When had the Turkish woman changed her strategy so she could attack Khalil himself?
Khalil drove on blindly, aimlessly, nearly running into pedestrians and other cars at intersections that appeared out of thin air. He knew he needed to get out of the car before he caused a massacre.
He eventually made his way back to the Arab League Building, and discovered that it was ready to be knocked down. He snuck up to the rooftop, careful not to let the eunuch see him, and headed for the storage unit where the old film projector was stored. His body was a sponge heavy with his sweat. The moment he opened the door and stepped inside, he sensed some strange presence was in there. An evil laugh lay behind the box where he’d hidden his rare projector, the only thing he’d inherited from his father. He yanked the cover off to find a smashed mess sneering back at him. The only thing that had survived the destruction was a single reeclass="underline" the black-and-white dinosaur. The vandal had left it untouched among scraps of other reels stuck to its tattered scenes.
Khalil fell to the floor sobbing, the roll of film lying in his lap like a dead child. He slouched, allowing the cancer to spread from his kidney to his liver, tearing through his gall bladder and spurting bile all through his insides. For a moment, he died there violently, and he only came back to life so he could experience the suffering of an even harsher death.
He sat there, glassy-eyed, replaying the shredded dinosaur film in his mind just like he’d done night after night on the rooftop when he lived in the building. He used to watch as the tears in the reel showed larger and larger on the dinosaur’s body with every viewing, waiting for the one showing when the dinosaur’s entire body would disappear and he would finally be stripped bare of his beastliness, forced to face the neighborhood as mere skin and bone. Khalil had never managed to beat his addiction to watching the dinosaur on the walls of the rooftop, its tail swooping in the air, falling down on the Lane of Many Heads.
Finally when his tears were dry and his heart exhausted, Khalil fell into a deep sleep and dreamed of doing a remake of the dinosaur movie. He’d turn the dinosaur into the huge reptile that would emerge from Ajyad Mountain on the heels of the Antichrist and slap its tail against the surface of the earth, flipping everything upside down and heralding the apocalypse.
The sun rising over the roof woke Khalil. He stuffed the reel back into his hiding spot. “No projector will ever play this reel again,” he reassured himself. No more decay, no more patching it up. The dinosaur is finally somewhere where it can never be wiped out.”
Garbage Red
“MOON-SHAPED AMULET … PARKING LOT, JAWHARA TOWER.” A SINGLE EMAIL of seven words had brought Yusuf to a parking lot outside one of the towers that overlooked the Haram Mosque. Living in the Lababidi building all by himself had affected his ability to see the world around him for what it was. Reality was no longer a simple tissue to him: his dreams, his memories, pictures, and every word from every book he’d ever read combined to form a new reality. Yusuf himself had turned into an apparition on a thin strip of film, liable to disappear if exposed to any light source. In al-Lababidi’s house, as he moved from room to room, he made sure to shut every door he passed through, keeping up the habit of al-Lababidi’s wife, Marie, and her servants: “Don’t let the outside touch the pictures.”
He gradually lost the ability to make sense of the world around him and the only reason he’d answered the message was because he was desperate to break out of the cycle of delirium he found himself in.
In plain view of the parking attendant, Yusuf walked past the gate, convinced that he was a ghost, and climbed up the exit ramp to the first floor of the parking garage. The attendant made no attempt to move toward him, he didn’t even look at him, which only added to Yusuf’s worry that he’d become invisible. When he got to the first floor, he saw that it was packed full of cars and stiflingly hot, like the inside of a boiling pot. The smell of electrical fires and fresh paint mixed with the sweat on the back of his neck. Yusuf wasn’t sure which of the four floors he was meant to wait on, he wasn’t even sure what he was waiting for.
He walked forward under the bright neon lights, cursing himself for coming to a place like this without even asking Mushabbab for advice. He felt the forest of concrete columns watching him and the glare of all the yellow signs and zone numbers blinded him. Some outside brain showed him the outlines of the car that came barreling toward him like a crimson lightning bolt. It emerged as if from some bloody patch beneath his eyelids. Even the hubcaps were painted dark red. The dream car grew larger as it headed for him. The moment lasted an eternity. Yusuf felt sluggish, his whole body froze as if to stay rooted to the spot. His body surrendered. His mind surrendered. His every muscle relaxed to receive the blow, his body went numb and indulged in the pleasurable sensation of being smashed before they’d even made contact. He tasted delicious death in that red second and savored it without knowing.
The deafening blow that followed brought him out of his reverie. Yusuf jumped, a delayed reaction, into any random direction falling onto the front of a blue garbage truck. The narrow band of red was squeezed under the truck’s front bumper but Yusuf didn’t have a chance to look at the thin red rivulets spreading out beneath the blue truck. He felt a hand yanking him, stuffing him into the front seat. Deep down he was certain that the red car would’ve crushed him to bits if the blue truck that had appeared from out of nowhere hadn’t wiped it out first.
He knew he was inside the blue truck because of the faint smell of rot that enveloped it. It made him feel woozy. He spread out, as if decomposing, peaceably and discreetly, within the grave. Nothing bad could happen to him any more.
He realized he was squeezed in between two men: a short man who was driving the truck and a tall man who’d rescued him. The tall guy, his face covered by a red-checked scarf, was as reedy as a scarecrow. As the garbage truck roared through the gate of the parking garage onto the road, Yusuf’s hand felt for the door handle, but was soon seized by an iron fist. The scarecrow turned to look at him. They were both panting. Sweat pooled between their shoulder blades and beneath their arms. Yusuf caught a whiff of something from the intimate past and noticed that the eyes staring back at him were gray. The man pulled the scarf away, slowly. Yusuf gasped.
“The Eunuchs’ Goat?” The harsh look on his face didn’t soften in the slightest. “I thought they deported you. Or left you to rot in some prison somewhere.”
“Yes, though are we not all destined to rot in this earthly hell?”