Ghassan was about to undo the latch on the door when the stranger spoke.
‘Do you smoke?’ He was offering a cigarette. Ghassan reached over and took one. The man lit the cigarette for him and their hands touched. Ghassan pulled away.
‘I think you are in my lecture. At uni. I do engineering as well.’ There was a hopeful glint in the man’s eyes. He was waiting expectantly for Ghassan’s answer.
And for a moment Ghassan wished to answer thus: I know you and I know who and what you can be. I have loved you for months now, and I have wanted to communicate to you all the wonder and joy and pain that is in this world. I have dreamt that together we would discover God and in our submission and faith we would also discover that there is a union of souls in love that the body and its base functions can never compare to. Oh, how I have wished for this and how I regret that this is not possible. Come now, take my hand, and I will lead you out of here. This place is death and destruction, and if it did not occur today, it would happen tomorrow or the day after, for this place is an abomination. Will you come with me?
Instead, Ghassan shook his head. He made his accent deliberately thick, his speech broken. ‘No, no me. I no go university, I no student.’
He thought the man would object, contradict his deceit. But instead the man nodded, and a rueful half-smile appeared on his face. ‘My mistake.’ The smile vanished. ‘Got a girlfriend, have ya?’ Then, more spitefully, ‘Or maybe a wife?’
Ghassan said nothing. He dropped the cigarette and stubbed it out on the dirty wet floor.
The man sat back on the couch and unzipped his jeans. ‘You can fuck me again.’
Ghassan unlatched the door and pulled it open. The whiff of chemicals and offal, men visible in the shadows.
‘Leave the door open,’ the man called out, in a tone both defensive and accusing. ‘I’m not finished.’
The corridor was full of shadows, naked ghouls — luminescent, poisonous white skin — whose hands groped at him. Ghassan pushed them all away, refusing to look at the bodies surrounding him. The noise of fornication was all around him, but he ignored it and maintained his purposeful walk. He walked past the showers and sauna and into the small alcove with the lockers. He pulled the key from his pocket.
Ghassan began the countdown in his head. He looked out past the locker room to where a bored attendant was sitting at the counter flicking through a magazine. Behind him was the exit, the door that led to the street and to the light. Ghassan hesitated, he panicked, his resolve gone.
Every second of every minute of every hour of every day, awake or asleep, we must pray in order to resist sin. In the diabolical din of this hellhole he heard Omar’s words break through, a ray of illumination that cleaved the darkness. The words, their light, wrapped themselves around him. He would not flee; he secured the bulky belt that contained God’s fury tighter around his middle. He patted, and he set forth.
As soon as he had entered this inferno, paid the surly attendant twenty dollars and spotted the youth in the alcove, Ghassan knew that he was doomed to sin, he did not have the resolve to resist temptation. Their magazines, their videos, their films, their dirty words scrawled on toilet walls, their nakedness, their parading of their bodies, their hatred of chastity, their decadence, their sadism, their brutality, their filth: it had infected him, it was in his blood. And like a cancer, it fed on itself, bred on itself, so that the fever intensified. He had once wondered what it would be like to touch another man’s skin. Now that was not enough. He had seen too much; nothing was sacred, nothing was safe, not even a child. He had become one of them but soon he and all of them would be gone. By doing God’s work he could atone. There would be no more magazines, no more films and filthy words, no nakedness, no brutality, no sadism, no filth. He was bringing the fire.
He walked out of the alcove and back up the stairs that led to the cubicles, to the violent red and orange light. A frail old man was desperately stroking at his crotch and clutched at Ghassan as he shoved past him. He stopped in front of the scene of his sin and saw that the European was once again bent over the vinyl couch, and another man was entering him.
Ghassan was the fire. He turned away and looked down the corridor. A dark-skinned man with the fleshy jowls of a bourgeois Punjabi was looking away from him, ashamed. Your false gods cannot save you. There is only one God, my God. At the end of the corridor, a television monitor looked down at them all. On the screen a scrawny pale-skinned youth had his eyes screwed shut as a man furiously ejaculated all over the boy’s cheeks, his chin, his naked shoulder, his hair, his lips and mouth. This was what they did to their children.
He was counting down. Only a few seconds now and he would be free.
On the screen, the boy’s eyes opened and looked straight at Ghassan. The boy was smiling and the semen on his face sparkled as tears.
Then there was only the unforgiving, intransmutable silence.