Shaman laughed. “You shouldn’t have slapped him, Gypsy. Now he’s awake, such as he is.”
“Mel . . .” Nora kept walking toward me, undeterred by the beet slices. “You shouldn’t distress yourself over blood. Bodies aren’t important, Mel. Don’t you remember? You were almost there with me. . . .”
“No more love-making!” Shaman warned. “I can do an epochй too, Nora, and you might not like how you’re greeted where I would take you.”
“You wouldn’t dare,” she said, without taking her eyes off me. “You don’t know how, Shaman. You’d turn the world inside-out. It would be the end of you.” She was more beautiful than ever. The blood somehow appealed to me now. It made me tacitly aware of her neck, her chest, her arms. I was hungry for her, starved to the marrow. She kept coming.
“What should I remember, Nora?” I said. Then she would be mine.
“Remember the Sphinx, called Abu al-Hawl!” Shaman shouted. “Remember he who made Chephren. The Sphinx is still thumbing, and in all these millennia, none of you Sanduleans has managed to pick him up. Stay put, Nora. You could wind up in some waterless place for a long time, Nora, and there’d be no WC.”
Gypsy burst into flame. “I’m you, Shaman!” he said.
“The hell you are. Don’t try that on me!” Shaman pointed at him, thrusting his arm as if it were a fire hose, and the flames whooshed out.
“What am I?” I said. I dropped the beets.
(The Haymakers still send me tribute every three hundred years: uranium juke boxes, fake books from all parts of the universe?with performance rights granted, since they know I like to gig on the acousticals Johnny gave me in Giza?music boxes with their songs transposed to Larmor frequencies, and so on. Three hundred years is a long time on Sanduleak, but for most of my galaxy, it’s a blink; Johnny and the boys are tremendously grateful to me, even though I really had no choice in the matter, and if I had, frankly, I wouldn’t have helped them.
I know that must sound pretty crass, given that the Italians were using Abu’s head for rifle practice during World War II, among other indignities that Ylemic Lord had to suffer during his captivity. Still, I thought of myself as an individual being for most of the time I was in the Milky Way. I didn’t think that the Sphinx was of any importance whatever! Deluded as that may be, I think you could call it a mitigating circumstance: not guilty by reason of insanity, Your Honor. I was looking out for Number One, so I thought, as if there were any.)
22. I’m You
“You are Abu al-Hawl,” Nora said, “the Father of Terror, Rahorakhty, Sun God of the Two Horizons, and I am Queen of Punt, the land of incense, the land of purified desire. Gypsy is my servitor. Shaman is a foul grave robber. Abu al-Hawl, thou knowest everything. Abu al-Hawl, Soul of the Great Sphinx, Ka, I invoke you.”
Nora was looking straight at me, but I could not believe that it was me she was talking to. She was talking through me, as if I were a phone tube. Behind her I saw Shaman laughing so hard he had to support himself against the glass door. “Tell the boy what you like to do in water closets, oh corpulent Queen of Punt.” He made for us, stumbling and guffawing. He placed himself between us, one hand on the sneeze guard, the other on Nora’s bloody shoulder. Gypsy rose. “Tell him how you have to watch water swirl in toilets or sinks or maelstroms, wherever water goes down, oh Queen of the WC.”
“You call it a toilet,” Nora said. I couldn’t see her face now. Shaman was in the way. “You think that makes it something profane. I tell you Shaman, whatever is, is an effulgence of Abu al-Hawl, whose home is Sanduleak and the stars, but who dwells in all thoughts and all things. All that swirls, swirls down to him. Feces and incense are one to him. Who shuts himself off from one shuts himself off from all.”