaye. “For more than two years.”

“And she displeases you?”

Abdoulaye’s forehead wrinkled up. “No, O Wise One.”

“And she has not harmed you in any way?”

“No.”

Hassan turned to me; Nikki was beneath his notice. “The guarded one wishes to live in peace? She plots no malice against Abdoulaye Abu-Zayd?”

“I swear this is true,” I said.

Hassan’s eyes narrowed. “Your oaths mean nothing here, unbeliever. We must leave aside the honor of men, and make a contract of words and silver.”

“Those who hear your words, live,” I said.

 
Hassan nodded, pleased by my manners, if by nothing else about me or Nikki. “In the name of Allah, the Beneficent, the Merciful,” declared Hassan, his hands raised, palms upward, “I render now my judgment. Let all who are present hear and obey. The guarded one shall return all jewelry and ornaments given to her by Abdoulaye. She shall return all gifts of value. She shall return all costly clothing, keeping for herself only that clothing seemly for daily attire. On his part, Abdoulaye Abu-Zayd must promise to let the guarded one pass about her business unhindered. If some dispute arises in this, I shall decide.” He glared from one to the other, making it clear that there would be no dispute. Abdoulaye nodded, Nikki looked unhappy. “Further, the guarded one shall pay unto Abdoulaye Abu-Zayd the sum of three thousand kiam before noon prayer tomorrow. This is my word, Allah is Most Great.”

Abdoulaye grinned. “May you be healthy and happy!” he cried.

Hassan sighed.
“Inshallah,”
he murmured, fitting the mouthpiece of the narjîlah between his teeth again.

I was forced by convention to thank Hassan, too, although he’d stung Nikki pretty badly. “I am obliged to you,” I said, standing and dragging Nikki to her feet. Hassan waved a hand, as if shooing a buzzing fly out of his presence. As we passed through the iron door, Nikki turned and spat.

She shouted the worst insults her add-on could supply:
“Himmar oo ibn-himmar! Ibn wushka! Yil’an ‘abook!”
I grabbed her more firmly and we ran. Behind us came the laughter of Abdoulaye and Hassan. They’d hustled their share for the evening and were feeling generous, letting Nikki escape unpunished for her obscenities.

When we got back to the Street, I slowed down, out of breath. “I need a drink,” I said, leading her into the Silver Palm.

“Bastards,” Nikki growled.

“Don’t you have the three thousand?”

“I’ve got it. I just don’t want to give it to them, that’s all. I had other plans for it.”

I shrugged. “If you want to get out from under Abdoulaye bad enough . . .”

“Yeah, I know.” She still didn’t look happy about it.

“Everything will be all right,” I told her, steering her through the dark, cool bar.

Nikki’s eyes opened wide, she threw up her hands. “Everything will be all right,” she said, laughing.
“Inshallah.”
Her mockery of Hassan sounded hollow. She tore off the Arabic daddy. That’s about the last I remember of that night.

4

You know what a hangover is. You know about the pounding headache, the vague and persistent sick stomach, the feeling that you’d just rather lose consciousness entirely until the hangover went away. But do you know what a massive hypnotic-drug hangover is like? You feel as if you’re in somebody else’s dream; you don’t feel real. You tell yourself, “I’m not actually going through all this now; this happened to me years and years ago, and I’m just remembering it.” Every few seconds you realize that you
are
going through it, that you
are
here and now, and the dissonance starts a cycle of anxiety and an even greater feeling of unreality. Sometimes you’re not sure where your arms and legs are. You feel like someone carved you out of a block of wood during the night, and if you behave, someday you’ll be a real boy. “Thought” and “motion” are foreign concepts; they are attributes of
living
people. Add all
that
on top of a booze hangover, and throw in the abysmal depression, bone-breaking fatigue, more nausea, more anxiety, tremors, and cramps that I owed from all the tri-phets I’d taken the day before. That’s how I felt when they woke me up at dawn. Death warmed over—ha! I hadn’t been warmed over at all.

Dawn,
yet. The loud banging on my door started just as the muezzin was crying, “Come to prayer, come to prayer. Prayer is better than sleep. Allah is Most Great!” I might have laughed at the “prayer is better than sleep” part, if I’d been able. I rolled over and faced the cracked green wall. I regretted that simple action immediately; it had felt like a slow-motion film with every other frame missing. The universe had begun to stutter around me.

The banging on the door wouldn’t go away. After a few moments, I realized that there were several fists trying to slam their way in. “Yeah, wait a minute,” I called. I crawled slowly out of bed, trying not to jar any part of my body that might still be alive. I made it to the floor and rose up very slowly. I stood there and wobbled a little, waiting to feel real. When I didn’t, I decided to go to the door anyway. I was halfway there when I realized I was naked. I stopped. All this decision-making was getting on my nerves. Should I go back to the bed and throw on some clothes? Angry shouts joined the pounding fists. The hell with the clothes, I thought.

I opened the door and saw the most frightening sight since some hero or other had to face Medusa and the other two Gorgons. The three monsters that confronted me were the Black Widow Sisters, Tamiko, Devi, and Selima. They all had their preposterous breasts crammed into thin black pullovers; they were wearing tight black leather skirts and black spike-heeled shoes: their working outfits. My sluggish mind wondered why they were dressed for work so early. Dawn. I don’t ever see dawn, unless I’m coming at it from the other side, going to bed after the sun rises. I supposed the sisters hadn’t been to—

Devi, the refugee from Calcutta, shoved me backward into my room. The other two followed, slamming the door. Selima—Arabic for “peace”—turned, drew her right arm up and, snarling, jabbed the hard point of her elbow up into my gut just below my breastbone. All the air was forced out of my lungs, and I collapsed to my knees, gasping. Someone’s foot kicked my jaw viciously, and I went over backward. Then one of them picked me up and the other two worked me over, slowly and carefully, not missing a single tender and unprotected spot. I had been dazed to begin with; after a few deft and punishing blows, I lost all track of what was happening. I hung limply in someone’s grasp, almost grateful that this wasn’t really happening to me, that it was some terrible nightmare that I was merely remembering, safely in the future.

I don’t know how long they beat me. When I came to, it was eleven o’clock. I just lay on the floor and breathed; some ribs must have been cracked, because even breathing caused agony. I tried to order my thoughts—at least the drug hangover had abated a little. My pill case. Got to find my pill case. Why can’t I ever find my damn pill case? I crawled very slowly to the bed. The Black Widow Sisters had been thorough and efficient; I learned that with every movement. I was badly bruised almost everywhere, but they hadn’t shed a drop of blood. It occurred to me that if they’d wanted to kill me, one playful nip would have done the job. This was all supposed to mean something. I’d have to ask them about it the next time I saw them.

I hauled myself onto the bed and across the mattress to my clothes. My pill case was in my jeans, where it usually was. I opened it, knowing I had some escape-velocity painkillers in there. I saw that my entire stash of beauties—butaqualide HCl—was gone. They were illegal as hell all over and just as plentiful. I’d had at least eight. I must have taken a handful to get me to sleep over the screaming tri-phets; Nikki must have taken the rest. I didn’t care about them now. I wanted
opiates,
any and all opiates,
fast.
I had seven tabs of Sonneine. When I got them down, it would be like the sun breaking through the gloomy clouds. I would bask in a buzzy, warm respite, an illusion of well-being rushing to every hurt and damaged part of my body. The notion of crawling to the bathroom for a glass of water was too ridiculous to consider. I summoned both spit and courage, and downed the chalky sunnies, one by one. They’d take twenty minutes or so to hit, but the anticipation was enough to ease the throbbing torment just a little.

Before the sunnies ignited, there was a knock on my door. I made a little, involuntary cry of alarm. I didn’t move. The knock, polite but firm, came again. “
Yaa
shabb,”
called a voice. It was Hassan. I closed my eyes and wished I believed in something enough to pray to it.

“A minute,” I said. I couldn’t shout. “Let me get dressed.” Hassan had used a more-or-less friendly form of address, but that didn’t mean a damn thing. I made it to the door as quickly as I could, wearing only my jeans. I opened the door and saw that Abdoulaye was with Hassan. Bad news. I invited them in.
“Bismillah,”
I said, asking them to enter in God’s name. It was a formality only, and Hassan ignored it.

“Abdoulaye Abu-Zayd is owed three thousand kiam,” he said simply, spreading his hands.

“Nikki owes it. Go bother
her.
I’m in no mood for any of your greasy nattering.”

It was probably the wrong thing to say. Hassan’s face clouded like the western sky in a simoom. “The guarded one has fled,” he said flatly. “You are her representative. You are responsible for the fee.”