When Gravity Fails (13 page)

That was the one hundred eighty-fifth verse of the sûrah Al-Baqarah, The Cow, the second sûrah in the noble Qur’ân. The Messenger of God, may the blessing of Allah be on him and peace, gave directions for the observance of the holy month of Ramadân, the ninth lunar month of the Muslim calendar. This observance is considered one of the five Pillars of Islam. During the month, Muslims are prohibited from eating, drinking, and smoking from dawn until sunset. The police and the religious leaders see that even those like myself, who are negligent at best about spiritual duties, comply. Nightclubs and bars are closed during the day, and the cafés and restaurants. It is forbidden to take so much as a sip of water until after dusk. When night falls, when it is proper to serve food, the Muslims of the city enjoy themselves. Even those who shun the Budayeen the rest of the year may come and relax in a café.

Night would replace day completely in the Muslim world during the month, were it not for the five-times-daily call to prayer. These must be heeded as usual, so the respectful Muslim rises at dawn and prays, but does not break his fast. His employer may let him go home for a few hours in the afternoon to nap, to catch up on the sleep he loses by staying awake into the early hours of the morning, taking his meals and enjoying what he cannot enjoy during the day.

In many ways, Islam is a beautiful and elegant faith; but it is the nature of religions to put a higher premium on your proper attention to ritual than on your convenience. Ramadân can be very inconvenient to the sinners and scoundrels of the Budayeen.

Yet at the same time, it made some things simpler. I merely shifted my schedule several hours later on the clock, and I wasn’t put out at all. The nightclubs made the same alteration in their hours. It might have been worse if I had other things to attend to during the day; say, for instance, facing Mecca and praying every now and then.

The first Wednesday of Ramadân, after I’d settled myself into the changed daily scheme, I sat in a small coffeehouse called the Café Solace, on Twelfth Street. It was almost midnight, and I was playing cards with three other young men, drinking small cups of thick coffee without sugar, and eating small bites of
baqlaawah.
This was just what Yasmin had been envious of. She was over at Frenchy’s, shaking her fine little behind and charming strangers into buying her champagne cocktails; I was eating sweet pastries and gambling. I didn’t see anything wrong with taking it easy when I could, even if Yasmin still had to put in a long, exhausting ten hours. It seemed to be the natural order of things.

The three others at my table were a mixed collection. Mahmoud was a sex-change, shorter than me but broader through the shoulders and hips. He had been a girl until five or six years ago; he’d even worked for Jo-Mama for a while, and now he lived with a real girl who hustled in the same bar. It was an interesting coincidence.

Jacques was a Moroccan Christian, strictly heterosexual, who felt and acted as if he had special privileges because he was three-quarters European, therefore beating me out by a full grandparent. Nobody listened to Jacques very much, and whenever celebrations and parties were planned, Jacques learned about them just a little too late. Jacques was included in card games, however, because somebody has to be there to lose, and it might as well be a miffy Christian.

Saied the Half-Hajj was tall and well-built, rich, and strictly homosexual; he wouldn’t be seen in the company of a woman, real, renovated, or reconverted. He was called the Half-Hajj because he was so scatterbrained that he could never start one project without getting distracted in the middle by two or three others. Hajj is the title one gets after completing the holy pilgrimage to Mecca, which is one of the other Pillars of Islam. Saied had actually begun the journey several years ago, made about five hundred miles, and then turned back because he’d had a magnificent money-making idea that he forgot before he reached home again. Saied was somewhat older than I was, with a carefully trimmed mustache that he was very proud of. I don’t know why; I’ve never thought of a mustache as an achievement, unless you’d started out life like Mahmoud. Female, that is. All three of my companions had had their brains wired. Saied was wearing a moddy and two daddies. The moddy was just a general personality module; not a particular person but a particular type—he was being strong, silent, rough trade today, and neither of the add-ons could have been giving him card-playing help. He and Jacques were making me and Mahmoud richer.

These three ill-assorted louts were my best male friends. We wasted a lot of afternoons (or, during Ramadân, late evenings) together. I had two prime sources of information in the Budayeen: these three, and the girls in the clubs. The information I got from one person often contradicted the version I heard from another, so I’d long ago gotten into the habit of trying to hear as many different stories as I could and averaging them all out. The truth was in there somewhere, I knew it; the problem was coaxing it into the open.

I had won most of the money on the table, and Mahmoud the rest. Jacques was about to throw in his cards and quit the game. I wanted something more to eat, and the Half-Hajj agreed. The four of us were just about to leave the Solace and find somewhere else to have lunch, when Fuad ran up to us. This was the scrawny, spindle-legged son of a camel who was called (among other things) Fuad il-Manhous, or Fuad the Chronically Unlucky. I knew right off that I wasn’t going to get anything to eat for a while. The look on il-Manhous’s face told me that a little adventure was about to begin.

“Praise Allah that I found you all here,” he said, snapping quick glances at each of us.

“Go with Allah, my brother,” said Jacques tartly. “I think I see Him heading that way, toward the north wall.”

Fuad ignored him. “I need some help,” he said. He sounded more frantic than usual. He has little adventures fairly often, but this time he seemed really upset.

“What’s wrong, Fuad?” I asked.

He looked at me gratefully, like a child. “Some black bitch clipped me for thirty kiam.” He spat on the ground.

I looked at the Half-Hajj, who only looked heavenward for strength. I looked at Mahmoud, who was grinning. Jacques looked exasperated.

“Them bitches get you pretty regularly, don’t they, Fuad?” asked Mahmoud.

“You just think so,” he replied defensively.

“What happened this time?” asked Jacques. “Where? Anybody we know?”

“New girl,” he said.

“It’s always a new girl,” I said.

“She works over at the Red Light,” said the Cursed One.

“I thought you were banned out of there,” said Mahmoud.

“I was,” Fuad tried to explain, “and I still can’t spend any money in there, Fatima won’t let me, but I’m working for her as a porter, so I’m in there all the time. I don’t live by Hassan’s shop anymore, he used to let me sleep in his storeroom, but Fatima lets me sleep under the bar.”

“She won’t give you a drink in her place,” said Jacques, “but she lets you carry out her garbage.”

“Uh huh. And sweep up and clean off the mirrors.”

Mahmoud nodded wisely. “I’ve always said that Fatima has a soft heart,” he said. “You’ve all heard me.”

“So what
happened?”
I asked. I hate having to listen to Fuad circumambulate the point for half an hour every time.

“I was in the Red Light, see,” he said, “and Fatima had just told me to bring in another couple bottles of Johnny Walker and I’d gone back and told Nassir and he gave me the bottles and I brought them up to Fatima and she put them under the bar. Then I asked her, I said, ‘What do you want me to do now?’ and she said, ‘Why don’t you go drink lye?’ and I said, ‘I’m going to go sit down for a while,’ and she said, All right,’ so I sat down by the bar and watched for a while, and this girl came over and sat down next to me—”

“A black girl,” said Saied the Half-Hajj.

“Uh huh—”

The Half-Hajj gave me a look and said, “I have a special sensitivity in these matters.” I laughed.

Fuad went on. “Uh huh, so this black girl was real pretty, never saw her before, she said she just started working for Fatima that night, and I told her it was a pretty rowdy bar and that sometimes you have to watch yourself because of the crowd they get in there, and she said she was real grateful because I gave her the advice and she said people in the city were real cold and didn’t care about anybody but themselves, and it was nice to meet a nice guy like me. She gave me a little kiss on my cheek, and she let me put my arm around her, and then she started—”

“To feel you up,” said Jacques.

Fuad blushed furiously. “She wanted to know if she could have a drink, and I said I only had enough money to live on for the next two weeks, and she asked me how much I had, and I said I wasn’t sure. She said she bet I probably had enough to get her
one
drink and I said, ‘Look, if I’ve got more than thirty, I will, but if I’ve got less than thirty, I can’t,’ and she said that sounded fair, so I took out my money and guess what? I had exactly thirty, and we hadn’t said what we were going to do if I had exactly thirty, so she said it was okay, I didn’t have to buy her a drink. I thought that was real nice of her. And she kept kissing on me and hugging me and touching me, and I thought she really liked me a lot. And then, guess what?”

“She took your money,” said Mahmoud. “She wanted you to count it just to see where you kept it.”

“I didn’t know she done it until later, when I wanted to get something to eat. It was all gone, like she reached into my pocket and took it.”

“You’ve been clipped before,” I said. “You
knew
she was going to do it. I think you
like
being clipped. I think you get off on it.”

“That’s not true,” said Fuad stubbornly. “I really thought she liked me a lot, and I liked her, and I thought maybe I could ask her out or something later, after she got off work. Then I saw my money was gone, and I knew she done it. I can put two and two together, I’m no dummy.”

We all nodded without saying anything.

“I told Fatima, but she wouldn’t do anything, so I went back to Joie—that’s what she calls herself, but she told me it wasn’t her real name—and she got real mad, saying she never stole nothing in her life. I said I knew she done it, and she got madder and madder, and then she pulled a razor out of her purse, and Fatima told her to put it away, I wasn’t worth it, but Joie was still real mad and come at me with the razor, and I got out of there and looked all over the place for you guys.”

Jacques closed his eyes wearily and rubbed them. “You want us to go get your thirty kiam back. Why the hell
should
we, Fuad? You’re an imbecile. You want us to walk up to some screaming crazy flatbacker who’s waving a razor around, just because you can’t hang onto your own roll.”

“Don’t argue with him, Jacques,” said Mahmoud, “it’s like talking to a brick wall.” The actual Arabic phrase is, “You talk in the east, he answers in the west,” which is a very perceptive description of what was happening with Fuad il-Manhous.

The Half-Hajj, though, was wearing this moddy that made him into a Man of Action, so he just twirled his mustache and gave Fuad a small, rugged smile. “Come on,” he said, “you show me this Joie.”

“Thanks,” said the skinny Fuad, fawning all over Saied, “thanks a whole lot. I mean, I don’t have another goddamn fîq, she has all the money I had saved for the next—”

“Just shut up about it,” said Jacques. We got up and followed Saied and Fuad to the Red Light. I shook my head; I didn’t want to be involved in this at all, but I had to go along. I hate eating by myself, so I told myself to be patient; we’d all go by the Café de la Fée Blanche afterward and have lunch. All of us except the Cursed One, I mean. In the meantime, I swallowed two tri-phets, just for luck.

The Red Light Lounge was a rough place, and you went into in knowing it was a rough place, so if you got rolled or clipped in there, it was hard to find someone to give you a little sympathy. The police figured you were a fool to be there in the first place, so they would just laugh in your face if you made a complaint to them. Both Fatima and Nassir are interested only in how much profit they make on each bottle of liquor they sell and how many champagne cocktails their girls push; they couldn’t be bothered keeping track of what the girls were doing on their own. It was free enterprise in its purest, most unhindered form.

I was reluctant to set foot in the Red Light because I didn’t get along with either Fatima or Nassir, so I was last in our little group to sit down. We took a table away from the bar. They kept it as dark in there as Chiri kept her place. There was a heavy, sour smell of spilled beer. A hatchet-faced red-haired girl was dancing onstage. She had a nice little body unless your gaze strayed up past her neck. What she did on stage was designed to keep your attention away from her defects and focused intently on what she had to sell. Fanya, her name was, I remembered. They called her “Floor-show Fanya,” because her notion of dance was mostly horizontal, rather than in the customary upright position.

It was still early in the night, so we ordered beers, but virile old Saied the Half-Hajj, still listening to his manly moddy, got himself a double shot of Wild Turkey to go with his beer. No one asked the undernourished Fuad if he wanted anything. “That’s her over there,” he said in a loud whisper, pointing to a short, plain girl who was working on a European in a business suit.

“She’s no girl,” said Mahmoud. “Fuad, she’s a deb.”

“Don’t you think I can tell the difference between a boy and a girl?” responded Fuad hotly. No one wanted to voice an opinion about that; as far as I was concerned, it was too dark for me to read her yet. I’d know later, when I saw her better.

Saied didn’t even wait for his drink. He stood up and sort of strolled over to Joie. You know, “nothing can touch me because, deep inside, I’m Attila the Hun, and all you other faggots better watch your asses.” He engaged Joie in conversation; I couldn’t hear a word, and I didn’t want to. Fuad followed the Half-Hajj like a pet lamb, piping up in his shrill voice now and then, agreeing vigorously with Saied or denying vigorously the new whore.