Fire in the Unnameable Country (47 page)

BLOW
A LITTLE PEPPER

Months passed and Q and I wrote the odes to our limbs together, to gazes, to the nude passing hours that turned to days sprouted weeks. We clung to each other's prodigal words, which had drifted into odd corners of the world and refused to announce themselves as love until revived by bitefuls of custard cake or gulp after gulp of strawberry wine.

They were days devoted to none other than each other, to the geography of her breasts to her pubis, to cue or queue, the braid of her hair. Will you blow a little pepper with me, she asked one night.

To blow a little pepper requires concentration of the senses, because while the pepper is ordinary, the effects are hardly. Sneezing, yes, of course. But then. And also. Recall the raisins of Mamun Ben Jaloun, or the onions of his father, Zachariah, the latter by the way it allowed my grandfather to cry, with its powers of howcanwesayit literary cathexis, while the former gave the other his gifts of transformative memory, fabulism, and song. Recall the effects of black pepper, if used correctly/incorrectly depending on one's vantage point, is worse, or perhaps far more powerful, to be more precise. If you will trust in my
Gargantuan belch while I recollect Doubly Tea's greasy menu, in my Pantagruel appetite for exaggeration and largesse: this is the part of the story where Q and I fly.

It all began one night when Q and I were enshrouded in boredom. And what boredom. A glaze had fallen over the eyes of that exquisite lady who was not Hosanna, who would never accept an invisible diadem, who was not free, since the question is negated imprimis in the unnameable country. But at least hers was a laughter that jingled and wrenched on all our invisible manacles. Always certain mischief coded in her smile of score years, of Q among the ghosts and the bottler of human blood, of spirited speech and that mischievous smile going on and on until a threshold: and then nothing. This was the way with Q, for as much as Hedayat also fell into silence around her, he possessed no interrogative sonar with which to plumb the depths of her faraway gaze.

On that night it was just Q and I. Masoud Rana was not yet, though, scheduled to appear later. And El Doubly Tea was giving us the most of its usual crowned divebomb singers the zombie prattle of the working poor winded by hauling the sun across the arc of the sky and without a buzzing thought left in their concave. El Doubly Tea and its familiar odours of tar cigarettes and burnt soy from the kitchen's teriyaki grill; El Doubly Tea: twelve tables, at most, and sixty chairs when pushed to the maximum. Recall El Doubly Tea's greyslanted weak incandescent track lighting and the static disco ball hanging dusty unfit to scatter light from all the music videos filmed in the establishment. Also fit for mention: a stage left for the karaoke machine and one wrinkled regular who sat up there, a spinner, Tahir, of top forty singles, the usual; add soiled comic book pages littering the floor and a hapless old jukebox. A few changes, I suppose, and more or less the same since.

Have you ever visited El Doubly Tea of La Maga's crooked alleyways, near the Ministry of Education and Languages and ever since the days of the Screens some nearly four decades now: that historic
establishment where Backslang was invented, and from where it was later lifted into the demonic realm of the lottery. Here, in the late hours or the very early, and for only the non-constabulary patrons working poor, mind you, cold tea still turned into a spot of bourbon or straight rye. A tap on the nose was sufficient cue for the waitress to perform the miraculous substitution. Once upon a time, tonight in fact, here and now in El Doubly Tea, the fad of blowing a little pepper would begin and eventually infect the whole country with fits of sneezing and its dogfighting, which would be just two fragments of the Re-Alphabet.

And what was I doing then. Nothing, mind you, except trying to tease out Q's impish smile. A game, why not, I clapped, and just how the light of her face. How so. Why take the pepper shaker, right or left hand is irrelevant, and place into the opposite hand, where the thumb meets the forefinger: and I poured out just a few grains, and like snuff, I raised it to my nostrils, you sniff. I had meant the funny, nothing more than to send her bubbling into laughter, and I had succeeded.

Again, she pleaded after both our tears subsided and I had finished mopping up the snot from my nostrils.

So I performed the trick again and this time her explosive laugh interrupted a karaoke artist's well-practised rendition of a popular tune that was breaking a lot of hearts at that time. Anger from the stage, of course, since the waves reverberated across three city blocks and continued hic for so hic long, with her intermittent addition of hiccups, that eventually it truncated the performance. But bemusement also, as the eavesdroppers' spotlight struck us from every other angle of the establishment. An odd applause found us, for her laughter, possibly, and for what I did to cause it.

I knew Q was speaking then, but I was sneezing and swimming in a mucoid and black pulmonary sea, and it was not good then. Deeply perturbing: surely you know the ordinary effects of black pepper from dinner accidents, but its effect on Hedayat was nothing short
of revelatory. Understand that when black pepper is inhaled under certain conditions, the experience is not unlike that of hashish at first draw, with its racing heart and perspiring palms. But then one's tongue begins to drag like a hard drinker's two
A
.
M
., and the black pepper junky talk is anything but parrotspeech lingua mirari, its effect singular, individuated.

At that moment, no one dared karaoke, when what emerged out of Hedayat was an owlish woot. Q no doubt interpreted this as a continuation of my performance, and it signalled her continuation of thunderous laughter and I, too, was trying, hooting and cooing and doing all the screeching inimitable by human speech organs.

But know the animal transformation was exactly involuntary. The only glossolalist inspiration for the moment I can recall is having gazed at an early framed portrait of the Madam meeting with a high-level American dignitary in some far peripheral corner while snorting a little, and it splintered my thoughts. I slipped into a baffling avian tongue, which was trying desperately to explain, and fell deep into the earthquake of Q's laughter, which was far louder and bolder than mine had been during the spilling stones of Masoud Rana on the jetty, until her sounds became indistinguishable because the whole room was also laughing.

Here, let's, she grabbed hold of the shaker after I had stopped momentarily to drink whatever was in the glass before me. I'll see now, she did it, and disappeared into a grey cloud of dust from which she emerged with a bewildered scream; at first I was certain something vital in her had been destroyed. But after the confusion of the initial hit she sank into her nose and gave up a language of buzzing and clear crystalline nasal, and her throat was going so much then; I can recall it was the throat gristle and music then, not laughter. The more Q tried to refine her speech the more it resembled the beggar's cant of a common mosquito.

From across the table, I hooted back my replies as the Doubly crowd gathered around us, too curious a performance for anyone to miss. And what a performance. The cross-species pidgin of an owl and a mosquito cannot exactly be translated, but let me say it convinced them and they wanted to do it as well.

Then all the pepper shakers were dumping and the grey light of the tea bar shone weakly, and in the twisted light the people became like the sounds inspired in them by blowing a little pepper. The hair of the barber with his straight razor still in his pocket was now a kookaburra's crown, and for a time he strode from table to table on hidden wings, calling to this person and warbling to another, whatever hairs I cut are also sheared from my head and the whiskers on my face, he promised, but since he spoke in a pepper-inspired bird's babble, it was difficult for others to understand him.

Then a man's nose truncated, by which I mean the opposite, it stretched five aardvark times longer, in fact, and allowed him to search and suck up all the ants of the dirt underfoot. So solemnly he performed his task, as if he had been doing it all his life, with such little notice for his surroundings that when the kookaburra barber tripped over his ankles, he was glad to have been awakened, and yelled, enraged, how weary I am of this scuttling feast.

There were dogs then, how many so many dogs to emerge from the black cloud of sneezes and to meet the world with great barking and unyielding clamour, leashed dogs of the unnameable country, who played humans playing dogs in their muzzled everyday, but understand it was not only animals, for as well there were those who began humming and beeping like machines; there was an office lady who spoke only in alphanumeric configurations reminiscent of the lottery codes, and who after pronouncing each character would slap her own face, and another who chattered dit-dahs at the appropriate, repeated between grimaced teeth, not unlike John Quincy
when he awoke from his great dream of Samuel Morse many years earlier.

It was difficult to know whether the hallucinations were theirs or belonged to us, whether we were peering into their minds or they were inside ours. The light twisted again and the jukebox started up on its own and spun a rousing dance number whose name had been lost in time.

That was when Hedayat stumbled into smoke, spun once, coughed a bunch as dells, torrents, flows and swift down both eyeballs cheeks flittering eyelids: a dense mist, another time, another light and heat: perspiring arms touched out of invisibility desiccated limbs levers or skeletons emerged, and hats, cloaks, ears, fluttering throats demanded attention/ Q, Hedayat cried out. Why, he asked the mist, but she was nowhere, remained nothing in only the mist. Fire in the unnameable country, what are you. Hedayat knew nothing about those pepper-inspired glossolalist visions and stumbled out of the struggling huddle into cooler streets. He turned a corner into a group of children crowded around, betting actual coinage on a chess match in which black had sent a knight errant to the furthest kingdoms of the board and white had just castled in front of an awaiting bishop. Excuse me, he asked one child, excuse me, he asked another, bouncing against one shoulder/ watch it/ against another/ where do you think you're going/ until he walked into the embrace of a beautiful woman. Hedayat tried to retrace the steps that nightmare. It's only the future, Q reassured, embraced tighter, recite. Only the future, Hedayat repeated after her, and when his face refused to abide and his thoughts remained close to the fire in the unnameable country, she tried lightening the moment: So pepper makes the crazy, Q sent up a froth of laughter, and I agreed with her then.

Eventually, the night dragged its feet, as do all great nights, and Q and Hedayat emerged from their pepper rush into the lunar dust and sublunary light of the curving alleyway where I kissed Q, her
collarbones, her solar laugh that my mouth dampened. Accelerando: time rushed arteries flowed quick venal wait as seconds dragged loud minutes of silence. What are you doing, she asked when I paused, reached into my shirt's inner pocket for flight.

Once upon a time, I said as I gave her a bootlace stored in a velveteen pocket, once upon a time a no-good charlatan pretended to be my departed Niramish's friend's uncle. He gave me a gift I distrusted until it lifted me out of the darkest place. A bootlace, she looked at me incredulously. A bootlace, I affirmed. How does one, she began, and saw me tie it around my ankle. All right, she gave an impish grin and did as I did. That's when I took Q by the hand, raced alleyway skittered wall up onto rooftop. We leapt again and again until she whoa/ close to the edge of rooftop and deepest drop.

But we just scaled a building wall fearlessly, I reminded her, as she looked at me daft as if we'd taken the elevator. Come on, I coaxed, plucked the buzzing sky caught her a firefly fluttering noctilucent palm. And these, I pointed to the magic laces at our ankles, and she kissed me instead of speaking her disbelief. Hallowed her lips and tongue, hallowed the water of her mouth. Let's live to do it again tomorrow night, she said, as I stepped away from her embrace for one moment to look into the vast abyss before the next building, the between-space where one could see toy cars hundreds of metres below. Okay, I agreed.

Accelerando: time heightened its tempo. Fortissimo: the days became weeks became months so loud so quickly we hardly knew what to make of the changes. To blow a little pepper produced an unprecedented masquerade effect: El Doubly Tea began to overfill with nightly carnivals, which was not the lottery's prescribed revelry, and it was difficult not to sneeze at, once after entering, for the dark clouds of crushed smoke that hung perpetually in the air, or to pocket one's ears for all the din. In order to accommodate the overflow, all chairs and wooden tables were replaced with long metal counters, which housed lines of pepper
shakers and glasses for the free jugs of sangria. Motley waitresses would pass in between and through the crowd, replacing the contents of each, and the only thing that wasn't free was the black pepper.

Something curious: the mutagenic effects of black pepper were conscribed to El Doubly Tea. No doubt other establishments tried to replicate such a lucrative venture, which increased the house revenue threefold, but they failed utterly, because it was not the pepper, as owners Hamida and Abdullah would proudly declare, though they never explained what was the key.

Then the Vulgarists arrived. Bete and Arachnae were the first, he with his extensive ball of yarn, which he kept with him at all times, which he would concatenate into knots he said allowed him to record any idea depending on the style of knot, of which he supposedly knew thousands—all thoughts recoverable at a later time by touch—and she with the flattest of faces, which allowed no light to escape, not for its colour but its ceaseless absent expression.

She was a painter of triptychs, only triptychs, she specified once, and offered no other explanations of her craft, though she would wear dresses of coarse lateen painted in broad solid colours, which one presumed were of her own design. As a counterpoint, he wore a goatee chin and mouth, which gave him the appearance of an off-duty sergeant of the armed forces, though his voice was placid and his eyes had the black drinking quickness of a lemur. What he actually did, aside from knotting balls of yarn, no one ever found out, but he belonged to the Vulgarists, and that gave him distinction.