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These were just meaningless scraps, which the wind would use to supplement its own historical archive. Nasser suddenly noticed something at the bottom of the cooking pits. He reached down into the nearest pit to examine the base. It felt strange. It didn’t feel like soil, it felt like something thick. Nasser touched something prickly; it was like plastic covered with real hair, as if the bottom of the pit had been coated with a half-plastic, half-animal skin layer. He had no idea what could have made for a substance like that.
Nasser hadn’t come to rifle through al-Ashi’s memory. He’d wanted to make sure that no one, especially the Eunuchs’ Goat, would be able to come hide out here in the yard. He could have spent hours there, and still not made head or tail of those sooty memories.
Detective Nasser carried on upstairs to where, according to Yusuf’s diary, the Eunuchs’ Goat’s room should have been. The door was locked. He rammed it with his shoulder, knocking it out of place and tumbling into the room, where he landed on a heap of women’s bodies. They were all in pieces and rigor mortis had long since set in, but they were still wrapped in evening dresses of lace and tulle and satin, embroidered with beads and crystals, girded in velvet and silk. What kind of a sicko had dreamt up this cocktail party massacre? Nasser was still half-blinded by the searing pain in his head, but when he regained his composure, he realized that he was surrounded by a phalanx of life-sized cork dummies, mannequins. Nasser sat there, staring at those amazing imitations of women. It had simply never occurred to him. What could these mannequins add to the case? What could the Lane of Many Heads know about the fetishes of a man with no identity who’d disappeared without a trace as if he’d never existed.
That evening, Nasser found something Yusuf had written about the mannequins in his diary.
March 2, 2004
After Mushabbab had liberated him from the terror of being deported, the Eunuchs’ Goat underwent a complete transformation. He started following his whims through Mecca. He stopped making furtive escapes, stopped always keeping an eye out for the deportation vans. His body tasted freedom for the first time: it was like biting into a peppercorn, or a cinnamon stick, or a clove; the sweet aroma stung.
I receded. It was like I was just recording the life of the Eunuchs’ Goat, who now had a feel for Mecca that I never had. The thing that most made him want to take his body outside the neighborhood and into the world of the markets outside was his love for the traffic and the way it pulsed. He discovered that he wanted nothing more than to surrender his body to the crush, to bump into and be carried along by the masses, never raising his eyes to look anyone in the face. He understood that parts of his body became parts of other bodies. Don’t laugh, Azza. He works in a kitchen. He enjoys slaughtering animals and butchering them, preparing them for the oven, slicing them up into pots. All his senses have been trained to slice, and to relish the act of taking bodies apart and cutting them up. When he sees someone’s leg or their rear or even their back, he feels like his leg is being summoned, that his own rear end wants to join all the others, that his back is unconsciously falling in line with all the backs of man. To him, these are just separate parts ready to join whatever body calls on them.
As night fell, Nasser’s body surrendered to the putrid smell giving form to the mannequins around him and I, the Lane of Many Heads, found it a perfect opportunity to perch on the threshold and whisper to him in Yusuf’s voice, “I am the Eunuchs’ Goat, one of the many heads opening up for you so that you may walk across the stage …”
Nasser carried on reading.
March 11, 2004
That Friday evening, he was meandering through the Gaza Market when he was blinded by a cacophony of lights in a store window he’d walked past dozens of time before. He’d never seen it like this before: it was like a planet with human life! Then came his epiphany: for twenty-eight whole years, his life had been nothing but a massive encyclopedia of black, from cover to cover, entitled Women: An Illustrated Encyclopedia. Every time he opened it looking for page X, he found a smear of black, or a photo of Y: also black, or — God forbid! — Z: black, again. His entire adolescence, his every waking dream about a woman’s arm or leg or shoulder: black. He used to try to conjure up some tender image, but the encyclopedia would always blot it out with blackness before he could.
Then as Soviet expansion brought on more and more Jihadist groups, the blackness veritably poured out from the pages of the encyclopedia, layers of black were pasted over other layers of black, shrouds sewn onto other shrouds, till the whole world was covered over. The only female reference the Eunuchs’ Goat knew was the woman who raised him, Umm al-Sa’d — broad-shouldered, flat-chested, with narrow hips — and if he tried really hard, he could add to that Sa’diya’s delicate wrist from behind the curtain.
Then suddenly, and without any prior notice, those women fell out of the sky to land before him: garish travelers preserved behind glass. He stood there for hours, in a daze. His encyclopedia absorbed the woman in the apple-colored muslin top with the lace décolletage and the embroidered leaves, which wound their way up from her left breast to her shoulder, leaving the top of her right breast and shoulder bare. Her flat belly was wrapped in pomegranate-colored silk, and chiffon hung from her waist — like a waterfall — down between her thighs and over her rear. The pain of desire pressed on his kidneys as he stood there like a taut string planted in the sin of that nearly transparent layer that ran from her navel to the top of her breasts. And those drops of bead falling over to touch her delicate toes and forming a long train followed him all the way into his dreams. A cart full of bolts of cloth swung past, knocking him unceremoniously to the ground and out of his own body. He didn’t bother to get up. He just stared up at the soft chest, twisting every last drop out of his body as it was rocked by wave after wave. He understood then that the female body is the secret we never dare expose. It is the intention that precedes movement. He knew that if he stayed there looking at it his body would pass through any solid barrier and that his desire would carry him over any distance, no matter how far. This was the secret behind the black covers of his encyclopedia.
An Afghan boy selling bundles of jasmine walked by, trailing the flowers across the Eunuchs’ Goat’s nose and giving him a knowing look as he followed the Eunuchs’ Goat’s gaze toward the shop window. The Afghan boy’s smile spread across his red cheeks before he walked off down one of the brightly lit market’s many aisles, followed only by a faint trace of jasmine. The sadness of the flowers revived the Goat’s desperate need to be touched.
The next day, when the Eunuchs’ Goat had mustered up the courage to go into the clothing store, he started having seizures. He could’ve sworn that he’d died and been resurrected in heaven, surrounded by all those beauties. Their bodies with the tiny exposed gaps and the mere suggestion of slight curves. He put up with the kicking from the Pakistani security guard in the blue uniform who threw him out onto the street. He disappeared from his father’s kitchen and scrubbed himself clean of the layer of rot that had settled on his skin. He didn’t eat for days as he wandered from clothing store to clothing store: paradises like al-Ceyloni, al-Bajiri, and Bin Siddiq. He knew that he would grow senile but that these women of his harem would never suffer the touch of old age or headscarves. Clothing stores became his entire focus. He derived more pleasure from going into a clothes store than from all the victories over all the devils that haunted his dreams. There among those silks was the greenery that would cover the entire peninsula, the rivers, the freely grazing ostriches alongside the night, and the beauties, whom he’d fight to liberate from their hell. You see when we, children of the lane, dream, we don’t dream about fairy godmothers, we dream about the war of the Hidden Imam who will come to earth and transform the Arabian Peninsula into heaven. We dream of death so that we can give life to the beauties in the peninsula’s rivers.