This story originally appeared in Rhapsoidia Literary Magazine.
Corey Wicks presents
Stained carpets
It was a curious thing to see Arabic lettering on a DVD case of a pornographic movie. And although I wouldn’t describe myself as a connoisseur of such prurient pastimes, I silently amused myself with the fact that I recognized the face of Ron Jeremy on the cover of the porn flick. Beside me, uncomfortably close to me, in fact, were several sweating dark-haired Iraqi men thumbing through the stack of lurid movies with a magnetic interest. They were completely oblivious to my presence. Perhaps this was their first peek at the forbidden fruit of pornography, the crowning achievement of 4,000 years of Western Civilization. I suspected, however, that these were no neophytes to the porn industry. No, these were budding porn addicts --- as addicted to smut as the junkie who smokes crack for the first time and is instantly hooked. What would be as mild as a bowl of marijuana to a Westerner was as potent as methamphetamine to the average sexually repressed Iraqi male.
But I was not in Baghdad to buy booby flicks, for that was the mere milk of babes. No, I was in search of a far more explosive forbidden fruit. This “fruit,” if it were found to exist, could prove to put an end to centuries of insanity --- an insanity which weighed most heavily on the entire Middle East. This, in many ways, was the Holy Grail of forbidden fruits. At the back end of the outdoor market, my guide, Rahi Ardashir, was in the thick of negotiating for this Holy Grail of anti-religious relics with the shopkeeper. I was thankful to have such a noble figure working on my behalf for such a lofty cause as this was.
Rahi prided himself on the fact that he was not Arabic but Persian. In fact, as he had told me many times, he was a direct lineal descendent of Ardashir I (A.D. 224-241), the founder of the illustrious Sassanid Dynasty (A.D. 224-637), of the Persian Empire at its nadir. Rahi happened to be the leader of the Naqshbandi, the largest band of the Sufi Order. The term Naqshbandi comes from the Persian word Naqsh, which means “to paint.” The Naqshbandi were metaphorically referred to as “The Painters,” even as some Masonic Lodges were referred to as “The Builders.” In this case, the Naqshbandi were figurative painters of the divine plan for humanity. Like most Sufi orders, their fraternity was a curious blend of Islam and Hinduism. The fraternity was especially popular in Turkey, where they were well-known for their whirling dervish dances. The image of bearded men, wearing fez hats and flowing white dresses, spinning ecstatically in circles, was as common an image to a Muslim as a parade of Shriners in toy cars would be to the American mind. But being broad-minded and cosmopolitan in their approach to theology had earned the Sufis the hatred of the firebrand religious conservatives. Wuhabi clerics and terrorists such as Osama Bin Ladin’s al-Qaeda network hated the Sufis almost as much as they hated the capitalist crusaders drilling oil in Muslim territory.
There seemed to be a great deal of gesturing and finagling involved in Rahi’s negotiations with the shopkeeper. Wearing a double-breasted navy blue suit jacket and tie, Rahi looked very much like a cultured Western businessman. His wire-rimmed glasses were the internationally recognized symbol of a studious intellect. Analyzing his gangly jet-black hair, however, you could tell that it took a great effort to civilize it; but with much effort it was as well-woven as a Persian carpet. His curly black chest-hair leapt up from his open collar in a more free-spirited manner compared to the tamed rug atop his head. The Iraqi shopkeeper had a tanned, bald head, and wore a white dress shirt. His sharp gestures were punctuated by the cigar in his hand, which he jabbed like a scimitar fighting off the Thief of Baghdad.
I sighed nervously while the two bartered, wishing I had a cigar of my own to give me a more suave, Humphrey Bogart look to my loitering. Still standing in the aisle of porno flicks, I awkwardly leaned up against a concrete pillar and allowed the sweaty customers to pass in front of me that they might satisfy their obsessions with cigars of a different flavor. Finally, the shopkeeper and Rahi nodded together, seemingly in an agreement of some sort. The shopkeeper disappeared behind a beaded curtain into a hidden foyer. Rahi turned to me, smiled and gave the thumbs up signal across the busy market. I returned the thumbs up signal, until I became slightly embarrassed at the thought that it probably looked like I was signaling the approval of the gay porn DVDs to my immediate left. The shopkeeper returned with an ornate oblong box and set it on the counter before Rahi. After fidgeting with the lock for a moment, the shopkeeper opened the lid and ran his finger over the face of the contents, somewhat like a model heralding a new car on The Price is Right gameshow. Rahi was counting something inside the box. Like a trader on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange, Rahi turned to me and held up his five fingers, closed his fist, opened it, closed it and opened it.
Fifteen! Fifteen fingers. I knew exactly what he meant and flashed the two thumbs up sign in return. Rahi then pulled his wallet from his suit jacket and carefully counted out the ten $100 bills that I had previously given him for the transaction. Rahi had just purchased, on behalf of my own fraternity, the Rosicrucians, the full 15-volumes of Porphyry’s Against the Christians. Excerpts from Porphyry’s treatise had been quoted from by Christian apologists in antiquity, but church authorities ordered all copies of the text destroyed. It was commonly thought that when the Library of Alexandria was destroyed that the last copies of the work were gone forever. Unknown to most people, however, the text was preserved by surviving Neoplatonist philosophers. When the Byzantine Emperor Justinian closed down the Platonic Academies in 529 A.D., many surviving Neoplatonists fled to Persia to the university town of Jundishapur, in what is today modern Iran. While the lights of scholarship and learning went out all over Europe, the greatest minds of the Western world flocked to Jundishapur to take haven under the protection of the Sassanid Dynasty. This particular 15-volume set was rumored to be a fifth century copy, meaning the volumes were first generation copies of the original work thought to be lost in antiquity. It was said to have been stolen from the archives of the Naqshbandi during the turmoil of the end of World War I and the downfall of the Ottoman Empire. Now, in the midst of the second Gulf War and its subsequent chaos, Porphyry’s explosive work managed to surface in Baghdad’s black market of antiquities --- alongside other profanities.
A big smile was on Rahi’s face as he turned and faced me holding the box of ancient books. Suddenly on the periphery of our eye contact there was the ferocious sound of screeching tires, engine acceleration, and husky male voices shouting in Arabic. The slow-motion realization of what was happening was cut short by a violent concussion.…When I came back into my body I first sensed the overall dissonance one feels when a baseball bat vibrates in your hand after hitting a baseball the wrong way. I slowly realized that for some time I had been rolling on the sidewalk covered in powdery dust. My ears rang, and I reached up to my left ear and felt the moisture of blood seeping through the dusty grit. Broken ear drum. A car bomb. A fucking car bomb. Dizzy. I felt a horrible headache coming on and nausea in my stomach. My eyes were stinging and the more I rubbed them and redistributed the gritty residue, the more painful and irritated my eyes became. My fingers smelled like gasoline. As I sat on my knees rubbing my eyes I realized that over the top of the ringing in my ears was the sound of human beings screaming as loud as the human voice could possibly scream. But through my blown ear drums it sounded like a wounded tiger shrieking underwater. The realization slowly dawned on me that despite the buzzing dullness caused by the blast, I was bodily intact, with all my limbs in place. Perhaps I could offer some form of first aid to the blast victims.
I staggered to my feet and surveyed the landscape with my bleeding eyes. Where once there were tables stocked with knickknacks, now there was a barren gritty floor and a burning frame of a van. Immediately behind me was the now shredded concrete pillar I had been leaning against before the blast. On the other side of the pillar, broken glass, metal siding from a fender and what must have been bone fragments were embe dded into the concrete. The shards would have severed my flesh were they not stopped by the concrete pillar. The screaming was coming from behind a pile of debris near the severed wall of a shop. Re-gathering my senses, I reluctantly overcame my squeamishness and headed toward the noise. But I didn’t get far before I recoiled. It was a man severed in half, flailing on the ground in the horrific realization that he was still alive when he should be dead. It was an image cauterized into my mind from that day forward. Needless to say, his injury was beyond any first aid training I had. First aid would be an obscenity when the thought of living in that torn open body for any second longer, let alone those last agonizing moments, would add to God’s felonies that day. Most of the others too that had been in the market moments before were now no bigger than the size of uncooked chicken nuggets.
Beneath the buzzing and swishing inside my eardrum I realized that a word had existed there since just before the blast: the sacred Lost Word --- spoken at the primordial instant of creation. It had returned across the void of space and time to protect me in the time of terror, just as my initiator had said it would so long ago when I stood before the triangular altar. And yet, how absurd the thought of giving the Grand Hailing Sign of Distress seemed amidst the human wasteland before me. How unlikely a place it would be to find a frater or a soror in this, the deepest region of hell’s bosom! The Grand Painter had reserved his ugliest artwork for that dark day! For it was then that I recognized the saddest canvas of all. On the sidewalk before me was, if you pardon the expression, a stained Persian carpet --- the scalp of Rahi Ardashir, the late head of the Sufi Order.
“I salute you my brother,” I said, reaching down to pick up the scalp. “And all the Knights and Secret Chiefs of the Rosy Cross salute you.” I placed Rahi’s scalp in the pocket of my suit jacket, feeling a lump of emotion in my throat. This was something to be filed away until a future moment when there was time to process its meaning. The thought came, “So this is how our dream ends, Rahi, in rivers of blood and fanaticism.”
By then people from the surrounding neighborhood were flooding into the ruins of the bazaar, yelling and screaming and crying, carrying out a few bloodied survivors. I stood straight up and just entered the silence for a moment. What the fuck just happened? What the fuck is happening to our planet? Evolutionary progress is flowing backwards and we’re becoming a bunch of goddamned gorillas and orangutans! As I vacillated between indignation and despair, something caught my eye that snapped me out of my funk. I spotted the ornate box amidst a smoking pile of rubble. I walked over to it, just ten feet away, and picked up the box. I lifted its lid and immediately noticed the ancient Greek script of the volumes, its pages still featuring distinct lettering after some 1700 years. Perhaps there was still hope.
At that moment I felt a tap on my shoulder and heard some indecipherable phrase in Arabic. Must be wanting to give me first aid.
“You there!” the voice demanded.
I turned, startled, to see a ski-masked militia-man pointing an AK-47 machine-gun at my face. He called out to several other ski-masked men who were standing near a sedan.
“Give me that! Come with me!”
He snatched the box from my hands with one arm, the other still clutching the AK-47.
“Muktar!” he said, and to my shock, tossed the box the 20-feet or so towards the sedan. Muktar, stepped forward and attempted a one-arm catch of the box. The brunt of the catch knocked him back a bit and his hip bounced against the opened car door as he stepped back. A volume of the ancient text fluttered out and landed on the sidewalk.
“Fuck! (something, something, something),” he said in Arabic, and kicked at the 1700 year old text that landed near his ankles. His foot went right through the brittle pages, causing them to explode into a small cloud.
By this time the militant Arab had already grasped the back of my suit jacket and was tugging me towards the sedan. He was laughing at his friend’s juggling of the box as we neared the car, which was a French Peugot four-door. I glanced down and watched the last remains of one of the most precious volumes of philosophical criticism floating on the wisps of Iraqi air, just a few feet away from a black column of smoke arising from the shredded van.
The militant shoved me into the back seat of the sedan, alongside what looked like a captured American. The masked-man jumped in the seat beside me and I was wedged between the two of them. The driver tossed the box into the back seat, trying to land it on the shelf beneath the back window. But it banged against the American, hitting him squarely in the forehead, causing the box to fall down against the back of my shoulder. There must still be at least 13 or 14 volumes left, I thought as I calculated from the weight against my shoulder. While another ski-masked man jumped in the front passenger seat, the driver stomped on the gas pedal and the car squealed forward, jerking our necks backwards. The driver turned the car wildly to the right and started speeding down a residential neighborhood at what must have been 60 m.p.h. I noticed that a rocket-propelled-grenade launcher was rattling against the doorframe as we bounced up the narrow road.
Suddenly, the driver rapidly decelerated and pulled off to the edge of the road. In the far distance, three U.S. Army Humvees turned onto the street directly ahead of us. They rapidly approached. The gang quickly pulled off their ski masks. Each of them had thick Assyrian beards. The driver got out and started waiving his arms towards the column of thick black smoke, pretending to direct the convoy through traffic. Sirens blared in the distance, getting ever closer. The mujahideen fighter to my left, now unmasked, lowered his AK-47 and pointed it at my abdomen --- a not-so-subtle hint that I shouldn’t try anything as the Humvees approached.
Silently we sat as the Hummers sped towards us. The three terrorists were smiling and waiving as the convoy approached. The driver moved to the front bumper as the convoy met us. Despite a clearance of maybe a foot, the army convoy passed doing about 40 m.p.h. I caught a glimpse of the American G.I.’ s as they whizzed by on their way to the bazaar. I looked over at the other captive to scan his face for a reaction.
“Josiah Johnson, from Lubbock, Texas,” the moustache’d man said quietly. He held out his hand to shake. “I’m a security analyst for DynCorp.” The man’s grip was firm, as if he was deliberately trying to impress me with his hand strength.
“Blessed be,” I said, releasing his hand.
“Your friend is a Texas cowboy who has come here to teach us his Southern manners, just like your president,” said the tanned man in the front passenger seat.
“He’s not my president,” I said.
“Not your president? You are American are you not?”
“I consider myself a citizen of the world.”
“What are you French?”
“No.”
“Then you work for the United Nations?”
“You could say that. I am here for humanitarian purposes only.”
“Majestic Allah be praised!” the man said to the driver. “We have captured Mother Theresa!” The two Arabs shared a laugh and a quick word in Arabic. I knew enough Arabic to pick up bits-and-pieces of their conversation. The driver reached into the glove compartment and produced in his hand a black cloth.
“Lean forward!” shouted the machine-gun toting front passenger.
The driver wrapped the black cloth around my eyes and tied it tightly. The pressure stirred up the dust in my eyes again and caused them to itch. Through my good eardrum I then heard him tying a blindfold on the Texan as well.
“Be silent, or Allah shall force us to shoot Mother Theresa and the Texan cowboy.”
We drove on rapidly through the streets of Baghdad, and with the blindfold on it was more difficult to anticipate which way to lean around the corners. I spent most of the next ten minutes falling onto the Texan as we cornered left, and falling onto the terrorist as we cornered right. He’d push me off him, muttering something with an annoyed tone. But we soon arrived at our destination. We were quickly ushered out of the car. Thankfully I could see my feet in the gap between my nose and the blindfold. They shuffled us rapidly into a building. I guessed it to be a residence of some sort. Once inside they made me hold out my arms behind me while they wrapped duck tape around my wrists and ankles. They pushed me over onto the ground and then dragged me across the stone floor into what must have been a closet. I heard them taping up the Texan as well. They dragged him into the closet too. I could hear him breathing beside me. Neither one of us said anything as we lay on the floor listening intently to the tone of the Arab voices, scanning them for clues as to their intentions. For hours we lay there, listening, listening, listening. Somewhere around midnight the Texan broke out into a kind of quiet charismatic prayer. He would be speaking in tongues, and then he’d break out into various “thank you Jesus” and “yes Lord, yes Lord” repetitions.
“Keep it down goddammit!” I whispered. “You’re gonna get us killed.”
He continued, unfazed: “Yes Lord, help me to wear your Crown of Thorns.”
“Miserable lout!” I whispered in a harsh tone. “The only Crown of Thorns existing in all of history is the circle of lies penetrating your own soft skull!”
Just then the door flung open and a foot smacked me in the stomach, knocking the wind out of me. The next kick smashed into my already-broken ear drum. After that I must have blacked out.…
I woke up choking. My mouth had been duck taped shut and my nose was clogged with blood. Couldn’t inhale. In desperation I wriggled close to the wall and started trying to catch the edge of the duck tape and get some space for my lips. It wasn’t working. My chin just slid up and down the slick stone surface; I still couldn’t breathe. I tried to pull my lips back and get them unstuck from the tape. Didn’t work. Suddenly I felt some hands wrapping around the tape. There was a quick yank, but it only made the tape stiffen into a rope and jerk my neck violently. I continued choking. Then I felt the cool of a knife blade sliding between my skin and the duck tape. A quick slice and a strong yank and the tape was ripped from my face, taking with it some skin and a bit of hair. I didn’t care; I just gasped for air. My blindfold was removed to reveal one of the terrorists staring at me.
“Now it is a Muslim who has saved a Christian soul,” he said.
I stretched the kink in my neck and tried to survey my surroundings as my captive continued to lecture me. To my left, sitting bolt upright, was the Texan. Hmm. Why wasn’t his mouth duck taped?
“I have the right to kill you, of course. As it says in the Koran: ‘Against them make ready your strength to the utmost of your power, including steeds of war, to strike terror into the hearts of the enemies of Allah and your enemies, and others besides whom ye may not know, but whom Allah doth know.’”
“Have you considered the number 9 ?”
“What are you saying, Mother Theresa?” The gender-twisting label seemed to delight his sexist world-view.
“You think you serve the number 1, but because you only think in terms of the number 2, you can never arrive at the number 1.”
The bearded man turned towards the Texan as if for a translation, but the Texan just shrugged his shoulders.
“You fear the West because they possess the number 3, which pervades all of nature,” I continued. “Despite possessing the number 3, the West cannot comprehend it because they no longer remember the 0 that precedes the 1. You, however, try to assuage your fear of 3 by attempting to destroy the 4’s and 5’s of the West. But by stripping away 2’s, you end up creating more 3’s, whose destructive power you fear most --- yet which you seek like nothing else. You fear the 3 because by thinking according to the number 2, you remain forever even --- and incapable of perceiving the fluidic secrets of nature. Therefore, it is only logical that you lack the number 9. For if you would but meditate on the number 9, eventually you would realize the secret mystery of the number 3.”
“What kind of American slang is this?” the mujahideen said to the Texan.
“Numbers. Some kind of occult gibberish,” Johnson said, shaking his head.
“It appears Mother Theresa has lost his mind.”
“The hearts of freemen are the tombs of secrets,” I said.
The bearded man shot me a stunned look. “That’s a Muslim proverb,” he said. “Are you Muslim?”
“I have Muslim brothers. A few less as of today.”
“You say you have Muslim brothers, but you do not include yourself. Then you are a Christian.”
“That depends on how you define the term Christian.”
The Muslim’s forearms tensed a bit and his lower jaw stiffened.
“You are either Muslim or you are Christian!”
“Ah, but there you return to the number 2. It is the number 9 you are looking for.”
“Sounds like y’all have been searchin’ for the devil long enough to have found him,” Johnson spoke up.
“If the word you are going to speak is not more beautiful than silence, then do not say it!” I said.
The mujahideen raised his forefinger. “Ah yes, I recognize that saying as well. My mother used to tell me that.”
“And my Sufi friend used to say that.” I remembered Ravi’s scalp and wondered if it was still in my pocket. Sure enough, I could feel the lump beneath my hip.
“The Sufis are not Muslims,” he said and walked around the corner.
“Sounds like you have given up on Christ,” Johnson said when the Arab was out of earshot.
“Now I have two fundamentalists to lecture me. Great.”
“You just have to open up your heart and let Christ in. Why don’t you pray with me now?”
“Look, I don’t mean to be rude, but your religion is the last thing I need, or anyone needs, for that matter.”
“God’s church is always there waiting for you to return to it.”
“God’s church? This will mean nothing to you, but the fact is, Emperor Justinian slit the throat of the Bride of Christ in the year 553 A.D. Ever since then she has been a corpse bride.”
“How can you say that? You have no proof.”
“The proof hit you in the forehead this morning, but I have no doubt that that was the closest it will ever come to actually entering your brain.”
Johnson rolled onto his side. “You’re worse than the terrorists,” he said. “No wonder America is going to hell.”
Looking at my fellow captive’s back, I thought about my harsh approach for a while. For many years my life’s mission was to combat fundamentalism in all its forms. My combative approach was mindful of the fact that fundamentalists tend to surround themselves with layers of barbed-wire, concrete barricades and trip-wires in order that they might preserve their pseudo-religious identities at all costs. Yet, I knew from my esoteric studies that the first stage of spiritual awakening is the death of the ego. Therefore, paradoxically, sometimes the most compassionate thing one could do was to aim a flaming arrow and land it squarely on the ego. Usually this was through a verbal slap against the head. With any luck the religionist would become enraged and come charging out of their self-created cages. Once out in the open field you could expose the absurdity of their self-delusions. Unfortunately, most of the time the fundamentalists would then realize their nakedness and charge back behind their barricades. But in the Middle East, where children are weaned on the milk of grenades, my harsh approach just seemed to add more flames to an already ruined landscape. The sea of overwhelming cruelty grew wearisome.
I rolled onto my side and drifted into the dream world.
I was pulled back into the material world when I felt a tap against my shoulder. Opening my eyes I was startled to see a veiled face in front of me. It was a women. I scanned her emerald eyes and the wrinkled skin exposed through the veil. It was an elderly woman. She had brought us tea and biscuits, which thrilled me since by that time I was famished. The woman had a knife in her hand and she used it to cut the duck tape off my wrists. I sat up and removed the remainder of the duck tape while she woke up Johnson. I loved this elderly women at first sight. She was an oasis of humanity in an inhuman desert. Johnson was startled when he woke up out of sleep. I was amused at the surprise on his face when he noticed that it was a woman with a tray of tea and biscuits. This must have been either the mother or grandmother of one of the thugs who was holding us captive. She left us and we sat there nibbling in silence.
Outside, through my good ear, I could hear some kind of argument brewing. One of the terrorists, who by this time I figured out was named Abu Sa’ed, was yelling at the other named Muktar. Soon, the closet door flung open and Abu Sa’ed stood there with Muktar behind him.
“Prepare yourself, Mother Theresa, for today you shall serve Allah on a great mission.”
The two reached under my armpits and dragged me out of the closet into a hallway. My feet were still duck taped together. They pulled me into a living room with a television set, a couch and a table. On the table was a lit candle. They propped me up before the table. Abu Sa’ed picked up the candle and turned towards me. The illumination created strange shadows on his bearded face, as he held the candle close to my forehead --- so close I felt the heat against my skin. I began to wonder if my eyebrows were about to ignite.
“Tell me, Mother Theresa, where does the Light come from?”
I drew my head back and blew out the candle. Sa’ed reeled back and inhaled as if he was a snake preparing to strike.
“Tell me where the Light has gone … and I shall tell you where it came from.”
This caused him to pause. “Very good, Mother Theresa. You speak like a Magi.”
“Yes, but can he pass the great test,” said Muktar, holding up an electronic device in front of the television.
It was a videogame console. Playstation2.
“We stole this from an American Jeep yesterday. I’m afraid G.I. Joe could not tell us how to use it on account of him being dead.”
It was then I realized that the “great mission” they had planned for me, was simply to help them hook-up the Playstation2. I looked at the game console for a moment and examined how they had it wired to the television.
“You need an adaptor,” I said.
They looked puzzled. I held up the power cord and pointed to the plug at the end. “An adaptor … you”
“Ah yes, a power converter,” the light bulb came on Muktar’s face. “I told you Sa’ed!”
Muktar left the room and returned a moment later with the appropriate adaptor. Within minutes, I found myself sitting on a couch with two terrorists, one of whom was playing SuperMarioBrothers.
“This is a stupid game, Muktar. Let us play the other one.”
“No, I like this one,” he said, as Mario continued forward on the screen. “Shut up, Sa’ed.”
Sa’ed reached down and jerked out the cartridge. He grabbed the controller that was in Muktar’s hands and for a moment they had a tug-of-war, until Muktar released it with an irritated sigh. In the empty slot Sa’ed jammed the cartridge of Grand Theft Auto, Miami Vice.
“See, this one is much better.”
A few seconds later, Muktar was coaching him in the game, and I was managing to understand the Arabic.
“Steal the car! That is what you must do! I have seen this game before, let me play it,” Muktar said, reaching for the controller.
“No, I can do it!” Sa’ed said, fending off Muktar’s reach.
As Sa’ed hogged the game and Muktar grew ever-more frustrated by his friend’s incompetence, my attention became fixed on the AK-47 that was resting against the wall a few feet to my left. The clip was in the chamber. I began mapping out a choreographed strike in my head. I could dive forward from the couch, roll, grab the gun and fire off two shots before they knew what hit them. But the more I thought about it, the more I felt a pair of eyes in the back of my head. I turned my neck around and saw that the veiled woman had been staring at me all along. Beside her was a rocket-propelled-grenade launcher. I smiled at her, and I think she smiled back.
Suddenly I heard footsteps and a voice outside.
“Salaam. The Sheik is here,” Muktar said. The videogame console was tossed aside and the T.V. shut off.
The Sheik entered the room and Sa’ed greeted him by kissing his cheek in the Middle-eastern custom. Muktar did the same. They conversed in a low tone for a moment, gesturing towards the closet. The Sheik wore an ornate robe, somewhat like the high priest of King Solomon’s temple. Muktar and Sa’ed walked towards the closet while the Sheik approached me. In my hands he placed a digital video camera. The Sheik began lecturing me in solemn tones as his confederates dragged the Texan out of the closet.
“Majestic Allah be praised. You have been chosen to serve the Light that shines on all men. The evidence that His glorious presence shall manifest among us shall be through this red dot.” The Sheik pointed to the recording light on the D.V. camera. “You must make sure that Allah is always present through the darkest hours. Should the red light go out, heaven forbid, then shall your own light be extinguished.”
The three of them had donned ski-masks now and lined up in front of the camera I pointed at them. Muktar and Abu Sa’ed were toting AK-47’s. The Texan was made to kneel before them as the Sheik rambled on about the West not learning anything but through the dialogue of bullets, assassination, and the diplomacy of bombs and machine-guns. Through the camera lens I stared into the eyes of Josiah Johnson and saw the fear of the unknown. I regretted every harsh thing I had said to him.
Suddenly from within the Sheik’s robe he pulled out a long knife. The Sheik blurted out something to Allah; Johnson said “thank you Jesus” just as the knife came thrusting into his neck. I expected there to be screaming as blood came spurting out of his neck, but instead the Texan’s eyes were as calm as a lamb on the Jewish Passover. I squinted as the slaughter continued, while the Sheik struggled to sever the bone with his knife.
“No, Muktar, you have hold his head.”
“Stop it Sa’ed, I’m doing it.”
In slow-motion I dropped the camera, hopped once in my duck-taped feet, and dove as hard as I could towards the veiled woman. Bullets ricocheted off the stone wall in front of me as I clutched the grenade launcher and pointed. The rocket whizzed the short distance. A concussion.
Gore splashed across the living room as the wall behind them fell down, exposing the nighttime sky. Through the smoke I noticed a figure hurling towards me. I reached up just in time to catch the knife with my palm. The blade stuck out of the back of my hand. The Sheik’s angry face glared a few inches from my face as he pushed his weight on top of me. I could smell his foul breath and then I recognized his spirit as one of the jinn from the Persian underworld. At that moment, deep within, I heard a word return across the void of space and time.
In a flash of lightning, I shouted the Lost Word “M__T___M” while grabbing the hilt of the knife and pulling it through my palm. I jabbed the blade through the Sheik’s right eye socket, all the way to the hilt. As the jinn’s dark spirit left the Sheik, I pushed his heavy body off of me.
Behind me, I heard a gurgling sound. The veiled woman was on the floor. I went over to her. The woman’s emerald eyes were tearing up, and yet there was a placid calmness to them. Gently I pulled the veil back and slowly revealed her face. As I somehow had known all along, her face looked strikingly similar to my own grandmother’s face. The one I missed so dearly.
There, in the side of her neck, was the deadly bullet wound. Blood was streaming out of it. I placed my wounded palm against her neck and felt her bleed into the hole in my palm.
“Go to sleep, proud mama. You have seen too much pain … Too many tears … so much cruelty … Go now … to a place where there is too much laughter … too much joy … too much kindness. They’re waiting for you.”
