Drugs are your friends, treat them with respect. You wouldn’t throw your friends in the garbage. You wouldn’t flush your friends down the toilet. If that’s the way you treat your friends or your drugs, you don’t deserve to have either. Give them to me. Drugs are wonderful things. I won’t listen to anybody trying to get me to give them up. I’d rather give up food and drink — in fact, on occasion, I have.
The effect of all the pills was to make my mind wander. Actually, any sign of life on its part was heartening. Life was taking on a kind of bleak, pungent, really penetrating, and awfully huge quality that I didn’t enjoy at all.
On top of that, I remembered that I’d collected a couple of caps of RPM from Saied the Half-Hajj. This is the same junk that Bill the taxi driver has coursing through his bloodstream all the time, all the time, at the cost of his immortal soul. I’ve got to remember not to ride with Bill anymore. Jesus, that stuff is just really scary, and the worst part was that I actually paid cash money for the privilege of feeling so lousy. Sometimes I’m disgusted by the things I do, and I make resolutions to clean myself out. I promised, when that RPM wore off, if it ever did …
Friday was the Sabbath, a day of rest except for everybody in the Budayeen who went right back to work as soon as the sun went down. We observed the holy month of Ramadan, but the city’s cops and the mosque’s bullies let up on us a little on Fridays. They were happy to get whatever cooperation they could. Yasmin went to work and I stayed in bed, reading a Simenon I think I had read when I was about fifteen and again when I was about twenty and again a couple of other times. It’s hard to tell with Simenon. He wrote the same book a dozen times, but he had so many different books that he wrote a dozen times each that you have to read all of them and then sort them out in some kind of rational order according to a logical, thematic basis that’s always been far beyond me. I just start at the back (if it’s printed in Arabic) or the front (if it’s printed in French) or the middle (if I’m in a hurry or too full of my friends, the drugs).
Simenon. Why was I talking about Simenon? It was going to lead to a vital and illuminating point. Simenon suggests Ian Fleming: they’re both writers; they both clawed out thrillers in their individual fashions; they’re both dead; and neither one of them knew the first thing about making a good martini — Fleming’s “shaken and not stirred,” my holy whoring mother’s ineffable left tit; and Ian Fleming leads neatly and directly to James Bond. The man with the Bond moddy never again left another 007 trace in the city, not so much as the stub of a Morlands Special with the gold rings around the filter or a chomped-on slice of lemon peel or a Beretta bullet hole. Yeah, it was the Beretta he’d used on Bogatyrev and Devi. The Beretta was Bond’s choice of pistols in the early Fleming novels, until some hotshot reader pointed out that it was a “lady’s gun” with no stopping power; so Fleming had Bond switch to the Walther PPK, a smallish but reliable automatic. If our James Bond had used the Walther, it would have left a messier indentation in Devi’s face; the Beretta made a rather tidier little hole, like the pop-top slot in a can of beer. That slapping-around I got from him was the last anyone saw or heard of James Bond in the city. He had a low tolerance for boredom, I guess.
That’s another first-rate reason for getting to know your medicines and correctives. Boredom can be tedious, but not when you’re counting your pulse at over four hundred a minute. By the life of my beard and the sacred shifting balls of the Apostle of God, may the blessings of Allah be on him and peace, I really just wanted to go to sleep! Every time I closed my eyes, though, a black-and-white strobe effect started flashing, and purple and green things swam by, gigantic things. I cried, but they wouldn’t leave me alone. I couldn’t see how Bill could drive his taxi through them all.
So that was Friday, in brief summary. Yasmin came home with the Jack Daniels, I killed the rest of my drug supply, passed out sometime near noon, and awoke to find Yasmin gone. It was now Saturday. I had two more days to enjoy my brain.
Early Saturday evening, I noticed my money seemed to have vaporized. I should have had a few hundred kiam left; I’d spent a little, of course, and I’d probably blown even more that I couldn’t account for. Yet I had the feeling that I ought to have more than the ninety kiam I found in my shoulder bag. Ninety kiam wasn’t going to get me much of anything; a new pair of jeans was going to cost me forty or more.
I began to suspect that Yasmin had been dipping into my finances. I hate that about women, even the ones whose generic threads in their cells still said they were male. Jo-Mama says, “Just ‘cause the cat had her kittens in the oven don’t make them biscuits.” Take a pretty boy, nip off his cojones and buy him a silicone balcony that could comfortably seat an underfed family of three, and before you know it, she’s digging around in your wallet. They eat up all your pills and caps, spend your money, bitch about the goddamn sheet and the blanket, stare rapturously all afternoon at themselves in the bathroom mirror, make innocent little remarks about the devastating young plushes passing by in the other direction, want to be held for an hour after you’ve exhausted yourself jamming them into the floorboards, and then they climb up your back because you look out the window with a slightly irked expression on your face. What could you possibly be annoyed about, with a virtually perfect goddess hanging around the apartment, decorating your floor with her dirty underwear? You might take something to elevate your mood, but the precious bitch already consumed all that, remember?
Only another day and a half of Marîd Audran’s brain as Allah the Protector in His wisdom had designed it. Yasmin was not speaking to me: she thought I was a coward and a selfish son of a clapped-up ass for not going along with Papa’s plan. One minute, it was all set — on Monday morning, I was going to meet with Friedlander Bey’s surgeons and have my thoughts electrified. The next minute, I was a rotten bastard who didn’t care what happened to his friends. She couldn’t remember if I was going to get my brain wired or not; she couldn’t think back far enough to recall the last argument (I could: I was not going to get my brain wired, and that was the end of it). I didn’t get out of bed all day Friday or Saturday. I watched shadows get longer and shorter and longer. I heard the muezzin call the faithful to prayer; and then, what seemed to me like a few minutes later, he called again. I stopped paying attention to Yasmin and her moods sometime on Saturday evening, before she started to get ready for work.