The Process

13. YOU (FEM.)

You yourself were the one who first pointed out to Mya, if not to Thay Himmer, that immortality was the one and only proposition worth pushing, weren’t you? Well, how do you feel about that since torture, Amos? Although, I suppose, an eternity of torture would be very much like an eternity of anything else, wouldn’t it; just a terrible bore in the end? And, as for hellfire, we have it all around us out here in the Sahara, whether the Muslims believe in the eternity of Gehenna or not. Funny, I was talking that over with Mohamed only the other evening before our terrible trouble came up. No, don’t try to talk! How that brute could have attached an electrode to your tongue and your penis! What villains they are! I mean, men.

You know what I mean about men, even if you are a man, too; or, are you entirely? Surely, half of you at least, must be me. I’m your sister, your twin, your other you in yourself whether you like it or not and, it’s true, Amos; you do! Your poor peeling penis can’t make all that much difference, can it? Is that reason enough to be other than I am and not think as I think? But, I suppose you’re a man for other reasons, too, besides this bit of festering flesh that you have and I don’t. Oh, don’t worry, we’re going to save it. Mohamed seems to have circumcised you a second time with fire but, apart from having to leave in the catheter, Francis says it looks good. The burns under your tongue aren’t so bad, either, that they’ll destroy your centers of speech. We’re not going to leave you tongue-tied like Thay. I do think it’s odd that two of Mya’s merry men should be speechless at a time like this. No, don’t try to talk!

I know what time it is: Present Time, indeed! I thought we were supposed to be on top of it and, here, Present Time is all over us like a great hairy blanket; the Sahara, itself. I never intended to play it like this and I still count on you to get us out of here. There, in the clinic, is my husband whom I love and respect, inside there trying to dig Olav’s bullet out of my lover’s arm: that murderous Mohamed, who would have killed me if you hadn’t flown to my defense. Francis was no use at all: I owe you my very life, Amos, I really do. Mohamed’s a maniac, isn’t he? Imagine him killing poor Karl Barx but, then, all Arabs panic with dogs and dogs don’t like them, either. I don’t know that I like dogs all that much myself. I must say, I thought that very typical of our darling little sister, Ana Lyse, to bring such a big dog along with her and call him Karl Barx. Ana Lyse, to bring such a big dog along with her and call him Karl Barx. And that woman; that newspaperwoman! Do you want to know where she is right now? No?

She’s right in there alongside Dr. Fard in Mohamed’s quarters, playing nurse and knowing full well — Francis is famous for it — that the doctor can never resist taking the nearest nurse every time he sees blood. That’s how I first got Francis myself. We had a badly wounded guerrilla fighter in the surgery, dying on a slippery couch. As the man was apparently passing away, Dr. Fard got more and more visibly excited and I did, too, I must admit; it’s a very natural reaction to life coming and going, after all isn’t it? We were both breathing hard as Francis motioned me to help put the man on the floor and then ordered me to get up on the couch in his place. Francis was all over me in a second; that’s always his trouble the first time around. While he was washing his cock in the laboratory sink, I thought I heard the patient stirring under the couch; so I swung around, leaning over to see. Well, Francis, catching sight of my bare white bum in the air, I suppose, simply bounded back without wiping his hands of the soap and breached me brutally from behind for the first time in my life. It was, well, tremendous. The trouble was that when we got married it never happened again quite like that. Francis is getting on, you know, and he’s had a hard life. We don’t have seconds and thirds any more; that’s out! I caught him once giving himself a series of hormones but nothing much came of it. I wish Miss Media luck but if Mohamed came up on her, now, that would be another story, indeed! Mohamed has positively seismic orgasms: he comes like an earthquake. No, don’t even try to talk!

You didn’t see Mohamed at his best: or, maybe, you did! Aren’t you the least little bit masochistic, just like me? If you like being penetrated, you really must be. You must have been almost tickled to death when he turned his juice into you, Amos; confess! Ooh, I can feel it, almost. You know, Amos, it’s true; I really can feel what you feel. I’m you. It’s nice having you all naked here in my bed where I can soothe you and care for you and torture you just a little bit, too, to keep you alive until the next act of all this nonsense the Himmers have wrought. Mya’s been using you like a tool, Amos! I know what she wants. She wants the Sahara and the Sahara itself is Police! Oh. There; I’m so terribly sorry, did I hurt your poor tool? I’m changing this catheter; don’t try to talk!

You cannot imagine how boring it’s been out here in this stainless-steel fortress, waiting for all this to take place. Practically the only regular visitor we have is old Professor Feldzahler, who comes whizzing over here in his helicopter from his atomic center in Reggan, looking more and more, talking more and more and acting more and more like the prophet Elijah, coming in his fiery chariot when he comes. You remember what an absentminded professor he used to be; well, it’s all gone now. He can frighten the stuffings out of even Captain Mohamed with his apocalyptic atomic talk. While he was haranguing Francis, the two of us used to slip away into the flowering oleander bushes down by the oued. Mohamed’s very well built. Things got more complicated around here when the Queen of the Tuareg blew in one day in a sandstorm. The sentinel at the gate who first found her would have raped her and robbed her, naturally, if Captain Mohamed hadn’t just happened along on a tour of inspection: he’s a terrible snoop. He’s forever turning the poor political prisoners out for a bed-check after midnight, as if he thought any of us would be mad enough to throw ourselves away in the Sahara. The Sahara, itself, is our jail. We depend on this fortress for our lives, after all. What makes you think Mya can keep it running for even a single day more, tell me that! No. No, don’t try to talk!

Nobody loves Sister Cassandra, I know. That’s what Francis and I have been calling the queen, as a matter of fact. That poor queen! She has nothing at all but those tattered blue robes she’s wearing; while she was unconscious, I went through her things. We found her clutching a roll of red rawhide, which was all that was left of the right royal leather tent around which the Tuareg used to assemble from all over the Sahara to the sound of the royal drum. When we took her in here we had no place for her, really, but a corner of the kitchen which we divided by hanging up her redskin curtains on the clothesline to give her some privacy. However, we both have to do our cooking in there so it’s gotten to be more than a bit of a strain on the both of us. I thought Francis might have eyes for the queen but have you noticed the goat-smell of untanned leather in here? That’s it. It ought to be nice to keep a queen in the kitchen but not when her leatherwork stinks!

Then, we had this odd English couple, mother and son, who came through here on foot. We called them Senior and Junior because they both had exactly the same name: Windfred Something-Something, I think. Senior knows every last blasted plant in the Sahara by name in both Latin and Arabic: the British used to train their people really well, didn’t they? I feel sure she was sent to track down something like Mya’s Borbor, don’t you? Junior is a man in his middle fifties; so Senior must be getting on for eighty, at least, but she’s as spry as a cricket and keeps the accounts. Junior, with a medical certificate from Medina and Mecca and a very sharp straight razor, does antiseptic circumcisions for money in the villages along the way. They get to places where the circumciser hasn’t made his rounds in years. By the time they come along, so she tells me, there are often large groups to be circumcised, including boys grown so big they get an erection at the sight of the knife and ejaculate all over your hands; sperm and blood. Would you like a job like that? No, don’t try to talk!

I became so impressed by the old woman’s knowledge of plants that I wrote this in my journal after the Windfreds left. May I read it to you?

Maybe I would get out of myself more if I knew something about botany. As it is, the Sahara is here at my throat. Sometimes I almost go crazy inside this place that wears as thin as a sheet of paper in the whine of the wind while that very real monster, Ghoul, growls around right outside, forbidding me to open up. He’s forever snuffling along the windowsill behind me or crawling along the crack under the door. I know, if I open up, he’ll be bounding around in the room like a fist. My refuge is here in this journal between whose pages I cower as though I were between the covers of a cardboard castle and I try to lie as flat as ink on the paper or, at most, bodied out no more than the dried desert flowers I press between these same pages.

There, isn’t that rather good? By the way, I think it a very bad magic for the Himmers to call their ruler Ghoul. That’s really tempting the desert itself, don’t you think? I say that’s going too far. Well, listen to this:

When I can get out of this starfish fortress, this hospital jail, this loony-bin which the clever Chinese anchored down to this rock of the Hoggar, I go botanizing. I don’t learn much, naturally, not knowing enough to begin. It’s as simple as that, but, at the same time, I feel sure that no botany book anywhere reproduces these ferociously ambitious plants I come across out in the Sahara. I observe them from a safe distance on some of my walks. These plants are at war, both with the Sahara, the sand and each other but, also, they are on the eternal lookout for any intruder who happens to put one foot out in front of the other through the desert.

There are plants out here with spined tendrils like elaborate steel traps and humanoid plants like silently screaming witches staked into the ground. I wouldn’t trust the plants out here with as little as one drop of water. It’s as plain as the Sahara itself that they don’t mean us any good; any more than Captain Mohamed does the last gazelles he guns down from his jeep. If the plants had their way, they would tear us to shreds and butcher every last one of us for casual manure if they could. If you take this ten-power reading glass of mine to get a closer look at these so-called plants, you will see that they are out there adding hook to handle; one saber joint to the next and all that on top of sawteeth, prickles, darts, barbs and every angle of thorn. The wind is their ally and is always behind them to give a push in order to slash at each other or you or any intruder; animal, human or plant. They would contend, I suppose, that they fight for water but I see their innate hostility as just one more example of the extreme nature of the Sahara; of the world.

You see what I’m getting at, don’t you? We are, all of us here, today and every day, in an extreme situation — between birth and death; you agree? Is there some still more extreme situation in which we can imagine ourselves? Yes; the extreme situation of leaving here willingly; do you follow me? Can you follow me if we go? Just nod your head: you don’t have to talk. I don’t mean just silly old Death, either; I mean sneaking past him. Oh, I don’t mean necessarily bodily but maybe so; maybe even physically; maybe as if we were just thinking-crystals in some other state, imagine. Well, it’s a lot less unthinkable since Space, isn’t it? Anyway, our Dr. Feldzahler says: “There is no Place in Space!” No hope of heaven or home out there, either, but, maybe, a hope of my I being You everywhere, do you see? Otherwise, a rather grim prospect for us space creatures, isn’t it; caught like astronauts dependent on their bodies like Thay inside his iron lung? No, don’t talk!

Francis and I were out in the jeep with the top down one day. We drove over to a place called Tit where there is what might be a Roman ruin and, on the way back, a sudden curtain of sand blew up and encircled us with the oddest green light. On the inside of this funnel, Francis and I saw huge but hardly distorted images of ourselves hanging there, hovering ahead of us, upside down. When we got back, the Queen told us the Tuareg say that is the last vision of those about to drown in the sand. Typical rubbish, isn’t it; how would she know? I do know, of course, as does anyone else whose name has been writ in sand, that the Sahara could breathe and cover us all forever like a book, closing on us, right now, but I wasn’t frightened when I saw my vision. I threw out my arms to throw them around myself but I faded in front of myself as I went. Wasn’t that sad? I’d like to walk into my own image as if it was you. Just imagine, you and I are on opposite sides of some shiny surface like a two-way mirror but thinner than paper; dividing two mirror-identical worlds, yours and mine. We stand as naked as you are now on my bed but without the bandages, of course. It’s so hot in here without the air-conditioning, I wish Thay would go back to his Imsak with Mya. So, I strip off all my clothes: like this! There, light flickers and ripples equally over my naked body and yours; shimmering between us. Light rushes up like a curtain or drops like a guillotine, pulsing between your side of the mirror and mine. Now, I am the bold one, of course, with nothing to lose and a penis to gain, so I leap to embrace the image of me which is, brother, you! And, brother, that’s what I really want; to be with the boys. I want to be able to turn over—Click! — the switch that made me a woman and you a man. I want to be both of us, Amos! No, don’t even try to talk back!

There, do you hear it? The air-conditioning is going again. That means Thay is at Imsak with Mya. Do you want to know, Amos; that makes my flesh creep! That woman’s an addict; no, don’t attempt to talk! I know she has been giving all of you her Borbor, for years. I know the whole lot of you have been borborized over and over again by her until all your value-judgments have been wiped out. I’ve had Borbor from Mya’s hands, too; don’t forget, she really sprinkles it around. Borbor has no effect on women except to make them a little lascivious; that’s the whole point. I’m not against vice, heaven forbid! and, besides, who am I to throw the first little stone? I used to make Mohamed take me “botanizing in his military jeep because it excited me so to think of what he might do to me when he machine-gunned down the gazelles. He’s a horrible racist, of course, but not as far as women are concerned.

He even stopped passing remarks about Professor Feldzahler when the old man showed up here with his new assistant over there in Reggan. She claims her name is Chungalorn Patticheki and she’s a Loatian who studied physics in France but I’d swear she was some sort of Chinese. No point in warning the professor, though. He calls her his “Pattycake,” and he’s a completely changed man. She comes on like a Dragon Lady in a black leather flying jacket and handles his helicopter like a man. I wonder where Thay Himmer would fit her into the game. That Thay Himmer, his games will be the death of all of us, yet. Well, that’s not entirely fair, I admit: the professor’s problems are equally apocalyptic, I suppose. He’s been having terrible troubles over there on his atomic pile, facing outright revolt on the part of his young crew of mercenary mathematicians with long bristly hair standing straight up all over their heads. They’re all in their twenties and pretty pent-up in the middle of nowhere, you bet! With nothing better to do, a gang of them have been feeding the computers with a calculation designed to predict when the next terrestrial magnetic-switch will take place; when the North Pole becomes the South Pole—click! — just like that!

The maddest of all these mathematicians worked on Telstar before he came out here and he insists on using a Chinese method called the Shortest Path. He claims to have already come up with an approximate calculation which practically throws the switch into Present Time — now! He goes around with a button he made for himself, reading: BOMB NOW, pinned to his atomic smock. Feldzahler insists the whole thing be double-checked, of course, just to give them something to do, but even he has to admit that the very calculations in which they are engaged are a danger in themselves. The Shortest Path, he claims, cuts swathes like cycles of light-years through the sea, the electro-magnetic sea which surrounds us. These very calculations are capable of pushing time further back than Fardism ever dreamed of and, therefore, they are building up an electronic tidal wave capable of sweeping down and over-whelming the lot of us; switching our current. What happens then? The professor, in his role of Elijah, suggests that all floods have their Ararat and, therefore, this time, because of the peculiar magnetic fields which are swirling around us, here right now, the Hoggar may prove to be it. Of all those in Present Time, we alone may be saved. No, don’t say a word!

That’s what I said: there’s no point in trying to leave here right now. We might just as well, for the moment, sit back and wait for the end of the world. We’re all waiting for someone or something, always, so why not wait for that? In the meantime, just let me read you something I wrote:

Professor Feldzahler says that, from his helicopter, he can see new sorts of erosion eating into the Sahara surrounding us; much more every trip. We notice it, too. Great gashes have sliced themselves into the hills between here and Tit, making crevasses which have cut off the road north. Feldzahler says that, from the air, he can see that all the trails which lead up to the Hoggar, here, have been broken off as if the Sahara were ebbing away from us, loosening the sand which took so long, so many eons, to gather in this volcanic cup. Those tremendous flash floods which sweep over the Sahara like a great floor mop, drowning countries bigger than France in an hour, are pulling the Sahara out from underneath us. Enormous flying dunes as big as provinces have suddenly marched out of the Great Sandy Erg to “colonize” broad expanses of flat reg over which trucks used to run. Professor Feldzahler saw with his own eyes a stretch of hammada cliff many miles long abruptly declare itself crystalline under some invisible stress. The whole red range stretching off into the endless horizon, suddenly shattered and fell like a curtain. A serpentine cloud of dust as long as a frontier slowly rose in the air like a dragon who had just laid a glittering trail of smashed polygonal spars, each one as tall as a fallen cathedral spire.…

That’s what I was writing when the professor called on the shortwave to say; we still don’t know what. You see, he and I had agreed to discuss things over the air in the language we both knew which was the least likely to be understood. It so happens that we both speak Swiss Romanch; me from the years I spent in that school in Rikon in Switzerland when I was interned there during the war. I don’t know where he picked up his but that’s what tore it. That evil eavesdropping spy, Mohamed, how would he know? He was sure it was Hebrew, of course. I barely had time to put a call in to you at “Malamut” before he was after me, waving a pistol. The key was open: you heard what he called me: “Jezebel! Spy! Bitch!” It was wonderful of you to come to the rescue like that. We simply couldn’t have survived another day in this place together but you had to pay so dearly for the help you brought me; you poor thing. No, don’t try to talk!

Just listen to the Sahara out there for a moment. You know how they always say they are going to the Sahara even when they just take a step out of doors? Mohamed does. Well, there it is whining to be let in; the Sahara, do you hear it? I swear, if you could look out and see it, it would be lying out there with its chin in its hands, grinning. Sometimes, when I am alone, reading or writing and not paying any attention to it, why, it’s suddenly there; here alongside of me or, even, inside of me, breathing along with me but just out of time until, in a moment, I’m breathless; the Sahara is smothering me. I’ve been lying there where you are, Amos, when it has come down on me like a lover trying to get into me and I panic like a fish with its mouth open so, like: O!

Then, at other times, I know the desert’s a void like the thin air outside of the cabin at thirty thousand feet up and we’re all ready to explode out into it when, suddenly, there is this babble of voices outside like a whole tribe of Arabs riding by in the night. The wind marches right up and knocks on the door like a master proclaiming his right to get in. When you don’t open up, the wind takes a few paces back and runs at the door, knocking more loudly again. Then, it gives up with a whoop and goes swooping away just to fool you. All the time, it’s right out there waiting for you. Intent as a cat, it tries to push one silky sand-paw under the door to catch at some one little thing in the room, as a cat will; chasing it around in one tight little swirl while all the rest of the room watches, perfectly still. The Sahara is out there, always, pleading and teasing to please be let in. When it does get in and I fight with it, it snarls back at me until I pick it up by the scruff of the neck and throw it back outdoors. Through this very window, sometimes, I can see the Sahara march off with its great bushy tail stiff in the air as it strides down the dead-end avenues of the star-shaped fort where the barbed-wire thickens in the sand.

Here’s a note I wrote on one of those days:

Spoons rasp horribly over the bottoms of our soup plates. Impossible to keep the sand out of the food. Chewing, one fears for one’s teeth. Sand seems to sift through concrete walls and to abrade the surfaces of even stainless steel. Sand hangs glittering in the dry air; glassy, metallic and dangerous. I am afraid to breathe for fear of tearing my lungs. No filter is fine enough to keep the sand out because, diamond cut diamond, the sand crystals are filing each other down into scarcely palpable dust. My pen squeals over this paper. Behind the gritty whisper of the sand, I hear a rasping silence like white-sound feedback.

There, Amos, you see; it would take words ground into gravel to get that down. These aren’t just my fantasies, either. Professor Feldzahler has seen from his helicopter an entire geological skin of the earth peeling off like a scab around the base of this volcanic carbuncle we live on. The bare cheek of the Sahara on this side of the planet is getting some sort of solar burn. Every day, you can notice, you can feel the sand slipping away from under our feet, ever-so slowly, a grain at a time, as it drains out of this big basalt cup our particular spar of stone stands in. Those chinese geomancers knew what they were doing when they pinned Star Citadel here. They picked out spots like this all over Africa as if they were playing a game. Everyone, everywhere, feels that the game is just about up. We feel it even more hauntingly here. Present Time is draining away from this point like the sand in an hourglass.

There, how is that catheter, dear? Amos, just let me take a look at your dressings.