In the road, whipped by the cold night, her disquiet grew. She understood the risk she was taking going out by herself this late, but she didn’t care. She only cared about the earthquake inside of her. She didn’t know when it was going to erupt onto the surface. It was the first time she’d ever dared break his rules. She walked uphill, the Palacio de las Cortes on her right, and veered left down narrow streets. Bars and restaurants were woven into the web along with laughter and flirtatious cries that trailed her as she passed. A young man circled around her singing gypsy songs and kneeling down theatrically until his girlfriend pulled him away. Nora carried on walking, staring ahead, her steps falling in time with the cackling of the woman behind her. The woman just kept on laughing and laughing. Nora floated on, mesmerized by everything she saw, totally unaware of the figure who’d been stalking her since the moment she’d left the hotel. She carried on further down narrow lanes toward the surprises they held. From deep within the darkness of one alleyway, a tall matador rushed toward her with a massive dog on a leash. When they shot past her, a soggy tongue licked the index finger of her right hand and the sensation of wet animal contact caused her to gasp. When she turned around to look, no trace remained in the darkness. The wetness puzzled her. Do you wash it seven times with water and a final time in sand? She hurried forward in the direction of guitar music and stamping feet. The melancholy Andalusian singing drew her forward until she found herself in the Plaza Mayor, a massive square designed by Juan de Villanueva in 1790 after the great fire. She was surrounded on three sides by two hundred and thirty-seven balconies and nine gates.
In the center of the great square, Nora was swept up in the flamenco music and the exuberance of a pair of dancing spectators. It was both overwhelming and upsetting. She looked around in amazement. In the colonnade surrounding the square, the cafes and restaurants were packed with night revelers and on a wooden stage erected in the middle of the square, a flamenco dancer strutted in circles around a gypsy dancer, while circles in the audience imitated his moves. In this city, resounding with amplified music, people could laugh and cry and dance and quarrel in Spanish and English and German. All those languages were awakened inside of Nora, a river of language that flowed between the banks of her past on either side.
To her right, a female dancer sprang out of one of the arcades and Nora shrieked, her heart frenetic, her body giving itself over to the dance. Her finger was still wet with that animal’s slobber. When she snapped out of her dancing reverie, she noticed the smiling, encouraging eyes around her. A young American came dancing up to her. He was imitating the male dancer, but mixing in matador movements, circling her as if she were a bull, in thrall to the agonized cries of the singer behind him. Nora felt that she’d been cut off from the world, from every bond, that her purpose in life was to be right there, to experience those feelings that summed up everything she’d lost. In that fleeting moment, Nora was one with the bulls’ blood that stained the walls of the wide arena around her where bullfights had been held in years past. “This void is you.” A voice inside of her commanded her cells and they responded. “Spread your limbs into every corner, occupy all space, spread out toward the never-ending. Your limbs will reach; they won’t tire. Your body is a droplet as vast as the night and all its lights.”
Suddenly, she realized the dancer was dragging her toward an alley, and when she tried to pull away, he wrapped his arms around her. In that moment, a hand reached out of the darkness, grabbing the man by the neck and throwing him to the ground, where he lay motionless under the arcade. The hand took hold of her, pulling her forcefully, and when she looked to see whose hand it was, she gasped.
“Rafi?” Her voice squeaked. A migraine struck her.
“SPEND MY MONEY ON WHATEVER YOU WANT, BIG OR SMALL, BUT DON’T YOU DARE use it to buy yourself a lover.” That was the note the sheikh had scribbled on her mirror before he left. She could tell his hand must have been shaking.
Reptile
HE REACHED OUT FROM HIS DEEP SLUMBER AND OPENED HIS EYES IN THE oppressive darkness. Khalil was lying an arm’s length away from the basement ceiling but for a moment he had no idea where he was. The ceiling looked damp. He struggled to remember how he’d died, when he’d ended up in this grave. Is this what death is really like? The power suddenly goes out and then when it comes back on, you find yourself underground? He couldn’t remember hearing any receding footsteps. His head didn’t feel concussed. He’d always been told that the first thing a dead person hears is the footsteps of those who’ve carried him to his grave receding in the distance. When he tried to sit up, he banged his head on the ceiling. His own groan confirmed: “Yeah, you’re dead.” That eternal sentence uttered at one point or another by all living beings. That sentence was like a door that opened up onto death itself. A little ways beyond it, the two angels Munkar and Nakir would no doubt appear and begin to judge his deeds.
The snake he’d been expecting to find beside him, ready to crush him, wasn’t there, though; instead there were sticky mounds of fat. The smell of dough and frying meat jerked him out of his burial. The Turkish seamstress, who was lying beside him, sensed his movements and began to coil her limbs around him. For a moment, he struggled to breathe, but the dinosaur inside him broke through the curtain of the grave and the fat, ascending to the heavens and beyond. The current of those heavens floated him higher and higher, and when he fell back to earth like a rag the walls and the low ceiling began to watch him. They’d gotten used to tracking his movements. He would walk down the Lane of Many Heads — he preferred to come on foot, having parked his taxi far away — careful not to be noticed by anyone as he snuck into the basement studio. He didn’t want Ramziya or anyone else’s prying eyes to catch him in his tracks. No matter how well he blended into the darkness or how softly he stepped, he could feel the emptying houses of the lane watching him. The goddamned Lane of Many Heads didn’t use the eyes of its inhabitants to watch him, it used its walls, ramshackle doors, cats, and trashcans, the dry air and the smell of desertion and sewage, the remnants of arguments that had taken place on every street corner, the slaps a wife laid on her husband. The Lane of Many Heads watched him with its every breath, and rebuked him.
Nasser’s fist had left a searing pain which ran from his jaw to the back of his neck and reminded him of his car door, which Nasser had crashed his own car into during the pursuit. That was right before he arrested him. The Turkish woman took pleasure in the bloody bite-marks she left on his shoulders.
“Are you angry, precious?”
His stomach twisted in disgust at her hissing, but he didn’t recoil from her bites. He thought back to the comic car chase, the sadistic pleasure he’d felt in his spine when his car crumpled as it crashed into the rubble on Qarara Hill. Nasser had forced him out of the car like a common criminal. Khalil couldn’t help but laugh when Nasser clamped the Hollywood handcuffs on his wrists, but the scenario became a nightmare when Nasser took his police thriller fantasy to the extreme. He threw Khalil into a filthy cell with hardened criminals and put him through intense interrogations day after day. Like all corrupt cops, Nasser enjoyed torturing suspects and Khalil wasn’t cut out for the challenge. He collapsed like the Twin Towers and confessed in the most exacting detail to having taken his passengers hostage, frightening them and dropping them off miles away from where they’d wanted to go.