Stabs at Happiness (19 page)

When he walked out of the relative coolness of the building into the sunlight, the heat surprised him. This was the hottest day he had experienced so far in Tangier. It's not like inland Morocco, like Marrakesh for instance, where temperatures regularly go above one hundred degrees. Usually, the sea breezes keep Tangier from ever getting much above the mid-eighties or so. There was no wind today, and the unmoving, dead heat was intense.

Anthony was not deep in thought in the sense of having one coherent complex idea lead him to other possibilities, considered systematically, linearly, but he was in a state of heavily-weighted, slowly-developing brooding, as if waiting for a revelation to assemble itself, or occur.

He walked away from Sara's building without really paying attention to where he was going, simply heading back towards downtown. Even up here in a fairly nice residential neighborhood the streets curved, you had to make decisions, and he only realized that he had somehow gone around in a circle when he saw for the second time the same three Moroccans working and talking, looking at the engine of a dark car with its hood up. He crossed the street to avoid them. He was a little embarrassed they might notice him, think he was lost.

This time he was more careful, he turned left this time at a particular junction, he thought he knew more or less where he was and he would emerge past this high wall somewhere near the Hotel Intercontinental, he strode through waves of resistant, heavy air.

When he saw the three men and the car with its hood up this time, he felt suddenly afraid, and this time they definitely noticed him, he stayed on the other side of the street and walked past, faintly hearing them talk to each other—one laughed. He didn't know where he had gone wrong. It seemed impossible that he could not get out of this neighborhood. The heat made it all worse. He was perspiring in rivulets. His shirt was stuck to him. The sun seemed unnaturally bright, the sky empty and dead. The landscape was baked. He was kicking sand. If he was lost on his own, with no one observing him, that would be fine, he could deal with it, it was a problem that could eventually be solved.

What he didn't like was having strange Moroccans aware of him, able to see that he didn't live here, didn't know where he was. He now no longer knew where Sara's apartment building was, his starting point. He walked along the same curving street past the same cement wall and this time it seemed like he came to a completely different, sand-swept intersection than before.

One of the town's many small green beat-up taxis sped by, accelerating, no chance to hail it, someone turning to look at him from the back seat.

Anthony picked a new street to follow, watching his surroundings with minute attention, as though reality was not entirely dependable anymore. He came to a familiar street, went by the Hotel Intercontinental, but everything looked different to him now. Even as, in fifteen minutes or so, he found his way downtown, to the Grand Socco Square across from the Café de Paris, everything looked strange. This was how it all was, this was how it had to be.

They thought they had given him a lesson. But “they” did not realize precisely who he was, so the lesson was not taken in quite the same way as they may have meant it to be. It did not frighten him away, but rather served, in his present condition, as a kind of lure. The lure, such as it was, had absolutely nothing to do with the mysterious circumstances regarding Patrick and Lauren.

They misjudged him. They thought he had a sense of responsibility, a curiosity—but that he was a rational Negro, and that he would fear losing his rationality, this carefully constructed identity out of Yale and so forth.

Such a conclusion was wrong.

He could hang around for twenty years and learn nothing, and this might be something extraordinarily important to find out.

“Nothing. Nada. Rien.”

Yes, he thought he might discover much more in such a fate than they supposed. He would hire a car and drive to Fez, then down across the Sahara to Timbuktu. Forget about his job, his girlfriend, everything, all the contents of this unreal life.

Maybe one day he would see everything anew, right hand touching left hand mirror-self, door opening to revelation of old/ new eternal knowledge, all mysteries forgotten but revealed. He wouldn't care—about
the facts, ma'am, nothing but the facts.

He would ask no questions, tell no lies. Seek not lest ye shall find. That's it, that's coming close. Seek not, lest uh… ye shall find. My father's house, his mansion, has many motherfucking rooms.

Mr. Right Hand, meet Mr. Left Hand.

I can see you've met before.

“S
O I OPENED
a door in his head and went in,” said Mahnoosh. “We lay there on the bed and contemplated our relationship. We possessed telepathy.”

“Wait… this is in the future?” Donya asked her friend.

“Yeah,” said Mahnoosh, then drank more raspberry-cranberry through a straw. The intense dark red now entering her inside matched the highlights of her hair as well as her leggings, more or less.

Donya moved slightly and said, “OK, what happened next?”

“What?”

“What happened next?”

Mahnoosh laughed and said: “I realized that I didn't have the remote. I thought that it was misplaced somewhere in the pillows or the sheets there on the bed.”

“Those are those pillows… isn't everything a leopard-pattern?”

“No, Donya, everything isn't a fucking leopard-pattern. How can you say that? There are many varieties of leopard-pattern. There's also cheetah-pattern, jaguar, tiger… sabre-tooth tiger, even.” But she giggled at that.

“I'm sort of distracted by this music I guess,” Donya said.

“Do you want me to turn it down?”

“No, it's fine. I'm getting used to it. I like the beat.”

Mahnoosh's lipstick was raspberry-cranberry only darker. Donya's lips were some other, pinker, peachier hue. Glossy.

The big television screen had some actors talking in a hotel room back in the admirable if strange black & white shadowy America of maybe 1948. Mahnoosh looked at the sexysexy dress the actress was wearing while Donya found an old Zippo lighter in between the pillows and used this to light a filter cigarette. Mahnoosh thought she could maybe fit in a dress like that. People would look.

She noticed the smoke in the air and said, “I need one too.”

“This is the last one,” Donya lied. She was a liar sometimes.

“Why are you lying to me?”

“I don't know. Here.”

Then, in three or four minutes, Donya said: “I'm bored.”

“Let's go outside.”

“It's the same as in here.”

“No it's not,” Mahnoosh said, noting how spectacularly pouty Donya's lips were now. If people were watching Mahnoosh would have kissed her then.

“Am I boring you?” Donya asked.

“You're getting close.”

Outside in fifteen minutes some crows on wires observed them walking down the avenue and commented while Mahnoosh tried to call Farid on a small dark-green plastic phone.

They were across the street from a building which had that look buildings have a week or two after being car-bombed. Debris was still strewn about in a disorganized fashion and the big hole exposed nude iron girders which looked unstable though the architecture was normal enough given the circumstance.

The weather was sped-up in the clouds above and traffic moved past in a stop-and-go rhythm with accelerations of motors and some horns.

“What was that?” Donya said but Mahnoosh didn't answer while a silver automobile slowed and then moved faster, sleek and blurred. Donya however had some other phenomenon in mind. The traffic meant little to her.

Farid, disembodied, somewhere, said “Yeah?”

“Remember when I was in your head?” Mahnoosh asked.

“You still are, baby, you still are.”

Romantic, so romantic. Donya, looking at her, she knew.

A
ndrogyny was in fashion. Full frontal nudity. Glitter bands. Boys wore makeup and high heels. Nixon was president.

It was 1973. Cheap sequins were in the air.

Nobody wanted to spend any more time thinking about Vietnam.

The first time they talked, at a party upstairs on 2nd Avenue, Jean-Luc, in his black-rimmed glasses, asked the pretty transvestite: “What's your name?”

“Kim.”

“What?” Jean-Luc couldn't quite hear: other voices and music partially drowned out their words.

“Kim. It's Chinese.”

“But you're not.”

“Sure I am. Kim Wong.”

“You don't look Chinese at all.”

“Kim White?”

Knifey guitar chord while Lou Reed deadpanned something about vicious flowers.

Then more guitar.

The Babylonians conquered the Sumerians and took over Sumer, absorbing and assimilating their culture. Then, after a few hundred years, the barbarian Assyrians conquered Babylonia and ruled it, with their fierce new laws, until the Babylonians, together with the neighboring Elamites and Medes, were able to successfully rebel and decimate the hated Assyrians, seemingly wiping them off the face of the earth.

“I want to make something like Cecil B. DeMille's
Cleopatra
,” Jean-Luc said, thumb and index finger squeezing Paulie's left nipple while it grew, pouty, erect. “There's something very sexy about the Biblical epic,” interrupting himself with a sticky kiss, their warm tongues exploring each other's mouths. “William Wyler's
Ben Hur,
Mervyn LeRoy's
Quo Vadis
?, DeMilles' S
amson and Delilah
… anything about Baghdad or the Arabian Nights, with Steve Reeves or maybe Sinbad… You ever thought about that name? No… not Steve Reeves.”

“Ben Hur,” Paul said, squirming a little, nude in Jean-Luc's arms.

He loved himself more and more in the heat of Jean-Luc's worship, eyes shut now, glued lost in delusion and dream as his body was explored and spread open like a big flesh flower, luscious plum-red anal sphincter forming a sensitive blossom in the golden light. Oh.
Oh
.

And so Paul Fairchild got the part.

Routine will change. You'll be with more people and popularity will increase. Due to unusual schedule, eating habits may become erratic. Don't neglect nutrition.