image-missing

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Dedication

Cockroach

I

II

III

IV

V

VI

Acknowledgements

Copyright Page

Cockroach

RAWI HAGE

HAMISH HAMILTON

an imprint of

PENGUIN BOOKS

For Ramzy, Jenny, and Nada, who bring me smiles; for my brothers; for Lisa, as once promised; for Madeleine, who loves the East; and for my exiled friends: may they go back.

 

What we call species are various degenerations of the same type.

— Isidore Saint-Hilaire,
Vie d’Étienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire (1847)

Then Satavaesa makes those waters flow down to the seven Karshvares of the earth, and when he has arrived down there, he stands, beautiful, spreading ease and joy on the fertile countries.

— Avesta, the ancient scriptures of Zoroastrianism

I

I AM IN LOVE with Shohreh. But I don’t trust my emotions anymore. I’ve neither lived with a woman nor properly courted one. And I’ve often wondered about my need to seduce and possess every female of the species that comes my way.

When I see a woman, I feel my teeth getting thinner, longer, pointed. My back hunches and my forehead sprouts two antennae that sway in the air, flagging a need for attention. I want to crawl under the feet of the women I meet and admire from below their upright posture, their delicate ankles. I also feel repulsed — not embarrassed, but repulsed — by slimy feelings of cunning and need. It is a bizarre mix of emotions and instinct that comes over me, compelling me to approach these women like a hunchback in the presence of schoolgirls.

Perhaps it’s time to see my therapist again, because lately this feeling has been weighing on me. Although that same urge has started to act upon me in the shrink’s presence. Recently, when I saw her laughing with one of her co-workers, I realized that she is also a woman, and when she asked me to re-enact my urges, I put my hand on her knee while she was sitting across from me. She changed the subject and, calmly, with a compassionate face, brushed my hand away, pushed her seat back, and said: Okay, let’s talk about your suicide.

Last week I confessed to her that I used to be more courageous, more carefree, and even, one might add, more violent. But here in this northern land no one gives you an excuse to hit, rob, or shoot, or even to shout from across the balcony, to curse your neighbours’ mothers and threaten their kids.

When I said that to the therapist, she told me that I have a lot of hidden anger. So when she left the room for a moment, I opened her purse and stole her lipstick, and when she returned I continued my tale of growing up somewhere else. She would interrupt me with questions such as: And how do you feel about that? Tell me more. She mostly listened and took notes, and it wasn’t in a fancy room with a massive cherrywood and leather couch either (or with a globe of an ancient admiral’s map, for that matter). No, we sat across from each other in a small office, in a public health clinic, only a tiny round table between us.

I am not sure why I told her all about my relations with women. I had tried many times to tell her that my suicide attempt was only my way of trying to escape the permanence of the sun. With frankness, and using my limited psychological knowledge and powers of articulation, I tried to explain to her that I had attempted suicide out of a kind of curiosity, or maybe as a challenge to nature, to the cosmos itself, to the recurring light. I felt oppressed by it all. The question of existence consumed me.

The therapist annoyed me with her laconic behaviour. She brought on a feeling of violence within me that I hadn’t experienced since I left my homeland. She did not understand. For her, everything was about my relations with women, but for me, everything was about defying the oppressive power in the world that I can neither participate in nor control. And the question that I hated most — and it came up when she was frustrated with me for not talking enough — was when she leaned over the table and said, without expression: What do you expect from our meeting?

I burst out: I am forced to be here by the court! I prefer not to be here, but when I was spotted hanging from a rope around a tree branch, some jogger in spandex ran over and called the park police. Two of those mounted police came galloping to the rescue on the backs of their magnificent horses. All I noticed at the time was the horses. I thought the horses could be the answer to my technical problem. I mean, if I rode on the back of one of those beasts, I could reach a higher, sturdier branch, secure the rope to it, and let the horse run free from underneath me. Instead I was handcuffed and taken for, as they put it, assessment.

Tell me about your childhood, the shrink asked me.

In my youth I was an insect.

What kind of insect? she asked.

A cockroach, I said.

Why?

Because my sister made me one.

What did your sister do?

Come, my sister said to me. Let’s play. And she lifted her skirt, laid the back of my head between her legs, raised her heels in the air, and swayed her legs over me slowly. Look, open your eyes, she said, and she touched me. This is your face, those are your teeth, and my legs are your long, long whiskers. We laughed, and crawled below the sheets, and nibbled on each other’s faces. Let’s block the light, she said. Let’s seal that quilt to the bed, tight, so there won’t be any light. Let’s play underground.

Interesting, the therapist said. I think we could explore more of these stories. Next week?

Next week, I said, and rose up on my heels and walked past the clinic’s walls and down the stairs and out into the cold, bright city.

WHEN I GOT HOME, I saw that my sink was filled with dishes, a hybrid collection of neon-coloured dollar-store cups mixed with flower-patterned plates, stacked beneath a large spaghetti pot, all unwashed. Before I could reach for my deadly slipper, the cockroaches that lived with me squeezed themselves down the drain and ran for their lives.

I was hungry. And I had little money left. So it was time to find the Iranian musician by the name of Reza who owed me forty dollars. I was determined to collect and I was losing my patience with that bastard. I was even contemplating breaking his santour if he did not pay me back soon. He hung out in the Artista Café, the one at the corner. It is open twenty-four hours a day, and for twenty-four hours it collects smoke pumped out by the lungs of fresh immigrants lingering on plastic chairs, elbows drilling the round tables, hands flagging their complaints, tobacco-stained fingers summoning the waiters, their matches, like Indian signals, ablaze under hairy noses, and their stupefied faces exhaling cigarette fumes with the intensity of Spanish bulls on a last charge towards a dancing red cloth.

I ran downstairs to look for the bastard at the café, and god behold! Two Jehovah’s Witness ladies flashed their Caribbean smiles and obstructed my flight with towering feathery straw hats that pasted a coconut shade onto the gritty steps of the crumbling building where I live. Are you interested in the world? they asked me. And before I had a chance to reply, one of the ladies, the one in the long quilted coat, slapped me with an apocalyptic prophecy: Are you aware of the hole in the ozone above us?

Ozone? I asked.

Yes, ozone. It is the atmospheric layer that protects us from the burning rays of the sun. There is a hole in it as we speak, and it is expanding, and soon we shall all fry. Only the cockroaches shall survive to rule the earth. But do not despair, young man, because you will redeem yourself today if you buy this magazine — I happen to have a few copies in my hand here — and attend Bible gatherings at our Kingdom Hall. And afterwards, my handsome fellow, you can go down to the basement and listen to the leader (with a cookie and a Styrofoam cup in hand) and he will tell you that transfusions (be they administered through a syringe, a medical doctor, or perverted sex) are a mortal sin. Then and only then will you have a chance. Repent! the woman shouted as she opened the Bible to a marked page. She read, The words of the Lord my son: Therefore will I also deal in fury: mine eye shall not spare, neither will I pity: and though they cry in mine ears with loud voice, yet will I not hear them. Buy this magazine (the word of the Lord included), my son. Read it and repent!

How much? I asked, as I liberated my pocket from the sinful weight of a few round coins sealed with idolatrous images of ducks, geese, bears, and magisterial heads. They were all I had.

Give me those coins and pray, because then, and only then, you will have the chance to be beamed up by Jesus our saviour, and while you are ascending towards the heavens, you can take a peek down at those neighbours of yours who just slammed their door in our faces. You can watch them fry like dumplings in a wok, and I assure you that our Lord will be indifferent to their plight, their sufferings, their loud cries of agony and regret and pain — yes, pain! And may God save us from such harrowing pain.

I kissed the Jehovah’s Witness ladies’ hands. I asked them to have mercy on me in that sizzling day to come. Dying from fire is a terrible thing. If I had to choose, I would certainly want something less painful, quicker, maybe even more poetic — like hanging from a willow tree or taking a bullet in the head or falling into a senseless eternal slumber accompanied by the aroma of a leaky gas stove.

I left the ladies and ran down to the Artista Café on St-Laurent, still hoping to find Reza in a circle of smoke and welfare recipients and coffee breath. As my feet trudged the wet ground and I felt the shivery cold, I cursed my luck. I cursed the plane that had brought me to this harsh terrain. I peered down the street and hesitantly walked east, avoiding every patch of slush and trying to ignore the sounds of friction as car wheels split the snow, sounds that bounced into my ears, constant reminders of the falling flakes that gather and accumulate quietly, diligently, claiming every car windshield, every hat, every garbage can, every eyelid, every roof and mountain. And how about those menacing armies of heavy boots, my friend, encasing people’s feet, and the silenced ears, plugged with wool and headbands, and the floating coats passing by in ghostly shapes, hiding faces, pursed lips, austere hands? Goddamn it! Not even a nod in this cold place, not even a timid wave, not a smile from below red, sniffing, blowing noses. All these buried heads above necks strangled in synthetic scarves. It made me nervous, and I asked myself, Where am I? And what am I doing here? How did I end up trapped in a constantly shivering carcass, walking in a frozen city with wet cotton falling on me all the time? And on top of it all, I am hungry, impoverished, and have no one, no one… Fucking ice, one slip of the mind and you might end up immersing your foot in one of those treacherous cold pools that wait for your steps with the patience of sailors’ wives, with the mockery of swamp monsters. You can curse all you wish, but still you have to endure freezing toes, and the squelch of wet socks, and the slime of midwives’ hands, and fathoms of coats that pass you on the streets and open and close, fluttering and bloated like sails blown towards a promised land.

I am doomed!

When I entered the café, I peeled myself out from under layers of hats, gloves, and scarves, liberated myself from zippers and buttons, and endured the painful tearing Velcro that hissed like a prehistoric reptile, that split and separated like people’s lives, like exiles falling into cracks that give birth and lead to death under digging shovels that sound just like the friction of car wheels wedging snow around my mortal parts.

I spotted Professor Youssef sitting alone at his usual table. That lazy, pretentious, Algerian pseudo-French intellectual always dresses up in gabardine suits with the same thin tie that had its glory in the seventies. He hides behind his sixties-era eyeglasses and emulates French thinkers by smoking his pipe in dimly lit spots. He sits all day in that café and talks about révolution et littérature.

I asked the professor if he had seen Reza, the Iranian musician, but he did not respond. He just gave me his arrogant smile.

I knew it, I knew it! The professor wants to shower me with his existentialist questions. The bastard plays Socrates every chance he gets. He has always treated the rest of us like Athenian pupils lounging on the steps of the agora, and he never answers a question. He imagines he is a pseudo-socialist Berber journalist, but he is nothing but a latent clergyman, always answering a question with another question.

Is it a yes or a no? C’est urgent, I shrilled at him, intending to interrupt his epistemological plot.

Non! J’ai pas vu ton ami. The professor pasted on his sardonic smile again, puffed his pipe, and changed the position of his legs. He leaned his body into the back of the chair and looked at me with an intellectual’s air of dismissal, as if I were a peasant, unworthy of the myopic thickness of his glasses. He does not trust me. He smells me through his pipe’s brume. I know he suspects me of stealing his last tobacco bag, which I did. But he cannot prove it. Now whenever I approach him, he acts as if he is repositioning himself in his chair in order to say something valuable and profound, but I can see him through his pipe’s smog, gathering his belongings closer to his body, hugging his bag like a refugee on a crowded boat.

I turned away from the professor, thinking that I would like to choke Reza, the Middle Eastern hunchback, with the strings of his own musical instrument. He owed me, and I was in need. He always managed to extract money from me, one way or another. He either gave me long monologues about Persia and the greatness of its history, or he re-enacted the tears of his mother, whom he will never see again before she dies because, as he claims, he is an unfortunate exile. But I know that all Reza cares about is numbing his lips and face. He is always sniffing, and if it’s not because of a cold, it is because of an allergy, and if it is not because of allergy, it is because of a natural impulse to powder his nose with “the white Colombian,” as he puts it. But there was nothing I could do now except dress again in my armour against the cold and go back to my room and wait for Reza to call.

At home I lay in bed, reached for my smokes, and then for no reason became alarmed, or maybe melancholic. This feeling was not paranoia, as the therapist wrote in her stupid notes (notes that I had managed to steal); it was just my need again to hide from the sun and not see anyone. It was the necessity I felt to strip the world from everything around me and exist underneath it all, without objects, people, light, or sound. It was my need to unfold an eternal blanket that would cover everything, seal the sky and my window, and turn the world into an insect’s play.

A FEW HOURS LATER, in the early evening, I decided to pay Reza a visit at his home. I walked through the cold to his house, rang the bell, and waited. Matild, a French beauty of a waitress and Reza’s roommate, opened the door. As soon as she saw me, she tried to slam the door in my face.

I put my foot in the corner of the door frame and whispered tenderly: I am worried about Reza.

Alors, appelle la police, quoi, bof. Ah moi, alors, je ne veux pas me mêler de cette affaire. He did not pay his share of the rent last mooonth. J’en ai marre là de vous deux.

Can I come in? I said.

I told you, he eeezzz not herrrreh.

I just want to take a look at his room, I said.

Mais non là, tu exagères.

Please, I begged. And I showed Matild what my droopy, bashful eyes were capable of.

You can only go in hiz rrrroom, she said. No kitchen, and no toilet-paper stealing, d’accord? When you worked with me at the restaurant zerre, everyone was saying that it was you who was stealing the toilet paperzzzz, and they all look at me bad because I was the one who recommended you forrr zee job.

I watched Matild’s firm ass bounce towards the kitchen. I shrunk into myself and hunched my neck into my shoulders, and my teeth felt as if they were growing points as I stared at her magnificent, majestic, royal French derrière — studied it, surveyed it, assessed it, and savoured it to the last swing. She was still in her nightgown, which ended right above her thighs. And she was barefoot!

I sighed. Still hunched, I scratched my legs against each other. Then, with the desperation of the displaced, the stateless, the miserable and stranded in corridors of bureaucracy and immigration, I turned and fled to Reza’s room.

His room smelled of old socks and a troupe of enslaved chain-smokers. It had barely any light, but still I recognized the old black and white tv that he had inherited from his friend Hisham, a Persian computer programmer who had moved to the United States because, as he said, there is more money there and no future in Canada — too many taxes. At least, that is how the empty-headed technocrat of an arriviste put it to me the night I was introduced to him at an Iranian party. The party was full of Iranian exiles — runaway artists, displaced poets, leftist hash-rollers, and ex-revolutionaries turned taxi drivers. That was also the night I met Shohreh. Oh, beautiful Shohreh! She drove me crazy, gave me an instant hit of metamorphosis that made me start gnawing on paper dishes, licking plastic utensils, getting lost inside potato-chip bags (bags that crunched with the sound of breaking ice and snapping branches). She was dancing with a skinny, black-clad Iranian gay man named Farhoud. He danced and rubbed himself against her firm body. Like him, Shohreh was dressed in a tight black outfit, and her chest was bouncing in time to the peculiar, menacing cries of a cheap immigrant’s stereo. When the music stopped for a moment, I trailed behind her in the crowded hallway and followed her to the kitchen. I made my way through plates, forks, and finger food until finally, as she dipped a slice of cucumber in white sauce thick as a quagmire, I made my move. I want to steal you from your boyfriend the dancer, I said.

Shohreh laughed and exclaimed, Boyfriend? Boyfriend! And she laughed even louder. Farhoud! she called to the man in black. This guy thinks you are my boyfriend.

Farhoud smirked and walked towards us. He put his arm around my shoulder. Actually, I am looking for a boyfriend myself, he gently whispered, and swung his hips. The drink in his hand took on the shape and the glow of a lollipop. Shohreh laughed and tossed her hair and walked away.

All night I followed Shohreh; I stalked her like a wolf. When she entered the bathroom, I glued my ear to its door, hoping to hear her eleven-percent-alcohol urine plunging free-fall from between her secretive, tender thighs. Oh, how I sighed at the cascading sound of liquid against the porcelain-clear pool of the city waters. Oh, how I marvelled, and imagined all the precious flows that would swirl through warm and vaporous tunnels under this glaciered city. It is the fluid generosity of creatures like Shohreh that keep the ground beneath us warm. I imagined the beauty of the line making its way through the shades of the underground, golden and distinct, straight and flexible, discharged and embraced, revealing all that a body had once invited, kept, transformed, and released, like a child’s kite with a string, like a baby’s umbilical cord. Ah! That day I saw salvation, rebirth, and golden threads of celebration everywhere.

I asked Shohreh for her number. I won’t give it to you, she said, but I don’t mind if you put in an effort and get it on your own. It is more romantic that way, don’t you think? As she danced she looked at me, and sometimes she smiled at me and other times she ignored me. I could tell how flattered she was by my look of despair. She knew perfectly well that I was willing to crawl under her feet like an insect, dance like a chained bear in a street market, applaud like a seal on a stool, nod like a miniature plastic dog on the dashboard of an immigrant cab driver. I wanted so much to be the one to swing her around the dance floor. I wanted to be the one who dipped her and took in the scent of her breasts flooding over her black lace bra.

For days after the party, I begged that asshole Reza to give me Shohreh’s number. He refused. That selfish, shady exile would only say, in his drooling accent, You are not serious about her. You only want to sleep with her. She is not that kind of girl, she is Iranian. She is like a sister, and I have to protect her from dirty Arabs like you.

But, Reza, maestro, I said, sisters also fuck, sisters have needs, too.

This upset him and he cursed, Wa Allah alaazim. I will prevent you from meeting her again!

But I did meet Shohreh again. I got her number from Farhoud, the dancer. One day I saw him walking down the street, bouncing happily, trotting like Bambi. I had a large scarf around my face that day, and I flew across the street and stood in front of him, my hands on my hips like Batman. Farhoud recognized me right away, through my mask and all. He pulled down my scarf and kissed me on the cheeks and laughed like little Robin. Right away I told him that I was in love with Shohreh and needed her number.

I will have to ask her first, he said, and his hands gestured in sync with his fluttering eyelashes. But she is not the in-love type, my love, he added.

Give me her number and I will love you forever, I promised him. I put my arm around his shoulder and gave him a kiss on the forehead.

He laughed. You are so bad! he exclaimed, and pulled a pen with a teddy bear’s head from his purse and wrote out both his and her numbers.

NOW I SEARCHED Reza’s room for money, food, hash, coke — anything I could get from the bastard. I opened his drawers, sniffed under his bed, reached under the dresser and scanned with my finger for the small plastic bags he usually tapes there, upside down. I would have settled for a bus ticket — anything to get back what he owed me. But there was nothing. That impoverished restaurant musician blows everything up his nose.

I shouted to Matild, but she did not answer me. I went to her room. She was lying in bed, half-naked, reading un livre de poche, smoke rising from behind its pages. She felt my heavy breathing and my eyes sliding over her smooth shaved thighs. From behind a scene in the book, she whispered, I thought we agrrrreed that you would not enterrrr herrrre.

Will you call me if you hear from Reza?

Matild puffed and did not answer.

It is important.

D’accord. I will call you. Leave now. Pleeeezzzz.

I walked to the apartment door, opened it and closed it loudly, then snuck back inside to the kitchen and opened the fridge slowly. I grabbed whatever I could — food and sweets — and then I left for good, shuffling home through the high snow.

At home in my kitchen, the cockroaches smelled the loot in my hand and began to salivate like little dogs. I moved to the bedroom, away from their envious eyes, and sat on my bed and made myself a sandwich. Now, I thought, I have to get some money before the end of the month, before I starve to death in this shithole of an apartment, in this cold world, in this city with its case of chronic snow. The windows whistled and freezing air drifted through cracks; it was a shithole of a rundown place I lived in, if you ask me. But what was the difference? Nothing much had changed in my life since the time I was born. At least now I lived alone, not crowded in one small bedroom with a sister, a snoring father, and a neurotic mother who jumped up in the night to ask if you were hungry, thirsty, needed to go to the bathroom (or if you were asleep, for that matter). I was no longer in the same room as a teenage sister coming of age, dreaming of Arabs with guns, ducking her left hand under the quilt, spookily eyeing the void, biting her lip, and rotating her index finger as if it were the spinning reel of a movie projector beaming sexual fantasies on the bedroom wall. And here comes the cheering, like that of the men in the old Cinema Lucy, where clandestine dirty movies quickly appeared and disappeared between clips of the Second World War, Italian soap operas, cowboys and Indians bouncing on wild horses. Cinema Lucy, with its stained chairs glowing and fading with semen, and its agitated men dispersed across the floor in the company of their handkerchiefs, which they held in their arms like Friday-night dates. Like guerrillas at night, these men waited impatiently for the porn clips to appear between the irrelevant worlds of the main features, circuses of jumping mammals and falling buffoons, fantasies of high seas and sunsets that faded and darkened into invading European armies stomping high boots over burned hills and cobbled squares, frozen at the sight of a few saluting generals and their fat-ankled women.

Inside Lucy we sat and waited for flesh to appear on the screen. We were like angels. And then, when the older men became afraid that too much time had passed or was being wasted on the projection of old memories, wars, and aging stars, they shouted and banged on the bottoms of the old chairs: Attcheh (a porn cut) Abou-Khallil! Attcheh, Abou-Khallil! And succumbing to the pressure of the drumming palms, a bosom would swell on the screen, the back of a head would veil a voluptuous thigh, and some of the men would stand up, cheer, and whistle until the swelling in their pants burst their zippers open, and their shoulders tilted forward like the silhouettes of fishermen against crooked horizons scooping fish by the light of a sinking sun, and they blasted their handkerchiefs with the bangs of expelled bullets, wounding their pride, and finally folding up images of past lovers and their own unsatisfied wives.

A joint will warm my bones, I thought, or at least numb my brain just enough so that I won’t feel my misery and the cold. I slipped inside my closet and reached for the secret hole beside the top shelf. I arrange my cupboards precisely: the towels and sheets on the bottom shelf, the untouchables like opium and dreams on the top. I pulled out a plastic film canister and the thin white papers that went with it. Only a small amount of hash was left — a small ball, enough for one thin roll to lift me up like a rope and swing me down into a calm descent. I cut it and tried to roll it, but my fingers were cold and, as usual, shaky. Besides, I had no tobacco to mix with the stuff. Cigarettes are bad for one’s health, I consoled myself.

I lay in bed and let the smoke enter me undiluted. I let it grow me wings and many legs. Soon I stood barefoot, looking for my six pairs of slippers. I looked in the mirror, and I searched again for my slippers. In the mirror I saw my face, my long jaw, my whiskers slicing through the smoke around me. I saw many naked feet moving. I rushed to close the window and draw the curtains. Then I went back to bed, buried my face in the sheets, and pulled the pillow and covers over my head. I closed my eyes and thought about my dilemma.

My welfare cheque was ten days away. I was out of dope. My kitchen had only rice and leftovers and crawling insects that would outlive me on Doomsday. I was lucky to have that bag of basmati rice and those few vegetarian leftovers from Mary the Buddhist’s party.

Where there is music there is food, I say! A few nights ago around seven, after the sun had left to play, I heard shoeless feet pressing against my ceiling from the floor above me, little toes crawling under the brouhaha of guests and the faint start of a jam session that sounded both menacing and promising. The drums were calling me.

I cracked my door open and I saw feet ascending to my neighbour’s place. Mary? I thought. Yes, that was her name. I remembered once meeting her down in the basement. She complained about the absence of recycling bins. Or was it compost? In any case, she wanted to fill the earth with dust from the refuse of vegetables, and she had a strange kind of theory about reincarnation. One look at her guests and I knew what kind of party it would be — one look at the braids, the drums, the agonized Rasta lumps of hair on bleached heads, the pierced ears and noses that would make any bull owner very proud, and I knew. What to wear, was the question. A bedsheet wrapped around my waist and nothing else? Or my pyjamas? Yes, yes! Everyone in the southern hemisphere fetches the newspaper at daybreak in pyjamas fluttering above flat slippers and vaporous feet, everyone drinks coffee on dusty sidewalks, their wrinkled morning faces staring out from between the fenders of bedridden cars. But I decided not to overdo it. The exotic has to be modified here — not too authentic, not too spicy or too smelly, just enough of it to remind others of a fantasy elsewhere. In the end, I kept my jeans on and took off my shoes and left my socks in my room to air a bit more, and I climbed barefoot through the walls.

Mary was welcoming. A peaceful smile wafted my way. I wasn’t sure if it was the effect of the ever-burning incense in the room or maybe the effect of the hallucinatory fumes that I myself had been pumping through the years, into her walls.

I had helped myself to food at her party while everyone else sat on the floor with folded legs, eating. I could hear their chewing, like an incantation, as they floated on Indian pillows, the humming inside their throats synced to the sound of Mary’s old fridge and the cycles of the world.

I despised how those pale-faced vegans held their little spoons, humbling themselves. Who do they think they are fooling, those bleached Brahmins? We all know that their low-sitting is just another passage in their short lives. In the end, they will get bigger spoons and dig up the earth for their fathers’ and mothers’ inheritances. But it is I! I, and the likes of me, who will be eating nature’s refuse under dying trees. I! I, and the likes of me, who will wait for the wind to shake the branches and drop us fruit. Filth, make-believers, comedians on a Greek stage! Those Buddhists will eventually float down, take off their colourful, exotic costumes, and wear their fathers’ three-piece suits. But I will still recognize them through their strands of greying hair. I will envy them when they are perched like monarchs on chairs, shamelessly having their black shoes shined, high above crouched men with black nails feathering and swinging horsehair brushes across their corporate ankles. At the tap of the shoeshiners, the Brahmins will fold their newspapers, stand up and fix their ties, scoop out their pockets for change, and toss a few coins in the air to the workingmen below. And they will step onto ascending elevators, give firm handshakes, receive pats on their backs, smooth their hair in the tinted glass of high-rises. Their radiant shoes will shine like mirrors and their light steps will echo in company corridors to murmurs of, “See you at the barbecue, and give my regards to your lovely spouse.” No, none of these imposters was chanting to escape incarnation; they all wanted to come back to the same packed kitchens, to the same large houses, the same high beds, the same covers to hide under again and again.

I was out of toilet paper, but who cared? I always washed after defecating. Though I must admit, during the water shortages in wartime in that place where I come from, there were periods when I did not wash for a long time. You could hardly brush your teeth. Oh, how I once gave priority to that which was most visible — I would wash my face, and deprive everything else, with the little water I had. Every drop of water that ran through the drain inspired me to follow it, gather it, and use it again. As a kid, I was fascinated by drains. I’m not sure if it was the smell, or the noises and echoes that were unexpectedly released after the water was gobbled, or if it was simply the possibility of escape to a place where the refuse of stained faces, infamous hands, dirty feet, and deep purple gums gathered in a large pool for slum kids to swim, splash, and play in.

I got up and went to the window and opened the curtains. The burning coal on top of my joint shone, lustrous and silvery, against the backdrop of Mount Royal. There was a large metal cross right on the top of the mountain. I held out the joint vertically, stretched my hand against the window, and aligned the burning fire on the tip of it to the middle of the cross. I watched its plume ascend like burning hair. The smoke reminded me that it was time to escape this permanent whiteness, the eternal humming of the fluorescent light in the hallway, the ticking of the kitchen clock, and my constant breath — yes, my own breath that fogged the glass and blurred the outside world with a coat of sighs and sadness as the vapour from my tears moistened the window. My own breath was obstructing my view of the world!

I reminded myself that I can escape anything. I am a master of escape (unlike those trapped and recurring pink Buddhists). As a kid, I escaped when my mother cried, when my father unbuckled his belt, when my teacher lifted the ruler high above my little palm. I disappeared as the falling blows glowed across my hands like thunder across landscapes of lifelines — long journeys, and travellers’ palms. I watched the teacher’s ruler as if it wasn’t me who was receiving those lashes across fingers extended like noontide red above beaches lit by many suns. I alternated my six cockroach hands and distributed the pain of those blows. And when my palms burned and ached, I fanned my cockroach wings. I let the air cool off my swollen hands as I stood in the corner, my face and a tender belly to the wall.

But I escaped most when I stole sweets, pens, chewing gum, and, later on, cameras and cars. Primitive and uneducated as I was, I instinctively felt trapped in the cruel and insane world saturated with humans. I loathed the grown-ups who were always hovering above me and looking down on me. They, of course, ruled the heights: they could reach the chandelier, the top of the fridge; they could rumple my hair anytime they pleased. But I was the master of the underground. I crawled under beds, camped under tables; I was even the kind of kid who would crawl under the car to retrieve the ball, rescue the stranded cat, find the coins under the fridge.

When I was a teenager I met my mentor Abou-Roro, the neighbourhood thief. He realized I had the capacity to slip through anything. To help me reach the heights, he would fuse together his fingers and I would step on his locked and open palms, and he would lift me up to small windows that only vermin can go through. Once I was inside a house, a church, or a school, I would go straight for the valuables. I stole them all. You name it and I stole it. I crawled through windows and holes and gathered silver sets, crosses, change, watches. I even took my time to nibble leftovers and kitchen-counter crumbs.

The underground, my friend, is a world of its own. Other humans gaze at the sky, but I say unto you, the only way through the world is to pass through the underground.

OVER THE NEXT FEW days I called Reza’s place in vain. I banged on every door at every place I thought he might be, with rhythms that he himself could never replicate — a few tat-a-tats here and there. Once I even experimented with a bouwang! and a bou-doum! But I could not find him. Forty dollars he owed me. Just imagine the soap I could buy, the rice, the yards of toilet paper I could line up, use to sweep the counter, mark territory and divide nations, fly like kites, dry tears, jam in the underground pipes and let everything subterranean rise to the surface. I would share it and cut it and divide it among the nation’s poor, fair and square. You name it, I would do it!

Reza, that charming compulsive liar, was a master charlatan who for years had managed to couch-surf in women’s houses, bewitching his hosts with his exotic tunes and stories of suffering and exile. His best and favourite story was how he almost lost all his fingers performing for the Ayatollah Khomeini. He usually told this story in bars after some fusion gig with an Anglo with an electric guitar or a Caucasian Rasta with a drum. He would tell the women gathered around him at the table how he was afraid and nervous when he was asked by the Iranian Hezbollah, the Guards of God, not to play anything subversive for the holy man, meaning no fast or non-religious tunes. Then, when he was finally pushed behind the door where the great leader of the Iranian revolution was sitting, he was so nervous that he forgot to kiss the great mullah’s hand, and even forgot to bow and murmur Al-salaam alaikum, which made the guards angry. He would relate how he’d sat on the floor tuning his instrument while sweat dripped down his spine, but once he started playing, he was transported (true to his art, to the artist that he was!). He forgot himself and played faster and faster. And here Reza would usually pause to gauge the women’s reactions and keep them in suspense, until one of them would ask: And then what happened? (And the woman who asked this was usually the one who would invite Reza to sleep over that night.)

Reza would continue his story, telling the women that he started to play fast and non-religiously and shook his head left and right, because when he plays he can’t help it, until one of the guards ran over to him and broke his instrument with one stomp of the foot and held Reza’s index finger in the air, bending it backwards, trying to break it, promising that this was the first of many broken bones to come. And if it hadn’t been for the Ayatollah Khomeini himself, who gave a slight wave of his hand and liberated Reza from the brute’s clutches, all the musician’s fingers would have been broken by now. And then the Musician of Love would end his story with a question: And you know what the consequences are for a musician like myself to have broken fingers, right? Gullible heads would nod, compassionate eyes would open, blankets would be extended on sofas and beds, fridges would burp leftovers, and if the rooster was lucky, it would all lead to chicken thighs and wings moistened by a touch of beer or wine, and hot showers seasoned by pizza pies delivered to the bedroom and gobbled in front of trashy movies on tv.

Once, when Reza and I were having an argument, and the topic shifted to each other’s lives and each other’s decadent methods of survival, I confronted him about his schemes and lies. He leaned his long face towards me and said: Brother, think of me as a wandering Sufi. I spread love and music, and in return I accept hospitality, peace, and love. Love, my friend — it is always about love. As he said this, his eyebrows danced and he swayed his musical head, dimmed his eyes, and smiled. I give something in return, he continued, while you are nothing but a petty thief with no talent. All you can do is make the fridge light go on and off, and once the door is closed you’re never sure if the light inside has turned to darkness like your own dim soul.

I cursed him to his face and told him that the day would come when all my power would surface from below. I shall bring up from the abyss the echoes of rodent and insect screams to shatter the drums of your ears! I told him. And then you won’t need to cut trees to carve music boxes, and no wire will be stretched, tuned, or picked, and all melody will come from the core of the beings whose instruments are innate inside them — insect legs making tunes as fine as violins, rodent teeth more potent than all your percussion, millions of creatures in sync, orchestrated, marching to claim what is rightly theirs…

Reza laughed at me and walked away, humming. I knew it, he said. You are a lunatic. I always knew it — a loonnneyyyy.

FINALLY, I REACHED Matild again, Reza’s housemate, the beauty who still works at the French restaurant where I used to work. Lately I find the city is being invaded by whining Parisians like Matild, who chant the “Marseillaise” every chance they get. They come to this Québécois American North and occupy every boulangerie, conquer every French restaurant and croissanterie with their air of indifference and their scent of fermented cheese — although, truly, one must admire their inherited knowledge of wine and culture. These are skills to be secretly admired. Indeed, the Parisians are highly sought after and desired by the Quebec government. Photos of la campagne rustique, le Québec du nord des Amériques, depicting cozy snowy winters and smoking chimneys, are pasted on every travel agent’s door; big baby-seal eyes blink from the walls of immigration offices, waiting to be saved, nursed, and petted; the multicolours of Indian summers are plastered across every travel magazine; and le nouveau monde français is discovered on every travel show. The Québécois, with their extremely low birth rate, think they can increase their own breed by attracting the Parisians, or at least for a while balance the number of their own kind against the herd of brownies and darkies coming from every old French colony, on the run from dictators and crumbling cities. But what is the use, really? Those Frenchies come here, and like the Québécois they do not give birth. They abstain, or they block every Fallopian tube and catch every sperm before the egg sizzles into canard à l’orange. They are too busy baking, tasting wine, and cutting ham and cheese, too occupied intimidating American visitors who play the sophisticates by tasting and nodding at every bottle of French wine wrapped in a white cloth.