The Garden of Last Days (53 page)

Lonnie stopped and looked back at him, this unhappy rich man in shorts and a T-shirt, his mouth half-open like he’d just been pulled from his bed to be given this news. And it wasn’t unlike the remorse Lonnie’d begin to feel after laying somebody out, the questions he had about himself after. “No, Louis. I won’t be going to the Pink Pony. Good luck.”

And he meant it. The Pony part and the luck part, April walking out of the dressing room just as he entered the kitchen, a pair of jeans rolled under her arm, zipping up a purple bag in both hands as if it held a secret she may tell him once they were both far from here.

SHE IS UGLY
and what she does is ugly and Bassam feels poisoned watching her, but he cannot move or speak nor is he breathing fully and his face burns with shame for the hardness he can only hope is not visible under his clothes. Tariq lies silently on his own bed, still and quiet as well. The shades are drawn and the room is darkened to the afternoon, the television’s screen so clear, the woman’s sounds turned low but so clear, her cries of pleasure.

She is thin and pale. Her nuhood are small and her hair is dyed the white-blond so many of these kufar prefer. Along her belly, close to her qus, is inked a man’s name:
Joseph
. On her ankle, a flower. On her shoulder one of the men grasps, is the cross of Mary’s son these ahl al-shirk worship as if their prophet were the Holy One and not simply one of His messengers. Stupid.
Stupid
.

But Bassam does not look at these inked markings. It is the man
thrusting himself into the woman, the wetness of her, how deeply he can go, how fast. Bassam cannot believe how deep and how fast.

How does this not harm her? How does she enjoy this? This ugly whore Bassam cannot turn away from. And Karim, the only one among them to leave their home. His studies in England. The Zionist he boasted about lying with. Did he do it to her like this? Did he turn her over and enter her as a dog? Grasp her hair and pull? Did she scream like this one? Did she?

Enough.

“Tariq, turn it off. We must turn this off.”

“We pay for it. We should see all of it.” Tariq’s voice is high in his throat, like after racing or just before.

Bassam closes his eyes, his face a wash of heat, his shame softening him. His shame, and yes, his disappointment. This act as ugly as something animals do. How will it be any more beautiful done by him? Will he not be given back his human body in Jannah? Won’t his companions have the bodies of women? How can he bring such ugliness to the highest rooms of the Creator?

The woman cries louder and she tells the man to push harder, harder.

“Tariq, please, turn it off. This is haram, brother. Please.”

“It is
not
haram, Bassam. It would not be here if the Creator does not deem it. Please, let me watch this in peace.”

Bassam stands. From the bedside table he takes his notebook and the pen from Florida. “Yes, Tariq. But we say ‘Asr in less than one hour. Remember this.”

Tariq says nothing and Bassam steps quickly past the television he disciplines himself not to view any longer. At the door he slips on his shoes. He looks once more into the room, sees only the television’s light moving upon the carpet and beds. Tariq’s feet, his long feet. From here, the woman’s cries sound manufactured.

He pulls closed the door. Checks that it is locked. He walks past Imad’s door; knows he is resting there. Resting after his long exercising.
Perhaps giving supplications to the Holy One, the Protector and Sustainer, and again, a hot shame moving through Bassam’s blood and skin; how can he even begin to question what waits for them in the highest rooms? How can he even begin to think he knows the beauty there? The women, chaste and chosen for him only, lying upon soft couches in lush gardens watered by running streams.

On the street his legs are too light beneath him, the grip upon his notebook weak. In his head only the pale whore. He passes an old woman, her lips red with cosmetics, the wrinkles deep in her face. She walks slowly with a wooden staff to aid her and she smiles at him and he sees the man’s hands on her, the thrusting so fast and so deep into her old body. Bassam runs across the street. The blare of a horn, the yelling of the taxi’s driver. An Arab. His accent Egyptian. Living here among the kufar, becoming one of them. Three women now pass on the sidewalk. They are girls not yet in university and two reveal their bellies, their legs behind tight jeans and their nuhood bouncing to their walking and they laugh and do they know how they will be penetrated? Have they already done this? And was there love? When they sinned, did they think it was love?

Oh, these kufar! Look at them. In front of a shop, two men play a guitar and drum. One’s hair is long and dirty. The other has no hair, and they play loudly and fast and the guitar player sings with a voice that only shouts, and look at the kafir woman dance to it in the sunlight. Her nose is pierced with silver, as are her ears and the skin above her eyes. Her hair is red and black and blue. Her ugliness is only surpassed by her lack of modesty, her nuhood beneath her T-shirt bouncing and jerking with her movement.

He hurries past them and the happy kufar watching. There is the guitar case of money, of loose change lying in blue fabric. All the money he let the whore April take. She must think him a fool or crazy from drinking. Or both. These people are only happy if you burn with them, and he cannot stop seeing the thrusting. Each woman he
passes, he sees her on her hands and knees, the man’s hands grasping her, the thrusting into her, a depth he did not know they had.

He is nearly hard again and he passes the newsstand. Gray stacks of newspapers, magazines in wooden racks and behind glass and inside the shadows of the shop. Is it possible that even one does not have upon its cover an immodest and beautiful woman?

How weak he was to lie there and do nothing as Tariq pressed the buttons. How
weak
.

There is more music, more dirty musicians in more doorways. Like the various radios playing on the bright beaches of Florida as he and his brothers rode their mopeds, the conflicting sounds then. Always such noise here. Three doorways. Three sorts of music. The young men and now an old one, his beard white, his hair tied backward like a woman, he plays an electric guitar, the sharp notes like needles puncturing the skin. And near the main square and the passing autos, in front of the bookstore and its stone columns and glass doors, a Japanese or Chinese kafir is playing the stringed instrument she holds at her shoulder beneath her chin, her music more beautiful than the others’, but her hair is long and straight and black and he sees her penetrated, only now it is
his
hands grasping her,
his
thrusting.

Do you see the work of Shaytan? Can you feel his power? He is working hard now, is he not? Is he not working hard to confuse him, to weaken him and Tariq? Shaytan has not been able to influence Imad or the Egyptian or, please Allah, any of the others. But he is working hard now to corrupt two of the four who will travel first.

There are the autos and vans passing before him, the smell of exhaust pleasing to him, a scent from home, though the conflicting music behind him is too much, the stringed instrument of the girl, the electric piercings of the old kafir, the drumming farther away, the voices of all the young and old kufar passing him on the sidewalk. Again the horns blaring at him, and Bassam does not remember running into the traffic with his notebook away from the musics and the girl from the east he can see now uncovered.

There is yet another newsstand, this one larger. Many hundreds of
magazines. So many. The shelves are the color of bare flesh. He wants to go inside. But it is Shaytan pulling him. And Bassam runs past the newsstand away from the square and its crowds and shops and warring musics, the Au Bon Pain where earlier he attempted to write to his mother but could not. There were too many young women. The air warm—not like Florida, not like home—but warm so they wore little, these waking, laughing jinn from the fires of Jahannam.

He would write the letter back in the hotel, Tariq exercising with Imad. But Imad was resting and Tariq lay there watching the life of this world as filmed by the kufar, then he pressed Movies. Then Shaytan pressed the rest.

Tariq, you must be strong, brother. You must help me find the river south. You have to be clear, brother. You have to be
pure.

This time no horns. He is across the street upon the sidewalk. The sun shines on the red stone of the high wall of the best school. It shines in the hair of the mushrikoon girls and boys, and Bassam walks among them and through the arched gate into the shaded grounds of this Harvard. There are no guards to stop him. No policemen. Only the young students and the deep green grass beneath the trees. The paved walkways wide and clean. Already there is more quiet. The drums an echoing in the traffic behind him.

O Lord, I ask You for the best of this place and ask You to protect me from its evils
.

He is walking beside a girl and boy holding hands. Her hair is long and blond and she is tall and her back is straight. They speak about someone, a friend, a Jules, lawskule. Bassam cannot place the word. She sees him. She smiles and turns back to her friend, continues her talk of Jules. But her smile is so warm and open and not paid for. Kelly, the trainer, her smile like that. Her bare neck, her hair pinned above it. And April, for just those moments in the end, when he spoke of Khalid, her face a face with no lies masking it. And because this blond girl’s smile was warm, Bassam falls behind and follows them.

Along the high walls beyond the trees rise stone buildings, some of their sides covered with vines and green leaves. And now they are
climbing many steps. They are long and each could hold twenty or thirty people. Some students sit on them and smoke or speak on cell phones or read books or write in notebooks such as the one he holds. He could be one of them. In appearance he could be one of these kufar. He is better dressed than many of them, his khaki pants ironed by himself this morning, his polo shirt clean from the hotel’s laundry service, and before dressing he made the supplication for it. He looks over the students on the steps and enters through the glass doors, and he sees many faces from other parts of the world—Japan, Italy, perhaps Algeria and Bahrain, Cambodia or Vietnam. And of course all the healthy white faces like those of the two he follows into the largest of buildings.

A security officer sits upon a stool beside a desk. He laughs and nods his head with a woman there, the woman’s eyes passing over Bassam for only a moment. The floor is polished stone and gives way to a deep carpet. Everywhere there are students sitting in chairs or at long tables, their books and papers open before them, yet this endless room is quiet. There are only the sounds of turning pages, a cough, whispers. Bassam sits. At this shining wooden table are many chairs but those near him are empty. At the end a black kafir woman writes. She is very dark, the color of a Sudanese. Her eyes move to his and he sees she does not see him but what is in her head to write and he looks downward, again the black whore sitting beside April, the brightly colored flesh she parted for him, just the beginning of a great depth he knows now. He forces the picture from his thoughts. He opens his notebook.

High shelves across from him rise meters in the air. They are filled with books. He can smell them, their dusty pages. Their thick covers. He has never been in a place such as this, but there is the feeling he has—many times. All the people, quiet, working together but separately on similar tasks, the rising ceiling, the carpet beneath him—a
mosque
.

Bassam feels at the farthest edge of falling into a new knowledge, but who are these people to give a building of books the same respect
as the holy place for the Holy One? Look at how they are stored with such precision and such respect when there is only one Book to be read.

These
stupid
people. Look at them, their faces lowered to these pages, studying only the life of this world, preparing to rise within it, to rise in their unbelief to power they will use against his brothers and sisters. So often he has asked himself why do these kufar have so much power? Why have they been given all that they have?

But look, Bassam, at what they have. They have eyes yet they do not see. They have ears yet they do not hear. And from their mouths come only seductions and boasts and lies. And do not forget Yunis 10:88, “‘Lord,’ said Moses, ‘You have bestowed on Pharaoh and his nobles splendor and riches in this life, so that they may stray from Your path.’”

Bassam’s heart pounds inside him but his legs no longer feel too light and his hands are steady. The woman at the desk, how she glanced upon you as if
you
were a student at this best school; to be included in this, something that would make Ahmed al-Jizani proud. Because why do you prepare to write to your honored mother and not your father? His tired eyes lecturing you of jihad. His newly purchased thawb loose upon him. The clothing he buys with his dirty money working for the kufar. And their jahili king selling himself and their kingdom as well, allowing their holy lands to be occupied, blocking the route of the Prophet, peace be upon him, to the farthest mosque in Jerusalem.