“Dualism.”
“Lord Abu al-Hawl, Great Beneficent One, please make the whore shut up.”
28. Who Am I?
I bolted upright, like a stricken dreamer. “Who am I?” Gypsy sat across the table from me, a half-peeled banana, the dendritic bulb sprouting from his crumpled human thorax like fungus from the crotch of a dead oak. He wasn’t moving. Nora sat beside him, still and silent. Her mouth was slightly open; she stared dumbly past me. Nora was naked?still human?and her long hair was splayed all over her face, shoulders, breasts. I touched her arm. It was cold.
From the kitchen: the whooshing and humming of the dishwashing machine, and sometimes a knock, as from badly vented plumbing; then the whole cafй shook. Each sound was accompanied by a change of scenery out the window. The streaks of starlight shifted angles, they grew dense or sparse, or danced in circles, or split into planes like layers of grenadine and liquor. We passed through glittering banks of sperm-like particles, auras of colored light, moments of darkness so profound they seemed to darkle the cafй pitch black, nullifying our fluorescents.
Tools clanked. Shaman grunted.
“Nora?” I said.
The noise in the kitchen abruptly stopped. Shaman appeared at the door. His white pants were stained with grease. He held a box-end wrench in one hand. He looked tired. “I’m you, you little shit.”
I slumped back into the chair.
He took a few steps in my direction, then barked, “You’re not here.” I was gone. It was night on the Sahara. On the fringe of my mind, fast fading, was the image of Shaman coming closer, jabbing at Izzy’s bung with something like an ice pick, doing it without much spirit, as if he’d tried it a dozen times before to no effect and didn’t really expect it to work now. He slapped Gypsy and Nora to see if they would respond?they didn’t. Then he returned to the kitchen, to the dishwasher, in the same disgruntled, hopeless frame of mind.
“I’ll have to do my own epochй,” he muttered, “if this doesn’t work. God help us all then.”
Then nothing. Then sand, sound and light, Sarvaduhka and Lila Kodzi shouting up my stone ass.
29. Epochй
” ‘Who am I?’ Did you hear that, Lila Kodzi? The Sphinx spoke.” Sarvaduhka shivered.
“It was one of the camels. Hamad snorted. He snorts, that’s all.”
Sarvaduhka persisted. “Oh Great One, I will convey your question to Izzy: ‘Who am I?’ I myself am but a poor, small person in the hospitality trade. I have two, three motels jointly with my cousins, although they hardly do anything but watch TV and drink alcoholic items. I will ask Izzy, who knows many things like that. But can you get Johnny Abilene, Wondrous One? Izzy wants to know, will you do it A.S.A. of P.? He would do this himself, but he is indisposed.”
“Maybe Abu can give us a sign.” Lila nudged Sarvaduhka.
“Exactly, but please be quiet, Lila. I am doing this . . . Great One, can you give us a sign?”
My selfhood was significantly in disarray. I was being addressed by creatures whose formation I had initiated some seven hundred million years before in an attempt to disembark from the Milky Way, where I found myself stranded. On the other hand, I was being held in a Texas highway rest stop cafй a good ways out in space toward the Large Magellanic Cloud. Besides which, I was some sort of tourist attraction.
Shaman wanted to eat me. I wanted to go home. Yet I couldn’t find my center. To me was lost that Archimedean fulcrum from which the soul can act.
“A sign, oh Great One! Please, a sign!”
It was like trying to sit up when your back is out?Where are those muscles? My desperation drove me deeper and deeper away from my senses, deeper and deeper away from thoughts and feelings too. Sinking in, even the desperation dwindled above me like bubbles rising away from a skin diver.
Through murk and roil, I squinted as an artist squints, bracketing the details to understand the whole. Fish and weed of mind tumbled by, denuded of names and relations, continually devouring one another, blurring boundaries. This wasn’t the swill of Shaman’s hole, for now I was the diver and the pearls I found would be mine.