The Process

8

Man, what a wild change of scene: last night in Tanja town and here we are back in the Sahara again! I guess I must have said: “Hello,” all right, to the lady; how could I resist? “Hello Yes Hello,” in fact. Here I have in my hand a big green carved stone, obviously ancient and said to be an emerald unless it’s jadite or glass. I have, also, a gold chain of linked letter H’s, presumably for Hapsburg, but it could be for Hassan, why not? The man whose name is not Hassan, I certainly am. So, what should I have said to the lady: “Good-by No Good-by”? Hamid says he always knows how to take a prize when he sees one but I never do. This time, we’ll see. I’m writing this painfully by candlelight in the big electronic library of “Malamut”—“my brain,” she calls it — surrounded by the consoles of the computers and the wired stacks of the communications system through which she intends to run this whole African scene of hers. Tonight, the generators are out of order, they tell me: for the moment, none of this works. The flickering light of my candle is lost in the shadows which race around this round room whose dome, high above me, represents Mya’s head on the top of the bulk of this building when you see this whole block of rocks on Cape Noon from a distance. As big as the Capitol building, Mya sits on the immense sweep of the Saharan coast of the Atlantic on the big bulge of Africa; massive, unique and alone.

Very impressive, I guess, but my first sight of all this from the air simply sickened me and might have killed all of us. Mya’s seven-passenger, two-million-dollar Lear jet nearly blew inside out, right overhead here luckily, but at thirty thousand feet up! Mya was sitting in her cockpit, like a throne under the plastic sky-dome, looking so luminous; looking so enormous; looking so like a whole galaxy of goddesses that I knew I was still under the effects of her Borbor, you bet! The Victory of Samothrace flying her jet with her classic bare blue feet set square on the pedals; solid marble arms reaching out for the power controls. Then, for a millionth of a second, she just flipped into the cabin; into Mya and out again, so quick I don’t suppose I was supposed to see her at all: a Medusa with a head full of snakes. Everything I looked at had a bright fuzzy halo around it; orange to indigo but dimmer than the prism you catch in the bevel of good-grade plate glass.

Wow! I said to myself: Someone is fucking my everyday clean-cut, crystal-clear keef-connection with the visible world and, also, my go-ahead-green perception of same. What is more, all this bamboozle is being laid on me by means of a paltry veil of illusion drawn over my eyes; and, drawn chemically, no less! I also reckon that this glassy veil is producing prismatic effects because it is imperfectly adjusted, or else — and worse! — the product has been adulterated along the way. Wow! So, the lady can commit a fault, can she! That’s all I needed to know but, like it or not, I have to go along with the ride.

I wouldn’t take a Nembie on a trip if the hostess forced one down my throat. Besides, I sit looking down on the desert I love from nearly a satellite’s point of view and I see, I can clearly perceive that the Sahara is Man, all Man. How could I ever have thought anything else! The sand is his shimmering silicone shirt stamped in a uniform pattern of dunes like the scales on a suit of chain mail worn by Ghoul. Ghoul lies down to rest on his desert as polished and bare as a shield, and he slumbers until he hears the hammering of the white north wind on the doors of his desert and, then, he stirs; he rumbles, he raises his voice. A sinister sound like the gritting and grinding of all the grains of sand in the Sahara furls out over the idle desert in a great wave, like a command to arise. A tremor runs under the sands and, then, the whole Sahara stands to attention for one breathless moment before it throws itself like a great sea of sand on the foe.

Ghoul, Defender of Africa, I hear your clarion call! In one pico-second I parachute down thirty thousand feet and I am back, living again in the guerrilla conditions I know. I know them for sure: Them or Us. My comrades-in-arms, Terror and Hunger and Cold, shuffle along like Shakespearean supers or huddle over the fire I made, first, of my arrows and, then, of my bow. Terror, forever behind me, drags Hunger along by a knot in his gut but that coward, Cold, has deserted us, gliding away like the vipers who dance on these black fields of clinkers, white-hot in the sun. The air melts to liquid. It ripples and runs like the seething of water when it roils to a boil. I flounder on through the swell of the sand with the rags of my black burnous for a sail. Know that I am the Captain of Patience whose heart is the heart of the hyena, whose sandals are shod with flint!

At that point, the Medusa head in the cabin snapped at me: “As far as Mother is concerned, every trek is a trick!”

I refused to let myself be turned into stone. When you are as high as that in the stratosphere, it is always a beautiful day — until something pops. In the back of the cabin, Hamid was giving Thay Himmer an expensive lesson in how to play Ronda; slapping his cards down on the table like firecrackers and probably taking Thay’s peach-colored Sulka underdrawers as well as his Sulka shirt. Thay grinned away goofily as he lost trick after trick. Hamid kept snapping: “Mine … mine … mine …” as he took them all and I was boozily amused to catch Mya with my other ear, singing exactly the same song to me as she swept us over this particular stretch of planet Earth: “Mine … mine … mine …! I own two million, nine hundred and fifty-six thousand, two hundred and forty-seven hectares of this … not God’s little acres, Hassan … hectares!”

The landscape I looked down on was so lunar and I was feeling so completely lunatic, myself, that all I had to do was to let the words “Lady Moon,” form in my head and there she was in the plane, beside me under the plastic sky-dome: Princess Mya at her Lear jet cabin controls. That must have been about the time the Borbor hit its peak: just at thirty thousand feet, I happened to notice. At that point, she throttled her engines and we would have glided peacefully, uneventfully into “Malamut”—if Ghoul had not intervened.

“You won’t believe it,” she smiled, as “Malamut” swam up out of the great circle of sand and sea but, when I saw what she was pointing out, my heart sank. All her bloody Borbor drained right out of my tank. I could believe it only too well. After all: I, too, have been to Southern California to see a six-story-high hot-dog-stand in the form of a giant Saint Bernard dog, makes you sick just to have to look at it on the skyline. Well, “Malamut” is Mya sitting in the lotus position with an Olympic-sized swimming pool on her knees. There she floats on the fringes of the Sahara and the Atlantic, like a giant broody Buddha with a two-thousand-mile strip of bare beach under her broad beam. It was crossing my mind that she hadn’t been wise to turn her back on the Sahara and Ghoul, when she screamed in my ear:

“That’s Heaven Rock, Hassan: that’s Me!”

Pop! Pop! went my ears like a double thunderclap inside of my head! I looked up past Mya and saw the plastic sky-dome had gone; grabbed off by Ghoul. Mya sucked at her oxygen in time to pull the plane out of its spin. We were all shaken up but Thay was worst hurt. They’ve got him in some other part of this palace I haven’t seen yet. I guess Hamid’s there, too. I really don’t know about this Thay Himmer cat; looks like he’s conjuring himself out of the picture real quick. I’m told that, as soon as he shut off his word-line, his old asthma has hit him so bad we got to get him into an iron lung. I would have thought Dakar would be nearest but:

“Not at all!” snaps Madame Mya. “We must all take off for Tam … and tonight!”

Well, this is the way I came — with nothing but my black suit of skin and my recording system. I’ll go anywhere, I guess; any time the lady says. Moreover, may I add, there is nothing to eat in this goddamn place. I have found nothing but a storeroom full of cases of chunky peanut butter, and that’s all! There are no servants on tap in this tomb because all of those faggotty Foulba have flitted off to the mainland to sew bead-fringe and ostrich feathers on their shepherdess hats for the beauty contest. They give me the creeps. Trust a woman to imagine I might be interested in the likes of them! Mya brought them down a present of five hundred gross of cheap blue cotton shirts from Hong Kong but, because they never wore shirts before in their lives, they hoisted them on little crossed sticks, over their heads, and tore off to their camp; looking like an army of “men whose heads do grow beneath their shoulders.”

The Himmer’s Swiss lawyer came in and I recorded him. Funny, I had to turn the tape over to record him on top of Thay, wiping Thay’s words as I went. I wonder if that sort of cannibalism is what Himmer meant by: “Rub out the word”?