Nowhere Land: A Stephan Raszer Investigation (48 page)

    
“Next
thing, they hear this weird flute that sounds like a sparrow hawk, and when the
smoke clears, there’s this guy, this fuckin’ sheikh dressed in black from head
to toe, and six more mean motherfuckers with Uzis. Henry said they looked more
like Indiana bikers than Arabs. And the sheikh starts laughin’ and says to
Johnny in English, ‘We need to talk.’ And they take them to this camp in a . .
. a
wadi,
Henry called it, and feed
them roasted lamb and hashish, and that’s where the deal went down.” Ruthie
stubbed out the cigarette and pointed with her right hand. “That’s your turn,
by the way. Up past that big tree.”

    
Raszer
made the turn in silence and heard the Jeep’s tires bite into loose dirt and
rocks. The headlight beams came to a vanishing point thirty yards ahead, and
then there was nothing but black. He’d never seen that before. No reflection.
He stopped the car.

    
“So what
was the deal?” he asked her.

    
“The
deal was, there’s only one army, there’s only one fight. There’s only one
insurgency that matters. We’re it. You two guys are warriors, but you’d be dead
warriors if we hadn’t just saved your asses. Now you play on our side.”

    
“And I
take it they accepted . . . ” said Raszer.

    
“They
took a blood oath,” said Ruthie. “They got shitfaced on hash, they got laid,
and they woke up in the desert two hundred yards from their base. Johnny said
it was destiny. Henry wasn’t so sure. But I don’t really think they had much
choice.”

    
“And
they served out their tours?”

    
“Yeah.
They didn’t hear from these guys until they were back in the States.”

    
“And
Henry left Iraq with his testicles?”

    
“Drive,”
she said. “I’ve told you enough for now.”

    
Raszer
put the gearshift into first. “Direct me,” he said. “I can’t see a thing.”

    
A build-it-yourself yurt could be purchased on the
Internet. On the granola circuit, they had attained a certain multicultural cachet.
The yurt occupied by the man who called himself Shams had not come from a kit,
but appeared—based on what the glow from its central fire revealed—to have been
constructed from raw materials in the manner of an Uzbek or Kazakh original.
The basic architecture was universal: a circular, wooden frame with a skin of
felt or canvas, a single door, and a conical roof with an aperture at the peak
to let smoke out and light in. After that, it was a matter of style. Some yurts
had raised floors, some were furnished like teahouses. Shams’ was right off the
Mongolian steppes, and so—at least, it seemed at first—was Shams himself.

    
He was
hanging by his feet from one of two heavy crossbeams that quartered the circle
and braced the yurt’s six-foot walls just below its circus-tent roof. Hanging,
as in dangling, his head about eight inches from the floor, his arms folded
across his chest. It was difficult to get a fix on his face, given the dim
light, the quantity of blood that had rushed into it, a full beard, and a
knitted Mongolian shepherd’s cap with a pointed top and large earflaps fastened
at the chin.

    
“How do,
Shams?” said Ruthie.

    
“Hi,
precious,” he replied, in a voice as reedy as a
duduk
. The white markings in his beard gave the impression that
there were eyes both above and below his mouth.

    
“You got
time for visitors?” she asked.

    
“I’ve
got all the time in the world,” said Shams.

    
He
reached up effortlessly, grabbed the beam, and untied the thongs binding him.
Then he did a short flip, landing upright, all five-feet-four of him. Raszer
stepped into the firelight. The hearth was vented by an aluminum hood that
tapered to a chimney. It gave off enough heat to make the yurt’s interior
sweat. Hanging over the fire was an iron kettle in which something with a
powerfully alkaline odor simmered.

    
“I guess
I’m the one responsible for the impromptu visit,” Raszer said, offering his
hand.

    
“And you
would be?” asked Shams, pulling off his sheepskin glove.

    
“Stephan
Raszer. I’m looking for Ruthie’s sister.”
  

    
“Ray-zer.
Raaay-zor,” said Shams, feeling the name on his tongue as he took Raszer’s
hand. “Interesting name.”

    
“We have
that in common. I only know of one other Shams. Shams of Tabriz, the spiritual
mentor of Jalaluddin Rumi . . . and one of the few guys to survive the Mongol
assault on the Ismaili citadel of Alamut. The Assassin fortress.”

    
“Praise
Allah!” said Shams, with a twinkle in his eye. “
I am remembered! My name
is
known to someone
.” He bent back and threw a lusty “Ha!” toward the hole in
the roof. “That’s the cry of the exile when he reaches Na-Koja-Abad. Do you
know it?”

    
“I have
a feeling I should,” said Raszer. “I may be going there.”

    
Shams
waggled his finger. “Not so fast, brother,” he cautioned, then swept his arm over
a wooden floor covered with Turkish carpets and an assortment of pillows.
“Sit,” he said. “Sit.”
  

    
From the
moment Shams gripped his hand, Raszer took him as a man entirely self-created.
He might’ve been raised in Fresno or Cedar Rapids as Arnold Schmidt, but
somewhere along the way, he’d become Shams. And if on the street, someone were
to walk up and say, “Hey! Aren’t you Arnold Schmidt? I went to high school with
you,” they’d be wrong. You could call it a con, but Shams didn’t strike Raszer
as a flim-flam man. No wonder Ruthie called him “the shit”; he was the
transformed identity she probably wished for herself, the role you play when
you’ve played out all the others.

    
Their
host sat first, and they joined him in a half-moon of cushions around the fire.
“Shams I am,” he said. “Shams the sham. Shams the shaman.” The hearth, which
sat on three stumpy cast iron legs, was a circle within the greater circle of
the yurt. It resembled the votaries found in ancient tombs, a big cast iron
dish hammered out over some Hephaestian forge. The kettle hung about eight
inches above the coals by a hook at the end of a winched steel cable. Steam
rose into the chimney along with smoke.

    
“What’s
cooking?” Raszer couldn’t help but ask. It didn’t smell like stew.

    
“Broth,”
Shams replied. “Mushroom broth. Ready to sip in two minutes.”

    
Raszer
smiled. “Those aren’t morels in there. I smell heavy metal.”

    
“A
connoisseur of fungi, are you? Well these aren’t psychotropic . . . not
exactly. . . but they will cure warts and whooping cough, restore lost hair,
and give you a hard-on that lasts through any dark night of the soul.”

    
“You
don’t say,” Raszer said. “Satisfaction guaranteed?”

    
“Or your
manna back!” answered Shams. “So, what’s your duty, friend? Are you after
wisdom or just information? ‘Cause if you want information, you can Google it.”

    
Raszer
considered his reply.

    
“A
little of both,” said Raszer. “I try to get people out of trouble when they
want to be gotten out. Have you played The Gauntlet?”

    
“Most
assuredly, man. I played it for two years. Even wrote a piece of it when it
went persistent. The Gauntlet’s the king of the IRGs. Or was, until the FBI
opened the curtains. Now all that’s out there are the weekenders and the guys
who played their line all the way out to the ninth level. It was like living
inside the web, man. You just jumped from link to link and never knew where
you’d wind up. A God game.”

    
“Like I
said,” Ruthie told Raszer, “he knows.” She curled up tight and laid her head on
Shams’ thigh, and with his tea-stained fingers he began to stroke her hair.

    
“You
started playing when you were in-country, right?” Raszer asked.

    
“On my
second tour, yeah. But I didn’t jump the wires until my discharge.”

    
“Jump
the wires?”

    
“When
you leave the Internet and go walking. Though it ain’t like you leave ‘virtual
reality’ and enter the ‘real world.’ It’s more like you take virtual reality
with you.”

    
“Were
any of the other soldiers into it?”

    
“Most
definitely, man. Especially the guys working intel. It played like a Eurail pass
to the Middle East. It works in the Muslim world. Muslims understand submission
to God. It was too heady for most of those Alabama boys, but not for the
codebreakers.”

    
“I lost
a kid to it,” said Raszer. “Somebody I was hired to bring home. I studied the
game, but from the outside. The designers did their homework: Aquinas, Erigena,
Averroes, the
I Ching
. . . all of
that. But at some stage of play—way the fuck out there when the player’s been
stripped of everything that binds him to his old self—it starts looking like a
proving ground for sociopaths. My kid got sidetracked. Now he’s in federal
custody. An ‘enemy combatant.’ An accused assassin. And that ties into Katy—”

    
Shams
pushed up to his knees and scooped himself a cup of the steaming broth, then sat
back on his heels. “Indeed. You see there, that’s what the GamesMasters didn’t
think through. They
were
fuckin’
seminarians, after all. All spirit, no psyche. They didn’t consider the
predatory instinct: that if you put all these innocents out there on the road
to Damascus, sooner or later some buzzard is gonna pick ’em off. I can still
quote from the book of play:
Do not
resist the entreaties of your
guide,
for God may appear in the guise of the corrupt or malign, just as his opposite
may appear beneficent. It is not for you to discern the difference. It is for
you to ask only, ‘How can I serve?’ In doing this, you will always find favor
with God
.”

    
“Sounds like good advice for rising in the Mafia,”
Raszer observed.

    
 
“Right,” Shams continued. “At the lower levels
of play, the worst that can happen is you wind up working for some sleazebag
and getting your nose rubbed in shit, which is a kind of inoculation if you
think about it. I ran whores for this evil fucker in Dubai, and believe me, I
never wanna see the inside of a whorehouse again. Seeing evil makes you not
want to be it. Plus, for the first six levels, you’re still wired in to the
game, to the other players. You’re swappin’ war stories in chatrooms, gettin’
texted and instant-messaged in the middle of the night, sent to porn websites
where a pop-up window gives you your next set of directions, even going to
parties where half the guests are actors. You’ve got a safety net, and you can
call for a DX if you get scared.

    
“But
once they give you Extreme Unction, you lose your bearings unless you’re really
together. Take this, for example:
You’re
in the seventh circle of play.
You’ve
jumped the
wires and you’re offline,
man
. No email, no text messages, no nothin’. The pay phone rings on an
empty street. How the fuck do they know you’re there? A recorded voice says,
Your next guide is a deceiver and a
criminal. Query him about the holiest place he has ever been and the wisest
person still residing there. Offer to carry a message or gift to that person on
behalf of your guide, and request a letter of introduction. Upon meeting, ask,
‘What is expected of me?’ Play out your line until you begin to feel the snake
.
This is where the men separate from the
boys, ’cause you don’t know where the fuck you are, man.
”

    
“So you
toss three coins and read the
I Ching
?”

    
“That
works,” Shams replied. “However you do it, you have to stop trusting your own
instincts—which are basically faulty—and start trusting the snake’s. Because
the snake doesn’t think—it knows. God is in the
I Ching
. He’s also in the Big Mac wrapper blowin’ down that empty
street. Will you recognize Him? That depends on something beyond instinct or
intuition or intelligence: it depends on
knowing
.”
       
“So who gets through the eye of the
needle?” Raszer asked. “Who wins?”

    
Shams
took two rough ceramic mugs from beneath the tripod and filled them with the
black broth. He handed one to Ruthie and one to Raszer. The liquid was viscous
and filmy and fermented. It smelled as old as the Mesozoic era.

    
“You
haven’t told me about the side effects yet,” said Raszer.

    
“Put it
this way,” said Shams. “I’ll make a whole lot more sense. Trust. Drink.”