Beast Of The Heartland And Other Stories Part 22

...and the sun overhead seemed to shift, putting forth prominences that rippled and undulated as in a dance, and shone down a ray of light to illuminate the tallest tower, the one we had sought for all these years, the one whose mystery we must unravel...

...and the opaque image of an old man in a yellow robe was floating above the crowd, his pupils appearing to shift, to put forth fiery threads as did the sun, and he was haranguing us, daring us all to penetrate his tower, to negotiate his webs and steal the secrets of time...

...and after wandering all day, we found a room in an inn not half a mile from the wizard's tower, a mean place with grimy walls and scuttlings in the corners and a straw mattress that crackled when we lay on it. But it was so much more than we'd had in a long, long time, we were delighted, and when night had fallen, with moonlight streaming in and the wizard's tower visible through a window against the deep blue of the sky, the room seemed palatial. We made love until well past midnight, love as we had never practiced it: trusting, unfettered by inhibition. And afterward, still joined, listening to the cries and music of the city, I suddenly remembered my life in that other world, the Spider, Helios Station, everything, and from the tense look on Carolyn's face, from her next words, I knew that she, too, had remembered.

"Back at Helios," she said, "we were making love, lying exactly like this, and..." She broke off, a worry line creasing her brow. "What if this is all a dream, a moment between dying and death?"

"Why should you think that?"

"The Spider... I don't know. I just felt it was true."

"It's more reasonable to a.s.sume that everything is a form of transition between the apartment and this room. Besides, why would the Spider want you to die?"

"Why has he done any of this? We don't even know what he is... a demon, a G.o.d."

"Or something of mine," I said.

"Yes, that... or death."

I stroked her hair, and her eyelids fluttered down.

"I'm afraid to go to sleep," she said.

"Don't worry," I said. "I think there's more to this than death."

"How do you know?"

"Because of how we are."

"That's why I think it is death," she said. "Because it's too good to last."

"Even if it is death," I told her, "in this place death might last longer than our old lives."

Of course I was certain of very little myself, but I managed to soothe her, and soon she was asleep.

Out the window, the wizard's tower -- if, indeed, that's what it was -- glowed and rippled, alive with power, menacing in its brilliance. But I was past being afraid. Even in the face of something asunfathomable as a creature who has appropriated the dream of a man who may have dreamed it into existence and fashioned thereof either a life or a death, even in a world of unanswerable questions, when love is certain -- love, the only question that is its own answer -- everything becomes quite simple, and, in the end, a matter of acceptance.

We live in an old chaos of the sun Wallace Stevens.

ALL THE PERFUMES OF ARABY.

First published in Omni Best Science Fiction 2, edited by Ellen Datlow, 1992.

For nearly two years after my arrival in Egypt, I put off visiting the Pyramids. I had seen them once, briefly at sunset, while en route by car from Alexandria to Cairo. Looming up from the lion-colored sands, their sunstruck sides ignited to a shimmering orange, as if the original limestone veneer had been magically restored, and the shadows in their lee showed a deep mysterious blue, almost purple, like the blood of Caesar's Rome. They diminished me, those ancient tombs. Too much beauty for my deracinated spirit, too much grandeur and immensity. They made me think of history, death, and folly. I had no wish to endure the bout of self-examination a longer visit might provoke. It would be best, I thought, to live a hard, modern life in that city of monuments, free of ponderous considerations and intellectual witness. But eventually curiosity got the best of me, and one afternoon I traveled out to Giza.

This time, swarmed by tourists, displayed beneath an oppressive gray sky, it was the Pyramids that looked diminished: dull brown heaps like the spoor of a huge, strangely regular beast.

I wandered about for more than an hour. I regarded the faceless mystery of the Sphinx and managed to avoid having a video taken atop a camel by a ragged teenager with an old camcorder and the raw scar of an AIDS inoculation on his bicep. At length I leaned up against my Land Rover and smoked a hand-rolled cigarette salted with hashish and opium flakes. I thought in pictures, my eyes closed, imagining ibis G.o.ds and golden sun boats. When a woman's voice with more than a touch of Southern accent spoke from nearby, saying, "You can smell that s.h.i.t fifty feet away," I was so distanced I felt only mild resentment for this interference in the plotlessness of my life, and said, because it required little energy, "Thanks."

She was tall and slender and brown, with a slightly horsy face and generous features and a p.r.o.nounced overbite, the sort of tomboyish look I'd always found attractive, though overall she was a bit sinewy for my tastes. Late twenties, I'd say. About my age. Her skin, roughened by the sun, was just starting to crack into crow's feet, her cheekbones were sharply whittled, and her honey-brown hair, tied back with a bandanna, was streaked blond and brittle at the ends. She had on chino shorts and a white T-shirt and was carrying a net bag that held a canteen, a pa.s.sport wallet, and some oranges.

"Aren't you goin' to put it out?" She gestured at my cigarette.

"Guess I better," I said, and grinned at her as I ground out the b.u.t.t, expecting her to leave now that her prim mission had been accomplished; but she remained standing there, squinting at me.

"You're that smuggler guy, right?" she said. "Shears."

"Shields. Danny Shields." I was not alarmed that she knew my business -- many did -- but I was annoyed at not being able to recall her. She had nice eyes, dark brown, almost oriental-shaped. Her legs were long, lean and well defined, but very feminine. "Sorry," I said. "I don't remember your name."

"Kate Corsaro," she said after a moment's hesitation. "We've never met. Just somebody pointed you out to me in a night club. They told me you were a smuggler." She left a pause. "I thought you lookedinterestin'."

"First impressions," I said. "You can never trust 'em."

"Oh, I don't know 'bout that." She gazed off toward the Great Pyramid; then, after a second or two: "So what do you smuggle? Drugs?"

"Too dangerous. You run drugs, you're looking at the death penalty. I have something of a moral problem with it, too."

"Is that right?" She glanced down at the remains of my cigarette.

"Just because I use doesn't mean I approve of the business."

"Seems to me that's tacit approval."

"Maybe so, but I see a distinction. Whatever else pays, I'll deal with it. Diamonds, exotic software, hacksaw blades... whatever. But no drugs."

"Hacksaw blades?" She laughed. "Can't be much profit in that."

"You might be surprised."

"Been a while since anything's surprised me," she said.

A silence stretched between us, vibrant as a plucked wire. I wanted to touch the soft packs of muscle that bunched at the corners of her mouth. "You've come to the right place," I said. "I'm surprised all the time here."

"Is that so?"

"Like now," I said. "Like this very minute, I'm surprised."

"This here?" she said. "This is just doin' what comes naturally."

Despite her flirtatious tone, I had an idea she was getting bored. To hold her interest I told stories about my Arab partner in the old bazaar, about moving robotic elements and tractor parts. It's odd, how when you come on to someone, even with the sort of half-a.s.sed move I was making, you invest the proceedings with unwarranted emotion, you imbue every action and thought with luminous possibility, until suddenly all the playful motives you had for making the move begin to grow legitimate and powerful.

It is as if a little engine has been switched on in your heart due to some critical level of heat having been reached. It seems that random and impersonal, that careless. Not that I was falling in love with her. It was just that everything was becoming urgent, edgy. But soon I began to bore myself with my own glibness, and I asked Kate how she had ended up in Egypt.

"I was in the Middle East nine years ago. I had an itch to see it again."

"In Egypt?"

"Naw, I was in Saudi. But I didn't want to go back. I couldn't walk around free like here."

I was just putting those two facts together, 1990 and Saudi Arabia, when the sun came out full, and something glinted on the back of her right hand: three triangular diamond chips embedded in the flesh. I noticed a slight difference in coloration between the wrist and forearm, and realized it was a prosthesis. I had seen similar ones, the same pattern of diamond chips, all embedded in artificial limbs belonging to veterans of Desert Storm. Kate caught me staring at the hand, shifted it behind her hip; but a second later she moved it back into plain view.

"Somethin' botherin' you?" she asked flatly.

"Not at all," I said.

She held my eyes for a few beats. The tension in her face dissolved. "It bothers some," she said, flexing the fingers of the hand, watching them work. She glanced up at me again. "I flew a chopper, case you're wonderin'."

I made a noncommittal noise. "Must have been tough."

"Yeah, maybe, I don't know. Basically what happened was just plain stupid." She lapsed into another silence, and I grew concerned again that I might be losing her interest.

"Would you like to go somewhere?" I asked. "Maybe have a drink?"

She worried her lower lip. "A drink's not all we're talkin' about here, is it?"

I was pleased by her frankness, her desire to move things along. Like her ungilded exterior, I took this to indicate inner strength. "I suppose not." She let out a breath slowly. "Know why I came back to this part of the world? I want somethin' from this place. I don't even know what exactly. Sometimes I think it's just to feel somethin' strong again, 'cause I've been so insulated against feelin' the past nine years. But whatever, I don't wanna be hangin'

around anybody who's goin' to hold me back." Another sigh. "It's probably weird, me sayin' all this, but I don't want any misunderstandin's."

"No, it's not weird. I can relate." Sad for her, I was careful not to let the words sound too facile, because though I did understand her, I no longer believed in what she thought was out there. I felt I should make a stab at honesty. "Me, I'm not looking for anything," I told her. "I just try to accept what comes."

"That's more than most," she said glumly.

Overhead the contrail of a fighter became visible, arrowing east toward Syria and the latest headlines.

Seeing it appeared to brighten Kate.

"Well," she said, shouldering her bag. "I reckon I'll take you up on that drink."

Around midnight I got up from my bed and went into the living room, to a telephone table by French doors that stood open onto a balcony, where I dialed the Belgian girl whom I had been f.u.c.king for the past year. When she answered I said, "Hey, Claire."

"Danny? Where are you?"

"Out and about." I tried to think of something else to say. She was helping to install an advanced computer in one of the mosques, one of those projects cloaked in secrecy. I found the whole thing immensely boring, but now I thought talking about it might be distracting. "How's work?" I asked.

"The usual. The mullahs are upset, the technicians are incompetent."

I imagined I could hear her displeasure in the bursts of static on the line. It was a cool night, and I shivered in the breeze. Sweat was drying on my chest, my thighs. Faint wailing music and a chaos of traffic noises from the street below. A slant of moonlight fell over the tile floor, a thin tide that sliced across my ankles and bleached my feet bone white. Beyond the light, two chairs and a sofa made shadowy puzzles in a blue darkness.

"You're with somebody, aren't you?" Claire said.

"You know me," I said.

"Perhaps I should come over. Make it a threesome."

"Not this time." But I could not help picturing them together. Claire, soft and white, black hair and large, startling indigo eyes, the submissive voluptuary, the intellectual with a doctorate in artificial intelligence. Kate, all brown and lithe, pa.s.sionate and violently alive.

"Who is she?"

"An American. She just got a divorce, she's doing some traveling."

A p.r.i.c.kly silence. "Why did you call?"

"I wanted to hear your voice."

"That's bulls.h.i.t," she said. "You're worried about something. I always get these calls when something's not going the way you planned."

I hung my head, listening to the little fizzing storms on the line.

"Is she getting to you, Danny? Is that it?"

Through the French doors I could see a corner of the building that housed police headquarters on Tewfik Square, and facing it, reddish-brown under the arc lights, the colossal statue of Rameses II, marooned on a traffic island, ruler now of a tiny country of parched gra.s.s and chipped cement, a steady stream of traffic coursing around it. "That's why you called," Claire said. "Maybe you're falling in love a little bit, and you wanted... what do you say? A reality check. Well, don't worry, Danny. The world's still just like it was this morning. The big ones still eat the little ones, and you and I, we have our arrangement. We still" -- she let rancor creep into her voice -- "we still are there for each other."

"It must be the drugs that make you so wise," I said, both irritated and comforted that she knew me so well.

"That's it! That's it, exactly. And you, lover. It's been an education with you."

I heard a noise behind me. Kate was standing in the bedroom door, a sheet wrapped around her body, her face in shadow.