Ink (57 page)
Authors: Hal Duncan
And don't vou hear the voice in vour blood?
A whisper:
Jack
.
A flash of Shamash, of shining sun on the silvery steel of the lighter as he flicks it into flame for Don's fag, gleam of it glinting in his eye and his grin in the mirror in the dugout—snicking white teeth, he has, like those of the lion in the corner slouched over the copper-smooth body of the boy, Private Tamuz Messenger, whose dead eyes stare at him now as his blue lips whisper his name again—
Jack.
When do I know you from? When are we?
Thunder of guns drum his dream with doom DOOM doom, and Jack picks up the sketch of the Phoenician ivory of Adonis and the lioness, places it in a tin mug hanging from a hook on the wall, rattling in time to the prattling Irishman chained in the chair in the corner, Finnan—
awake again, Jack. Sure andwefookin need ye ‘cause it's worse than Spain ever would have been if we hadn't gone andfooked it royally
, he's saying,
yerselfand me and Fox makes three.
And Jack looks at the Irishman just sitting there on the bunk in his dream of a dugout past, Sergeant Finnan, it is, Seamus Finnan, Shamash or—
… Prometheus, chained up in the Caucasus for his theft of fire. Of course, given the identification of Japheth with Iapetus, Prometheus's father, this lent further credence to the correlation of Noah's three sons, Shem, Ham and Japheth, with the Semitic, African and Indo-European peoples respectively. To the European scholars of the day, the “dynamic fire” of the Aryan warrior race was clearly of immense historical import; it was unthinkable that the Biblical taxonomy would overlook the founders of classical civilization; it was absurd to imagine that the blacks and the Jews should be traced back to their antediluvian roots, but the Aryan race not be legitimized in the same way.
I made a mistake
, says Jack, looking out of the dugout across the mountains of the Caucasus at airships gathering to drop fire on Armenian villages.
A grave mistake.
Christ, what did he do? What have they done?
We all make mistakes. All that matters is ye have tofookin wake.
The wind that blows past him into the cave behind is cold as winter, cold as a Hinter night, though, God, and Jack pulls up the collar of his greatcoat as he turns to the light of the dawn, of the day breaking over Jerusalem where the women wail for Thomas always and forever, singing laments of Eastern mourning, loud and
long and ululating as a muezzin in a minaret, paeans of pain to God, no, not to God but to the rising sun, to Shamash, to Seamus, to—
As a mark of just how far the Romantic model was willing to stretch credibility on the basis of racist assumptions, Schiegel (1853) even went so far as to identify Japheth with Jupiter, and the Hebrew Yahveh with Jove, seeing in the coincidental similarities a great Indo-European God, brought to Rome from Ilium “while the Semites were still sacrificing infants in the furnaces of Moloch.” When the Bible tells us that the sons of Japheth dwelt in the tents of Shem, he goes on to tell us, “clearly it is the civilizing influence of the Aryans that is meant here, everywhere bringing with them the shining ideal of an Almighty God of Gods to replace the heathen Goddess of old.”
Anna sits in the dark at the back of the antiquities shop, among the clay-covered skulls and shabti figures, in a widow's veil of sorrow for her brother, her other, reading the old blind beggar's withered hand, tracing the lines of the mummified dead man with a clay reed, pricking the skin to bleed black blood that dissolves into vapors in the air, whispers of darkness that shroud him, MacChuill, half blind, half beggar. She reaches out toward Jack.
Cross my palm with silver. One sekhufor a fortune. All your talents for the one you love.
He walks into the room—it's hardly high enough to stand or wide enough to fly, six khaibits by six khaibits by six khaibits—and he kneels before the statue of her, under her outspread wings, this angel of mercy with her red hair and her copper skin, her lips kissing his forehead with forgiveness, tears running down to merge with his, salt of her grief running into his mouth, salt of her sweat as he kisses her breast, her neck, her chin, his lips, his puckered, puckish lips and the feel of his nibbling teeth on Jack's ear and nipping fingers on a nipple.
Tamuz
, he murmurs in his sleep.
In fact, were it not for the use made of Schiegel's “Aryan Yahweh” hypothesis by both Fascists and Futurists seeking to justify their anti-Semitism, the arrogance and absurdity of the claim would render it laughable. The fact is that the compilers of the genealogies of Shem, Ham and Japheth clearly had little interest in the obscure tribes at the far reaches of their sphere of knowledge. Just as the listings of sons of Ham (whose curse, in this Romantic racist model, was of course their black skin) contain far more Semitic tribes, cities and nations than they do
African ones, so too the sons of Japheth can largely be identified with indigenous Caucasoid tribes of the northern Anatolian regions. Few of these were Indo-European. None of them were the white-skinned, blond-haired, blue-eyed Aryans of Romantic invention.
Follow me, Jack
, says Thomas.
And Tamuz leads him through the streets of the souk, where angels of death and peace walk, men in long black feathered cloaks, dreadlocked and copper-skinned, faces like vipers, fire blazing from their mouths against the men and women and children dying in flames. A Hassidic Hobbsbaum stands against a wall, murmuring prayers to himself as an angel sniffs him.
You are ours, old man. You are all ours. You are in the booh of all that is ours, the booh of all ours, all that belonged to
—
And the word he says is a whisper of
hhhh
, just a breath without vowels, little more than a rounding of lips in the
wh-
of a
why, a who,a when
, and the touch of a tongue in
they- of a you, a yeah, a jawohl. Yahweh.
You belongs to us now.
Jack has his gun in his hand.
Fuck that shit.
He wakes, upright in bed, sheafs of Hobbsbaum's notes sliding off the sheets to scatter across the darkness of the floor.
We need to understand these Biblical genealogies as retroactive attempts to make sense of the melange of ethnicities inhabiting the Fertile Crescent, compiled generations after the forefathers of their writers swept down from the northern area around Hittite Haran to devastate the coastal city-states of Canaan, taxonomies based less on racial distinctions than on the political and cultural divisions between semi-nomadic “Semitic” herders and the “Hamitic” settlers whose towns and cities they pillaged. In this context, it seems quite obvious that these sons of Japheth who “dwelt in the tents of Shem” simply represent the northern Anatolian tribes who spoke non-Afro-Asiatic languages, but who may or may not have been ethnically “Semitic” (given that linguistic and ethnic roots do not always match) and who we know made up a large proportion of those raiders known as “Khabiru,” or “Habiru” … or “Hebrews.”
—
Coils of a Snake
innan sits down at the small wooden table under the black awning, chugs a long cold swig from the bottle and pushes his seat back to look out into the crowd. He's getting used to the place now, the subtle shifts in the way the throngs move that keep you from getting from one place to the next by the exact route you'd intended, the way the stalls switch places when you're not looking. It hadn't taken him long to find the old roofless empty bar with a crate of beer behind the counter, covered in dust but ice-cold, the table and chair set up outside, waiting for anyone who cared to use them. A bit of luck.
He watches a couple of tourists walking round in a circle, one stall to the next, to the next, to the next, and back to the first, asking the same questions each time, getting the exact same answers. He watches the way the Cold Men skirt round them, avoiding the loops, striding through other areas, the crowd parting to let them through, the slipstreams of dust under their feet. The street of curio kitsch doesn't quite hold together, doesn't quite have the logic it should; but it has a certain dynamic to it. Coils of a snake, he thinks.
He takes another slug from the beer and lays his softpack of Camels and lighter on the table. He pulls a pack of cards out of his pocket and lays them on the table too; not tarot cards, just everyday spades, clubs, hearts and diamonds. He deals out a hand of solitaire, then lifts off the little mojo bag that hangs around his neck on a leather string, opens it up, takes out a peyote button. You can't beat the serpent playing straight. He knocks it back with another swig of beer.
Five minutes pass.
Ten minutes pass.
An eternity.
The mescaline is starting to kick in by the time the barker strolls up to the table, casual as a spring day, to ask if he can take a seat. The multicolors of his clothes slide at the edges, streaming by each other like candy-stripe motorways, running rivulets of glows.
“Help yourself,” says Finnan.
He lays the Queen of Hearts down onto the King of Clubs. The colors on the cards are liquid television, set turned up to burn-out bright. Simware gone crazy.
“Join me in a beer, old friend. A game of Happy Families?”
The barker wanders into the bar behind him, feet thumping on the heavy wooden floor, comes back out with a chair and a bottle. He scrapes the chair rear-first up to the table, opposite Finnan, and straddles it, arms crossed over its back. He takes a slug from the beer. A wry half smile, half grimace.
“A little warm,” he says.
“Unlucky,” says Finnan.
His face is so white, hot white, like a light under his skin, like an overexposed film. Powdery moondust, silvered pearl and sheen. No irises to speak of in his eyes, just big black pupils in the whites, open and honest—
honest, old friend.
Finnan doesn't trust him for a second.
“You know, old friend,” says the Cold Man, “I didn't even know this place was here.
Worn did you
find it, tucked away in this corner?”
Finnan shrugs.
“Once I've been somewhere, I never forget how to get back there.
” “Thought you said this was your first visit to Sante Manite?”
“But I'm an old friend,’ old friend. Don't you remember me?”
“Well, you know, I
truly
am sorry, but I clean forgot your name.”
“Finnan.”
“Finnan,” the Cold Man repeats. “Finnan…”
“That's right.”
“So remind me, old friend,” says the barker, “where was it that we met?”
“Prague, maybe? Weren't you there at the Dissolution of Prague?”
“Only saw it on the news. You were there, then? What was it like?”
The barker looks interested, but it's all about getting leverage, trying to figure Finnan out. They may not be unkin, these Cold Men, but they play the same game, all ambiguities and avoidance. If information is power, their communication is a light skirmish. Finnan shakes his head.
“Sure and I couldn't say,” he smiles. “I wasn't there, old friend.”
High Stakes
He flips a card over, a Jack of Swords, places it down over the Queen of Hearts. A little shift in the suits, so it is. So it's started now. The next card is a Page of Chalices, followed by the Ace of Suns—old Shamash Seamus, to be sure—then Knight of Moons and Don of Bones.
The barker shuffles his chair a little forward and a floorboard creaks.
“Wood sounds rotten, old friend,” he says. “You think it's safe to sit here?”
“Sure and the place is just a bit neglected. Ye could fix it up real easy.”
“Hardly worth the trouble.”
“Beer behind the bar, a fan up on the ceiling … ye've got a lot of hot and thirsty people out there looking for refreshment.”
“We offer more of a… spiritual refreshment, old friend.”
“Finnan.”
“Finnan. Anyway, we cater to other kinds of tastes, as you see.”
Finnan nods. The mescaline is laying its feathered arms around him, sending a tickling shudder down his spine. He's not sure how long it is since he dropped the peyote but he's on the slow rise to the peak now. He can feel it.
“So, tell me, old friend… Finnan, I mean… what is it that a man like you is looking for in a place like this? You're not our usual kind of customer.”
“No? In what way?”
“It's hard to say.”
Finnan studies the veins under the skin of his forearm, the green pulse of life, a flow of oxidized copper. He tenses the sinews that come down from the wrist, leans back in the chair and stretches lazily, relishing the feel of being embodied, the real sensual trip you get from good peyote.
“What's your name?” he says. “And what's your game?”
“Harker. What do you mean game’?”
Harker the barker. Nice.
“Game,” says Seamus casually.
He gathers up the pack of cards.
“Poker? Rummy? Blackjack? You know.”
“Ah… right,” says Harker. “I don't really play.”
“Everyone says that,” says Seamus. “But everyone plays.” “Gambling's illegal in this state.”
Finnan riffles the cards, shuffles them. He puts the pack down, to raise his beer bottle. He winks.
“Sure and I don't gamble in any other state,” he says. “Besides, who says we're playing for money?”
“What are we playing for, then, old friend?”
Finnan deals three cards to himself, faceup, the Ace of Suns and the Queen of Hearts again, followed by a Joker.
“Information,” he says.
Harker takes a sip from his beer, places the bottle on the table.
“High stakes,” he says.
“Sure and what other kind of stakes are worth playing for?”
Finnan deals him three cards, facedown, from the bottom of the pack. Two Jacks for this joker—a pair of cowboys, a pair of hooks—and the third card the unspoken secret that the two of them are dancing around. The Queen of Books.
“Ye don't mind playing with the Joker, do ye?” he says. “Only there's one card missing from the deck and I've been looking all over for the fooker, but I'll be fooked if I know where it's gone.”
“Fair enough,” says Harker. “What will we be playing?”
Finnan takes a swig from his beer, swallows, draws a Camel out of the pack and puts it in the corner of his mouth. He picks up the Zippo.
Chunk, snik—fsssh
—
chuk.
Takes a draw.
“The name of the game,” he says, “is Find the Lady.”