The Process

16. THEY

They can all be rubbed out by the zikr, of course! Wow! The minute I typed those last words to YOU, I knew what had to be done: Wow! Anything to get myself out of that trap in Tam. I paid the lady gladly; the Emerald for my UHER, cheap at any price. It was a simple matter, then, to record the zikr on a loop of spliced tape; playing endlessly over and over, again and again and again.

I press the old button to give it a whirl; double speed and, then, double that:

Rub out the word … Out-word rub Thee … The Rub-out word … Word out-rub Thee … Word rub Thee out … Out the Rub-word … Rub out the Word …

Such is the process.

The word-process in reverse sounds less like blank verse than it does like a garbage-disposal unit built into a kitchen sink. Be as careful about inserting your finger in the running loop of words as you would be about plunging your finger down your own throat. Abrupt word-withdrawal can be a shattering experience. Taken cold-turkey, it can cramp you with chills of panic as the seasick words swirl around in a long ring-a-rosy like a vomit of alphabet soup. The nymph Nausea grabs you by the gullet, throwing you into severe anti-orgasmic spasm while Pan, the dumb little brute-god, attacks you along with his goats:

… frisking you, fucking you … biting you, butting you … taking you, leaving you. … Gone!

I clench my eyes tight for one pico-second, just the time for one all-knowing blink, and I open them again. They are … gone! Gone, leaving me speechless! What a relief to be back again at my own station in life. After all, I and only I; Ulys O. Hanson, III, of Ithaca, N. Y. — or whoever this is that I am — I am the sole captain of this super-stoned subway-system called Patience which burrows under the sands of the Sahara and — man! this subway sails only on keef. Borbor? What a bore! What a mothering bore! One thing I can tell you, I have come a long way but I’m back. I am not about to sign any more of that crew on again, ever! I learned my lesson with those characters. I have changed and, I think, progressed.

Could that be the clatter of my coffee cup crashing?

I am about thirty thousand feet high this morning so I have to parachute down from my crown to take a better look at those twin mountains I see down there, looking like loaves of brown bread cast in bronze. They are — if I can believe anything any more — my own feet. From between them, a dark brown oued is crawling across the Sahara paved with cement. Higher up, on the marble plateau of the table in front of me, the flash flood of coffee spreads slowly but inexorably across my still unfinished letter to the Fundamental Foundation, blotting it out. I crumple up the soiled page, not forgetting that I still have that other letter to write; my letter of application to the Independent School of Algut. I must remember to ask them if they want their new assistant headmaster to be both a pot-smoker and Black.

Out there in the heat on the Place de France, I can feel the tangle of midday traffic on the Boulevard thickening and tightening around me like a web. When I peer at the scene over the tops of my shades, Tanja appears a bit peaky but I have to admire that every last detail is bright, bright, bright! Dazzled by all the candy-colored little blobs of light frantically jazzing each other out there, I pull down my shades to take a reading on my watch. It is just a few minutes past noon and here I am back on the terrace of the Café de Paris up on the Boulevard, penniless on that very corner Hamid once called the Cape of Good Hope. Slightly shaken to find myself still shipwrecked here, I take out my last white handkerchief to wave it, unconsciously, around like a flag. Forgetting for a moment what I took it out for, I decide not to mop up the coffee with it and break into a lunatic laugh.

I laugh at the very idea of letters. How can mere words get me across half a lifetime in the Sahara and back again in a matter of minutes! The thought of it makes a shiver run through me like someone just walked on my grave. My scalp tingles and tightens like a drumhead over the open roof of my skull. My hairs uncurl stiffly, one by one; all frizzling out in an electronic halo that buzzes around my ears like an alarm. My ears swell and stand up in total erection like the ears of the jerboa when he hears the fennec hunting him down. Tin-tinnabulating choirs of lullilooing women ululate like a limitless pasture of bluebells, one bluebell to every square mile, ringing out over the Sahara after any short season of rain. A sudden squeal of brakes on the Boulevard in Tanja cuts through the heavy hum of the traffic on the Place de France like the jerboa’s dying scream. I nearly jump out of my skin.

I sat there feeling as if I had been turned into stone. Slowly, I swiveled my eyes around like a periscope until I caught the glint off the glass on a big old British car pulled up right in front of me. Trust any White Hunter to spot me as soon as I show the white flag! Slowly and stiffly, I brought the full power of my blackest Black Look to bear on the bold blank face of a white woman, obviously American, despite the desert drag she had on. The cheap blue cotton sari she had pulled over her head made her look dissolute rather than decent; like the defrocked mother superior of some lay order of barefoot working nuns. She hung one mottled-blue arm out of the side of the car nearest me like a slab of bad veal and put her other hand up to shade her eyes from the burning sun as she trailed her big tits back and forth over the steering wheel of her rented Rolls Royce, with its GBZ plates from Gibraltar. In a flash, I dug her essential indifference to all experience and association. That placid stupidity overlaid evident cunning: that soft firmness, her motherly look, was a cover for cruelty. Yet, there she sat projecting all this bundle like a challenge no man could afford to dismiss and, at the moment, she shone for no one but me. Instinctively, I jerked up, stripped naked, lathered myself all over with soap, waved my big cock at her, rinsed myself off, dressed and sat down like a good old boy; a real spade stud. She did not blink. The striped awning flapped over my head as a red-hot gust of the gaïla, the noon wind, grabbed at my breath and — who should bounce out of the back of that old British pile but Hamid; my Moroccan mock-guru himself!

I thought sure I had left Hamid safely tied down with his family and flocks on his Pan mountain but trust Hamid to come up with any eerie American couple rolling around Morocco, on the loose in a Rolls Royce. After all, the world is Hamid’s parish and all such, ah, “spiritual” chores of this caliber are part of his diocesan duties as a self-imposed “guide.” From the back of this rusty old Rolls, a youngish billiard-bald whitey with buck-teeth and bug-eyes, obviously the husband, bobbed his head and grinned out at me; giving me the greedies, too, if you please. I could see at a glance that Hamid had this one firmly fixed on his big hook. Somehow, from even fifteen good feet away, these people embarrassed me: they looked too eager and too shoddily disguised. My first guess was that Hamid had hustled them in a hurry through some “cheap bazaar belong to a friend,” where these buffoons come out the other end after great expense, masquerading as ersatz Arabs.

In fact, it turned out that Hamid had found them already dressed like this when he waved them down on the open road, on their way back from their first trip to the Sahara. Hamid was born to be a highwayman rustling Christian captives. All he has to do is to squirt them one look with his watermelon-pip eyes and promise to show them the Rope trick. They loop his lasso around their own necks. When they stumble after him into his Moroccan corral, he paints them in his own colors and rigs them as “Ringers” before he hawks them about in the world. I guessed that the woman took to Hamid’s high-handed treatment less well than the husband. She seemed a shade sullen and resentful; the white American look. Hamid bustled up to my table, cunning as a koala bear in his wooly jellaba, coming on strong to me like the spurious pusher of slaves. Hamid always has a bargain but, as they said of a man more after my own hue, Othello: “These Moors are changeable in their wills.” So, when you deal in this kinda merchandise on the hoof, you don’t shilly-shally around in the marketplace, do you? One single well-chosen word from Hamid, “Food!” and he had me on my feet. I was on! I rang down my last dirham on the marble-topped table and the two of us, arm in arm, à pas de loup, hungrily stalked our prey in their car.

“Him ’n’ Her,” as Hamid always called them, were dying to take us to lunch in their cool colonial villa out on the Old Mountain Road, overlooking the Straits of Gibraltar, in the middle of a garden set out with one hundred and sixty varieties of flowering mimosa planted by the brother-in-law of an English lord over a hundred years ago, now, at the end of a delicious ten-minute drive. In Tanja, the past is that close to hand. I am getting all this load from Her, up in front. Back there with Hamid, there is not word one out of Him although I can feel Him practically panting like an Irish setter down the back of my neck. I thought, maybe the language difficulty made for the silence between Him and Hamid but I was wrong. When I got it from Her, as we sailed through “Suicide Village,” that they were missionaries from Champagne, Illinois, I felt like peeling right out of the car.

The Hymners, as I decided to call them, had rented a big old house it would take about ten servants to run and there was not one single servant in sight. The Hymners, in fact, kept a pretty seedy house. Piles of old magazines and tracts slithered about underfoot or slid from stacks, high in the halls through which they led us straight to the kitchen. You could see the Hymners liked that room the best. They had modernized it, as she said, with paint, plastics and appliances. Hymner got down to his chores without saying a word. Like a wizard, he whipped indented metal-foil trays of nameless foodstuffs out of a deep-freeze as big as a bank. Then, like a flash, he slid these through an infra-red ray oven on the wall and slapped them on the kitchen table in front of us piping hot but, before we could get down on all fours to gobble up this great chow, we had to say grace.

That is, Mrs. Hymner — call me Maya; like the Great Mother, she said, coming right out with it — Maya Hymner said grace wrapped in the endless yards of carbon-paper indigo-dipped blue material it takes to make a dress for a dancing girl in the desert. Some of those Guedra girls get so big they have to do their dance sitting down. Maya’s gown swathed her like a tent but, when I squinted up my eyes at her, she looked like a giant bluebell to me. She had blue donkey-beads and cowrie shells braided into a sort of wild Saharan hairdo she allowed it had taken three women a week to plait on her head, but she wore no jewelry at all and strictly no makeup; except she was all smudgy-blue around the edges from the indigo dip. Somehow, despite this disguise, Maya managed to look one hundred percent corn-fed, barefoot, big old American girl with enlarged pores and gray skin. I shot this good look at her as she bowed her veiled head in prayer, spilling out a long flowery oriental-type grace over the plastic-topped table. To my astonishment, if ever I can be astonished by Hamid, I heard him gabbling along after her in his best hobbled English. Hymner just stood there agape, wordlessly gazing on Hamid with the liquid look of a novice-master glowing over his latest Adept but there was still no word out of Him. I raised a tall eyebrow as Maya went on pouring out an entire seed catalogue of heavily scented flowers, endless bushel baskets of rare jewel-stones and piles of precious metals that clinked out of her like a jackpot of more than oriental confusion. At least, I knew where we were at: my mother once had a brush with Bahaï. Lest I be recorded as one of the heedless, when she finished I joined in: “Amen!”

All this time, Hamid is piously wig-wagging me to take off my shades. I can see how Hamid might ride right down the line with this Islamic splinter-group but I know it is too late in the day for me. I shake my head sadly at Hamid as I listen to Maya’s thick thighs slap-slapping together under her robe as she paddles over to get a bottle of boiled water out of the frig. No stimulants, ever, eh? OK. I adjust my shades with distinction, indicating that I am not about to take them off to look on the likes of this great bargain of his. I can feel that my stiffness excites him. I know my Hamid, after all; what odd commodities have we two not bought and sold? Here he is trying to sell me his Hymners: what is my price? I figure Hamid cannot possibly know what the real deal is about: I don’t know, yet, myself. I can see that reconnaissance conversation is not going to be easy. Unless we babble on about Bahaï, it is all going to be: “Have you read that book, whats-itcalled: The Confessions of Denmark Vesey?” and guff such as that.

In some ways, Hamid’s take-over of the Hymner household was hellishly handy — and I mean it just like that. The Hymners were our meal ticket of the moment, feeding us both on their embalmed American food. Categorically, I refused to move in with them out there on the Old Mountain. I knew better even if Hamid did not. Anyway, he was used to living like a gypsy in seven different houses at once: they could never pin Hamid down the way they could me. I stayed on holed-up in my room at the Hotel Duende, letting Hamid break it to the Hymners just how much I owed in back rent. The going was not all that easy. That old meal ticket had to be punched and punched regular; a lot harder, too, than I had at first been ready to reckon. Happily, the local electricity went on the bum for a few days, during which time the Hymner’s endless stacks of nameless frozen foods melted and died in their silent food-safe. Hamid took over the cooking and it became really worth-while to drag my ass out there to eat. Their old bus was pretty much always at our beck and call to cart us around wherever we wanted to go: Maya Hymner always heavy behind the wheel of the Rolls, Him always silent in back. Hamid perched back there, too, on the very edge of his seat, straining his ear and his English to make out what she was saying to me; as, with her eyes fixed on the road ahead, she slurred their lurid life-story at me out of the side of her mouth.

This colorless couple from Champagne, Illinois, were living out a drama which they, at least, thought would yet shake the world. Her people were from Canada, originally, and the least said about that the better, I gathered. Was she “Colored,” I wondered? I took a squint at her hair and threw that thought out of my mind. The Hymners “had money.” They had once owned a sawmill someplace out West. “Him ’n’ Her,” had met at the home of some Bahaïs in Illinois: met, married and settled down in Champagne, as she said. They were both Adepts who hoped to be accepted into the Faith but a couple of things had gone wrong. She told me this when we were back at their villa in Tanja but I swear I could hear the old skeletons rattling in Maya’s voice, all the way from the great Middle-West. Hymner was grinning and nodding, eager to corroborate every word Maya said. Well, it seems that Maya, at the very instant of conception, when his diamond-headed sperm-adder pierced the delicate membrane of her egg, Maya knew — she just knew! She was shy, she said, to tell even Him, at first but, eventually, all their circle in Champagne, Illinois, knew, too: Maya was chosen to give birth to the Babe!

Now, not everyone in Champagne swallowed this tale and, when the day came for her to face her, well, her Trouble; why, she found herself absolutely alone. Everyone failed her; especially Him. Hymner, it seems, took advantage of her pregnancy to get himself picked up by an electronic eye in a public toilet, like a Presidential aide at the YMCA. When Maya turned on, tuned in and heard all about it over the local network, she went into the kitchen of their ultra-modern home and aborted herself with a fork. Two cops in blue brought Him to Her in the hospital and, there on her hospital bed, she forgave Him. She got out and got home before he did. When he got out, she took Him back. But — and that was a hell of a But! he could never become the father of the Babe, now, could he? He had to shake his head: obviously not. So, she sent Him to the hospital to have himself sterilized and the operation so affected Him that he lost all his hair and his voice. Naturally, they had to get out of Champagne overnight and that brought them to Tanja, where else? In Tanja, at least, no one put all your business out in the street; now, did they? He nodded and grinned, content as a capon, confirming all this.

They had now decided, she went on relentlessly, that the Babe should be Black. It was on the tip of my tongue to tell her that would be quite a trick, when I bit the words off with my teeth. So, a spot of my sperm was the price! One diamond-headed sperm-adder of mine was to puncture her egg and plunge on into the Stream of Life; was that it? And did he think he was going to get to watch this? Maya stood there like a sibyl beside the kitchen sink. This child was to be a Mahdi, it was promised: Emperor of Africa. “Togetherness,” I thought I heard her say: “You will all assist at the birth.” Great Ghoul! There was a silence, as pregnant as you wish.

I began to get that old wound-up, wordy feeling and found myself talking too fast and too much. To put them at their ease, if you please! I launched into a largely fictitious tale about my mother, a very big powerful woman she was, too, who had much the same trouble with Ulys O. Hanson, Jr., her husband my father, who had taken off with her best black lace and her add-a-pearl Tecla necklace to go to the Beaux Arts Ball at the old Savoy Ballroom, years ago, and neither hide nor hair has ever been seen of him from that day to this. I could see that the Hymners were profoundly shocked. Panic-stricken, I began to blurt out yet another story; the story, I claimed, of how I had first ever heard about Bahaï. I felt their faces stiffen in apprehension but it was already too late. My technique is to overwhelm one enormity with another, so:

There I am back in Carnegie Hall with my mother, right after the war and still in high school. Up on the stage, Mrs. Roosevelt is sitting side by side with our own Great Educator, Mrs. Mary McLeod Bethune. This duo of dainty dinosaurs is perched on two rickety little old gold chairs pulled up by a skinny-legged gold table on which the girls are munching away at the “Star-Spangled Banner” like sisters until, all of a sudden, Miss Mary lets out a holler like someone just stuck her under the table with a fork. Looking blacker than Granmaw in a pastel-pink potato sack and a hat made of ice-cream cake like Schraffts’ melting on top of her meringue of fuzzy white hair, Bethune grabs the mike from the First Lady to bawl at us:

“I want all of you all out there to know that every last one of us here is descended from the Black Kings of Africa!”

Hamid, who had been sitting cross-legged on the floor, biting his nails as he listened intently up to this point, let out a loud snort; got up and left.

Too late! Carnegie Hall is rocked by applause like a mortar barrage. The Hansons, mother and handsome adolescent son, are beaming in the middle of a parterre of one hundred and seventy-seven handsome young Black Kings of Africa from Nigeria; all students at Lincoln University in Pennsylvania. The young kings have been obliged to leave their crowns with the white hat-check girl at the cloakroom, who insists that, made out of gold or not, what you wear on your head is a hat. The kings of Black Africa proudly sweep the streets of New York with their trailing robes gorgeously embroidered in silver and gold. Ergo, not all Black men are slaves or descended from such. Thank you very much! We who have been nothing, can become Black Kings, every one! Mrs. Roosevelt has skillfully fielded the mike and is making her eloquent speech: “Not having had your advantages in adversity …” she seems to be saying.

Mother was a speech therapist so, at that point, she had to give me a big nudge: “She takes Voice!” she whispered delightedly. Eleanor was all too soon over for her and Miss Beryl Brown was announced. I could feel Mother stiffen when Beryl pranced out on stage, wound up in a little strip of leather torn off the skin of Life, like a lady-wrestler with nothing much on but a patch here and a patch there. Miss Brown announced, in a voice Mother could have done something with, that she was about to go into a Magic dance she picked up in Africa on her Fulbright. It was a dance of Initiation but she did not say who was going to get initiated into what. Then, Brown rolled out a big African drum, about as big across as a washtub, and she began to jump up and down on it like a trampoliner. That was all she did but, at every drum-jump—Boom! — and she pumped herself up just one more big puff. For a while, it hardly seemed to make all that much difference, she’s such a big girl, but, when the drums began pounding into your head, Beryl began blooming and booming and looming so big she could have floated away over Macy’s. Before she could explode the proscenium arch with her expanding naked brown-skinned flesh, they eclipsed her just in time with the big golden curtain before she could become what she was about to become, the great matriarchal myth-figure: Mother Maya Herself!

Hamid came back into the room and threw me a look of disgust. I could see that my elaborations had fallen rather flat. I had forgotten to add that, on leaving Carnegie Hall, my mother and I had decided to mark the occasion by venturing into the Russian Tea Room, which we understood was Restricted and, there, Mother had met up with a very nice woman from Larchmont in a mink coat, who told her all about Bahaï and offered her a job as … I could feel myself floating away into another one of my stories but I managed to stop. Simulating a sudden attack of brain-fever to the stony-faced Hymners, I rushed back to the Hotel Duende in the clamorous Socco Chico and dashed off that letter to the Independent American School of Algut. By return of mail, they wrote back to say that, what with the dollar and one thing and another, the school was facing hard times, financial difficulties and blah blah blah. They were dreadfully contrite to carry on like this with a man of my caliber but they simply could not pay for transportation at this point because, what with border controls and currency restrictions and blah, more blah, but it was a deal: I was on.

All I had to do was to go out to the Hymners and hit them up for the bread, I told myself. It was a lot less easily done than said. One of the worst things at their house was that no one could smoke because Maya suffered from asthma and other allergies. Her asthma was aggravated by overweight and her overweight was accentuated daily by Hamid’s great cooking with which he had, finally, hooked her. That girl was a greedygut; never stopped eating crunchy peanut-butter snacks between meals. Who ever told her she could play Desdemona? One night, we all dined out of doors by the light of candles in Moorish lanterns, tearing chickens apart with our hands under Hamid’s orders, lying around Moroccan-style on cushions and rugs. For a change, there was no Levant-wind blasting through Tanja. The sticky-sweet, night-blooming flowers like dama de noche, datura and jasmine, seemed not to bother Maya for once. When the candles guttered out, Hamid and I even dared light up a sebsi of keef on which we took turns in the dark. The night was lousy with stars and that old pregnant silence again from Him ‘n’ Her. When Hamid got up and went inside to clean up the kitchen, Maya began to talk.

“Hanson,” she said, perverting it into: “Handsome,” I thought I heard her; “when you say the Word, the Word will be made Flesh.”

“Of course!” I ejaculated, trying to pass it off as a cough. I was on! Coughing in earnest all of a sudden, spluttering and laughing, I got up and stumbled away through the dark garden.

Nothing daunted, Maya was down at the Hotel Duende, bright and early next morning, sitting on the foot of my brass bed. My Moroccan maids out in the hall made like they were scandalized; knocking and laughing, bumping their mops and pails against my door. I opened one blazing eye as I rapidly pulled on my black suit of human skin under the covers before I sat up and let Maya have it hard and straight. I told her I wanted no son of mine to be mooted about as a midget Messiah. I want no son of mine to preach or to teach and, besides — Yes, besides! I want no son of mine to be even one drop lighter than me. If I make a son, he has got to be Black, Black, Black; a real spade, see! Does she figure to raise this child with a white mother and a white father and him fitting into no skin at all? And what if it turns out to be a girl? If she really feels she needs an African for this deal, Hamid is an eager African. Delicately, I indicated something flattering about his painting technique and the size of his brush. As for me, I am only a poor old, retired, spade performer; just shoveling along, dig? Now, would she please be a good girl and go order me a café au lait and a croissant on the terrace of the café in the Socco Chico below. In the meantime, I would shave my beautiful black puss and be with her in no time flat. I meant that: no time at all. That was it. When I did get down there about half an hour later, she was nowhere in sight.

Within the hour, Hamid came trotting up with a sealed envelope addressed to me. I must have laid it on her, too, about needing that bread. Quite obviously, the letter contained cash and Hamid, who still cannot read, tried to shove it playfully into my ear; “making it talk.”

“Here is the price of the Hymners,” I told hin. “I have sold you to Her for this. I’m sorry, I know it’s not near enough.”

Hamid knew what I meant and he wept. I embraced him and told him how broken-up I was to be leaving him but there was just enough bread, there on the bed where I threw it, to take care of the Hotel Duende and buy me a solo ticket to Algut where the term at Independent is starting this week. Hamid was so emotional, he could hardly count his cut of the take through his tears.

“The train is standing in the station, Hamid. This may not be the way I came but this is the way I must go. See; no baggage, Hamid. I must return to the World.”

“Here, take all the days of my life!” cried Hamid, much moved. “All I have to give is my brush and I’ll do anything with it for you. I’ll paint this lady from head to toe, if that’s what you want. I’ll give her my life!”

I do hope Hamid’s words are not prophetic, because a very nasty scene took place, just now back in the station, as we pulled out of Tanja under the first autumn downpour. The Hymners did not come down to see me off, naturally, and I have not one dirham left. She even had the nerve to suggest that I sell my UHER and, somehow, between the hotel and the train, the UHER has just gotten lost. Hamid blamed it on her black magic, of course, but he was frantic and made a terrible scene with everyone in the station. My last vision of Hamid was a glimpse from the already moving train. He was practically throwing himself over the barrier, weeping and waving good-by when, all of a sudden, two tall men who were obviously plainclothes police, swooped down on poor Hamid like vultures and bore him aloft, backward over the crowd; astonished and terrified. Hamid was bawling like a calf at the killing until the rumble of the moving train drowned him out and he was drawn away into the mysterious past. What was all that about? What did that mean? Hamid is far too cool a character ever to be busted for keef; what else could he have been up to? Someone’s revenge? Beware the fury of a woman scorned and all that but: Would she have taken it out on Hamid? No. I hope not. No. I sat down somewhat gingerly on the brown plastic seat of the train leaving Tanja station at just the right speed. I sat awkwardly because of the sheep’s bladder of keef Hamid scored for me as usual, at the very last minute and for a very hurry-up price. I had stuffed what I scored into the Y-front of my jockey-shorts, from which the hard-packed poke of keef had slipped down and bulged like a baseball bat between my thighs. I needed something to steady my nerves, so I was prying into my own zipper like a pickpocket to pull out the precious packet, when a uniformed cop on his beat bumped past my compartment blindly, happily without busting in.

Suddenly, as I stood there swaying in and out of my mind on the last few farewell pipes shared with Hamid, it struck me like a blow between the eyes: I had forgotten to tell Hamid one thing. I had forgotten to tell him why the Hymners had no servants, no servants other than us; no hired servants at all in their house. The Hymners feared local servants might inform on them to the police. In theocratic countries, Bahaï has been considered a heresy tantamount to treason and the penalty for treason is death. Oh, well; are we not all condemned? I wouldn’t put it past old Hamid to dodge even Death. However, I do recall what he said:

“Hamid, Consul of Keef, renews this green passport for you in the name of the Old Man of the Mountain, King of Keef. Long live the Assassins! On your Way, you are bound to run into some fellow-Assassins, you know.”

“But I’m not an Assassin, at all!” I laughed. “I’m purely a potted professor. I insist.”

“We are all of us Assassins,” he gravely replied as he gave me the grass.

I find myself sitting back in the train leaving Tanja, gliding around the curve of the beach. I note sourly that they have truncated the beach once again to put in the new port installation and the enlarged railway yard. The necessary new mole has changed the profile of the beach for the worse by deflecting the wind-driven currents to pile up seawrack, refuse and oil slick on the sand. A minute back, we passed a man-made jungle of rusted iron girders, the skeleton of some long-forgotten fun fair, followed by a chain of leprous bathing establishments with: Tea Like Mother Make, scrawled everywhere to attract the vanished British tourist. Jumping up from my seat, I go lurching off down the corridor of my continental coach to the toilet. The cop comes out, still buttoning up. Having satisfied himself that there is nothing contraband lurking in there, he is not likely to come back this way soon.

I stagger into the swaying water-closet, lock myself in and carefully hang my jacket over the doorknob and the keyhole behind me. Above the immovable frosted-glass window, I turn a flanged air-vent to OPEN, before unzipping my fly. I pull out my business and pick out the body-hot bladder of keef to hug it between my knees while I redress. The old train is picking up speed, clickety-clix, as I fish into my passport-pocket to pull out my sebsi in its slim leather case. I fit the two sections together with a handsome brass band at the link. Placing a finger over my tiny flesh-colored clay pipe head, I try the pipe like a trumpet; airtight, good! A masterpiece matchbox the size of a big postage stamp leaps into the overturned bowl of my left hand and I laugh.

I laugh because this whole business is, of course, just a trap well-enough woven of words — or so I must hope — for the meaning, if any, to show through like a lining of silk. What was it the matches used to say before they learned the latest: “Burn, baby, burn”? When I bend an ear to listen, the train is already rattling it out: “Kaulakaulakaulakaulakaulakau …” I grasp the match firmly and strike it, exploding its head. Before it burst into flame, its head was a heavenly blue. I apply its red hair to the green bush of keef I have packed in my pipe and I suck it all up in one single toke. Exhaling, I breathe: “That’s the truth!” blowing it all out the air-vent marked OPEN, from which it trails after the train to plane out over Tanja like a plume. Expertly, I spit the red comet of keef-coal into the open thunderbowl beneath whose open trap I can catch a patch of planet Earth spinning between our magnetic rails. Everything spinning must appear symmetrical: is that what it’s all about? I turn back to the frosted window, standing on tiptoe to catch my last glimpse of the blue Leaping Hills through the air-vent; but night has already fallen in cold curtains of rain. I content myself with repeating the saw: “As no two people see the world the same way, all trips from here to there are imaginary; all truth is a tale I am telling myself.”

So: there are no blue Little Hills and none of the rest is true, either. I condemn the whole thing. Then, like the governor before the execution, I want to wash my hands but, on this man’s train, there is no water forthcoming. No matter what plunger I push: HOT or COLD, nothing flows out of the rocking walls at my once-magical touch. Fortified by a few more pipes, I replace my poke in my pants where it hangs like a blackjack. Pushing my face into the mirror over the basin, I say, I breathe to whoever is in there: “Human problems remain insoluble on purely human terms.” Whoever it is I see in there nods in agreement with me. I light up a Player’s to cover the keef before I boldly throw open the door to face a mob of Middle East refugees lined up six-deep, all twisting their legs. Then, when I plunge both through them and the swinging glass door in a panic, I see I am right back on that same old circular subway, suddenly; going nowhere again but fast. A handsome old white-bearded Arab loon, all dressed in white, bursts out of a blazing broom-closet, barring my way with an iron-tipped staff.

“You may not pass this way again in a lifetime,” he says.

All the people I ever have seen in this lifetime are melded and jelled into some sort of red-hot honeycomb the old cat keeps in his closet. Outraged that we should all find ourselves, still, on this subway under the Great Desert called Life, I explode with all the conviction of a man who has found himself, finally:

“Let me in there again, goddammit!” I cry. “Whether I like it or not, I guess, I’m a Teacher and it’s just because all you donkeys are so goddammed dumb that a Teacher has to go over the same old lesson, again and again. So, one lifetime isn’t enough, eh? Well, give me more! No! More!”

The windows are streaming with gold. I look out to see we are spinning through the Sahara faster than the speed of light, escaping the clutch of the great hairy magnet of the Sun. From behind my back, this little old gink with one eye is asking me:

“Why were you in such a hurry to get here, when the desert gets us all in the end?”

Campoamor

Tanger, Morocco

1965–1968