The Angel of History (6 page)

Ferrigno took the shy young trans man first, the contrast in size was like a Coleridge poem to a Dickinson, and even though Ferrigno carried a clipboard, he didn’t have to peruse it or call out a name, he just nodded and was followed out of the waiting room, a strange form of power dynamics that reminded me of how uncomfortable I felt in gay bars because I always thought I was missing the visual cues that the men were exchanging, not that many sent signals my way, yet I wished I had been more adept at reading gay semaphores when I was younger, too late for me now. They’re writing songs of love, Satan sang, but not for me, and I tried to shut him up, to no avail, he kept asking me, Are you going to do the poor, poor pitiful me routine, because if you are, I’ll just zone out for the next fifteen minutes.

It has been getting worse, Doc, I don’t seem to be able to cut him off, I am all wound with adders who with cloven tongues do hiss me into madness, it wasn’t always this bad, I went along for years doing rather well, didn’t hear his voice, but then one day he reappeared, and he’s been getting more demanding, more irksome, hissing, hissing, and I get headaches, I fear the return of the great migraine storms, I need a break, Doc, I need a break.

The man in the corner conspired softly with his hand, whispered of conflicts and intrigues and possible plans of action, though his hand remained tongue-tied as usual, unsure how to reply, and the bespectacled lady observed me while pretending not to. The peal of a church bell shocked all three of us, rang out of my jeans pocket, one round of
titong-tong-titong-tong-titong
. Bespectacled lady, her gray hair tucked behind her ears, glanced up at the
NO CELL PHONES
sign on the left wall, then back at me with nothing if not deeply chiding eyes, returned to staring intently at her own phone while I hurried to turn the ringer off, and Satan said, Just like you to have a church bell as annunciation, maybe you should wear a garlic necklace to ward me off.

I knew what he was doing, he wanted me to go crazy so he could have full rein, he was afraid that I would get rid of him as I did the last and only time I stayed for three days in St. Francis after you all died, he was out of my life then and I was able to function once more, go to work, hang out with friends, have a life, for crying out loud. Are you sure it was me, Satan asked, it could have been just your run-of-the-mill, garden-variety voice, maybe your fourteen saints, maybe you heard His Mightiness himself, or his son
who died for your sins, or maybe the prophet of your true religion, Mo’ Ho’, or one of the first caliphs, with you it could have been anybody, yet you insist it was the ruler of this world, the tempter, me, I know you know that wasn’t the case, but still you choose to believe, I am here now, not going anywhere, get used to it. As smoke is driven away, I told him, so will you be driven, as wax melts before a fire, so will your wickedness perish, and he laughed like a demon.

Odette’s text simply asked where I was, but it was in all capital letters, which meant she was furious, happy, or worried, and we can safely assume that it was the last in this case since I had texted her two hours earlier asking if she could mind Behemoth for three days because I was thinking of going on a mini vacation, but she knew me better than anyone else and probably figured I was lying. You never met Odette, Doc, she’s my closest friend, my confidante, and my funniest person in the universe, she moved in a couple of years after you left because she needed a place and I thought it would be good to save on rent. She ended up staying because we were ideal roommates. Are you going to explain to him about cell phone technologies next, asked Satan, interrupting me as usual, because you know he isn’t listening, he’s dead.

I woke to the sound of my mother singing an old Yemeni folk song, one of my favorites, and my heart was uplifted until I began to consider that she rarely woke before me, and once I did, the evanescent song faded into black. Neither my mother nor her song could survive the light of my day, I wak’d, she fled, and day brought back my night. Orange light pressed on my bedroom window.

I know, Doc, I know, my sanity is deserting me. Have you ever wondered about the noun
desert
and the verb? They’re derived from the same root, left behind. Since I began to drop the pail in the well of my memories, I’ve had no rest, no slack for that rope.
Whoosh
fell the bucket and up came salty recollections. Remember the snow globe you kept mocking me for saving, for being so attached to, the one remaining memento of my mother, yet you kept telling
me to throw it away, to discard it in some trash heap? I had a sentimental heart, you said, the souvenir was much too ugly, and it was, of all things, a snow globe from Stockholm, of all places. Well, your horrid mother stole it. She did. I don’t want to think about that. I do not recall when my mother acquired that snow globe. What I do recall is that sometime after my eighth birthday, my mother began to dream of Stockholm and its long winters.

One evening, a lanky, tall Swede with hair the color of dry hay in high summer, almost as bright as the thin gold necklace he wore, walked across the salon and held out his arm for her. It was a performance, but still, it was the rare client who performed the role of a gentleman, everyone was dazzled. My mother looked around to make sure that he meant her, and only her, she even looked at the wall behind her, at the large carved figurehead of an unknown beast, openmouthed as if caught in mid-scream, with horns and dark brown eyes. No, it wasn’t the beast the Swede was after. When she was assured that she was the one he wanted, she stopped being able to see anything but his eyes. She got up off the purple ottoman, hooked her elbow in his, and luckily she was wearing high heels that evening or she would have had to tiptoe. His shirt was unbuttoned down to his belly button, his dangling gold chain reaching just a hair above the shirt’s V. He romanced her as everyone watched, then took her into the room and seduced her, and did not leave till the morning cock crowed.

The next day the aunties offered her congratulations over orange blossom water, loudly gossiping and laughing but no ululation because celebrating early would certainly put a hex on the budding relationship. Of course they didn’t
sleep, my mother, exhilarated and exhausted, told her sisters, he paid for the entire night so they could conjoin, not rest. They made love a number of times and they talked when he needed a little time to recover, it was difficult without a common language, but he was interested in hearing her and she wanted to know him. He told her to apply for asylum in Sweden, and she decided to do just that, but first she had him explain what the word meant. In Stockholm, he told her, God wipes the tears off His children’s faces. Apparently, He did not do such a thing in Cairo. She told her sisters that she would live with him in Stockholm and she would cry no more. Asylum, she kept repeating the word over and over, asylum, in the salon she sat, on the jacaranda rocker, asylum, asylum, back and forth, she deserved asylum, had there ever been anyone in the history of mankind who was more persecuted than she, no, of course not.

In the upcoming days, she worked on her application. She donned her coat and trudged to the Swedish embassy fifteen streets and two alleys north, she filled out forms and more forms, she saw a picture of Ingrid Thulin in a magazine and pulled her hair back à la Ingrid. She tried and tried but was unable to get an interview, she was told someone from the embassy would get back to her, no one did. She whined and complained but no one could help her, not at the embassy or at the house. She did not give up, though. She told her sisters that as soon as the Swede returned, she would relate all her problems and he would explain to the embassy that she was special and deserved a visa. Her Swede was important enough to demand respect from the minions at the embassy, she was sure of that, he carried himself as if he was.

As it came to pass, our Swede returned to the whorehouse thirteen days after his first visit, walked into the salon as if he were in a western, with the shuffling gait of a cowboy. He acknowledged my mother with a nod before joining the other men for the pre-fuck amusements. She saw salvation, saw oodles and oodles of snow in her future and a log in a fireplace and even a dog, a Saint Bernard with a tiny barrel of cognac hanging from its collar. This time, though, when the Swede performed the role of a gentleman, he chose someone other than my mother. She watched him walk with the same intensity toward another auntie, with the same devotion and desire, she saw the look of momentary shock on her sister’s taut and pale face. To this day I remember my mother’s countenance when the choice was made, Doc, and that of the other auntie, how the chosen and the betrayed exchanged stealthy glances, and how my mother unclasped her hair, locks falling on her fragile shoulders. She couldn’t allow herself much time in shock, within minutes she’d regained her infantile charm. My mother retired to her room with a different man, an Englishman. That was the day when my mother gave up.

Auntie Badeea would ask me to come home to Cairo at least once every couple of months, I would be happier, she’d say. Why did I have to live so far away? What could be worse than to dwell here, driven out from bliss, condemned in this abhorred deep to utter woe? But then, what matter where I was if I was the same? Every which way I fly is Hell, myself
am Hell. Those lines were assigned to me, Satan said, stop plagiarizing, Milton was writing about me, not you.

I know you’ll hate me for this, but I went astray after you died, really far afield astray, Pluto-far. Demons hover like moths at the closing doors of life, waiting patiently for the bereaved. He was both my death and my salvation, a brief, intense, motherfucking affair, he almost killed me and I would certainly have killed myself had he not come along to save me, this, this, his full name escapes me, this Viking demigod, but I called him Deke because that’s how he introduced himself the first time, I’m Deke, he said, short for Dickhead, and I laughed, of course I fell for him. I was Icarus, he was the sun that couldn’t even spell Icarus, of course I fell.

I was feeling deathly depressed and lethargic, spiraling downward, eddies of crappy water whirling down the drain, all of you dead, couldn’t force myself out of bed, under the covers I remained, you were no longer there to lift my spirit or the duvet with the pink oleander design, which I once found strikingly beautiful but no more. I found so little beautiful, as each one of you became sick, as you died, one by one, I could see nothing but black. Your physical absence was soul-crushing. I needed to return to work, back to my job, buried daily in the law firm’s cloister-like cubicles, needed the money, needed a bump, just a little one, ended up at Kawahi’s apartment on Sixth Street, which always frightened me enough that I considered quitting everything
and becoming monastic just so I’d never have to revisit that den of drugs, but of course I didn’t, not then. The middle of Kawahi’s living room was overwhelmed by a coffin-sized safe, I kid you not, Doc, an airtight steel safe whose every inch of surface was covered with phosphorous graffiti, its contents a mystery, sawed cadavers probably, but Kawahi and his cabal used it as a bench, as a coffee table, to cut the speed down to salable portions. Three troops sat on the safe while I was there, one looking like a baby-faced Huggy Bear from
Starsky and Hutch,
the television series, not the movie, yes, believe it or not, Doc, they made a movie of that as well, and I wanted to tell him he was almost two decades too late but I was nervous and no one would have gotten my bad joke in any case. Deke stood in well-trod orange high tops next to the only other white boy in the room, tall he was, towered over his seated friend, his head almost reached the low ceiling of the basement room, and above him was a dropped beam on which Kawahi had written in blood or red lipstick,
WATCH YOUR DUMB
, but of course at my height I didn’t have to worry about hitting either my head or my dumb, whatever that meant. Deke’s flat, shaggy blond hair told me he’d skipped his shower that morning and probably the day before as well. His hands languidly parked in the pockets of gray mechanic’s overalls without a name on his left breast, which was why I asked him for it when I shook his hand, and you know that I don’t have a strong grip, you used to enjoy calling me Limp Wrist, but Deke made sure to squeeze so hard I almost felt my knuckles pop, and I gasped, and he knew, he knew right then, he looked straight into me and said, Buy me a baggie, and I did, of course, anything he wanted me to do I did without question, I did, I did. He
grabbed the bag when I offered it, glanced at his friend sitting on a filthy fauteuil, fake Italian baroque, and smirked as if saying, See, this is how you do it, get your own boy. His friend looked puzzled, not comprehending, a smaller guy, nondescript, lost in the grandness of the fauteuil, which you’d think would have looked odd in such a room but not so, everything about the place was bizarre. The filth seemed arranged, like the graffiti safe, the red lettering, the idiosyncratic collection of glue guns on a corner table, an honest-to-goodness halberd leaning against the wall, no stench at all except for the vestiges of inexpensive jasmine deodorizer, and I could imagine that Kawahi’s name was probably Lawrence or Philip, and if there were rats they’d be bejeweled, that pretend downwardly mobile decor was what frightened me, the inauthenticity of everything, one committed the most heinous of crimes to defend the make-believe.

Deke, on the other hand, was all authentic. So fine, this blond god, hair wavy when washed, statuesque, skin the color of peonies in a Fantin-Latour painting, an ideal tone if you ignored the purple and yellow bruises that appeared once or twice a week out of the blue, blue eyes with lashes so long. He was all man, so he said, spermed a baby and everything, once beat his woman when she got out of line, she left when she got tired of his bullshit. He was no Sunday night master done up in black leather drag, he was no expert in the art of pain manipulation with a box of toys, he was the real thing, low-class grade-A trade, a little funky, a little nasty man whose every other word was fuck, fucking motherfucker, shit, or pussy. I liked the word
pussy
out of his mouth, I was that pussy, that was me, he didn’t fuck me, though, never, that would prove he wasn’t a man,
unlike getting his dick sucked, prison pussy, a mouth is just a mouth, he said, and he never heard of Freud, or Gertrude Stein even though he was born and raised in Oakland.

When I left Kawahi’s room, he came with me, didn’t say anything, didn’t talk, just walked out with me, walked like a sated big cat surveying the savanna. Outside he seemed surprised that I didn’t have a car, disappointed, but he accompanied me to my apartment. I chatted nervously about this and that, probably even the San Francisco weather, and he didn’t listen or pretend to care. He followed me into our home, looked around, asked about your room but decided not to expropriate it because he didn’t appreciate ghosts, said all phantasms and demons hated him. He claimed my room instead and my sheets and flowery duvet, and he banished me to yours. I could suck his dick but being in the same bed with another man disturbed his sleep. We smoked my rocks, then the ones I bought for him, then we went to work, he to whichever garage employed him and I to the bowels of the law firm, where the slogan
JUSTICE MAY BE BLIND BUT SHE SEES IT OUR WAY
90%
OF THE TIME
was embossed right above the entrance to the word-processing room. All infernos have a sign on their gates. When I returned home he was there, and he relied on me to feed him and take care of him and bathe him and massage his tired feet and trim his toenails and procure his happiness. He made me hungry for a little affection, so grateful for the little I received, you see, he was so fine, he was the prettiest man I’d ever been with, he was preening-peacock vain, how could I help myself, I did everything he asked. He used to take his two fingers and walk them through the air, let your fingers do the walking through the Yellow Pages, I bet you remember that, that
was his signal for me to go get more, and I would, cursing him all the way, traveling in heavy rain or in mother-of-pearl light, peregrinations at dusk, I did what he asked, his laws were not to be questioned, just like those of gravity and the IRS, and the rocks had better not be too small or he’d be pissed off.

Upon my return he barely held out his hand, opened it like a corolla, and kept it steady until he got what he wanted. He lay back on my couch, his gaze, the look of a tiger holding its prey, this epitome of masculine languor, he lit the pipe, and I crawled between his legs, pulled down the zipper with a deep sigh, and as each of the teeth separated, I breathed in the mistral and the sirocco, his flesh recoiled at first, then yielded, and I licked my way down, from the golden hairs of his chest to the treasures of his crotch, and then he would lift my head, let me have my turn at the pipe, and I would fly, float with the winds, he knew just how and when to get me up in the diaphanous air, so high.

I quickly had to learn to hold in the smoke while getting hit, because if I inhaled too much, took in more than what he thought I deserved, and it happened every time, every day, he slapped me so hard my brain rocked in its skull. I would crawl and fly, crawl and fly, cry and fly, until I crashed. He never held me, didn’t touch me, even though he knew I wanted him to, just a touch, gently run his hand across my back was all I wanted.

If you saw us in the mornings, you’d think we were lovers. I’d make breakfast and we’d share the Sunday paper over coffee. Except for the bruises we looked normal. I wallowed in all the beating and begging and humiliation and sanguinolent whipping, cared about little, danced with Gog,
frolicked with Magog. But he was so fine, this maleficent, pretty white boy, my Charon, he had no compassion but why should he be the only one in the world who did? He’d brought me back home. Then one day he too went out and left me, I don’t know why, just disappeared. I thought it was love. I searched the city and all her numbered stars, I looked for him in her bottomless pits and her abhorred deeps, over and over, for days and nights, with fading vigor, I peered into the nooks of Hades and did not find my love. I grieved and cried and keened and mourned, wailed for all the lost possibilities. I wept, howled, then left my kennel and went back to work.