“And the fire that burnt down your house in the Lane of Many Heads — was it really caused by faulty wiring?”
“Oh yeah, thanks again for your efforts,” he drawled. “You and the firemen whose truck got stuck at the entrance to the alley and didn’t get anywhere near the fire at all.” The same devil goaded him to go further stilclass="underline" “You’re in the middle of an ocean of drug dealers and illegal migrants, fires that happen over and over, sewage floods, overcrowded, crumbling buildings that collapse here and there. The police and the fire department are a joke. Your emergency vehicles can’t even get down the Lane of Many Heads because there’s no suitable road, and now all you want to know about is a body? This neighborhood desperately needs an enema to be followed by several microsurgeries.”
Nasser met his insolence with a question. “Do you realize that you’ve made a lot of people in the neighborhood feel very uneasy recently?”
“That’s to be expected. This place is in one time zone and I’m in another,” he said, gesturing upward.
“So then what’s keeping you here in an alleyway in the underbelly of the world?”
“It’s temporary …” A drop of sweat formed on Khalil’s temple. If the detective had asked him “How long is temporary?” he wouldn’t have known what to say.
Nasser didn’t think Khalil was giving away his real age. There wasn’t a single gray hair spoiling his youthful appearance. “I hear Saudi Airlines decided they could do get by without your services. Something to do with you hitting a female flight attendant?” The sweat on Khalil’s temples trembled, and he could feel the heroin, which had destroyed his dreams and ambitions and driven his life to the brink, flowing through his veins. He’d put too much faith in the brakes and in the autopilot inside himself. That day was the first time he’d flown without waiting for two days to let his system clear itself after a fix; he was still strung out six hours before takeoff. Everybody who looked at his eyes and dilated pupils during that flight could see that he’d crossed the red line.
“You can’t mess around with the chain of command onboard a plane. A plane is like a kingdom in the air. The pilot is the king, and everyone else is a subject who must obey him blindly from the moment the plane doors are shut until they’re reopened after landing. If anyone has any kind of objection, they have to present it in writing to the authorities after the flight because arguing with a pilot while airborne is a capital offense …” He didn’t want to mention what it was that had made him lose his better judgment on that flight just yet. Was it that the Turkish flight attendant had rebuffed him or that she’d upgraded that passenger to first-class without first checking with her supervisor? How was he supposed to know that that cursed Turkish woman with the faded eyes was one of Satan’s demons herself? With a single swipe of her paw, she knocked twenty years of service off his personnel file.
Nasser seized the opportunity presented by the glimmer of arrogant lunacy in Khalil’s eyes to catch him off guard: “And Yusuf, what’s your connection to him?”
Khalil exhaled derisively. “Yusuf comes from the time before Abbas ibn Firnas and the Wright Brothers. In the century he’s from they haven’t even discovered flight yet …” A note of malicious satisfaction in his voice left question marks in the air.
“Do you think he has anything to do with the body?”
“Don’t implicate me in other people’s accusations; I fear God …”
Nasser wanted to be reckless, to give in to the rumors and search the trunk of Khalil’s taxi for the disguises the whole neighborhood was gossiping about.
“What about Mushabbab?”
“Myth.”
“A myth?”
“This whole web of tiny alleyways is built on myths.”
Nasser was still waiting for an answer. He was well aware that Khalil was trying to distract him with that generalization.
“So you’re married to Yabis the sewage cleaner’s daughter, and yet they say you proposed to Azza recently but were refused?”
“Have you got a problem with that?”
At that moment, Nasser caught sight of the madness that the neighborhood folks whispered about. Khalil retreated in the face of the detective’s attack, guarding himself with sarcasm. “The old man’s lost it. He believes in myths too. He told me not to ask for Azza’s hand during times of bad omen: I’m not allowed to propose to her in the month of Muharram, when bloodshed is forbidden, or in Safar, when it’s said that provisions are scarce, or in First or Second Jumada, during which our fortunes are fixed and unchanging, or in Ramadan because, as you know …” He winked at the detective. “Threads of piety and threads of desire woven together to make a web. I’m also supposed to refrain from asking for her hand in the months of Shawwal and Rajab, and abstain in Dhu’l-Qada, and then the old man goes on Hajj in Dhu’l-Hijja … What about you, Mr. Detective? You married? Or are you just planning to fast for eternity? Your breakfast’s on me: dates, halva, Turkish delight, Egyptian bonbons …”
Veil Monster versus Siren Man
NASSER LAY IN BED, SOMEWHERE BETWEEN SLEEP AND WAKEFULNESS. THE LANE of Many Heads’ unending, day-and-night torrent of odors and chaos assaulted his every sense, getting back at him for taking Aisha’s side and accusing The Lane of Many Heads of being The Veil Monster.
Whenever Detective Nasser appeared, they shouted: “The siren man is here!”
Naked, barefoot, and with dusty snotty faces, the children flocked around his official Land Rover. The rotating, flashing light on the roof was still on. Nasser left it on deliberately so that it would point its accusatory red finger all across the entrance to the alley. The ice-seller came running after him, begging him to move the vehicle just a little so that the indictment wouldn’t completely hide his fridge from the cars passing by in the fast lane. The children, meanwhile, ignored him and clambered up to the roof to turn their faces blood-red in the light, or sat on the hood tickling their cheeks with the windscreen wipers, leaving scratches across the Land Rover’s brilliant shine.
Half asleep, Nasser could hear the voice mocking him: “Officer, you’re up to your eyeballs in pages and pages of the Lane’s faked memories. They’re luring you into that memory, and then they shut their eyes and stop up their ears to trap you inside the nightmare nesting in their heads. They aren’t even memories; they’re a counterattack against a disappointing reality …”
Some of Yusuf’s phrases that he’d read that morning floated around in his mind:
March 3, 1995
Do you think we’ve sinned against the revelation that made its home in Mecca, the revelation whose battlefields and great men we’re reducing to mere legend by erasing every physical trace leading back to them?
Hulagu Khan drowned the works of generations of scholars and thinkers in the Tigris so as to destroy the legacy of the Abbasid Dynasty and before them the Umayyads.
And here, nothing remains of the Well of Zamzam now but a row of pipes and taps — who knows where the water actually comes from. A mere quarter-century ago, the froth of longevity and blessings used to drip directly from the bucket of the well into the hands of the nation of Muhammad. These days God’s gift, the water of Zamzam, is being sold. There’s no froth left any more. We’re up against risk factors like high cholesterol and premature death and we take anti-depressants to treat our delusions.
Delusion 1: We used to think of the nation of Muhammad in a vague sort of way as something like a tall, alluring servant girl who lived in the desert and suckled all of humanity’s children from her vast breasts. She could never die because everyone we knew prayed to God every day for her longevity.