Izzy waved a little navy-blue book. “I got it! I got it, Melly baby. I got you a passport. We’re gonna haul ass out of the Sahara.” They cantered into the enclosure. “His Polaroid did it; the sun spoiled my Fuji’s. Sarvaduhka’s a hero. And you, you’re great too, boy. You got Johnny Abilene here, and he’s our main man.” Izzy dismounted and held the passport photo up for the Sphinx to see.
Lila jumped down beside him and twined herself around his arm. “You lovely one-brow, you are a crazy man everywhere, just like in bed. How will you get the Great Sphinx through customs?”
My father clapped a husky arm around Sarvaduhka. Sarvaduhka was cadaverous and grim on the outside. Inside, he was set to explode. “He gets everything,” ?I could hear him thinking? “female action included, and my squareback thrown in, free mileage, everything. And what do I get? Saddle sore.”
“It so happens,” Izzy crowed, “that if we can take him through during the hour just after sunset, the customs official lets it right by. He just thinks maybe something’s kind of funny, but he can’t put his finger on it, see what I mean?”
“Why do you have to move him at all,” said Sarvaduhka, and he thought, “. . . you stupid, back-stabbing fornicator?”
“I’ll ignore the last part, Marmaduke, but the fact is, I gotta take him into the shop. I can’t finish fixing him against Shaman out here in the Sahara. My skin’s too pale, okay?”
“I will not bother to ask how you expect to move a sixty-five-foot-high limestone statue across the desert, through customs, and up the gangplank onto an airplane, and convince everyone that he is simply a mid-level executive at Coca-Cola. Two hundred forty feet long, Izzy!”
“Good work,” said Izzy, “you’ve been listening to the Son et Lumiиre. I get his peanuts and that on the airplane, don’t forget. I called it at the Cairo Khan Suites.”
They were gathering under my chin, where my plaited stone beard used to hang, the Pharaonic sign that shaded Tuthmosis when he dug me out of the sand. My father, Johnny Abilene, passed around his canteen; it was a scrotal second-hander from Death Valley. “I’ve been waiting for this moment for a long time, Your Majesty,” he said to Izzy.
“Don’t call me that,” Izzy hissed, “not in front of him.”
34. Peripherizing the Sphinx
“Okay, Johnny A.,” said Izzy. “I think you know what to do.”
The Haymaker produced a ukulele and started strumming backup, while Johnny tightened his bowels as if he were about to defecate. Johnny pursed his lips and squinted. The sky blinked black and then shone so brilliantly that they all had to squint and shade their eyes. There was a faint rumble from deep below.
Johnny was peripherizing. “I’m gonna impossibilize that gigantus right down to a midgy,” he grunted. “He can walk among us like a regular man, as long as we don’t look too hard, and I’m gonna fix it so’s we can’t, and so nobody can, till he gets to Izzy’s shop.”
Sarvaduhka was unimpressed. “What about the plane? It won’t hold him.”
“Anything that touches old Abu, once I’ve peripherized him, is gonna fall down into the same squint and follow along.”
“Do it, cowboy,” Izzy said, sweating under his pith helmet as the sun crossed over the zenith.
Johnny gave one last push, “Ee-hah!” Nothing had changed, but suddenly, everyone was looking at me differently, that is, without craning their necks! It was no longer possible to focus directly on the Sphinx; I was quarantined to the corner of everyone’s eye, where a lot can pass, believe me, that would terrify down center. I was as if man-sized. Johnny patted me on my stone shoulders, gave me a kiss, they all remounted, and we headed out.
35. The Space People
came across the desert like a swarm of locusts. They were swinging “spirit catchers” over their heads, dowel-and-rubber-band doohickeys furiously buzzing.
We had left the Sphinx enclosure. Dad had given me sunglasses and a white polyester suit to wear. Izzy stuck a briefcase in my paw and hoped that the headdress would pass for a touristy gewgaw. For reasons unknown, the headdress, unlike my gigantic size, earthen complexion, missing appendages, and leonine corpus, could not be easily camouflaged. I walked in the middle, flanked by Johnny and the Haymaker, a baritone in a bolo tie, with Izzy and Lila Kodzi in front and Sarvaduhka bringing up the rear.