Gospel (105 page)

“I'm curious but I'm not sure I want to know,” said Lucy quietly.

“Something to do with a
jinn,
” said O'Hanrahan.

Lucy brought up her legs and hugged her knees. “It's odd, isn't it, how even the most monotheist religions have all these little subgods and minidemons roaming about.”

“Everyone else's religion is always quaint. I, for one,
like
the idea of genies. With earthquakes and sandstorms and famines out here, it is tempting to find God cruel. With accidents and injuries…” A faded photo he carried in his wallet of Beatrice and Rudolph was dimly illumined in his mind. He ignored them. “… but once it is explained that there are all sorts of mischievous
jinn
running about causing mayhem—”

“Like the Irish fairy people,” inserted Lucy.

“Or the Scandinavian trolls…” His mind was half on this discussion as the truck began to rock. Mohammed beseeched the
jinn
causing the storm to accept his screwdriver. O'Hanrahan finally laid a hand on Mohammed's shoulder and asked him what he was doing, perhaps Lucy and he could help.

“Hadid! Hadid!”
he continued to yell at the sky.

“Uh-huh…” said O'Hanrahan as he listened, looking back at Lucy occasionally. “It is the
jinn
Zauba'ah who causes these storms and he is only scared of one thing and that's iron. So no harm will come to us if we…” With this O'Hanrahan stretched over to Mohammed's tool box. “… if we clasp to our bosom these iron tools.” Mohammed, after a brief smile, bowed his head repeatedly, happy his charges would now be safe.

“Hadid!”
yelled O'Hanrahan to the
jinn.
Lucy clutched a rusted wrench.
“Hadid,”
she mumbled.

Lucy noticed in the next moment O'Hanrahan laughing to himself, and she began to smile too. Out in the middle of nowhere in a sandstorm, huddled with the chickens, scaring off the evil genie with a screwdriver.

Ten minutes went by.

It was possible, Lucy decided, to get bored in a sandstorm, now that she was sure her life wasn't threatened.

O'Hanrahan repositioned himself a little closer. “There are good genies, some are devout Muslims. If a snake crawls into a mosque during prayertime, he's a bad
jinn
in disguise; any other time, he might be a good
jinn
coming to privately worship Allah.”

“I see.”

(The tales of the
jinn!
The
Shiqq
is a horrible thing, half a human cut lengthwise, very kind to you until he turns and you see he is only one half a human—in your shock he will attack you. But he is not nearly as common as the
Nasnaas
genie, also half a human, an incredibly agile hopper. In Yemeni history one can read innumerable accounts of their being caught and eaten—the people of Hazramaut as late as the 20th Century swore that its flesh had a lemony, sweet taste. It, like the genies of Java, has a head tucked into its breast.
Tir
is unfailing in his capacity to cause wars,
al-A'war
is the genie of the erection, and watch out for
Dahsim,
who invents all marital strife, and that great Egyptian scourge, the
jinn Zalambuur,
who presides over traffic and intersections. The
Ghaddar jinn
lingers in dark caves and dark rooms and children are wise to be terrified of him. The most feared
jinn,
Iblis, the fallen angel, mentioned by The Prophet, often comes in female form, bearing forbidden wine, and this evil one excels at poetry and music, and he/she is thought to be the leader of all the other lesser
shaitans.
Or so Our Moslem children believe.)

“Shooting stars,” remembered O'Hanrahan, “are explained by the people of the Sudan as Allah's attempt to nail an evil
jinn
with a divinely hurled stone. ‘May Allah destroy the enemy of the faith!' they say, rather than making a wish when a meteorite falls.”

“How much is this stuff believed nowadays?” asked Lucy.

“How many Christians worldwide believe there is a demon named Legion? An angel named Gabriel?”

Then suddenly it was quiet.

Mohammed, kissing the screwdriver, undid a knot of the canvas flap. It was clear, he announced, and began leading the escape from the back of the truck. When Lucy jumped down to the fine sand, filling her shoes with soft dust, she saw a new five-foot dune around the truck and above saw nothing but clear blue sky. She peeked around the truck, north, south, east, west … no funnel cloud, no sandstorm, just a calm azure afternoon.

O'Hanrahan shared her amazement. He looked at his watch, shook it, and cursed that sand had managed to get inside the watchface. He and Lucy observed how the other was coated in fine dust, looking Al Jolson–like. O'Hanrahan sang a halfhearted rendition of “Mammy,” before Mohammed looked at him with a stare of concern. It had been cool during the duststorm, refreshing actually; now it was baking again, and Lucy and O'Hanrahan without eagerness returned to the cab and their lukewarm water bottles to quench their irremediable thirsts. Mohammed announced to O'Hanrahan that they would make Delgo by nightfall.

Back on the road.

Thought O'Hanrahan: this is what I live for.

He looked out the grimed window to the desert, the endless tract, monochrome yellow-beige in the middle of the 115-degree afternoon. A place to be by oneself, like the monks of Wadi Natrun and their caves. No place was ever more quiet. It takes a desert to invent religion—Islam, Christianity, Judaism, all products of too much time out here in the sun.

O'Hanrahan thought of the Grazing Monks who only ate as animals ate, grass and herbs from the ground. The Arboreal Monks who lived atop trees, begging to be scourged with storms, vultures, lightning. Coptic monks who interwove chains with their beards, so as to live in constant pain; some Copts spent a lifetime burdened with weights. Some took to cells too small to ever stand or sit in, forever writhing; the Hairless Ones who had every hair plucked to be sexless, featureless before God; and the Hairy Monks like St. Mekarius who let their hair grow long to cover their entire bodies, matted and infested; the Crucifixionists demanding nails be driven through all hands and feet. St. Moses the Black, St. John the Dwarf, St. Apollo of Scetis who before his conversion ripped pregnant women apart to molest the unborn children—saved and redeemed by the desert! The Anchorites of the rocks, the Hermits who lived out among the desert like Bola and Anthony, whose monasteries endure from the late 200s! European faith seems
arriviste,
nonchalant beside such a pedigree …

And the Stylites. Simon, who lived atop a desert column for thirty-seven years continuously, through duststorm and earthquake, who wore chains so tight that his skin was a raw breeding-ground for the maggots he introduced there, who wouldn't eat for forty days at a time. A pop star of sorts, a tourist attraction, raising his column higher and higher to avoid the throng that came to seek his guidance. His disciple Daniel, thrown out of all ordinary monasteries for being too masochistic.

(That took some doing in the 400s, We can assure you.)

O'Hanrahan laughed out loud at the thought—

“Something funny?” Lucy asked.

“No, nothing,” he sighed, and they both returned to trancelike silence, staring straight ahead.

All this mortification of flesh, thought O'Hanrahan. Life expectancy being what it was, how could these saints have known that the great mortification, the supreme male humiliation, would elude them—
old age.
Saints Simon and Daniel should have taken a church post somewhere, a desk job and just waited, just held on until that 65th birthday rolled around. The sagging chest. The permanent gut until the hour of your death. Let's not even mention O long-dysfunctional Priapus—or worse, the
occasionally
functioning machinery. The creasing, drooping face, the lengthening, old-man ears, the loss of hair—the graying of the pubis! Yes I suppose one could alter these signs of mortality but what vanity! Never would Patrick O'Hanrahan be the clown with the hairpiece, the old-fart professor blackening his hair, corseting himself for that last undergraduette's felicities …

(We seem to remember some trips to the drugstore.)

Aw Jesus. Drink and corrode myself as I will, I still have the best damn memory in the world. Beatrice used to use this depilatory cream on her upper lip—she'd often as not send me down the block to the drugstore to get it, and happy to escape her house for any amount of seconds, I'd go. Then one day, disgusted with my ears, which were getting long like Lyndon Johnson's, I noticed the newest little surprise: hair growing out of my ears. Now
that
was a sign of ancientness, and it flashed back to me my father and the profusion of old-man ear-hair, gray and curly—never! So as Beatrice's bottle of Nair was on top of the toilet near her leg-shaving stuff, I would reach over and dab a bit on my ear. Then Beatrice had to go and die on me, leaving me to make the trip to the drugstore and buy a regular bottle of depilatory …

And once I felt accusing eyes upon me and I overexplained myself to the clerk: it's for my wife, you see. And the pharmacist, who knew Beatrice, who
of course
knew Beatrice, who had worked there for twenty years, regarded me with that sorrowful look you give to crazy old men. He thought that I bought bottles of Nair in order to pretend that Beatrice was still alive. These are my humiliations and humblings! Pharoah got plagues and miracles and magic tricks, but you break my heart with emblems of
mediocrity
! So that you, Lord, can sup and take sustenance from my ridicule!

(You have no affection for human life and its frailties. Least of all your own.)

Well, my affection for myself is making a comeback.

I've had some time to think it all over since Greece: I was a bad husband, I was a bad father, I was a prejudiced and intolerant administrator of the department … You know what? I don't care. I felt guilty like a good Irishman, on cue like a good Catholic, but that guilt has solidified now to indifference in lieu of my life sentence of loneliness, which has risen up to atone for those previous transgressions.

“What time is it?” asked Lucy.

“Not half an hour since the last time you asked,” O'Hanrahan said, glancing at his watch.

Yes, O'Hanrahan convinced himself, death by cholera in the wilds of Africa, far from friends and family, is preferable to one more goddam day puttering around with nothing to do in Forest Park. He thought: I'll happily avow that the only thing that could make old age worse is loneliness—which is a delightful little coincidence since the only thing that could make loneliness worse is old age.

Perhaps it's impossible for someone of Lucy's years to understand, or for that matter, for someone surrounded by wife and family: how each day takes forever to extinguish. To make it worse, you don't sleep as much; you can't even drown the day in sleep and afternoon naps. No. Wakefulness and insomnia, like my father had, thought O'Hanrahan, that has been the obstacle of the last ten years. Even the occupied, the semiemployed senior citizens I know, find it hard to get rid of all that time. I've seen my colleagues burn the hours away in card games, bridge addiction—bridge will kill off one's retirement years properly—gardening is good, organizing family photos, thereby allowing them to be thrown away with greater efficiency by the next generation … and still. All I was reduced to, the only real human contact I was allotted was my once-a-month advising of doctoral candidates back at the university. Those bastards. They first let me lecture, then cut me back to advising and grad seminars, then just advising … And that was hardly a salvation from the run of my daily life.

He returned in his mind to Forest Park, for the first time in months.

The morning. Awake again, still alive. O'Hanrahan would feel the weight of the unlived day upon him. Toiletries. To shave or not to shave? The only thing that made him shave and groom himself some days was the ghastly sight of white stubble, that bowery bum, staring back at him in the mirror. Look at the clock. Splendid: 7:30
A.M.
A nice early start. The news shows. The anchorwomen so cute, perky, fresh, bright, laughing: both of you go to hell. Make some coffee. The kitchen is a nightmare, some dishes in the large two-basin sink will probably go unwashed until the day that he dies. Why bother, as there's never company. He eats out or eats frozen dinners so plates aren't important. It's the ashtrays that goad him. Always filling, overflowing. Not the kind of thing you think about in the middle of the day, emptying and cleaning those ashtrays, because one's nose is used to the stale, smoky air, but first thing in the morning there they are, staring at you, the cigar-stink of an old, old man's house. Maybe an old drunk man—look, there's the whiskey glass half full. O'Hanrahan will pour it back into the bottle he's working on, no sense wasting it. And now the TV has nothing but women's shows or greed-oriented game shows, nothing entertaining. Off goes the TV.

Congratulations, it's 9:30
A.M.

He reads. Yes, and a damn sight more than most people. But he has problems with books. Whereas an awful cop show on TV can occupy him, a well-written thriller often cannot because he takes the written word more seriously. If he's going to read, the book better hold him to the very core of his intellect. Literature, biographies, histories. He gave up contemporary fiction long ago, all the current product an advertisement for the superiority of the ancients.

How about a little exercise?

There's a convenience store six blocks away, Thomas and Roosevelt. Open 24 hours. Here comes Human Contact No. 1, the smiling, overweight black girl, Zelda, behind the counter, calling him “professuh.” He doesn't know Zelda's last name despite the fact they've been seeing each other in these circumstances for, what? Five years now? Before Zelda, there was Bob, who was white, zitty, painfully slow at the cash register, spent too much time reading drag-racing and motorbike magazines. You can get a 12-oz. cup of coffee for 59 cents. That and the doughnut of the day. O'Hanrahan, who had sipped cappuccino in Rome, espresso in Paris, Turkish coffee with ground pistachio shells with Moslem imams in Baghdad,
café brûlot
with rowdy Loyola novices in New Orleans … O'Hanrahan's great treat for the past ten years is nothing better than yesterday's Dunkin' Donut, now on special, 45 cents, and the 12-oz. convenience-store coffee. And a newspaper. Got to watch the money. If the headlines don't interest, he doesn't buy the paper—since there'll be Paul Harvey at noon on the radio and Peter Jennings on the nightly TV news, CNN, McNeil-Lehrer—god, considering it's a world I disapprove of and a country I think is in decline, I sure do keep up.