When Gravity Fails (20 page)

The Black Widow Sisters had had first crack at me; various lackeys of Lutz Seipolt, Friedlander Bey, and Lieutenant Okking had caused me grief, as had their smugly smiling masters; and just last night I’d been briefly chastised by this James Bond lunatic. My pill case was now completely empty: nothing but pastel-colored dust on the bottom that I could lick from my fingertips, hoping for a milligram of help. The opiates were the first to go; my supply of Sonneine, bought from Chiriga and then Sergeant Hajjar, had been downed in rapid succession as each of my body’s movements brought new twinges and spasms of pain. When the sunnies were gone I tried Paxium, the little lavender pills that some people believe is the ultimate gift of the organic chemical universe, the Answer to All of Life’s Little Worries, but which I’m coming to the conclusion aren’t worth their weight in jackal snot. I ate them anyway and washed them down with about six ounces of Jack Daniels that Yasmin brought home from work with her. Okay, that left the full-throttle blue triangles. I didn’t really know what they’d do for pain, but I was certainly willing to use myself as a research volunteer. Science Marches On. I dropped three tri-phets, and the effect was fascinating from a pharmacological standpoint: in about half an hour, I began taking a tremendous interest in my heartbeat. I measured my pulse rate at something like four hundred and twenty-two per minute, but I kept getting distracted by phantom lizards crawling around just at the edges of my peripheral vision. I’m almost certain that my heart wasn’t really pumping that hard.

Drugs are your friends, treat them with respect. You wouldn’t throw your friends in the garbage. You wouldn’t flush your friends down the toilet. If that’s the way you treat your friends or your drugs, you don’t deserve to have either. Give them to me. Drugs are wonderful things. I won’t listen to anybody trying to get me to give them up. I’d rather give up food and drink—in fact, on occasion, I have.

The effect of all the pills was to make my mind wander. Actually, any sign of life on its part was heartening. Life was taking on a kind of bleak, pungent, really penetrating, and awfully
huge
quality that I didn’t enjoy at all.

On top of that, I remembered that I’d collected a couple of caps of RPM from Saied the Half-Hajj. This is the same junk that Bill the taxi driver has coursing through his bloodstream all the time,
all
the time, at the cost of his immortal soul. I’ve got to remember not to ride with Bill anymore. Jesus, that stuff is just really scary, and the worst part was that I actually
paid
cash money for the privilege of feeling so lousy. Sometimes I’m disgusted by the things I do, and I make resolutions to clean myself out. I promised, when that RPM wore off, if it ever did . . .

Friday was the Sabbath, a day of rest except for everybody in the Budayeen who went right back to work as soon as the sun went down. We observed the holy month of Ramadân, but the city’s cops and the mosque’s bullies let up on us a little on Fridays. They were happy to get whatever cooperation they could. Yasmin went to work and I stayed in bed, reading a Simenon I think I had read when I was about fifteen and again when I was about twenty and again a couple of other times. It’s hard to tell with Simenon. He wrote the same book a dozen times, but he had so many different books that he wrote a dozen times each that you have to read all of them and then sort them out in some kind of rational order according to a logical, thematic basis that’s always been far beyond me. I just start at the back (if it’s printed in Arabic) or the front (if it’s printed in French) or the middle (if I’m in a hurry or too full of my friends, the drugs).

Simenon. Why was I talking about Simenon? It was going to lead to a vital and illuminating point. Simenon suggests Ian Fleming: they’re both writers; they both clawed out thrillers in their individual fashions; they’re both dead; and neither one of them knew the first thing about making a good martini—Fleming’s “shaken and not stirred,” my holy whoring mother’s ineffable left tit; and Ian Fleming leads neatly and directly to James Bond. The man with the Bond moddy never again left another 007 trace in the city, not so much as the stub of a Morlands Special with the gold rings around the filter or a chomped-on slice of lemon peel or a Beretta bullet hole. Yeah, it was the Beretta he’d used on Bogatyrev and Devi. The Beretta was Bond’s choice of pistols in the early Fleming novels, until some hotshot reader pointed out that it was a “lady’s gun” with no stopping power; so Fleming had Bond switch to the Walther PPK, a smallish but reliable automatic. If our James Bond had used the Walther, it would have left a messier indentation in Devi’s face; the Beretta made a rather tidier little hole, like the pop-top slot in a can of beer. That slapping-around I got from him was the last anyone saw or heard of James Bond in the city. He had a low tolerance for boredom, I guess.

That’s another first-rate reason for getting to know your medicines and correctives. Boredom can be tedious, but not when you’re counting your pulse at over four hundred a minute. By the life of my beard and the sacred shifting balls of the Apostle of God, may the blessings of Allah be on him and peace, I really just wanted to go to sleep! Every time I closed my eyes, though, a black-and-white strobe effect started flashing, and purple and green things swam by, gigantic things. I cried, but they wouldn’t leave me alone. I couldn’t see how Bill could drive his taxi through them all.

So that was Friday, in brief summary. Yasmin came home with the Jack Daniels, I killed the rest of my drug supply, passed out sometime near noon, and awoke to find Yasmin gone. It was now Saturday. I had two more days to enjoy my brain.

Early Saturday evening, I noticed my money seemed to have vaporized. I should have had a few hundred kiam left; I’d spent a little, of course, and I’d probably blown even more that I couldn’t account for. Yet I had the feeling that I ought to have more than the ninety kiam I found in my shoulder bag. Ninety kiam wasn’t going to get me much of anything; a new pair of jeans was going to cost me forty or more.

I began to suspect that Yasmin had been dipping into my finances. I hate that about women, even the ones whose genetic threads in their cells still said they were male. Jo-Mama says, “Just ’cause the cat had her kittens in the oven don’t make them biscuits.” Take a pretty boy, nip off his
couilles
and buy him a silicone balcony that could comfortably seat an underfed family of three, and before you know it, she’s digging around in your wallet. They eat up all your pills and caps, spend your money, bitch about the goddamn sheet and the blanket, stare rapturously all afternoon at themselves in the bathroom mirror, make innocent little remarks about the devastating young plushes passing by in the other direction, want to be held for an hour after you’ve exhausted yourself jamming them into the floorboards, and then they climb up your back because you look out the window with a slightly irked expression on your face. What could you possibly be annoyed about, with a virtually perfect goddess hanging around the apartment, decorating your floor with her dirty underwear? You might take something to elevate your mood, but the precious bitch already consumed all that, remember?

Only another day and a half of Marîd Audran’s brain as Allah the Protector in His wisdom had designed it. Yasmin was not speaking to me: she thought I was a coward and a selfish son of a clapped-up ass for not going along with Papa’s plan. One minute, it was all set—on Monday morning, I was going to meet with Friedlander Bey’s surgeons and have my thoughts electrified. The next minute, I was a rotten bastard who didn’t care what happened to his friends. She couldn’t remember if I was going to get my brain wired or not; she couldn’t think back far enough to recall the last argument (
I
could: I was
not
going to get my brain wired, and that was the end of it). I didn’t get out of bed all day Friday or Saturday. I watched shadows get longer and shorter and longer. I heard the muezzin call the faithful to prayer; and then, what seemed to me like a few minutes later, he called again. I stopped paying attention to Yasmin and her moods sometime on Saturday evening, before she started to get ready for work.

She slammed her way back and forth across my room, calling me all kinds of innovative foul names, some of which I’d actually never heard before, despite my years of wandering. It just made me love the little slut even more. I didn’t get out of bed until Yasmin left for Frenchy’s. My body alternated between rattling chills and flashes of fever so bad I had to cool off in the shower. Then I’d lie back in bed and shiver and sweat. I soaked the sheets and the mattress cover, and clung with white-knuckled fingers to the blanket. The phantom lizards were on my face and arms now, but crawling around less frequently. I felt safe enough to go to the bathroom again, something I’d been thinking about for a long while. I wasn’t hungry, but I was getting pretty thirsty. I drank a couple of glasses of water, then slid shakily back into bed. I wished Yasmin would come home.

Despite the waning effects of the drug overdose and my growing fear, I had made up my mind about Monday morning. Saturday night passed with more cold sweats and remittent fever, and I stared wakefully at the ceiling, even after Yasmin came back and went drunkenly to sleep. Sunday, just before sunset, while she was getting herself ready to go to work again, I got out of bed and stood naked behind her. She was putting on her eye makeup, screwing her face into crazy expressions and glossing her eyelids with loveliness from some rich-bitch department store beyond the Budayeen. She wouldn’t use inexpensive paint from the bazaars like everyone else, as if anyone in Frenchy’s could get a good look at her in that dimness. The same makeup was on the racks in the souks, but Yasmin paid top prices for it across town. She wanted to look heartbreaking on stage, when not a juiced-up fool in the place would be looking at her
eyes.
She was going for a layered effect of blue and green below her narrow, sketched-in eyebrows. Then she worked on a tasteful sprinkle of gold glittery sparkles. The sparkles were the hard part. She put them on one by one. “Get to bed early,” she said.

“Why?” I asked innocently.

“Because you have a busy day tomorrow,” she said.

I shrugged.

“Your brain,” she said, “remember?”

“My brain, I remember,” I said. “It’s not going anywhere unusual. I don’t have anything particularly taxing lined up for it.”

“You’re getting the worthless thing wired!” She turned on me like a nesting falcon on a hawk.

“Not the last time I thought it over,” I said.

She grabbed up her small blue overnight case. “Well, you son-of-a-bitching, mother-ugly
kaffir”
she cried, “fuck you
and
the horse you rode in on!” She made more noise leaving my apartment than I thought was possible, and that was before she even slammed the door. After she slammed the door it got very quiet, and I was able to think. I couldn’t think of anything to think about, though. I walked around the room a few times, put one or two things away, kicked some of my clothes from the right to the left and back again, and laid down on the bed. I’d been in the bed so long that it wasn’t diverting to be there again now, but there wasn’t that much else to do. I watched the darkness in the room stretch and reach out toward me. That wasn’t so exciting anymore, either.

The pain had gone, the overdose-induced hysteria had gone, my money had gone, Yasmin had gone. This was peace and contentment. I hated every goddamn second of it.

In this silent center of motionless and mindlessness, free of all the frenzy that had surrounded me for many days, I surprised myself with a piece of genuine intuition. It began by congratulating myself for figuring that the man with the James Bond moddy had a Beretta rather than a Walther. Then the Bond thought linked up to something else, and they hooked together with one or two more ideas, and it all illuminated an inexplicable detail that had been simmering in my memory for a couple of days, at least. I recalled my last visit to Lieutenant Okking. I remembered the way he didn’t seem to be at all interested in my theories or Friedlander Bey’s proposition. That wasn’t so unusual; Okking resisted interference from anyone. He disliked positive interference, in the form of authentic assistance, just as much. It wasn’t Okking himself to whom my thoughts kept returning; it was something in his office.

One of the envelopes had been addressed to Universal Export. I recalled wondering idly if Seipolt ran that firm, or if Hassan the Shiite ever received any curious crates from them. The company’s name was so commonplace that there were probably a thousand “Universal Exports” all around the world. Maybe Okking was just sending off a mail order for some rattan patio furniture to put next to his backyard barbecue.

Of course, the very ordinariness of “Universal Export” was the reason that M., the head of James Bond’s special 00 section, used it as a false cover and code name in Ian Fleming’s books. The forgettable name would never have stuck in my memory without that connection to the Bond stories. Maybe “Universal Export” was a disguised reference to the man who’d worn the James Bond moddy. I wished that I had memorized the address on that envelope.

I sat up, startled. If the Bond explanation had any truth to it, why was that envelope in Lieutenant Okking’s
Out
box? I told myself that I was getting as jumpy as a grasshopper on a griddle. I was probably looking for honey where there were no bees. Still, I felt my stomach turn sick again. I felt myself being drawn unwillingly into a morass of tortuous and deadly paths.

It was time for action. I had spent Friday, Saturday, and most of Sunday paralyzed between my worn and grimy sheets. It was the moment to get moving, to leave the apartment, to rid myself of this clinging morbidity and fear. I had ninety kiam; I could buy myself some butaqualides and get some decent sleep.

I threw on my
gallebeya,
which was getting a little on the soiled side, my sandals, and my
libdeh,
the close-fitting cap. I grabbed my shoulder bag on the way out the door, and hurried downstairs. Suddenly I really wanted to score some beauties; I mean, I
really
wanted them. I’d just gotten over three horrible days of sweating too much of everything out of my system, and already I was rushing out to buy more. I made a mental note to slow down my drug intake; crumpled the mental note; and tossed it into my mental wastebasket.