She slammed her way back and forth across my room, calling me all kinds of innovative foul names, some of which I’d actually never heard before, despite my years of wandering. It just made me love the little slut even more. I didn’t get out of bed until Yasmin left for Frenchy’s. My body alternated between rattling chills and flashes of fever so bad I had to cool off in the shower. Then I’d lie back in bed and shiver and sweat. I soaked the sheets and the mattress cover, and clung with white-knuckled fingers to the blanket. The phantom lizards were on my face and arms now, but crawling around less frequently. I felt safe enough to go to the bathroom again, something I’d been thinking about for a long while. I wasn’t hungry, but I was getting pretty thirsty. I drank a couple of glasses of water, then slid shakily back into bed. I wished Yasmin would come home.
Despite the waning effects of the drug overdose and my growing fear, I had made up my mind about Monday morning. Saturday night passed with more cold sweats and intermittent fever, and I stared wakefully at the ceiling even after Yasmin came back and went drunkenly to sleep Sunday, just before sunset, while she was getting herself ready to go to work again, I got out of bed and stood naked behind her. She was putting on her eye makeup screwing her face into crazy expressions and glossing her eyelids with loveliness from some rich-bitch department store beyond the Budayeen. She wouldn’t use inexpensive paint from the bazaars like everyone else, as if anyone in Frenchy’s could get a good look at her in that dimness. The same makeup was on the racks in the souks, but Yasmin paid top prices for it across town. She wanted to look heartbreaking on stage, when not a juiced-up fool in the place would be looking at her eyes. She was going for a layered effect of blue and green below her narrow, sketched-in eyebrows. Then she worked on a tasteful sprinkle of gold glittery sparkles. The sparkles were the hard part. She put them on one by one. “Get to bed early,” she said.
“Why?” I asked innocently.
“Because you have a busy day tomorrow,” she said.
I shrugged.
“Your brain,” she said, “remember?”
“My brain, I remember,” I said. “It’s not going anywhere unusual. I don’t have anything particularly taxing lined up for it.”
“You’re getting the worthless thing wired!” She turned on me like a nesting falcon on a hawk.
“Not the last time I thought it over,” I said.
She grabbed up her small blue overnight case. “Well, you son-of-a-bitching mother-ugly kaffir,” she cried, “fuck you and the horse you rode in on!” She made more noise leaving my apartment than I thought was possible, and that was before she even slammed the door. After she slammed the door it got very quiet, and I was able to think. I couldn’t think of anything to think about, though. I walked around the room a few times, put one or two things away, kicked some of my clothes from the right to the left and back again, and laid down on the bed. I’d been in the bed so long that it wasn’t diverting to be there again now, but there wasn’t that much else to do. I watched the darkness in the room stretch and reach out toward me. That wasn’t so exciting anymore, either.
The pain had gone, the overdose-induced hysteria had gone, my money had gone, Yasmin had gone. This was peace and contentment. I hated every goddamn second of it.
In this silent center of motionless and mindlessness, free of all the frenzy that had surrounded me for many days, I surprised myself with a piece of genuine intuition. It began by congratulating myself for figuring that the man with the James Bond moddy had a Beretta rather than a Walther. Then the Bond thought linked up to something else, and they hooked together with one or two more ideas, and it all illuminated an inexplicable detail that had been simmering in my memory for a couple of days, at least. I recalled my last visit to Lieutenant Okking. I remembered the way he didn’t seem to be at all interested in my theories or Friedlander Bey’s proposition. That wasn’t so unusual; Okking resisted interference from anyone. He disliked positive interference, in the form of authentic assistance, just as much. It wasn’t Okking himself to whom my thoughts kept returning; it was something in his office.
One of the envelopes had been addressed to Universal Export. I recalled wondering idly if Seipolt ran that firm, or if Hassan the Shiite ever received any curious crates from them. The company’s name was so commonplace that there were probably a thousand “Universal Exports” all around the world. Maybe Okking was just sending off a mail order for some rattan patio furniture to put next to his backyard barbecue.
Of course, the very ordinariness of “Universal Export” was the reason that M., the head of James Bond’s special 00 section, used it as a false cover and code name in Ian Fleming’s books. The forgettable name would never have stuck in my memory without that connection to the Bond stories. Maybe “Universal Export” was a disguised reference to the man who’d worn the James Bond moddy. I wished that I had memorized the address on that envelope.
I sat up, startled. If the Bond explanation had any truth to it, why was that envelope in Lieutenant Okking’s Out box? I told myself that I was getting as jumpy as a grasshopper on a griddle. I was probably looking for honey where there were no bees. Still, I felt my stomach turn sick again. I felt myself being drawn unwillingly into a morass of tortuous and deadly paths.
It was time for action. I had spent Friday, Saturday, and most of Sunday paralyzed between my worn and grimy sheets. It was the moment to get moving, to leave the apartment, to rid myself of this clinging morbidity and fear. I had ninety kiam; I could buy myself some butaqualides and get some decent sleep.
I threw on my gallebeya, which was getting a little on the soiled side, my sandals, and my libdeh, the close-fitting cap. I grabbed my shoulder bag on the way out the door, and hurried downstairs. Suddenly I really wanted to score some beauties; I mean, I really wanted them. I’d just gotten over three horrible days of sweating too much of everything out of my system, and already I was rushing out to buy more. I made a mental note to slow down my drug intake; crumpled the mental note; and tossed it into my mental wastebasket.
Beauties, it seemed, were scarce. Chiriga didn’t have any, but she gave me a free drink of tende while she told me about how much trouble she was having with a new girl working for her, and that she was still saving her Honey Pílar moddy for me. I remembered the holoporn ad outside old Laila’s shop.
“Chiri,” I said, “I’m just getting over the flu or something; but I promise, we’ll go have dinner some night next week. Then, inshallah, we’ll burn your moddy out.”
She didn’t even smile. She looked at me as if she were watching a wounded fish flopping in the water. “Marîd, honey,” she said sadly, “now really, listen to me: you got to cut out all these pills. You’re wrecking yourself.”
She was right, but you don’t ever want to hear that kind of advice from anybody else. I nodded, gulped the rest of the tende, and left her club without saying good-bye.
I caught up with Jacques, Mahmoud, and Saied at Big Al’s Old Chicago. They said they were all tapped out, financially and medicinally. I said, “Fine, see you around.”
“Marîd,” said Jacques, “maybe it’s none of my—”
“It’s not,” I said. I passed by the Silver Palm: no action there, either. I passed by Hassan’s shop, but he wasn’t in the back and his American chicken just gazed at me with sultry eyes. I ducked into the Red Light — that’s how desperate I was beginning to feel — and Fatima told me that one of the white girls’ boyfriends had a whole suitcase full of different stuff, but that he wouldn’t be in until maybe five in the morning. I said that if nothing else turned up by then, I’d come back. No free drink from Fatima.