Utopia
Authors: Ahmed Khaled Towfik
AHMED KHALED TOWFIK
Translated by Chip Rossetti
The Utopia mentioned here is an imaginary place, as are the characters who live in and around it, even though the author knows for certain that this place
will
exist soon. Any resemblance to places and individuals in our present reality is purely coincidental.
Ahmed Khaled Towfik
Indeed I live in the dark ages!
A guileless word is an absurdity. A smooth forehead betokens
A hard heart. He who laughs
Has not yet heard
The terrible tidings.
Ah, what an age it is …
– Bertolt Brecht, translated by H.R. Hays
Predator
1
It was like the famous old poster for the film
Platoon
. That’s what ran through my mind at the time.
The reason was that I have that poster hanging over my bed.
Willem Dafoe looks up to the sky – nothing separates him from it – lifting his arms as if in a final prayer. He has fallen to his knees after the bullets have ripped him apart, at the moment that death becomes larger than life itself, at the moment that death becomes a kind of artistic beauty.
The scene was fearsome, especially since it wasn’t on the television screen. Everything was real and terrible and cruel and, and …
And seductive.
Please don’t deny it.
I saw him standing, worn out by exhaustion. With the loss of blood and hunger wearing him down, he couldn’t undertake this pursuit to the end. I saw him bend over, his palms on his knees, trying to catch his breath. Then I saw him look up as the helicopter slowly and calmly circled around him. It had all the time in the world: there is no target clearer than an unarmed man in the sands
of the desert. A man worn out by running. A man worn out by hunger. A man worn out by desperation.
Don’t fight it, you idiot! What would a few more moments of living with the Others give you? What haven’t you accomplished in the past twenty years that you planned to accomplish if you’d stayed alive? This flight of yours is no different from a cockroach fleeing on the kitchen wall, or an amoeba sliding under the lens of a microscope. It’s the call of instinct, that’s all. It’s a flight reaction that nature planted within you. You should learn how to disregard it so you can get the rest you deserve.
The machine guns burst into life and he looked up. Yes, those shots are for
your
sake. They trace that long line in the sand, the line that passes by you. Willem Dafoe in the
Platoon
poster.
It occurred to me that film directors were stupid to show someone hit by bullets falling instantly to the ground. No, this man looked up and it seemed as if he wanted to say something, then he fell to the ground, his face in the sand.
Germinal gasped in terror but I noticed that glimmer in her eyes: the glimmer of excitement, no doubt about it. Her chest rose and fell. Our fingers touched as we stood there behind the wire watching the helicopter descend, throwing up a cloud of sand around it. Then the American guard jumped out of it to examine the corpse. He kicked it with the tip of his boot, then bent over to feel the carotid artery.
He gave the thumbs-up sign.
‘Lovely!’ he shouted in English.
Then he ran towards the helicopter and in seconds the giant mythical beast ascended, having completed its hunting assignment. All these guards were retired Marines – I don’t know why – and they certainly weren’t lacking in physical fitness.
Germinal gasped in terror.
Germinal gasped in ecstasy.
Death: the great game we haven’t yet played.
I stand in front of the mirror.
I make sure my hair is shaved in the well-known style of the Mohawk Indians: shaved on the sides, with a tall purple tuft in the middle, like a rebellious wild rooster. My chest is bare except for several bulky necklaces covered with skulls and voodoo icons. I’m not a devil-worshipper; in fact, I don’t believe in the existence of anything at all, but those things look provocative on my chest.
The tattoo is strange, too. Girls here like it. My shorts are carefully designed to show off my legs in the most macho way. Sometimes I go barefoot, but not today. I put the new ring through my nose, and the other ring in my eyebrow. I won’t wear the tongue stud today. Then, patiently, I start colouring my teeth: red for the canines and yellow for the incisors. Blue for the molars. This dye is excellent and doesn’t come off easily. They say it isn’t toxic, but who cares about that? If only it were toxic!
I put in the new contact lenses that turn your pupils white. It has an exciting effect on girls when you look at them with eyes gone white, like you’re the Grim Reaper. It really blows them away.
I make sure that the wound on my forehead is open. I meticulously manipulate the edge of it so it looks bloody. Wounds are a turn-on, no doubt about it. It’s a trend that appeared two years ago, and now there are people who specialise in it. The important thing is for the wound to look as grotesque as possible, and artificial, too, so people who see it won’t be disgusted. There’s a real art to it.
An Israeli doctor who specialises in this art cut this wound for me. He said he studied it in New York. His name was Eli. He was a nice guy. He told me his father got a similar injury in the 1973 war with the Egyptians. He asked me if I knew anything about that: I told him that I had an uncle who had died in that war, but I didn’t know the details. It’s been fifty years since those events. I don’t know why – at some point – the Egyptians used to hate Israelis. But I’ve got no interest in understanding those things. I might go to war, if I was asked to, for one reason: to break up life’s routine. Walking through a hail of bullets in the desert with dead bodies scattered all around! How awesome would that be?
In Utopia, where death retreats behind barbed wires and becomes nothing but a game that adolescents dream of …
Sixteen years old, and you don’t belong anywhere except Utopia. You’re a Utopian resident, softened by a life of luxury and boredom. You end up unable to tell an American from an Egyptian from an Israeli. You end up unable to tell yourself apart from other people. If it weren’t for the remnants of lust in your veins, you couldn’t tell men from women.
Who am I? Let’s not talk about names. What’s the value of names when you’re no different from anyone else?
Salim
bey
told me, ‘You read a lot. You’re crazy.’
I told him that reading, as far as I’m concerned, is a cheap drug. I use it only to withdraw from my conscious self. In the past, they used to read in order to gain consciousness. Imagine that!
I’m no longer a child. I’m past sixteen. I’ve read every book I could get my hands on until I’d had enough. Books are a rare commodity here, but I found a treasure trove of them with Salim
bey
, the editor-in-chief of that newspaper, who lives two hundred
metres from my house. He has lots and lots of books, and I began reading as a challenge, because Mourad doesn’t read, and neither does Larine. It’s beautiful to do something they can’t stand doing.
For some reason, I fell in love with this habit, and found in it magical worlds I could escape to whenever I wanted. Salim
bey
would watch me in amazement when I visited his office, saying, ‘Believe me, son, there’s nothing of interest in those books. I buy them because they make the office look sophisticated, but life is your only teacher.’
I didn’t reply. I would take ten books at a time from him, exchanging them for some Libidafro, which I’d stolen from my father. Salim is a widower who hasn’t remarried. So I can guess what he plans on doing with the Libidafro. This way, before the age of sixteen, I’d read most of the books I’d found on philosophy and religion, as well as novels. I don’t like reading about politics at all, and I take no interest in it. The same goes for history. I also read a lot on the Internet, and I seem to have read more than I should have because I can no longer stand seeing another book. No doubt that’s why I’m more cultured than my friends.
At my relatively young age, I am pretty much satisfied that there is nothing new under the sun, and that not a single thing exists that you can learn any more. There’s a social imbalance that has led to the state we’re in, but it’s an imbalance that should continue. Everyone who tries to reform it risks losing us everything. This is a situation like McCarthyism in the United States, when Americans in the last century felt that they had to defeat every leftist trend because it threatened their very existence. That’s what Salim
bey
told me.
I’ve been intimate with every girl I found appealing, and I’ve tried all kinds of drugs, even the new phlogistine imported from
Denmark, which smells like lemon. They say it’s extremely expensive, but what does ‘extremely expensive’ mean? We chew this phrase in our mouths without knowing its meaning. What I do know is that it takes you far away the moment you put a drop of it on the skin of your forearm, and with it, you can see those seductive flames it gets its name from. You come back to your senses hours later, only to realise you need more.
I had started experimenting with marijuana – no big deal – and I’ve tried ecstasy and LSD. The problem with the latter is that you really can’t be sure you’re still alive until you come down from it. In every group, you have to have one person who doesn’t take it so he can keep an eye on the others: they call that person the ‘trip-sitter’. When euphoria penetrates the trippers’ minds, jumping off a balcony, setting fire to themselves or staring at the sun until they go blind seem like very logical things to do. It’s exciting, but I wouldn’t like to be blind for the rest of my life.
I’ve tried lots of drugs. We buy them from the American guards, but the problem with drugs is that they lose their excitement if they’re easily available. An important part of the game is that they should be forbidden and hard to get hold of; you should already be worried about your next hit as you take the first one. When drugs are available all the time, you lose any pleasure in them. They become boring and vulgar.
It doesn’t help that my parents aren’t used to watching me. No one interferes in my life in any way. I have a right to take anything in any quantity and at any price. If I can’t, then they shouldn’t have had me.
Being a parent isn’t that much work. I could be a father to a hundred sons if you gave me a thousand women, and I’d thank you for them.
Today I told Larine that Suzanne is pregnant.
That’s become routine in my life. I don’t know why nature endowed me with such fertility. My father only had me, and I don’t believe he was capable of having other children. But I came into the world as a real force of nature: I touch a girl and, a month later, she comes to me saying she’s missed her period. What girl over twelve here hasn’t had that experience and got used to it? In any case, the result is the same: I’ll get a cheque from Larine and give it to the girl; the girl will head to the medical centre to get rid of this nightmare. A one-day operation ends it quickly – it’s just that the girl is forced into a life without sex for two months. Really boring.
Suzanne … Katie … Maya … Germinal …
But I prefer the last of them for some reason. It isn’t love, of course. Is she sexually exciting? Maybe. But I no longer know if the girl is a turn-on or not since they all look alike down to the last detail.
In exasperation, Larine told me: ‘Don’t you do anything else with your life except sleep with girls? It’s getting tiresome.’