Authors: Graham Joyce
'But it
can't live in your mouth, little brother. Or it will want to come out again
disguised as bad poetry. No, no, it must go
inside?
Mehemet
gagged
and stiffened as the cobra's head eased into the back of his throat. The
muscles of his neck constricted as the creature forced its way in, a centimetre
at a time. A moment later the snake had filled his windpipe and was squeezing
towards his gullet.
Mehemet
was choking. With a
sudden force he lashed out with his legs and fell on his back. Still gagging
for air, his body rocked with uncontrolled spasms. His eyes were darting
wildly, until they rolled back in their sockets, all white. He thrashed at the
ground, writhing, kicking. Finally the black tail of the cobra disappeared
inside his mouth.
Mehemet's
head crashed against the
desert floor. His fists beat the dust as his agony went on for several minutes.
At last his body heaved in a final spasm and fell back, utterly lifeless, his
dead eyes wide open. I lifted his head and looked into those dead eyes. They
reflected the yellow and pink light of the breaking dawn.
I held
Mehemet's
lifeless body, wondering what to do. The sun
peeled over the mountain as I sat. Some instinct made me look around. The girl
was standing behind me. She was dressed, for her wedding, in crimson robes.
'There has
been an accident,' I said softly. 'You know
Mehemet
was an epileptic. He suffered a fit in which he swallowed his own tongue.'
She looked at me suspiciously.
'Examine him if you don't believe me.'
'I
don't need to,' she said. 'But I must have my bridegroom.'
When she
showed neither sadness nor emotion, I knew for certain that she was a
djinn
.
But I had no fear, and I went with her
into the cave, where
Mehemet
and I had laid out a
comfortable bed and the wedding breakfast. There she undressed. Her skin was
the colour of cinnamon. The smell of the dawn was on her. The yellow and
cerise light was on her shoulders. Her perfume made me swoon.
She
spread herself for me. And at the moment of my greatest fulfilment, at the
moment of penetration, she shed her earthly form. For the next three hours I
was driven almost out of my mind with terror as she took me by the foot and
flung me round and round the planet. For the sin of intercourse with demons,
with the
djinn
,
I have been paying ever
since. Every night before dawn the
djinn
returns
to me and demands that I uphold my wedding promise of that night by making love
to her. If I give in, she turns into one of her many abominable forms and
terrifies me. Therefore every night I must wrestle with her, holding her off
until she becomes tired, or until the light becomes too much for her.
That
is the
djinn
with which I have to live,
Tom. Would you like more mint tea?
32
'Michael Anthony is dead,' Kate had
reported.
'Oh,' said Tom.
Silence itched.
'He
said I should go to Jerusalem. That day in the park. He described it to me, and
he said if I went, a little bit of him would still be alive. In me. Shall we go
to Jerusalem, Tom?'
'Why?'
'He said the
city is like a fractured mirror: you can see yourself, but you get a shock at
how it comes back to you. If we went, we could visit Sharon.'
'I don't think so.'
'Why
does the thought of Sharon make you feel uncomfortable? Why won't you talk to
me? I feel like I've lost you, and I have to find another way through. I feel
like Mary Magdalene. Like I was a big part of something and then I was squeezed
out to the edge, and I don't know how. Can't we go, Tom? Can't we go to
Jerusalem?'
33
Magdalene. He called her
the Magdalene. There was no rational basis for this. The name had suggested
itself in his dreams. But as soon as he had named her, the figure haunting him,
terrifying him, crying out to him in the streets of Jerusalem, became real.
Ahmed had warned him not to name her; but she had named herself.
The faces of
the Arabs in the Muslim quarter had softened and seemed friendlier after Tom's
visit to Ahmed. The alleyways appeared less sinister, the shadows among the old
stones less menacing. He smiled at people in the narrow streets, and they
smiled back. The cobwebs of his fear had been broken. After all, he reminded
himself, this was an Arab city, Muslim since the seventh century apart from a
very brief interruption during the Crusader period. Now the Arabs were pushed
into a tiny quarter, ghettoized and perceived by Westerners as dangerous
intruders.
At the
Bethesda pool he turned sharply. Someone was following him. He quickened his
pace along the Via Dolorosa and stopped suddenly. Two young Arabs passed by,
talking loudly. He waited until the street cleared. He sensed someone hanging
back in the shadows. Continuing along the Via Dolorosa, he passed into the
Christian quarter.
It was not his phantom;
the sensations were very different from those of the occasions when he was
harried by the Magdalene. No scent, no mysterious quickening in the air.
Something else. Reaching David's Tower at
Jaffa
Gate,
he turned decisively. A man in a black suit stepped smartly off the Via into a
side street.
A dress pageant was
taking place inside the Citadel at David's Tower. He passed through the crowds
beyond the gate and made his way up to the
pedestrianized
streets of the New City.
Sharon was away, working;
counselling her alcoholic women and drug addicts. 'They see visions,' she'd
said pointedly. 'They have delusions. They're visited by phantoms.' She
wouldn't be free until the evening. He whiled away the afternoon at her flat,
thinking about her. When she returned he pinned her to the door and tore off
her clothes. She told him she hadn't made love that way since she was sixteen.
Afterwards
he told her where he'd been and what Ahmed had told him. He was betraying no
confidence, he'd decided, as Ahmed himself had told the story to Sharon.
'Cobra-shit,' she said.
'What about
the Masters, living in the desert? Or the Near Ones, as Ahmed called them?'
‘I don't know about any Masters.'
'Maybe he's referring to the Sufi mystics.
They exist.'
'Maybe.
But Ahmed is a dope-head. I deal with these people all the time. You'd be
amazed at what they come up with.'
'Is none of it true?' asked Tom.
They
lay in each other's arms on Sharon's bed, semiconscious, drugged with coitus,
brains still soaring, slurring their words.
'His friend swallowed
his own tongue and died while under Ahmed's hypnotic influence. That much is
true. All the rest is constructed out of his feelings of guilt. These phantoms
he claims persecute him every night are created by his own imagination.'
'But he believes they're real.'
'And you think that makes them real?'
He thought for a moment. 'Yes.'
'So if I believe in fairies, that means
they exist?'
'That's not what I'm saying.'
She murmured something barely
audible. She was drifting towards sleep. He stared into the visible darkness,
knowing this question led, insidiously, remorselessly, to another one, about
his own beliefs, about his faith. That faith had become like a magnificent
edifice crumbling in the desert but watched on accelerated film as centuries of
eroding wind holed it, cracked it, clawed it into dust. When it had gone, only
the desert remained.
'What
I'm trying to say,' he tried again, not sure she was listening 'is that if
enough people share a belief, then, to all intents and purposes, the thing is
true.'
He was
talking about GOD and LOVE and TRUTH and other words styled in illuminated
script. But were these things, after all, just writings in the sand? Monuments
to
Ozymandias
? Buildings crumbling in the desert,
eroded by memory?
Sharon,
lying next to him, had fallen into a slumber. She hadn't heard a word. He
peered at her in the inky dark. Who was this woman, and was there anything
wrong in what they were doing? Did it offend his memory of Katie? Would she
have disapproved? If not, then why did it still feel like an act of infidelity?
Like his
first act of infidelity, committed against Katie while he was actually making
love to her.
No, he
couldn't stop his fantasies. It would have been like trying to stop his dreams.
And, as he made love to his wife, the familiar fantasy
unspooled
.
It was during the first sexual congress with Katie that he'd lost focus. In her
stead it was Kelly McGovern. It was the class stockroom. The bleeding heart rose.
He undressed her hurriedly, and Katie's full breasts diminished to Kelly's
adolescent teats in his hands; her belly flattened out under his caress; her
thighs trimmed; even her scent, her sex odour, changed; and virginity was
magically restored. As he ejaculated into his wife, he heard his semen thump
hollowly in the sterile cave of his fantasy. And, in the moment after, he knew
absolutely that Katie knew.
From
the time he and Katie had fallen in love, they had enjoyed a period of rich
telepathy, no different from that of all lovers in the first thrill of
connection: a telepathy apparent from the ability to second-guess their
partner's next words, to feel their needs, to communicate in a shorthand which
was almost a code, to detect hidden thoughts. Perhaps, by some special grace,
their period of telepathic insight had been extended beyond the norm, but when
it was taken away, as it was in that moment of cold ejaculation, he had known
it was irrecoverable. The special grace had been withdrawn. It had felt like a
death.
It was a death.
Katie had
felt it too. The expression of hurt and bewilderment on her face had suggested
it all, but they couldn't speak about it. Because where was the betrayal? It
was all too abstract, beyond reference. But her eyes showed that she knew. A
glint of hoar-frost chilled them as she glanced back at him, before turning a
cold back, covering herself and feigning sleep.
He'd stayed
awake that night for an hour, peering into the swirling dark. Yes, it had felt
like a death.
He looked
now at Sharon's sleeping form in the dark, her hair tumbling over her
shoulders. He started. He'd thought her asleep, but her wide-open eyes were
watching him. A disconcerting smile had settled on her lips. Her posture was
odd. Her arm was drawn under her head and she seemed propped at an awkward
angle. He leaned across her to switch on the bedside
light.The
light fell across her and he shuddered.
It
was not Sharon. In her place the Magdalene was sprawled naked across the bed.
Her tattooed skin was dark, wrinkled, like the flesh of a dried fig. Long, grey
hair hung over her withered dugs. Tattoos on her arms and legs and belly were
unknowable symbols, brightly illuminated against her sand-coloured skin. Her
eyes were completely white, blind. She groped across the bed, reaching an arm
towards him.
He was out
of bed, slamming his back hard up against the wall.
'What is
it?' Sharon was saying. 'What is it?
’
Tom was shivering
uncontrollably. At last she managed to calm him. 'It's me,' she said. 'Tom,
it's me.'
The
apparition had gone. Sharon stood over him, fully dressed. She was still
carrying a plastic bag full of groceries. Tom's eyes raked the room for signs
of the old woman. He too was fully clothed.
'How long have you been back?' he asked.
'I just got
in,' she said, 'and here you were, screaming.'
Tom let
Sharon hug him. But he was unable to explain. The room was still heavy with the
familiar, spiced odour of opal balsam.
34
Ahmed felt strangely troubled
for several hours after Tom's departure. He'd recounted the tale of his desert
years because of an annual need to unburden himself; it was always the same
around both the anniversary of
Mehemet's
death and
what he'd come to see as his doomed marriage to the
djinn
.
His reasons, though, were not completely selfish. He had an acute sense of—
and sympathy for — Tom's suffering. He'd seen a
djinn
clinging to Tom's back like a blood-sucking creature. Sharon would have
another name for it, in her arrogance, but he, Ahmed, had seen it for what it
was. He had told Tom his desert story so that the Englishman might realize he
wasn't alone in his suffering.
A
new thought occurred to him. Were all
djinn
female? Or, if you were a woman, were all
djinn
male?
He shook his head,
trying to cast off the idea, vigorously stubbing out a hashish cigarette in an
ashtray. He returned to his table, flicking aside the chequered Palestinian
headscarf he'd draped over the spiral scroll. He took out the initial notes
he'd abandoned in disgust on discovering that the scroll opened with a
genealogy. Ignoring the first three outer rings of the spiral arm, he recommenced
his translation at a new and arbitrary point, following the text anti-clockwise
towards the centre of the spiral.