Now even my voice has changed because of the painkillers, my face is swollen, even the breaths I take don’t taste like my breaths.
Aisha
P.S. Just now the loudspeakers of the mosque across the street announced the beginning of the eclipse prayer. They pray until the moon reappears. “It was He who created the heavens and the earth … so that He might determine who among you does most good,” Imam Dawoud recited. They believe that our sins blacken the surface of the moon and that prayers for repentance clear it.
Which prayer can clear my face?
P.P.S. You’ve helped fix my computer more than once through remote desktop access. Yesterday you simply said: “Click OK to give me access to your files, your heart, your soul. Let me see who you are, where you’ve come from, your wallpaper, the people who make you who you are.”
I was trembling. Clicking OK seemed like tearing the veil off the Lane of Many Heads …
Yusuf has lost his mind because of Azza, and attacked the people praying in the Lane of Many Heads Mosque. They beat him savagely and he was taken to Shihar hospital in Ta’if. For two weeks the Lane of Many Heads was as silent as a tomb, incredulous that they’d sent the only voice that wrote their dreams — Yusuf — to a psychiatric hospital.
In the end it was al-Ashi who took the initiative to go to Shihar to get him released. We rarely see Yusuf now, though. Can you hear him limping about on the roof?
He tore up all his papers; the alley outside my window is covered in his shredded words, his anger, his identity. Every dawn, the Lane of Many Heads awakes to find a new pile of his possessions on the ground: articles, diaries, personal pictures taken by Mu’az, his ID card, his emblazoned bachelor’s degree from Umm al-Qura University.
Finally there was nothing left for him to tear up,
And then he came out into the Lane of Many Heads, and flitted about collecting blackened bread from houses, trash dumps, the heaps outside bakeries, and cooking yards, taking them back to the roof to build a horrifying sculpture that smelled like fire. Even the pigeons stayed away from it. The people in the alley joked: that’s the Many Heads, being consumed in the fire of our sins, with the overflowing fountains of minds. And they named him “he who is not eaten, nor burned.”
The name made me curious. I spied from the roof. Seeing it there in the sun gave me gooseflesh, like a glimpse at death leaking the yellow essence of a life that had once been.
Mu’az was convinced that this was actually the unholy devil himself and that Yusuf had erected him on the roof so he could watch everyone coming and going.
There was an emptiness inside Yusuf. I felt like it was himself he’d erected up there. He’d reassembled whichever pieces of his brain had survived the shock therapy they’d put him through, and then one day he’d ground them up like dust and left the result out for the hot sandstorm winds to blow in our faces.
What’s he going to tear up next?
He’s tearing Azza to shreds, he’s cut her off completely. He didn’t write a single word to her even after she was returned, defeated, to Sheikh Muzahim’s house. No one had any idea how they’d forced Mushabbab to divorce her. Yusuf kept to the Eunuchs’ Goat’s empty room above al-Ashi’s kitchen; God only knows what he’s doing in there. The Lane of Many Heads has gone topsy-turvy. Without Yusuf’s words, Azza can’t find her way.
The handwriting in Yusuf’s journal began to alternate, and Nasser struggled to work out if someone else was planting entries in Yusuf’s journal. There was something that had him worried: some of the pages were written in splendid naskh script, of the kind often used in old manuscripts, and decorated with gold pointing and marbling. For a moment, he thought it was excerpts from the Quran, written in Mu’az’s handwriting, but Mu’az swore it wasn’t him: “Yusuf plays the part of the storyteller. He adopts our personalities so as to expose us to ourselves.”
Could Nasser believe, alternatively, that an alleyway like me could have its own handwriting? The thing is, although I took Yusuf’s madness with good humor, it’s not like he managed to pull the wool over my eyes. His madness hit me like a stroke, a gray patch that spread instantly over each of my different heads, and if it hadn’t been for al-Ashi, savior of freaks, I’d have left him to rot in the loony bin at Shihar. That’s why, ever since he got back, I’ve spent my time following his every move. Look at that deep trench between his eyebrows; he spoils my nonchalance and sense of humor. Maybe I’m slowly losing my lust for life, but my foolproof cunning still has the power to outwit. I’m not going to let him trick me.
The moonlight penetrated through the ripped-out window in the Eunuchs’ Goat’s bedroom, which overlooked the cooking yard. A patch of milky moonlight deepened even further the shadow over the faces of the heavenly maidens who gazed longingly at the dark body on the bed that occupied the narrow space along the wall behind the door. Yusuf hadn’t slept a wink for several nights on end. Like a worshipper he strained his eyes to read something in their pensive looks. He was fasting, surviving only on water from Zamzam and five dates per day, which Mu’az got him by sneaking a little money out of the mosque’s charity box. The whole time he spent lying there, Yusuf could feel Mu’az’s idolizing gaze keeping vigil over him through the slightly-open door, though he was careful not to open the door and go in. They spent several nights sitting on the narrow doorstep, leaning on the door. They looked like a photo and its negative, a young man on the inside and his dark shadow on the outside, leaning against the same door, each feeling the heat of the other’s body through the crumbling wood, one watching as the other performed a postmodern play for his audience of girls. Yusuf and Mu’az shared their hunger; they were both thin. They told themselves that the early believers had fought great battles and won, with only dates to keep them going.
Even Yusuf’s heart quieted in the presence of those women. The light of the moon kindled the scent of the bed Yusuf was lying on — a mixture of blood and rancid cheap food. Yusuf had abandoned his books and begun working as an errand boy for the nearby kitchens, before submitting to depression, withdrawn and alone in that room. He himself smelled of food; he was too drowning in the intoxication of having discovered that world to bother feeling any guilt for having taken on the personality of his friend the Eunuchs’ Goat and invaded his plastic and cork harem. He was switching roles in my web of despair. That Mu’az always turns the pupils of my eyes back at me, to make me look inside my many heads, exposing faults that I wouldn’t allow one of my heads even a glimpse of. Mu’az was the first to notice that the Eunuchs’ Goat had possessed Yusuf when he interrupted prayers in the mosque and Imam Dawoud confronted him with the Verse of the Throne, which drives away the devil. That dawn, the Imam ordered the devil that had taken over Yusuf’s body to make himself known:
“Which devil are you? What is your name?”
A Satanic voice deep in Yusuf’s chest replied, “I am Salih.” The name literally meant “good.”
“Salih son of whom?”
“Salih till the end …” The answer frustrated them; the imam and the other sheikhs didn’t have a list of devils without expiration dates. Nor did they know what immortal devils like this one were capable of, nor how they could be resisted.
IT WAS PAST MIDNIGHT BY THE TIME NASSER GAVE UP IN DESPAIR AT THE LANE OF Many Heads’ red herrings, the diary’s hallucinations, and Aisha’s schizophrenic emails. Their predestined fates — no, the life decisions they’d made themselves — were an affront to a conservative man like him. He’d never even heard of this job of “DJ” that the boys of the Lane of Many Heads dreamed of becoming; when he Googled it he discovered it was a man who manipulated women’s bodies through music. It was basically like being a pimp. Nasser sensed the mocking eye that had been toying with him and directing his movements since the very beginning of the case. He pushed Aisha’s sleeve deeper underneath his pillow. His anger dissipated and he got up to look in his dresser, not for anything specific, but for any sign that he belonged. What did he know about this world around him? He went through all the trinkets he’d carried with him since he was a child, such as the bullet-adorned leather belt with a dagger sheath on one side. The leather smelled of his grandmother, the scent of banquets on nights gone by. When he looked through his dresser, there was no sign of Nasser, who like his father used to be smart enough to snatch kohl off an eyelid, but just a bunch of his uniforms: six, seven, eight, ten, forty uniforms, two for each year he’d served. He spread them out on the floor of his room. The uniforms started out as thin as the ghosts of a famine and got progressively wider. There was no mistaking the pot-belly that had filled out over the years. The jacket shoulders had begun to slacken around his shoulders like they belonged to someone else. He’d spent more on dry-cleaning these uniforms than he’d spent on his own body. These uniforms were lord of this room, and he was their servant. The bedroom floor looked like a graveyard of soldiers, for forty men in one.