She pressed her lips like blotting paper against his face, murmuring, “You’re this Turkish woman’s soul.” An atomic meltdown of hatred was unleashed inside of him, stronger than the cancer that had exploded out from behind his recently operated-on kidney. He trembled with the pleasure of oppressive hate, and right away — as though her body were a finely tuned vibration-sensor — her desire was awoken. She reapplied herself, but for the first time in his campaign, the dinosaur inside him let him down. No matter how many times he swung at the Turkish woman, the dinosaur wasn’t moved by the violence, the spilled blood. It played dead, lying there like a limp worm. The Turkish woman, on the other hand, had been taken over by a nymphomaniac lioness. She was bashing his dinosaur around in her claws, desperately trying to excite him, only vaguely aware of his sudden impotence, while his mind raced, thinking of all manner of possible cures and remembering how he’d once snickered at the warnings about the increased risk of heart attack from those blue pills he used to take. He wished he could have had a heart attack right then; it would at least spare him the embarrassment of impotence. On a third level of consciousness, he was aware that he was smashing those bulges of fat with his fists and feet in order to compensate for his impotence until her bubbles floated climactically to the surface.
Finally, miraculously, he managed to drag his worn-out body away from that fatty mass, and with superhuman strength pulled his clothes on. He stumbled over to the wooden staircase that led down from her bedroom to the dance floor below. He didn’t even glance at the bodies gyrating around him, and they just watched him indifferently as he struggled to find his way out, any way out.
As soon as his lungs filled with the air of the lane, he began to cough and he hawked up something yellow. The last of the smell of her. As he staggered on, he stepped on an alley cat’s tail; it hissed, baring its teeth. He stepped on the filth that had turned the white cat’s coat gray, the signs of its last dust-up with some stray dogs.
“You and I are a lot alike, kitty. We’ve got eight souls, but have you heard of cancer? It’s not just a stray dog that wants a bite. It’s a dinosaur with gigantic feet that chases me and stomps on my souls, one after the other. The first time it attacked, it destroyed all my sperm, robbing me of the chance to have children. Now it’s crushing the rest of me, Khalil the devil, my manhood.”
He drove off in his cab. Alone in the car, the last thing the Turkish woman had said to him, the last he’d smelled of her, came back to haunt him. He scratched at his face because it still bore the marks of her lips. Her constant generosity always aggravated his dreams.
“Without your dinosaur, you’ll never be anything but a sewer worm, Khalil.”
Defeat. He slammed on the brakes, stopping his cab in the middle of an overpass, and considered everything he’d lost.
Every attempt at arousal had failed to revive him, but his lower half, which seemed paraplegic to him now, shot back, “How long is the Turkish vampiress going to let you get away with it?” He drove on recklessly, arriving at Mina, where he turned off the engine and sat in the blackness of the darkest night. He summoned the genies of Mina to revive his dinosaur. He wasn’t in the mood to acknowledge that he was a man devouring the very last crumbs of life. If all he had left was a single day, he’d spend it as drunk as an animal. The thought of being drunk made him laugh. How could he hope to get drunk in the midst of all the garbage that seemed to be his lot in life? He was so deep in the mound of garbage the only way to get rid of it was to burn it all. It wasn’t just the cancer, it was also his addiction to that piece of Turkish trash.
“That Turkish woman is the only one who can tear the dead flesh off your heart to see through to your true, unadulterated, desires,” a voice inside chastised him. “She’s the only one who can go toe to toe with your dinosaur, may he rest in peace. You deposit all the hatred you feel toward those people who are waiting patiently for the Mahdi inside of her. You belong to a race of people who are trying to engineer Judgment Day. You nurture wars so that they’ll wash the earth away with pure blood. You dream up all these plots that will wipe the slate clean, but they’re about as realistic as a Bollywood film. And yet it still pisses you off that they won’t even give you a supporting role.”
It killed him that they insisted on giving the lead role to the Antichrist in the war to come. They were even going to give a speaking part to a rock by the side of the road that will say “There is an infidel behind me” to believers, but they continued to ignore his talent. Come on! Khalil was a walking database of every action scene in every American movie ever made. He could act. He could tell you which corner every bullet and missile came from and the exact type of cruelty they would visit on human tissue, both living and dead. He used to drive to the edge of Mecca and park amidst the brutal volcanic mountains, just to think about the different types of homemade explosives that existed and how to pack them. All his passengers could attest to his encyclopedic knowledge of hydrogen bombs, their mass, and how deep through the ground their blast radii would reach.
“Out of all of us, I’m the one who’s best prepared to kill but still you guys go out and attack the Antichrist without me!”
All throughout their peculiar relationship, the Turkish woman had listened carefully to all his complaints. His every drop of rancor produced more evil in the lane. In the darkness at Mina, surrounded by demons and the ghosts of slaughtered animals, Khalil felt like he himself was the cancer that gave rise to the saga of the malignant cells that were ravaging the neighborhood: the appearance of the body was just the opening scene. It was followed by the destruction of Mushabbab’s priceless orchard and the story really reached its climax when Yusuf was hounded into exile. He suddenly had the feeling that he was writing the script, in invisible ink. Khalil remembered sitting with the Turkish woman, watching her copy down his story in magical ink as he dictated it. He pretended that he’d been enlisted to help her, that he was under hypnosis, that there was a whole troupe of Hollywood actors waiting in the lane, preparing to film scenes for a film about the role of Arab minorities in global terrorism. They were the ones who put up the YouTube video that broke open the scandal of the Lane of Many Heads.
“Khalil the pilot, always escaping from reality into your cinematic delusions.”
No matter how much Khalil gave into his love of Hollywood’s plots and sacred jungles, he always guarded a few things fiercely: his life, his cab, his special pillow, his mother’s ashes and his resolve never to let the Turkish woman record Azza’s story in her magic ink. His heart was seized by a fear that writing these things down would produce a chemical whose capacity for disfigurement was beyond comprehension. As soon as that nightmare struck him, his fingers jerked and he shook the hypnotized agent inside him awake. “That Turkish woman is Ottoman trash!” He’d upturn the Turkish woman’s table and break her inkpot, rip the role of spying and whoring out from beneath her, banish her from the most important plotline in her heart.
Sometimes, when his dinosaur overpowered him, he was desperate to sacrifice Azza, who was taming him like Jessica Lange tamed King Kong: he thought about dropping her from his gorilla palm and giving her as a burnt sacrifice to the Turkish woman. At moments like that, their demonic qualities brought him and the Turkish woman closer together, evil pulsed through their veins, their heads drew nearer, and being alone together was like being in an opium den filled with the smoke of devilish intentions. In bed together, perched near the ceiling of the basement, above the dance floor, they looked like they were sitting on a bench suspended in the air like demons who sit in the sky eavesdropping on humans below and dodging God’s angry shooting stars. Together they listened in on the bloated or anorexia-stricken fates of the female dancers below as the lights from the different dance sequences played across their faces. Against the backdrop of that lighting, which wouldn’t have been out of place in a nightclub, there was no limit to the photographic tricks his cinema-soaked mind could play. He imagined that he was the Turkish woman and that she was him, as if they were starring in the film Face/Off. She had his elongated face with his long, wide, even nose, his ears that pointed backward with clipped tips like a bird’s wings, his mouth, and his drop-shaped eyes. It was easy to imagine his own stretched-out face atop the rolls of fat on her neck, and her own monstrous face above his Adam’s apple and body, the muscles of which had slackened after all those immobile hours behind the wheel in the unbearable Meccan heat.