The Process

4

It was written, indeed! But does that mean I am supposed to believe on some level that Hamid actually brought me back from my trip, magically? I ought to be downright mad at him if he did it but, instead, I have spent all this time translating, transcribing and, yes, transposing the Hamid I captured on tape. When I read back what is written, I hear how very far it is from Hamid’s real speech and I ponder on how much I betray him each time I correct or rewrite. Only this morning, I found myself switching still more of his so-called sentences around, trying to catch at some of the unconsciously rhyming effects he manages to ring from the voluble but wildly incorrect Spanish he still uses with me; although my own bed-and-kitchen Arabic is already good enough to get by. Fact is, the man in the marketplace here in North Africa takes me automatically for a fellow Moroccan as soon as I slip on a striped silk jellaba and slap a red tarboosh on my head. Everyone calls me Brother: “Hai.”

Not up on the Boulevard in the New Town of Tanja, though, where I wear my American threads. When I sit out on the terrace of the Café de Paris, every last hustler who ever guided an American gob still slobbers and hovers around but they keep their distance, these days. Not one of them would dare, any longer, to call me: American Joe. I guess I owe Hamid that, too. I am Hassan only with him up on his mountain or down below the Socco Chico in the underground keef cafés. Up on this Boulevard-level of town, Alcohol is King. It is not the cool thing to smoke pot in public; at least, not in a pipe. Instead, I take a deep drag on the Casa Sport cigarette I gutted and refilled with great grass I got from Hamid before I pulled my poor self together and struggled up here in the European town for a change of elevation and air. The tangle of traffic, out there in front of me somewhere in the Place de France, looks a bit distant and glassy, I have to admit, but everything is bright, bright, bright! Every last little dancing blob out there is all jazzy-bedazzled with candy-colored light. I adjust my shades with distinction, puffed up with pride at how well the taste of Tanja suits someone like me and, then, I carefully drop my eyes to the pen and paper on the table in front of me but my gaze never gets there because I break into a loud laugh. I laugh like a lunatic to think that a year of sea and sand has burned up behind me since I first dropped into Tanja for what I thought might be, at most, a couple of weeks.

Now, I think I have got Hamid safely tied up with his family and flocks on their Pan mountain and here I am back at the Crossroads again. “Do something!” I keep telling myself, but what, really, do I want to do? If I dared, I would ring my last dime on this marble-topped table and get on my feet and then … and then, with bowed head, just shuffle off into the crowd, known to no one, with the wind whistling behind me as I shuffle off into the Sahara again. If I had the nerve, I could launch myself like a leaf on that sea of life, flowing by me out there. If I really wanted to catch up with that tide, I could mutate into just one more mad marabout like the Marvelous Major of Merzouk who was both revered and kicked about by the natives for years until the day the Marines landed, when he threw off his rags and stood there revealed with, tattooed all over his white ass: CIA! Nay! Very well, then I will have to become a saint of the so-called absurd, a man without a country, wrapped in a pied cloak sewn of nothing but flags. I’ve seen some of those cats — Bouhali Brothers — and they really look great — like they really have got it made. There they go, their bare feet deep in the dust but their heads, man! their heads touch heaven: loser take all! Just the mere thought of that fate makes a shiver run through me. I feel my scalp tingle and tighten on the roof of my skull. My hairs stand on end, one by one; all frizzling out slowly in a fuzzy electric halo that comes down around my ears. My ears are becoming the ears of the fennec who hunts the jerboa; bristly antennae that pick up and tingle with the silky sound of the sand sighing across the Sahara. It crackles like static inside of my head. Grains of sand, more numerous than the stars, are slipping and sliding and I am startled to hear in the roar of traffic on the Place de France, abruptly, the rumbling voice of Ghoul! I could easily blast so much keef night and day I become a bouhali; a real-gone crazy, a holy untouchable madman unto whom everything is permitted, nothing is true.

I was thinking along these lines this morning, if you can call that thinking, as I sat at a round marble-topped table on the terrace of the Café de Paris, today about noon. It was hot and I wanted to be alone so I propped this Moroccan leather briefcase I have, full of this manuscript, on the chair beside me, reserving the seat. On the table in front of me, I had my pad of letter-paper over which my pen has been hanging fire, now, for over a month. I hate writing letters but, if I was going to go on, or so I told myself in order to whip my penhand into action: “You better write this.” This was my letter to the Foundation, from whom I had heard nothing since I sent them a copy of my desert diary; pretty heavily varnished, I have to admit. I want my follow-up letter to be more business-like, maybe. After all, I have to brazen the whole thing out; my failure to cross the Sahara in less than a lifetime; my failure to find myself in Black Africa, floating down the bosom of its broad rivers through the jungle to the sea and, then, to return to the world around its hump. I mean to say to the Foundation: Frankly, I am fresh out of bread. In your service, O mighty Foundation, I have experienced extreme experience and been taken for an Adept along the Way. Extreme experience is, naturally, extremely expensive and so it should be. I have given of my person. I intended to add, rather insolently: “Now, pay me!” I considered enclosing a street photographer’s shot of me taken in the thick of the Socco Chico crush and scrawling across it, perhaps: “Which one is me?” To a man who has little or nothing to lose, after all, everything is surely permitted when dealing with these powerful abstract entities like Fundamental, for whom, equally surely, after dealing with hordes of applicants like me, nothing is true.

My other less abstract application for re-entry into the Race would be to answer a want-ad I picked out of the Paris edition of the Herald Trib. The Independent American School in Algut needs an assistant headmaster. Do they want a Black one? The ad had been running for weeks. It looks mighty like nobody is hard-enough up to take a teaching job in Africa. Besides, nobody wants to hear about Algut, the way things are going there, now. Yet, Algut is nearer the desert than Tanja, I was beginning to tell myself. Of course, I would have to teach a whole year there to get free. “Are you out of your mind?” I heard myself asking myself: “You work? Work, you?” I talk back so much all the time to that little voice in my head that anyone overhearing me might think I smoked too much keef. Which reminds me, I must have an all-out session with myself and my UHER, one day, just to see if I can make my little voice talk for the tape. I clench my eyes tight for one picosecond, just the time for one all-knowing blink, and I open them again.

All this bit just to show you how far I could be from consciously conjuring up this outrageous cat who had apparently curled himself up at my table totally unnoticed by me and was already deep in my briefcase, clawing into it like a real cat after fish, before I could snap: Scat! I blinked and here was this white fellow, already plumped down beside me, plunging into my manuscript totally unasked.

“Hey!” I shouted. “Get the hell out of my book!”

“Is that what you think you are writing?” he drawled, bathing me at the same time in a ten thousand watt Cheshire Cat grin. I started to splutter with rage but I ended by laughing at him; I just had to laugh. He was funny, hilarious even, to look at but he looked, also, very very rich in his regulation threads of camel, cashmere, vicuña and Thai silk. Quite a few years my junior, I judged with a glance at his bald head — or was it shaved? His straggly red beard was shaped Arab-style but on him it looked like a hopeless attempt at disguise. I continued to laugh. This whitey grinned back at me like a jack-o’-lantern with sunburn. “Good! That’s better,” he said. “Laughter is refusal,” he went on airily, “but, at least, it is in Present Time — the only real time there is. Snap into Present Time, Hanson,” and he had the nerve to snap his fingers like a cheap magician, right under my nose. “Mankind sleeps in a nightmare called Life! Hassan, wake up! If what I see there on the table is your forever unfinished letter to the Foundation for Fundamental Findings, Professor Hanson, forget it; you hear me? Just throw all that letter-writing out of your mind. We are the Foundation, Professor: my wife Mya and I. The name is Thay Himmer but just call me Thay. Hakim is my Arab nickname as yours is Hassan. But let’s forget about that, shall we? Hmmm?”

All this time, he is scanning me with his incandescent American dental work; feeling up my face. Ever since I was conscious in the cradle, I have hated this; hated all the slippery eyes that ever have flitted over my face like sticky-footed flies. I know what frail, hot-eyed Franz Fanon felt when he spat on himself: “Ah, le beau nègre!” I know the spleen Mohamed Ali feels when he proclaims himself, O how rightfully: the handsomest cat of them all. I am beeeauuutiful! I look down at my body, sometimes, and I say in despair: “It’s this whole system got me into this here and now.” My current relief comes from living with Hamid, who never has looked at my looks. Monkey-faced Hamid thinks he is the beauty of the family and I like it that way. What am I going to do to counter the present blue-eyed attack?

This blue-eyes is bugging me with the offer of his freckled white hand. I find myself fumbling across my own chest, taking care not to upset my coffee with my elbow; unable to look at this character squarely, at least partly I realize, because he is so overwhelmingly white. His blue-veined, hairy fingers loaded with rings wind painfully about mine with a grip like the Old Man of the Sea. I wince because I know who he is, of course: he has been cruising me, now, for a week. Everyone in Tanja knows Himmer from a photo they ran in the local Spanish-language paper, calling him: El Unico Radja Americano. Now, even the little bootblacks call him El Unico, as he sweeps around town, trailing his vicuña burnous. One good look at Thay Himmer, VII, last White Rajah-Bishop of the Farout Islands, is enough to tell you that he is more than a little bit mythological and, of course, quite unique.

His wife, the former Mya Strangleblood, is the Richest Creature in Creation. The title was worked out for her by an agency hired by her lawyers, who were anxious to avoid litigation with any of the old title-holders in the Fortune Poll of the Rich. As Suzy Scandal said in her syndicated society column: “You can’t have two Richest Girls in the World, after all, even though some of the old title-holders have refused to turn in their crowns when their fortunes faded or were spent. Princess Mya holds her title as long as she holds the Strangle-blood oil wells, pitchblende pits, uranium outcroppings and platinum lodes found on the tribal grounds of the Barefoot Indians in Northwest Canada. PP Strangleblood, her first husband, is still missing in Tibet. Her current consort, Thay Himmer, VII, lost the family outpost in the Farouts and is not very well fixed but, as Mya’s seventh husband, he was somewhat of a catch. Thay is fey but Mya is a Canadian Red Indian with both feet on the ground; said to be equally inscrutable at poker or in business, she has used her first good fortune as a spring-board to much greater wealth. Mya is said to have gotten out from under the dollar and does all her business in Basel.”

“Of course,” I ejaculated, finally; belatedly equating the Foundation with Fundamental Funds. Suzy Scandal said that her Fund had made Mya so much richer that she had been voted Hors Concours, in all further Fortune Polls. When her money, finally, could no longer be counted because there was nothing higher than billions so far, Mya would gain the privilege of keeping out of print entirely. In the meantime, her husband is coming on to me so strong and so fast I can hardly keep up with the message.

“Be a rose among roses; a thorn among thorns.” Who said that? Did he just say that or did I? Or, was that Hamid’s voice? No, Hamid said:

“When I see a prize, I know how to take it. You never do.”

Himmer is swinging his buggy blue eyes back and forth across my face like a lighthouse of brotherly love, and I sense, without any sense of shock, what a holy innocent he looks and probably is. “If I am thine, thou art mine,” I say silently; taking him, I think, like a pawn. If I can believe my ears, this whitey is about to hand me over his wife and, maybe, his life.

“This is the Seal of the Sahara,” he is saying as he flashes a big green stone. “It is carved out of an emerald and I have been instructed to give it to a man whose name is not Hassan. Mya and I believe that man to be you.”

My ears are so tuned that I can hear the emerald crushing stray sugar crystals on the marble top of the table as he pushes it at me with long fingers, like a man making a move in a game. The scarab rolls toward me as relentlessly as a dung-beetle plowing its way over a dune.

“A beautiful bauble, Mr. Himmer,” I admitted uneasily, hefting the bright green stone in the palm of my hand before pushing it back at him, “but I can’t take your queen.” I saw his big blue bug-eyes open even a little wider at that but I had caught sight of a shoeshine boy stopped stock-still in the street, staring at the stone with coffee-cup eyes. “Have a coffee with me, Mr. Himmer,” I offered him grandly while slapping away at the boy.

“Most gracious of you but, no; never!” Himmer protests. I am shocked to see just how flustered he is. “No stimulants ever,” he grins. “I just don’t need them, I guess.”

“Oh, thass all right,” I mumble, realizing with relief that his grin is a purely mechanical reflex of extreme oriental politeness. For a split second there, he looked almost Chinese: quite distinctly, I saw formalized orange and black flames of anguish licking his rictus.

“Welcome aboard,” he is saying: “like a full-gown Dalai Lama found in the beauty of his age. In Present Time, it’s your move, Hassan. You now hold the master-pawn which may well include some sort of claim on Mya herself, for all I know: but always remember that I am Mya’s seventh husband and her last. I have no more to say — ever! — and, now, I must go.”

“Am I supposed to give this jewel to your wife?” I asked, lamely.

“At your risk and peril!” he snapped. “She may try to cozen it out of you: in fact, she most certainly will, but if you give it to her — if you play it over to her, into her full power and possession, that’s the end of that! The Emerald Seal, lawfully, is the Beginning and Ending of words. Having played the Green Beetle on you leaves me speechless. I mean that quite literally: I have only these few last words. Such has been the immutable rule since time immemorial when the Seal was first put on the Word. You can, I imagine, guess why. In Present Time, however, we must avail ourselves of the new knowledge, must we not? I have thought it wise, therefore — although it may not have been wise of me at all: it may have been downright criminally insane of me, who knows? to make you a tape! However, I have. Previously, the whole silly old Master-Adept game-situation had to be played out telepathically but Mya and I think that’s so out of date, don’t you? There’s so much static about these days since electronics that most messages get hopelessly garbled. For Mya and me, the message is OUT! This, therefore, my dear Professor Ulys O. Hanson the Third, is our first conversation and our last. What you know, you know, and the rest of the garbage you’ll get from my recorded Last Words when you play back this fiveinch spool of magnetic tape on your UHER.”

With that, he handed me over a red, white and yellow box of “SOUND MAGIC” tape.

Then, he took a little white plastic bronchial inhalator out of his pocket and he opened his mouth round-open, so: like, O. My own so-called mind was working so slowly that, while I registered that Himmer had heavenly good breath, like flowering alpine pastures still half under snow — how rare! probably because his teeth were so wide apart he had no decay and he probably never smoked — no stimulants ever! — all this time, I was politely withdrawing my gaze from this wet open red mouth in order to drop my gaze and, yes, I remembered where I meant to look — at my UHER, still tightly gripped between my two feet.

“Damn!” I sighed. “I wasn’t turned-on.”

When I raised my eyes from the ground, Himmer had inhaled his little puff of vapor and, without a further word, vanished; I suppose, into the noonday crowd on the Boulevard but who knows? I could hardly wait to play back his tape: