The Angel of History (11 page)

It was darkening outside and inside had not adjusted, the hour of the lamps, the ceiling lights felt dim and antiquated, the bespectacled lady’s skin was turning a shade of citrine, the cream wastebasket in the corner a vitamin-enriched urine yellow, my dark skin unaffected. The bespectacled lady had given up the search, with quite a bit more care she returned all the stubs and knickknacks to the handbag. Concentrating and earnest, her mouth seemed weighted at the corners. I was about to give her pen back, but Satan chided me for being stupid, Such a silly boy you are, he said, so ungrateful, and I slid it into my jeans pocket, my hand remained there, caressing it, and I began to click the red, counterclockwise from the clip, then the clockwise blue, red,
click, blue, but she did not seem to notice, didn’t remember that I had her pen. Hopeless you are, Satan said, and I told him he was using Yoda grammar, I’m poetic, he replied.

The bespectacled lady told me she saw Genesis at a concert in 1974, or around that time, she couldn’t recall the exact year, she said, I am too old in memory.

Ask her to repeat that in Yoda grammar, Satan said. Well, she wasn’t going to remember a silly click pen, I told him, and I hadn’t seen one in ages, but I felt guilty about keeping it, not that I haven’t swiped pens before, but never had I taken one from someone so helpless. She won’t even remember she ever had a pen, Satan said, treasure it, you ungrateful buffoon, write. Here’s what I’ll do, I told Satan, I will spin the pen in my pocket and then click one of the buttons, if it turns out to be the blue one, I return it, red button and I keep it. Hey Catherine, Satan yelled at the ceiling, see what I have to deal with here, he’s going Matrix Morpheus on me.

I didn’t have the chance to do anything,
thud, thud,
went the sound of heavy footsteps on the linoleum, and Ferrigno came for me.

I was sad, Doc, reading about another drone strike in Yemen, once more in Hadramawt, not too far from the provincial capital Al Mukalla, a city that consisted of two broken-down houses and three jackasses when I was a young boy. Three men were traveling in a truck when a missile hijacked them to their maker. Suspected al-Qaeda militants, terrorists, al-Qaeda, terrorists, terrorists, Yemenis were always that, four men and a boy in a truck full of concrete blocks on their way to build a house, dead terrorists, a party of seventeen, two men, ten women, four children, and a young bride trying to get to a wedding, al-Qaeda, al-Qaeda, al-Qaeda. My head hurt, and I shut my eyes, hoping to keep the world at bay, hoping to avoid a headache.

I hadn’t been able to find my reading glasses for two days, I had a number of inexpensive ones strewn around
my apartment but I kept my favorite pair next to my bed, and they had magically disappeared, I’d looked for them everywhere. Your mother has been dead for a while, Doc, so maybe it’s her ghost, ha-ha, tell her to stop it. I must have dozed off, because I opened my eyes upon hearing an ambulance siren caterwauling one or two streets away, and came face-to-face with a big-ass raccoon whose eyes were darker than night itself. The size of a pit bull terrier, he was climbing the fire escape, only the cold, divisive glass separated us. I screamed, Behemoth jumped off my lap, I held my breath, but the raccoon did nothing, kept staring at me through the window, admonishing me for being such a scaredy-cat, such a frightened soul. I was insulted. I banged on the window, and the raccoon, deciding that I was too powerful an enemy, gingerly descended the flimsy ladder. Yes, I was the king of my realm, I was unable to do anything about drones, but I crushed raccoons, I stomped, I triumphed; I, Saint George, would defeat the dragon. I should have scared it more because I began to worry that if it could climb the fire escape ladder, it would be able to come into my apartment through the deck, whose door I leave open for Behemoth. Lo and behold, half an hour later while reading in bed wearing a pair of the cheap glasses, I looked up and saw the same big-ass raccoon walking down my hallway. This time when I shouted, the monster did not look as blasé, there was nothing but blackness where its eyes would be. I jumped out of bed naked, followed it as it rushed onto the deck and descended the ladder, not so lackadaisically this time. I banged on the metal fire escape trying to frighten it, but the raccoon slowed down upon reaching the ground, knowing there was little danger left, it sauntered off
into the neighbor’s boxwood hedge. The raccoon had eaten all of Behemoth’s dry food on the kitchen floor.

In another kitchen on the other side of the world, fifty years ago in Cairo, I encountered a little monster who ate whatever scraps of food he could get his paws on. The mouse was no intruder, though, he lived in the walls of the kitchen. I assume there were others, but only one, my Shemshem, made his appearance while people were around. Shemshem, a brown mouse no bigger than a child’s finger, would poke his little pink nose out of any number of cracks in the wall every time I sat down at the long table for dinner, his head swiveling one way, then the other, testing the terrain with experienced eyes. He watched me knowingly, because I always dropped food, the first few times accidentally, but after watching the little bugger scamper across the uneven floor and stuff his pygmy cheeks before rushing back to safety, I began to do it intentionally. Absolute appetite he was, and I loved his boldness, the way he scurried, his stride quick and jerky, yet also supple. I stalked him for a while, tried to catch him, tried to make him mine, was never able to. He was training me. Auntie Badeea suggested that I should think this out, a man without a plan, she said, is like a gun without gunpowder, lay some crumbs for him, but don’t frighten him. I sat before one of the small holes in the wall, my legs spread, the soles of my bare feet on either side of the hole, and crumbled some white goat cheese between my thighs. Shemshem exited his home, trusted me enough to go for a piece of cheese, but as soon as I moved to trap him, he darted back to his safe hovel. Patience, Auntie Badeea said, patience extracts sweet out of a lemon, so I waited and waited, Shemshem would come out to eat his cheese,
and I didn’t move or breathe, and I allowed him to return home when done. We did this a number of times, at least once a day, and it was only much later that I realized I had not caught him nor did I want to anymore. I felt Shemshem understood my loneliness. He sat on his haunches and I on mine, he ate and I watched, his eyes conversed with mine, friend to friend.

One day, Shemshem stopped appearing, and even at such a young age, I did not need anyone to tell me that he had died, Death is no stranger to an Arab. It is one of the reasons a Yemeni wears a janbiya on his side at all times, Death should always accompany a man, my mother told me, the knife its symbol. Shemshem might have been tiny but his disappearance weighted my heart, crushing heft, devastating gloom, I sat on the floor gazing at the holes, hoping to change what I knew I could not. Trying to help, my mother, fully dressed and made up, ready for a night of labor, knelt next to me, stroked my cheek with her perfumed thumb, told me, Don’t become attached to animals, my dearest young one, for they all die, and the hurt never goes away, the pain returns over and over, again and again, and eats at your heart until what you have left cannot hold even a grain of love. I wish I’d known how to listen, Doc.

My next attachment was to a goat, a kid really, all white with blue eyes, I was bigger than he was, if barely. He belonged to one of the neighbors, who had a pen that faced our house, six or seven goats and a donkey that brayed at night, whose tail never ever stopped sweeping side to side, all of them wore brass bells around their necks to warn the neighborhood children of their movement. The children teased and mocked the animals when they were in the pen
but left them alone if they were out, the animals seemed mostly serene, and the adult neighbors tolerated the goats because they quickly dispensed with any weed that dared make an appearance in the narrow alley between houses. As long as I did not wander into the maze of streets at each end of ours, I was given freedom to roam the alley at the back of the whorehouse. A vast world, full of wonders and children and a baby goat.

He was an awkward kid, could not walk straight, which was not completely his fault since both sides of the alley angled down toward a middle aqueduct no wider than a hand that was supposed to direct rainwater away from the houses but was rarely effective if what dropped from the sky was more than drizzle. I called him Afkah, and I loved him. He was funny-looking, with curvy, droopy ears so long I could wrap them around his head. Unlike the other children, I did not tease him when he was penned, but since I was smaller than all of them, Afkah came after me at first, wanting to regain some dignity after being mocked for so long. He had only short nubs for horns and he ran at me and I turned to get away and he headed my butt, a head butt, ha-ha, and I fell down, the yellowish dust talcuming my short pants. Afkah was allowed out of his minuscule pen only during the day, at times with one or two billy goats, mostly by himself.

One afternoon, around three o’clock or so, he and I were alone in the alley, a rare occurrence, and the unthinkable happened, two city dogs, growling, hunger-driven, seeking new haunts, marched down from the east entrance, they risked appearing in daylight for the chance of catching unwary prey. Afkah was too paralyzed to run away, as
was I, he started crying out like a child, and I did as well, we sounded like twins as we sidled closer to each other. Afkah shook so much the brass bell around his neck jingled. Auntie Badeea came out of the kitchen, yelling and cursing, brandishing a long wooden spoon, the dogs ran away. Afkah cried like me, and then when his owner carried him away in his muscular arms to be slaughtered, Afkah wailed like a baby and I wailed back, I remember the man’s broad shoulders, his dark jacket over his jellabiya, Afkah’s tiny legs dangling from both sides of the man’s waist, Afkah’s head, drooping and frightened and howling. I remember Auntie Badeea holding me, I in front of her, cocooned in her red paisley jellabiya, nestled between her thighs, her hand on my chest as I sobbed.

I don’t know what possessed the owner to send me a dish with a small piece of roasted Afkah over rice, maybe he thought I would find it so delicious that I’d understand the need to eat friends, maybe he was asking for forgiveness, maybe he was inherently evil, I don’t know, but I refused to eat, of course, have not eaten any kind of meat since, ever, no goat, no lamb, no cow, no turkey.

The howl, Doc, not the silence of the lambs, the howl stays with me, I hear it, I scream, I raise my arms to the sky, I try, Doc, I try to defend myself, to protect my soul. Auntie Badeea used to say that jackals have howled at the innocent moon for aeons because they mourn the fact that they are not eternal, that when Death with his pale eyes comes for them they will be no more, unlike us who climb up Jacob’s ladder to Heaven in God’s embrace or fall to Satan’s fiery Hell. I don’t think so, Doc, I disagree. Jackals howl because we don’t. The howl has been traveling for thousands of years,
from the beginning of time, when Adam and Eve tasted the fruit and Satan triumphed and his son, Death, was born, when loss became our intimate, across deserts and seas the howl moves, loaded with dust and grime and brine, searching for souls to remind them to grieve, but we pay little attention, always avoiding, always moving forward, our souls filled with termite holes that the howl passes through, only whistling. Lost we are, so the jackals and coyotes, the wolves red and gray, howl for us, howl at the baby-faced moon.

When I was ten and my mother wanted to send me to my father, she gave me what turns a boy into a man, the object of every Yemeni’s desire, a janbiya. Even though I did not mind attaching a curved knife to my belt, I could not fathom that a rhinoceros had been killed for its horn to make a handle, and Auntie Badeea and my mother kept assuring me that no one in the house could afford a rhino-horn hilt, that my janbiya was nothing but good old plastic, tastefully finished and well polished and trim and right for my slight hand, yet I howled. I shamed my mother and aunties. I’m good at that, Doc, I was just not good at being a man.

And Doc, when the raccoon ran away and I went to the kitchen to drink a glass of orange juice because the fear had left a sour coppery taste in my mouth, I found my preferred eyeglasses in the fridge. I have to ask you, Doc, did you put them there?

Our world was young, verdant, and dewy-eyed, but it was already a prison. We were hothouse flowers, we bloomed
and perished, wild, exuberantly colorful, attention-grabbing, out of season, out of place, out of context. Well, you were. I made it through, did not perish. Greetings me, O favored one, the Lord is with me, hail me, chosen one, blessed am I before all other faggots. I was left alive so I could be lonely. Who would have thought that I, the foreigner among you, the most frail, would be the one who survived? Not you, Doc, that’s for sure. You thought I would die long before you, and I should have. In you I shall die, you once said, and all the time you used to tell me to go to hell, maybe you were right on both counts. Go to hell was your favorite curse.

Remember Mandeep, I’m sure you do, the Indian boy you salivated over, the one who was so flustered when you made your bad joke about being the man to go deep in him that he stuttered for a few minutes like a stuck gramophone, the one who wanted me. At one of Greg’s infamous bacchanalia, you kept staring seductively at Mandeep and he paid you no mind, yet he followed me onto the deck, handed me a joint, and once we looked at each other, he saw in an instant what you never could, he knew he could not offer what I needed that night or any night, he said he hoped I would find what I was looking for, but then you came along and put your arms around me possessively for the first time in so long. If he wanted me, you would get him. You liked us short and dark, didn’t you? I took you aside, told you I did not want to do it, you stood hunched and baleful, you said it was our chance to recapture what magic we had in the beginning, only in the beginning, that if I did not bring him to your room I might as well go to hell. Magic? You were naked, I was naked, Mandeep was naked, three on your queen bed with its luscious linens, but instead of the
sizzle and sparkle of James Brown funk, we were dull New Age music.

I excused myself for a minute, left your room for mine, got dressed, then left my room for hell. Come on get happy, get ready for the Judgment Day, shout O Mohammad, we’re going to the Promised Land. It was ten on a cold night, I was shivering and sweating, the fog draped itself over the city and its lights like a luminous shroud, dampened noise, all things became unmoving, unchanging, uncaring. Denuded of time, the fog made the numened gray city eternal, like Death. I walked looking for him, the man who knew what I needed, I walked to the place where I was most likely to find him, paid my four dollars, signed my name as Judy Garland, and descended into the obscurity of that opprobrious den. Darkness outside, more inside, and the smells of bodies that needed a shower, of damp clothing, most of all the foul, intoxicating aroma of male secretions. Where was he? Through lightless tunnels I searched, into black rooms I peeked, dark labyrinths, dark was our world. Heard the unmistakable sounds of assignations but he was not there, a smack echoed in a chamber, a crack. An exit sign in dim red illumined but was the more dark, darkness visible, served only to shape sights of lust, to outline immortal desire.

There, in a room of more shadows, leaning a left shoulder on the wall, I found him, covered in black leather, fitted jacket zipped all the way, collar up, gloves, tight pants and studded codpiece, high boots, skull mask, only the white of his eyes showing, wore his niqab as naturally as my mother did back in Yemen. Come here, boy, he said, show me your ass, I turned around, dropped my pants, bent over, hoping to pass inspection, I felt the leathered hand touch, grope,
maul my ass. He ordered me to look at the wall across from us, really look, but I could not see much at first, it was dark and my glasses were too weak, but slowly, as my squinting eyes adjusted, the penumbra shrank, and the tools of his trade emerged, the instruments of my pain took shape one by one, his pleasure, my hunger, my unrelenting erection. No doubt he could offer what I needed that night, he was he. The hunt was over, the prey had trapped the predator.