Under torture, Khalil would have confessed to anything had the cursed Turkish woman not intervened. He had no idea what strings she’d pulled to get him released, back into this fetid bed. He turned over and deposited those days of torture in her fleshy punching bag of a body. She, in turn, received his brutality with a satanic hiss, “Give me your rage, all of it.” She egged him on while he simply buried his face in the pillow, hoping to suffocate, to rid himself of this revolting thing. That pillow was the only thing he had left in the world. He took it everywhere with him like a turtle takes its shell, from Mecca to the U.S. and back. When he’d brought it with him to the basement that night, the Turkish woman had spotted it straight away, her teeth chattering like a rat-trap. Her entire body chattered when she danced.
Beneath the gallery, music blasted and then stopped. It started playing again and then stopped. Somebody was going through their entire vulgar collection. Khalil didn’t bother to look to see what was happening. He was stuck like a bug in the wooden nest that the Turkish woman had installed beneath the basement’s vaulted ceiling so she could spread out her large bed.
“Don’t be afraid! So long as your Turkette is alive and kicking no one will dare lay a finger on her pleasure-saurus.”
She bit his earlobe hard and what sounded like a pack of hyenas roared within her. Jail had broken something in him — not his body, but his sense of superiority, the idea that he was untouchable, a heavenly creature.
The night he got out of jail it was Mu’az who found him. From the bus, the imam’s son had spotted Khalil’s car on the side of the road some distance from the Lane of Many Heads. It looked like the sand at the edge of the Umrah Road had reeled the electric-yellow car in and swallowed its front tires. It was past midnight. Mu’az jumped out of the bus before it had even stopped, muttering the Throne Verse as he approached the car. It looked broken down and like it was surrounded by demons. Up close, in the light of passing cars, Mu’az spotted Khalil’s face, ashen, smashed against the steering wheel. The sweat on Khalil’s unconscious face poured hot out of Mu’az’s temples and forehead, blinding him. For Khalil, time had come to a standstill. He had a vague sensation of being manhandled and stuffed into the first passing car, and then ending up at Zahir Hospital where they succeeded in reviving him. That was when he came face to face with the dinosaur inside of him, the creature that he no longer controlled.
“This time the cancer is spreading out from your right kidney.” The doctor began that way so as to soften the blow of what was coming next: “This form of cancer is the most aggressive.” A week passed in the blink of an eye, like it does sometimes in movies. The surgery to remove the tumor behind his kidney went smoothly and Khalil came out of it cracking jokes, almost pleased that the dinosaur had taken a bite out of his body.
The relapse hit hard, though. In the days that followed, it seemed as though the cavity that the surgery had left in his back and abdomen had given the dinosaur a foothold and it began to spread through his body. The blank look on the doctor’s face as he examined the X-ray terrified Khalil. He was trying to hide the fear from Khalil’s body, to communicate what was happening without getting Khalil worked up. “Your condition is disconcerting. Such rapid and aggressive cell division is extremely rare. It’s like a fire through dry straw. It won’t take more than a few days, a month at most, before, uh …” The doctor struggled to collect his thoughts. Khalil seemed to have gone deaf, lost in a Hollywood daydream-thriller in which he’d have to play the part of crowd-pleaser and insist on leaving the hospital to confront his dinosaur nemesis on the streets of Mecca.
“But where would they discharge you to?!” The walls were deaf to Mu’az’s pleading questions. He was the only person in the audience, the only person there to object to the suicidal plot. Khalil was running away from the prospect of further amputation. “You can’t convalesce in a taxi!”
For the first time, Mu’az understood what kind of person Khalil really was: he was hostage to a fatal solitude. He belonged to no one and the sadness that enveloped him was unbearable. It tore at him.
The first course of chemotherapy was the worst. It laid waste to Khalil’s bones, all the way through to the marrow, but despite how frail he was, he was up on his feet an hour later, paying no mind to the nurse standing by with a wheelchair as he staggered out of the hospital.
Beneath the fiery Meccan sun, he was blinded by the sweat pouring from his forehead and the rest of his body. He turned to Mu’az suddenly, clutching at the arm that propped him up, and stopped in the middle of the boiling asphalt. He held Mu’az’s head between his feverish palms, ignoring the prickle of his coarse hair and squeezed as if to wipe the events of the past week from his memory. “This movie isn’t to be replayed for the gawkers in the Lane of Many Heads, got it? Just forget you ever saw me like this.” Mu’az nodded, assenting to a command that came across as part plea and part threat. He hid his pity for the former legend of the Lane of Many Heads, the Hero of the Streets, who stood shrunken on the black asphalt, as pallid as quicklime.
Privacy seemed to matter more to Khalil than anything else. The first time cancer attacked him was back when he was in flight school in Florida and he’d kept it a secret — from his own father even. Ever since then, whenever he spoke about his illness it was as if he was talking about a film he’d once seen. Privacy and a creative imagination were the only weapons Khalil had against his self-destructive impulses. In one way or another, cancer was something he felt he could be proud of. To him it was like an excess, or an eruption, of cellular production in which he played the role of nuclear reactor, setting off a chain reaction, producing boundless energy.
Khalil took his time outside the crumbling Zahir Hospital building where he’d received a dose of radiation that spread through his body, poisoning his cells. He stood up straight. He wanted Mu’az to see him as the six-million-dollar man, a hero who’d just received an injection of enriched uranium and was off to do battle with viruses from outer space.
“I swear on the Quran, I won’t tell a soul. But you really should follow the doctors’ advice and stay in the hospital for another week. The food here is good at least, and they’ll keep tabs on your treatment.”
Comforted by the promise, Khalil drove off in his cab, escaping from the look of cancerous fear in Mu’az’s sad eyes.
He was careful not to show any hint of illness in front of the Turkish woman. All she could talk about was how Nasser had rammed Khalil’s cab with his car.
“Don’t let them beat you down with a couple of dents. When you get better, just hobble over to the nearest car dealership and pick out whatever toy you want. Just so long as you promise never to take my favorite toy away,” she said, wrapping her iron grip around him. “If you treat your Turkette right, she’ll get you all the latest toys.” The look of disgust he gave her was like a slap across the face. He would never let that succubus buy him. Not because he wasn’t for sale — no, there was definitely a price-tag hanging around his neck — but because the interested buyer was such trash. Whenever she bragged about being Turkish, he felt like spitting on her and calling her trash. A word like a cleaver to decapitate her with.